MONEY BILLS.

HC Deb 06 April 1910 vol 16 cc449-515

Considered in Committee.

[Mr. EMMOTT in the Chair.]

Motion made, and Question proposed, 1. That it is expedient that the House of Lords be disabled by Law from rejecting or amending a Money Bill, but that any such limitation by Law shall not be taken to diminish or qualify the existing rights and privileges of the House of Commons.

For the purpose of this Resolution a Bill shall be considered a Money Bill if, in the opinion of the Speaker, it contains only provisions dealing with all or any of the following subjects, namely, the imposition, repeal, remission, alteration, or regulation of taxation; charges on the Consolidated Fund or the provision of money by Parliament; Supply; the appropriation, control, or regulation of public money; the raising or guarantee of any loan or the repayment thereof; or matters incidental to those subjects or any of them."—[The Prime Minister.]

The SECRETARY Of STATE for WAR (Mr. Haldane)

In the preliminary skir- mishing which has already taken place upon these Resolutions, two points have been taken—one notably by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for East Worcester (Mr. Austen Chamberlain), who said that the terms of the Resolutions contemplated a revolution, and a revolution which would be regarded as such by every competent authority on constitutional law who was not biassed. The other point on which I shall have to respectfully submit some observations to the Committee, is one which I regard with more encouragement. It was made by the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition when he said that unusual importance, even greater than otherwise would have attached, attached to this proposal, because it was made for a Constitution the essence of which was hitherto unwritten. Well, I agree with him that it is most unfortunate that we should have to introduce at any time a written provision into an unwritten Constitution.

4.0 P.M.

I believe that an unwritten Constitution is the best for this country. I believe it would be to our advantage to leave things to develop in accordance with the genius of the nation and the spirit of our forefathers, who, imbued with the traditions of the old common lawyers, never went beyond the situation they had in hand. So it was that the Constitution was statesman-made just as) the law was judge-made, and to my mind it is an unhappy circumstance that we should have to make a departure from that tradition. But what is the cause of that departure, and who is responsible for it? For my part I would willingly have left the House of Lords alone if they would only have observed, not the letter—for there is no letter in an unwritten Constitution—but the spirit of that Constitution. But when a breach is made of the gravity of the breach which was made last winter, and when we have no assurance that that breach will not be repeated, then I say we should be unworthy of the traditions of our forefathers if we did not try to deal with the situation. For more than two centuries in the history of this country it has been an established principle that Aids and Supplies are matters within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commons House of Parliament. That tradition has been rudely broken, and we should be unworthy of those who went before us and who, on the floor of this House, struggled for the liberties which we believed had been secured for ever, if we did not stand up in defence of those liberties. I regard this Resolution as standing on a special footing, a footing of special importance. It is not merely a question of a legal Veto as applied to general legislation. As regards that Veto, there may be differences of circumstances. It may be right that there should be opportunities of delay and consideration, but when we come to finance we rest our case on a totally different ground, and that is that the House of Commons has, and ought to have, exclusive jurisdiction over these great questions of Supplies and the Votes of the year.

The first proposition which I submit to the Committee is that the Resolution in truth and in substance merely gives legal form and sanction to a usage of the Constitution which is not only well defined, but which is constitutionally binding. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for St. Andrew's University (Sir R. Finlay) made a very able speech the other day, in which he showed himself far too fine a lawyer to overlook the distinction between legal and constitutional power. He did not contend that because the House of Lords has in connection with Budget Bills and other Bills the legal power to reject that therefore it had the constitutional right. He passed from that point, which was made in the earlier part of the discussion, to the further point that when you examine the precedents they only show that the other Chamber was restricted in the right to alter, but not in the right to reject. That was the proposition of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, and I quite agree, when you look at these old Resolutions, they are sometimes worded in a very curious fashion. Sometimes they are not very distinct, but, on the whole, if you look at them, you find upon analysis there is not solely that narrow question of alteration, but the much broader question that the House of Lords did not in those days, in the eyes of the House of Commons, have the power to deal in any way with financial business.

