A SECOND CHAMBER

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 245, 4 July 1918, Page 6

A SECOND CHAMBER

HOW THE H6USE OF LORDS MAT . ,BE RECONSTRUCTED. It is understood (says the "Daily Mail") that tlio chief recommendation of tho conference on tho reform of. the House of Lords 13 the elimination of 'the Second Chamber as ire have, known it, baaed on the hereditary principle but for' the bench or bishops and a few /law lords, and its replacement by an Upper Chamber based ichiclly on indirect election and partly on nomination. The present House has a membership of about 701), mid the Lords actually outnumber tho Commons. The Chamber favoured by the conference would have approximately 300 members. ' Although, under the scheme, a peer of the United Kingdom would no longer havo the right,' as he has had for centuries, of receiving a writ of summons to the Second Chamber, tho conference does not contemplate the entire abandonment of tho hereditary principle. A committee of peers, it suggests, will havo power to elect n certain number of members to the new House, presumably on the model of tho present representation of Scottish and Irish peers at Westminster. It is also proposed that a proportion of the members of the Second Chamber should bo elected by a committee- of tho House of Commons appointed for that purpose. There may also be a,joint committee- of Lords and Commons with similar powers. Provision is further made for the election of distinguished members of the legal and medical professions, as woll as leading representatives of tho Navy and Army.