functions of the House of Lords, it is argued, are valuable in every other department of public affairs; they are inadmissible in finance. The Crown and the House of Commons have the sole right of taxing the subject, according to Mr. Bright; the House of Commons alone is vested with an uncontrollable power of imposing or retaining taxes, according to Mr. Cobden. Taxation and representation are inseparable. Our ancestors fought for centuries to escape bondage to the Lords in taxation. A usage of 200 years of the Lords themselves has ratified the doctrine that the granting and management of supplies belongs exclusively to the Commons. The Lords are introducing a substantial innovation into the Constitution. No adequate reason, no crisis called for such an unconstitutional interference. They are setting up a right, capable of the widest extension hereafter, and which will radically alter the machinery of government in England.

The application of the principles which we have expounded above will enable us to dispose rapidly of these statements. The constitutional right of the Lords to reject any financial measure cannot be disputed. It has been exercised down to the latest times, whatever may have been the proceedings to which it subsequently gave rise. In modern times finance has become the most extensive and the most important field of legislation. A Budget in our day is a very different thing from a granting of subsidies. It embraces every consideration of public policy; it ranges over trade, foreign affairs, education, military organisation, ecclesiastical institutions, improvement of towns, postal and international communications,-over every element of the life of the nation. To exclude the Lords from this field would be to shut them out from three-fourths of the public business. It would be a gigantic expansion of the power of the Commons; and by compelling the Lords to stand still within a technical limit, would overthrow the proportions of the Constitution, and extinguish the House of Lords for all useful purposes. Almost every measure would be gradually withdrawn from its revision. It would be most easy to represent churchrates as a tax, or to claim that the Crown and Peers should say nothing on war and peace, because war can be carried on only with the money of the people. The branch, reduced to inactivity, would speedily lose its vital force, and drop down in decay from the tree.

We go further, and maintain that in no part of public affairs is the revising action of the Peers more salutary than in finance. In no other sphere is the temptation to excess and unfairness so strong in the House of Commons, and the checks against them

so weak. The Crown is nothing in finance. It is still powerful as the executive, and through the Ministers, in many departments, contends successfully against the House of Commons. But it is powerless in finance. There it can do nothing for the people, as distinct from the Commons and their constituents. In finance the Ministers are the nominees of the House of Commons alone. By no other means can members of Parliament so effectually please their constituents as by procuring for them some local grant or some personal exemption. The interest of the whole people is sacrificed to the interest of those who have the most influence for the day in the Commons. "There are particular moments," says the distinguished American Judge Story, "when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of a body of respectable citizens, chosen without reference to the exciting cause, to check the misguided career of public opinion, and to suspend the blow until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind!" Did he foresee the domination of traders in the Parliament of 1860, the treaty with France, the rhetoric of the enchanter and the alliance with the demagogue, and the abandonment of a large national revenue which, however objectionable, is not more so than many other sources of revenue, at the very moment when it could least be spared? But for the thoughtfulness of the Lords, the Commons might be now proposing to remit taxes by the help of a loan to be paid by their successors; and next session might open with a scheme to relieve what is called industry from paying any part of the cost of government and order, and to lay the load on realised property, with a special exemption for the capital and profits of traders.

But taxation and representation go together. This is the cardinal axiom of the English constitution; and the Peers are not part of the people. We answer, in the noble and profound words of Burke, "It is not the derivation of the power of the House of Commons from the people which makes it in a distinct sense their representative. The king is the representative of the people; so are the Lords; so are the judges. They all are trustees for the people as well as the Commons, because no power is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although government is certainly an institution of divine authority, yet its forms, and the persons who administer it, all originate from the people. A popular origin cannot therefore be the charac

teristical distinction of a popular representative. This belongs equally to all parts of government, and in all forms." The Peers, by the nature of their wealth, and its liability to the common taxation, directly represent owners of property, however small: themselves, in the first instance, fundholders, farmers, peasants, professional men, the orphan, and the widow. Much more, they are the bulwarks of fairness and equity, of even-handed justice between class and class, of the impartial distribution of the public burdens, of the steadiness and stability of the financial policy of the whole nation. It is the temptation of members of Parliament to be careful for their own advancement, and to be absorbed by the rise and fall of ministries. It is the danger of constituents to think of themselves and to forget the people, to provide for the interests of Birmingham and Manchester, and to cast on others the care and difficulty of upholding the honour and safety of all England. The Peers are not beyond the reach of the influences of party or natural selfishness; but their position is so secured by rank and wealth, any undue personal advantage in taxation is so unattainable, and so comparatively worthless if attained, that the maintenance of general prosperity and contentment must ever be paramount with them above all other considerations.