I quite agree that if you take the constitutional literature of that period you find it obscure not only on this, but on many other points. Anybody whose duty it has been to read Lord Coke as much as I have done will find obscurity characteristic of the old common lawyer, and they will find laid down a dislike of abstract principles. It has always been contrary to the custom of our people to lay down abstract principles, and the characteristic of old common lawyers shows that tendency of mind. I am not talking about finance, but about the elementary principles of common law, and you will find them exemplified in Lord Coke. Now I pass to the Resolutions in the Commons Journals, and you find what is meant there indicated. You find, if you look at it, that the House of Commons has stuck firmly to the proposition that there is no power to interfere with what, in modern parlance, is characterised as the Budget of the year by the House of Lords. It was distinctly laid down in such a way as frees it from obscurity that there is only one mode in this, as in other matters, and that is the historical method of searching out reasons for these declarations, and in the light of these reasons say what the conclusion was. If you do that, I maintain that it is perfectly clear that the proposition is nothing short of what I have stated, that the House of Commons has maintained at all times control of what in modern parlance is called the Budget, and the House of Lords has not, and never had, any power to interfere. The struggle for the establishment of that principle rests on higher ground than mere precedent and occupied centuries. It took a very long time before the Commons established their control of the Executive Government and Administration generally. At first the struggle was between King and Commons. The Lords in those early days were, on the whole, inclined to be King's men, rather than on the constitutional side of the controversy. Consequently the controversy was between the Commons and the Lords, the Lords favouring the view that the executive power rested with the King, and whatever control the Commons maintained they exercised through the medium of finance. It is the tracing of the history of that struggle— which, of course, I cannot go into to-day— which is the key to many of these Resolutions. If you want to find the culminating point you may do so in a Resolution in the Commons Journals of 8th April, 1700, repeating the established principle that the exclusive right to deal with Aids and Supplies was in the Commons, and them alone. The Resolution went on:— This is well known to be such a fundamental right of the Commons, that to give reasons for it has been esteemed by our ancestors to be a weakening of the right. Unfortunately I shall be compelled to offer a few reasons for it to-day. As I have said, the key is to be found in the reasons of the rule, and the character of our Constitution has been increasingly so. For three centuries past the control of the Administration has been placed under the Commons, and the Commons alone. I am quite aware that that has not always been the doctrine of the Constitution. Charles I. intimated that he regarded it as the sole duty of his Parliament to give him information as to government, but that was thrust aside, and progressively it was made perfectly clear that the supreme control of administration lies in the House of Commons. In a passage in Mr. Bagehot's book he says if you want to find, what is not always easy to find, where the sovereignty in a newly elected House of Commons lies; if you want to find the locality of the Sovereign, you find it most distinctly in the House of Commons expressing the policy of the nation; just as in these days the King reigns, but does not govern, and the House of Commons govern, but do not reign.

That is a principle which is made manifest in various ways. For instance, Ministers in matters of administration, as distinguished from legislation, are not responsible to the Upper House. Resolutions of Censure in the other House do not affect the continuance in office of Ministers, and although we treat them with attention and respect, we are not moved by them. Then, again, when the House of Commons passes a Budget Resolution imposing a tax, until now it has always been possible to collect the duty at once from the date of the Resolution, because it has always been known that the House which passed the Resolution had the power to pass the necessary legislation. It was never contemplated that the other House could reject legislation which is necessary to give legal vitality to a Resolution. That I take to be the explanation of the raising of the taxes which have bean collected under Resolutions The courts have said, and the sole responsible body has intimated its intention to us, that it would be nugatory to prevent that being done which presently will be ratified by virtue of this exclusive authority.

