Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches - McCarthy Justin Huntly

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small minority; the English Establishment is the Church of the majority, and is an institution belonging to the soil. The very principle which maintains the English Church ought of right to condemn the Irish Church. But it is the fact that an agitation more influential than it seemed to the careless spectator, has long been going on in England for the abolition of the State Church system altogether; and there can be no doubt that the fate of the Irish Establishment will lend immense courage and force to that agitation. Revolutionary movements are always contagious in their nature, and the movement against the Irish Church is in the strictest sense revolutionary. The Dutch or the Scotch would have carried such a movement to triumph across rivers of blood if it were needful; and no man of spirit could say that the end would not be worth the cost. I assume, then, that the overthrow of the Irish Church will inflame to iconoclastic fervor the movement of the English Dissenters against all Church establishments. I do not stop just now to inquire whether the movement is likely to be successful or how long it may take to accomplish the object. To me, it seems beyond doubt that it must succeed; but I do not care to assume even that for the purpose of my present argument. I only ask my readers to consider the condition of things which will exist in England when a movement resting on a suffrage which is almost universal, a movement which will have already overthrown one State Church within Great Britain, proceeds openly and exultingly to attack the English Church itself, within its own dominions. I ask whether it is likely that the institution which is supposed to be bound up inseparably with that Church, the Monarchy which is based upon, and exists by virtue of religious ascendency, is likely to escape all question during such a struggle, and after it? The State Church and the Aristocracy, if they cannot always be called bulwarks of the throne, are yet so completely associated with it in the public mind that it is hard even to think of the one without the others, and yet harder to think of the one as existing serene and uninjured after the decay or demolition of the others.

      Now, the Aristocracy have, as Mr. Bright put it so truly and so effectively the other day, already capitulated. They have given up all notion of any longer making the laws of the country in the interest of their own class. One of the first things the Reformed Parliament will do, when it has breathing-time to think about such matters, will be to abolish the purchase system in the army, and throw open promotion to merit, without reference to class. The diplomatic service, that other great stronghold of the Aristocracy, will be thoroughly reorganized and made a real, useful department, doing solid work, and open to talent of whatever caste; or it will be abolished altogether. Something will have to be done with the House of Lords. It, too, must be made a reality, or dismissed into the land of shadows and the past. Efforts at reforming it, while it stands on its present basis, are futile. Its existence is, in its present form, the one great objection to it.

      The good-natured, officious Lord Shaftesbury went to work, a few months ago, to prepare a scheme of reform for the House of Lords, in order to anticipate and conciliate the popular movement which he expected. He could think of nothing better than a recommendation that the House should meet an hour earlier every evening, in order, by throwing more time on their hands, to induce the younger Peers to get up debates and take part in them. This, however, is not precisely the kind of reform the country will ask for when it has leisure to turn its attention to the subject. It will ask for some reorganization which shall either abolish or reduce to a comparative nothing the hereditary legislating principle on which the House of Lords now rests. A set of law-makers or law-marrers intrusted with power only because they are born to titles, is an absurd anomaly, which never could exist in company with popular suffrage. "Hereditary law-makers!" exclaimed Franklin. "You might as well talk of hereditary mathematicians!" Franklin expressed exactly what the feeling of the common sense of England is likely to be when the question comes to be raised. I expect then, not that the House of Lords will be abolished, but that the rule of the hereditary principle will be brought to an end—that the Aristocracy there, too, will have to capitulate.

      Now, I doubt whether an American reader can have any accurate idea, unless he has specially studied the matter and watched its practical operation in England, of the manner in which the influence of the Peers makes itself felt through the political life of Great Britain. Americans often have some kind of notion that the Aristocracy govern the country directly and despotically, with the high hand of imperious feudalism. There is nothing of the kind in reality. The House of Lords is, as a piece of political machinery, almost inoperative—as nearly as possible harmless. No English Peer, Lord Derby alone excepted, has anything like the political authority and direct influence of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Disraeli, or Mr. Bright. There are very few Peers, indeed, about whose political utterances anybody in the country cares three straws. But, on the other hand, the traditional prestige of the Peers, the tacit, time-honored, generally-conceded doctrine that a Peer has first right to everything—the mediæval superstition tolerated largely in our own time, which allows a sort of divinity to hedge a Peer—all this has an indirect, immense, pervading, almost universal influence in the practical working of English politics. The Peers have, in fact, a political droit du seigneur in England. They have first taste of every privilege, first choice of every appointment. Political office is their pasture, where they are privileged to feed at will. There does not now exist a man in England likely to receive high office, who would be bold enough to suggest the forming of a Cabinet without Peers in it, even though there were no Peers to be had who possessed the slightest qualification for any ministerial position. The Peers must have a certain number of places, because they are Peers. The House of Commons swarms with the sons and nephews of Peers. The household appointments, the ministerial offices, the good places in the army and the church are theirs when they choose—and they generally do choose—to have them. The son of a Peer, if in the House of Commons, may be raised at one step from his place in the back benches to a seat in the Cabinet, simply because of his rank. When Earl Russell, two or three years ago, raised Mr. Goschen, one of the representatives of the city of London and a partner in a great London banking-house, to a place in the Cabinet, the whole country wondered: a very few, who were not frightened out of their propriety, admired; some thought the world must be coming to an end. But when the Marquis of Hartington was suddenly picked out of West End dissipation and made War Secretary, nobody expressed the least wonder, for he was the heir of the House of Devonshire. Indeed, it was perfectly notorious that the young Marquis was presented to office, in the first instance, because it was hoped by his friends that official duties might wean him from the follies and frivolities of a more than ordinarily heedless youth. Sir Robert Peel the present, the magni nominis umbra, is not, of course, in the strict sense, an aristocrat; but he is mixed up with aristocrats, and is the son of a Peer-maker, and may be regarded as claiming and having the privileges of the class. Sir Robert Peel was presented with the First Secretaryship as something to play with, because his aristocratic friends, the ladies especially, thought he would be more likely to sow his wild oats if he were beguiled by the semblance of official business. A commoner must, in fact, be supposed to have some qualification for office before he is invited to fill a ministerial place. No qualification is believed necessary for the near relative or connection of a Peer. Even in the most favorable examples of Peers who are regular occupants of office, no special fitness is assumed or pretended. No one supposes or says that Lord Clarendon, or Lord Granville, or Lord Malmesbury has any particular qualification which entitles him, above all other men, to this or that ministerial place. Yet it must be a man of bold imagination indeed, who could now conceive the possibility of a British Cabinet without one of these noblemen having a place in it.

      All this comes, as I have said, out of a lingering superstition—the faith in the divine right of Peers. Now, a reform in the constitution of the Upper House, which should purge it of the hereditary principle, would be the first great blow to this superstition. Julius Cæsar, in one of his voyages of conquest, was much perplexed by the priests, who insisted that he had better go back because the sacred chickens would not eat. At last he thought the time had come to prove his independence of the sacred chickens, "If they will not eat," he said, "then let them drink"—and he flung the consecrated fowls into the sea; and the expedition went on triumphantly, and the Roman soldiers learned that they could do without the sacred chickens. I think a somewhat similar sensation will come over all classes of the English people when they find that the hereditary right to make laws is taken from the English Peerage. I do not doubt that the whole fabric of superstition will presently collapse, and that the privilege of the Peer will cease to be anything more than that degree of superior

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