Even, therefore, in the strictest sense of the words, the principle that taxation and representation are conjoined would not bar out the action of the Peers in finance. But a more direct reply may be given to this objection. The right for which our forefathers struggled so long, and which is the noblest portion of the inheritance we have received, is the right of determining the expediency and regulating the amounts of the aids to be granted to the public service. That right is retained whole and unimpaired by the Commons. The money comes from the whole people, and doubtless it must be the gift of the whole people, if they are to continue free and independent. But so it is in fact. It is they who grant it in the House of Commons, not, as so many suppose, by the imposition of taxes in Committee of Ways and Means, but by voting, on the Estimates, the objects and the amount of the national expenditure. Not a shilling can be spent without being first voted, and the purpose to which it is to be applied approved, by the Commons. the moneys voted by the whole Legislature cannot issue from the Treasury except under the authority of the Appropriation Bill, in which the Peers never attempt to make an amendment. This is the answer to the sophistical objection that the Lords, by retaining a tax repealed by the Commons, have in substance imposed a tax on the people. It was the House of Commons

Even

which retained the Paper Duty, by voting an excess of expenditure beyond the ways and means provided, and accepting from Mr. Gladstone a budget which did not balance the national accounts. We claim, indeed, for the House of Lords the high national function of rejecting any expenditure which they may think the Commons to have sanctioned, in the true language of Judge Story, "under the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions." The Lords may have taken a mistaken view of the proposal of the Commons; for no form of government whatever can be devised which shall not be subject to error; but the necessity and extreme importance of the function remain the same. It is the duty and the popular right of the House of Lords in all matters to appeal from the Commons to the calm and deliberate sense of the whole community. A financial despotism of the House of Commons would be as disastrous as any other.

On the other hand, it is forbidden the House of Lords, by the Constitution, not only to originate any tax, or to specify its object, but even in any way to regulate its amount; not because they do not form a part of or represent the people, or because they have acquiesced in a usage of 200 years, but for reasons far deeper and truer than these. They are incompetent, by their very nature, as much as an absolute monarch, to sympathise with the financial wants and difficulties of the mass of the population. As rich men, they are not as keen as the people themselves to perceive the various needs for which public assistance is required, still less can they estimate the severity of the pressure of taxation on the comparatively poor. They can afford the luxuries of rich men: stately public buildings, showy and expensive armies, gorgeous staffs of stateofficials, and costly wars, for the gratification of personal sentiment. Public content, as to taxation, is the strongest foundation of social order; and the surest guarantee for the depth and permanence of that content is the conviction brought home to every man's mind that he himself determines the expenditure for which he is obliged to pay.

Finally, it may be asked, was there sufficient cause for startling the country by an apparent breach of one of the most ancient securities of its freedom? We answer that the country has not been startled. It has shown no sense of an encroachment having been committed on the rights of the Commons or of the people. Nay, the very reverse is obvious. A universal satisfaction is manifest that the Constitution has found a natural

instrument in the House of Lords for encountering a dangerous crisis. The Lords have exercised a great function; the people have recognised that function, and approved its use. The deliberate judgment of public opinion condemned the repeal of the Paper Duty at the present crisis, and the general feeling of the nation ratifies its rejection. It confirms the declaration of the Lords, that the Commons have not made sufficient provision for the expenditure which they have practically voted, and that they have thereby endangered the credit and the safety of the national finances.

It would be vain for the Commons to attempt to cancel the overthrow of their policy, or Ministers to seek a new trial. The Commons can, if they please, stop public business, turn the whole financial system into annual grants, and refuse to vote any tax till the Lords have submitted to their pleasure. But in all collisions between the three estates, it is the people, the force of public opinion, which is the umpire; and the attempt to sustain error by faction might bring down signal punishment even on the House of Commons. But it can have no desire for such a contest. Declining majorities proved that the sober sense of the House, when emancipated from the spell of a bewitching voice, felt that it had been misled by excited hopes and a misplaced trust in hasty statesmanship. It has become aware how its own free agency was compromised by the skilful tactics which mixed up the Budget with the Treaty, and by a use of the royal name which the king's friends of George III. might have envied. If it smarts under the humiliation of a rebuke, let it remember that it has no one to blame but itself. The House was plainly warned, in several speeches, against the dangers of the course on which it was entering; but it was captivated by the charmer, and would neither reflect nor examine. It has paid the penalty of its thoughtlessness. Its decision has been overruled, its pretensions corrected, and its amenability to a court of error, even in finance, established. What the Commons have lost, the country has gained. It has gained an invaluable safeguard against the only formidable danger of modern times, the disproportionate growth of the power of the House of Commons and its constituents. The evil had its roots in the very heart of modern political society; it was certain to rise to the surface at one time or another; but the unimpaired vitality of the British Constitution had vigour enough to generate the antidote. It has endowed the House of Lords with the public confidence and the strength requisite to enable it to balance the expansion of the Commons. The country has recognised that the Peers

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