Between our Constitution and other constitutions there are marked features of contrast, a contrast which it is necessary to bear in mind, because arguments have been adduced against this Resolution based upon precedents drawn from the practice of other nations. The point I make is that the sovereignty is in the popular Chamber, and that is not the case in other countries. The United States of America proceeds-upon a highly different principle, because there the sovereignty is split up. For example, it is not strictly true to say that Congress rules legislation and the President rules administration, although it is sometimes stated. Congress can vote the money for a war and declare war, but the President can carry it on without going back to Congress. President Lincoln exercised that power to carry on the war of 1860. Again, the Constitution cannot be amended without the consent of the State. The whole matter is subject to the review of the Supreme Court in a fashion that shows that in that Constitution the sovereignty is carefully split up. Nor did this happen by accident; it was done by those wise men who founded the Constitution of the United States for the very reason that they wanted to avoid what the example of George III. had placed before their eyes. They wished to see the executive power put under the control of the people of the United States in various ways. The people were to elect the President by one process and the Congress by another process, and they carefully provided that there should be no such control in any one man or any one body as should make it possible for the sort of things to happen which they had seen happen before their eyes. That is the course which has been taken in the United States, and it is not for us to judge whether it is good or whether it is not; it is their way. Something of the sort is true of other countries, but it does not follow that we should go copying foreign institutions. We have got our own Constitution, a Constitution of historic growth.

If you look at other countries you find, for example, that in France the President is elected for a term, and is to that extent independent of the moods and variations of the French Senate and Chamber. In other countries, as for instance in Prussia, you have an hereditary constitutional power and a Chamber separately elected. But with us the every essence of our Constitution is that Parliament should control its administration, and the very essence of that Parliamentary control is that it should rest with the House of Commons. I come back to that in another form, because there are some important witnesses whose testimony adds greater force to this proposition than would be lent to it by any argument of mine.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

What is the proposition?

Mr. HALDANE

The proposition is that the complete control of the administration, and consequently of the finances which are required to make that administration effective, rests with the House of Commons. It has been suggested that a different principle obtains in our Colonies. It is very difficult to know what is the state of things in our Colonies. If hon. Members had spent time, as I have in days gone by— I have had to do it officially—in wading through the voluminous precedents connected with Mr. Todd's Parliamentary work on "Parliamentary Government in the Colonies," they would have found the variations of view which prevailed from time to time. There is no condition and no set of precedents which make the British Constitution apply. On the whole, the tendency of the dominions oversea is to approximate more closely to our own Parliamentary practice, but there are some parts of the Dominions of the Crown where even to-day it is by no means clear what are the functions of the Upper Chamber. You therefore cannot draw any argument from any one Colony or Dominion oversea. You must look at the question as a whole, and, if you do, you will find a great deal of conflict. If you pass from generalities and come to details, you will find that this is strictly so, and it arises from the necessity of the situation.

What would be the position of a Minister in charge of an administrative department if he had to go to another board of directors other than the House of Commons? What is a Ministry? It is a sort of committee appointed by the majority in a newly elected House of Commons. It is nothing else. That House, with a majority who puts them in, can turn them out, and the Ministers look to the House of Commons, and to the House of Commons alone, for the final voice upon their conduct of business. The House of Commons prescribes most elaborate rules, not only for furnishing them with the Supplies necessary for carrying on their Departments, but in restricting them in the use of those Supplies. A Minister's money comes back to the Treasury on 31st March, and he knows that on 1st April he must begin to spend again, and he must get a fresh Supply from the House of Commons. He submits an Estimate in advance, and the House of Commons votes him, on carefully prepared written statements which he puts forward, the money requisite for the year. The House of Commons afterwards directs by a Consolidation Act the amount so granted to be paid out of the Consolidated Fund. Later on in the year, when the Services are completely provided for, an Appropriation Act is passed. It is the Consolidated Fund Act and something more, and it is an Act which provides the various sums granted to the various Services which have to be provided for and which the House of Commons has sanctioned. Then the final step is the step taken in the Budget Act of the year, which raises the taxes necessary to make good the supply. Supposing some other authority had the right to say, "Yes, it is all very well for you to provide money for these Services, but we have a judgment about them too, and we are in a position to say whether the money can be granted or not," how could any Ministry carry on its business? No man can serve two masters, and no agent can look to two boards of directors, both of whom are to sign his cheques, and to one of whom, and one alone, he is responsible. It is the very essence of our Constitution that Ministers should be entitled to look to the House of Commons as the source not only of the Supply voted to them, but of the machinery necessary for raising the money required to make those Supplies good.

