The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1907 THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3750, 12 February 1907, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1907 THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

The British Attorney-General is a bold person. He predicts the downfall of the House of Lords. It is a very safe prediction, but one that few people would have dared to make a year or two ago. As a matter of history the Lords are stronger than they have ever been, and curiously many believe that the house would be much weakened in power by being added to in numbers. It is possible tor a peer to have radical ideas, and the making of non-hereditary peers is considered in some quarters to be the next best thing to burning the woolsack and sacking the House. A peer is very much hurt by the making of another peer. The dignity becomes too cheap. Originally, the feudal barons were few and had absolute power of life and death over the people in the places after which they were named. IT was only in the sixteenth century that the Crown began to exercise its right of creation of peers without giving them any feudal rights at all. There were fifty Lords Temporal in the sixth century. There are 593 in the presnt House. There are besides these a couple of dozen Lords spiritual which is slightly better than in the pre-Reformation days, when the abbots and those kind of gentry outnumbered the temporal peers and made England a hell upon earth. The clergy are still struggling in this direction. It was the British Premier Pitt, who was the greatest democrat and the greatest peer-maker, which may sound queerly, but Pitt did it deliberately to break up the aristocratic cliques. Still so many of the new peers were wealthy landowners that the rank and file of the people.gained nothing, and the ‘ ‘ nouveau-riche ’ ’ was ever the worse animal to deal with. One

comfort exists. The House of Lords is perfectly helpless in the matter of money. The Commons alone have power to deal with money bills. The Lords may accept or reject a money bill, but they cannot amend it. The Lords, whether as feudal barons, newlymade beer-lords, paper-peers or candle-coronet wearers have been strenuously opposed to reform of themselves or progress of the country. They themselves are comfortable enough, and their troubles apparently end there. If the family needs money there are plenty of American heiresses who are only too willing to sell themselves to a beer-title. It is possible to have a democracy under a sovereign as it is to have it under a republic as in , France. There is no title that is better worth having than mere “ Mister.” It is recognised that hereditary peers must have the largest billets the Crown can give, be the, peers men'of brains or otherwise. About the only plain 11 Mister ” who has been given the Governorship of a country, is Le Hunte, of South Australia. Of course he has been duly branded since. While everything in the Fmpire has progressed the Lords have halted where ttiey were. There is no need now for them to fight their neighbouring Lords, so.they fight the people by hanging on to their lands and their insolence. How it comes about that less than six hundred persons with perhaps the lowest type of intelligence the Empire possesses* >.should control immediately over forty million people, besides being the last Court of Appeal for the colonies, is one of life’s mysteries. The peers of England are England’s most charming people —supposing one sees them as private persons. The peers as a body, are ogres, not because they desire to be, but becausi they are insufficiently enlightened to know what a dreadful incubus they are. And the House of Lords is going to be wiped out as sure as you are alive. You see, although the peers have not progressed in thought, the people have. Up to now the peers have always demanded. Now the people are about to demand. Some day it may be possible to see a peer working for his living. As a general thing the people work so that the peerage may get a living without doing anything. Quite a lot of recent peers have been made because the people have consumed an inordinate quantity of the honoured |oue’s beer. Some day perhaps King Edward will make the champion potato digger a peer just as he now places a coronet on the head of the largest manufacturer of beer.