The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 1911. A FAMOUS VICTORY

New Zealand Tablet, 17 August 1911, Page 1581

The New Zealand Tabl et THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 1911. A FAMOUS VICTORY

§« ITHOUT pretending that there is any sort MiwAiWjv ,of absolute or mathematical certainty. j|(a> that Home Rule will be accomplished in j .y) 1914 the unexpected happens in politics as elsewhere—it is, perfectly safe ) ©Sft' to say that the last and most formidable barrier has been removed, and that the accomplishment of self-government for Ireland is how, brought well within measurable distance. The Veto Bill —or, to give it its correct name, the, Parliament Bill—passed the House of Lords on Friday by a majority of 17, the figures being;—For the motion, 131; against the motion, 114. The Bill abolishes absolutely, the Lords’ right to rejecteven for one session—any Money Bill; and with regard to other measures it enacts that ‘ If any Bill other than a Money Bill is passed by the House of Commons in three successive sessions (whether of the same Parliament or not), and, having been sent up to the House of Lords at least one month before the end of the session, is rejected by the House of Lords in each of those sessions, that Bill shall, on its rejection for the third time by the House of Lords ... be presented to his Majesty and become an Act of Parliament on the Royal Assent being signified thereto.’ There are no exemptions specified in the text of the Bill —the various amendments which were proposed in the direction of exempting certain questions from the operation of the measure having all beep rejected. Mr. Asquith has promised to introduce a Home Rule Bill, on the lines of Mr. Gladstone’s Bill of 1893, in January, 1912. If, then, the Premier keeps his promise; and the measure passes the Commons but is rejected by the Lords, and this procedure is repeated in 1913 and 1914, the Bill will, on its third rejection in the latter year, automatically become law, merely on receiving the Royal Assent.

The Peers was only to be expected—have tried in every possible way to block or to destroy the Veto Bill; and have fought to the last ditch in defence of their ancient privileges. The principal 'wrecking' amendments brought down by the Lords were (1) A proposal to set up a Joint Committeerepresenting both Houses of Parliamentwhose function it should be to decide what were, and what were not, Money Bills; and (2) An amendment exempting from the operation of the Veto Bill any Bill (a) Which affects the existence of the Crown or the Protestant Succession thereto; or (b) Which establishes a National Parliament or a National Council in Ireland. Scotland, Wales, or England, with legislative power therein; or (c) Which has been referred to the .Joint Committee, and . which, in their opinion, raises an issue of great gravity, upon which the judgment of the country has not been sufficiently ascer-

tamed../ In order to relieve the Speaker of . the sole responsibilitywhich he was very unwilling to takeof determining what were Money Bills, the Government .have adopted, in a modified form, the Joint Committee suggestion, the work of the Committee, however, being expressly restricted to the one function of deciding oh , Money Bills. It is obvious that the acceptance of the other amendmentsparticularly of that exempting from the operation of the Veto Bill any measure which : ' raises an issue of great gravity'—would have completely nullified the whole Bill; and the Lords were given the option of either abandoning their amendments or of being swamped by the creation of sufficient new Liberal Peers to carry the Bill through as it stood. They wisely accepted the former alternativelest a worse thing should befall them. Prom first to last of the struggle between the Government and the Peers no quarter has been either asked or given on either side. Some time ago, when the Budget was under discussion by the Lords, and Lord Milner was advocating its rejection, he .was asked, What about the consequences? and he replied bluntly: f "D —11 the consequences.' At a meeting of ' Stalwarts,' held a little over a week ago, the Right Hon. G. Wyndham de—according to a Press Association messagethat ' when Mr.. Asquith talked of creating five hundred peers, the Unionist Party's answer should be like Lord Clive's to the cheating bully, "Shoot and be cl d.' According to the cables, Mr. William O'Brien has been vaguely deprecating the ' belligerent methods' that have been used to coerce the Lords, without, condescending to indicate in any way the alternative measures which he thinks could have been successfully adopted. In view of the fact that flat defiance had been frankly and fully proclaimed on both sides it is ridiculous, when the fight is over, to whimper about the 'belligerent methods employed.

That the Lords have fairly brought their fate upon themselves cannot be questioned, much less denied, by anyone who looks quietly and dispassionately at the matter. For centuries their attitude has been one of continuous and consistent opposition to all real progress and reform. To take, out of many instances, only a few of those in which we are specially interested: The House of Lords refused Catholic Emancipation until it was extorted from them by the dread of revolution. They maintained as long as they dared the fiendish penal laws by which the life of every Irishman was at the mercy of the meanest of the dominant class. They have at all times rejected or obstructed every measure intended to secure a more popular and effective representation of the wishes of the people; and they have thrown out, mangled, or postponed, from the time of the Union to the present day, every bill which was intended to secure to the 'lrish tenant his fair interest in the land which he tilled and to give him some guarantee for the product of his industry and his thrift. 'The chronicles, of the House of Lords,' said Mr. Joseph Chamberlain in 1884, ' are one long record of concessions delayed until they have lost their grace, of rights denied until extorted from their fears. It has been a history of one long contest between the representatives of privilege and the representatives of popular right, and during this time the Lords have perverted, delayed, and denied justice until at last they gave grudgingly and churlishly what they could no longer withhold.' And the following scathing indictment of the Second Chamber is from one who is himself at the present moment a member of the House :of Lords. { What I complain of in the House of Lords,' said Lord Rosebery, in a speech delivered in 1894, ' is that during the tenure of one Government it is a Second Chamber of an inexorable kind, but while another Government is in it is no Second Chamber at all. . . . Is it possible to believe that rn^these days, with the democratic suffrage that we have established, a House of Commons elected by the democratic suffrage will, suffer itself to be constantly thwarted, hindered, and harassed by the action of an hereditary Chamber, in which the proportion of Tories to Liberals 5s no less than 10 to 1 ? We boast of our free insti-

tutions; we swell as we walk abroad and see other countries; we make broad our phylacteries of freedom upon our foreheads; we thank God that we . are not as other men are— all the time we endure this mockery of freedom. You are bound hand and foot. You may vote and vote till you are', black in the face; it will not change the aspect of matters at all. Still the House of Lords will control at its will the measures of your representatives. ... We have nothing to do with the present constitution of the House of Lords. • . . We find the House of Lords as it stands, and we desire as the most piactical way of effecting the object we have in view so to readjust the relations of the present House of Commons to the present House of Lords that the deliberate will of the House of Commons shall not be overborne by the action of the House of Lords. In our opinion' (Lord Rosebery was then Prime Minister) 'the time has come when the right of the House of Lords to absolute veto upon the wishes or legislation of the House of Commons should for ever be closed.'

What Lord Rosebery so long ago projected is now happily—and, we may add, accomplished. For though Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne may talk airily about repealing the Bill when they return to power, nothing is more certain than that the Commons, having once emancipated themselves, will ' never go back in their tracks on this question. ■ Although, as we have hinted, Home Rule may not arrive in 1914 though the probabilities are that it will—its coming, sooner or later, is now certain, the one impassable barrier having been removed. Apart from Home Rule, the Veto Bill ensures that the will of the people shall be given effect to on all other questions as well; and it clears the way for the passage of measures of reform that will revolutionize social and industrial conditions in England. Unquestionably the main credit for this history-making victory rests with the Irish Party and their leader; and the taunts of the Opposition are a very genuine tribute to the fact that it -is owing to Mr.. Redmond's determination, level-headedness, and statesmanship, that the Veto project has.been brought, without hitch, to successful fruition. If ever a man deserved the gratitude, not of the Irish people only, but of the whole democracy of Great Britain, that man is John Redmond.