Going behind all those dicta which you find in these Resolutions, and which I think I shall show are pretty clear, the reason of the rule makes everything apparent and frees you from the confusion which you might otherwise have, if you had no guiding principle, because it shows the House of Commons persistently asserted, and at last succeeded in establishing, its right to be the sole and exclusive source of the Aids and Supply for carrying on the Administration of the day. Of course, all this was the outcome of a very long struggle. It did not happen all at once. There was a long period before the Tudors, at the beginning of which the Lords and the Commons assessed themselves, and assessed themselves separately for the aid of the Crown. Ultimately, they came not to assess themselves separately, and the Commons assessed, but there came a period when it had to be decided which was the predominating body in doing so, and, as long ago as 1407, in a document called "The Indemnity of Parliament," well known to historians, in Henry IV.'s time, it was laid down that the Commons granted and the Lords assented. Then came the time of the Tudors, who were very powerful in their control over Parliament and of financial legislation. In the time of the Stuarts there was a long struggle, and after 1688, which may be taken as the commencement of the new period, the present position was established. As long ago as 1628 it was well established that the preamble of a Bill granting Aids and Supply to the Crown should be that: "We, the Commons, have given and granted to your Majesty." The Lords objected to that, and there was a discussion, but they ultimately tacitly agreed, and ever since the Speaker of the House of Commons has presented the Finance Bills to the Sovereign for the Royal Assent. They do not go through the Lords in the same form as other Bills; they come back to the hands of the Speaker of the House of Commons, who presents them for the Royal Assent. That may seem to be a small formality, but all these things are indicative. If you read these Resolutions in the light of the principle which underlies them and the reasons which brought that principle into existence, there is no ambiguity about the language of them all. There was another important precedent in 1640. The Lords thought fit to give an injunction to the Commons in very respectful language that the Commons should proceed with the consideration of Supply first of all, because it was important that the Supply should be provided for. Thereupon the Commons apparently took this much risk and demanded a conference. The Solicitor-General reported that the Lords at that conference had entirely given in, and had stated they would not. meddle with matters of subsidy which belongs naturally and properly to you [the Commons]; no, not to give you, advice therein. It is not uninteresting to see what Lord Clarendon said:— This conference was no sooner reported in the House of Commons than their whole temper appeared to be shaken. This had never been infringed or violated or so much as questioned in the worst of times; and that now (in 1640), after so long intermission of Parliament, that all privileges might be forgotten, the House of Peers should begin with an action their ancestors never attempted, administered too much cause of jealousy of something else that was intended, and so, with a unanimous consent, they declared it to be so high a breach of privilege, that they could not proceed on any other matter until they first received satisfaction and reparation from the House of Peers, and which the next day they demanded at a conference. He continues:— The Lords were sensible of their error which had been foreseen and dissuaded by many of them. They acknowledged the privilege of the Commons as fully as they demanded it, and hoped they had not broken it by offering their advice to them without mentioning the nature of the Supply, the proportion, or the means of raising it, which they confessed belonged entirely to them. Then we come to 1671, a date on which the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite laid such stress. He said the word in the Resolution of 1671 was "altered," and so it is; but when you look up what the question was about and the Resolution entered in the Commons Journals, you see at once why the word "altered" was used. What was done was merely carrying out the principle laid down in 1640, that the House had nothing to do with these matters of Supply. As a result of this controversy the Commons laid down in their Journals:— That there is a fundamental right in this House alone in Bills of Rates and Impositions on Merchandise as to the matter, the measure and the time. That shows perfectly clearly that they claimed in those days complete control over these matters, and that they objected to the alteration, because the alteration was only an example of a larger and broader principle. They made that finally clear in 1678, when they declared that all Aids and Supplies are the sole gift of the Commons. That has been the case ever since. There is no instance of a Taxation Bill being rejected before the time of Queen Anne; but, after that, when Bills became more numerous, there are several instances. Eighteen or twenty small Bills were thrown out then, but they were nearly all Bills in which there was some very small question of duty and very large question of principle involved. For example, there was the Bill which the Lords rejected in 1781, described as An Act for providing a reward to Henry Phillips on his making a proper discovery for the use of the public of the composition of his powder for the destruction of insects. Then again, in 1790, they rejected a Lottery Bill in the form of a Bill, for granting to His Majesty a certain sum of money to be raised by a lottery. I dare not think what, if my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed to raise money by a proposal of that nature, would be said. It would involve some very large question of public morals altogether swallowing up any consideration of finance. But if you look at these precedents you will see that they are nearly all of them questions in which some big principle altogether overtops the financial point involved. I prefer to rely on the authority of Sir Erskine May (Lord Farnborough), where he says:— Until the year I860, although the Lords had rejected numerous Bills concerning questions of public policy in which taxation was incidentally involved, they had respected Bills exclusively relating to Supply and Ways and Means. He refers to a Resolution of the House of Commons on 6th July, 1860, and gives as the substance of it that the right of granting Aids and Supplies to the Crown is the Commons alone: that the power of the Lords to reject Bills relating to taxation was justly regarded by the Commons with peculiar jealousy, as affecting the right of the Commons to grant the Supply and provide the Ways and Means for the service of the year, and that ' to guard for the future against the undue exercise of that power of the Lords and to secure to the Commons their rightful control over Taxation and Supply, this House has in its own hands the power so to impose and remit taxes and to frame Bills of Supply that the right of the Commons as to the matter manner, measure and time may he preserved inviolate. What does that mean? It is plain it means that while some isolated point of taxation incidental to some large measure of policy may legitimately be refused, it was clear in the minds of the House of Commons of that day that it was absolutely in the power of the House to deal with Bills for maintaining the service of the year exclusively, and that they always had it in their power to put a question in that position by including it in their Budget. It is quite true that the majority of the Committee on that occasion did not pronounce in favour of that point, but there is a Minority Report in 1860 which says:— The Committee cannot doubt that the right which the Commons have contended for and maintained is nothing less than an absolute control in determining the expenditure necessary for the service of the Crown and the mode and amount of taxation which shall be imposed on the people. It is quite true that only three voted for this—Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright. In all cases the Commons appear to have stuck to their point; sometimes they affected to concede the power to reject, but this appears to have been legal only, like the modern recognition of the Sovereign's legal right of veto. It was confined to a legal power, and it goes back to the old Indemnity of Parliament Bill of 1407, for they stuck to their exclusive power as to quantum, matter, manner, and measure. That shows—looking at the circumstances and language alike—that they considered they had exclusive power over the Supplies of the year. When one considers not only that no Budget Bill had ever been rejected until last year, and when one considers that no Appropriation Bill has ever been rejected, and that Appropriation Bills are as old as the time of Charles II., it does seem that we have coupled with practice and precedent a very strong case indeed for the considerations which I venture to present to the Committee. I am fortified in this by authorities. Here are one or two in support of my view that the suggestion that the Lords should reject was a legal right. I have the view of Lord Chatham in 1765, in which he says:— The taxes are a voluntary grant and gift "f the Commons alone. The concurrence of the Peers and the Crown to the tax is only necessary to clothe it with a. form of law. The gift and grant is in the Commons alone. Then I come to a declaration of one of the famous Leaders of the House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington, who took a very high constitutional view. The Lords had been invited to reject the Corn Law Bill in 1846. It had been said in the Debate on the Lords that the Vote of the Commons was Inconsistent with the supposed views of the constituents by whom they were elected…. My Lords I think that is not a subject which this House can take into consideration. Now I come to more modern times. The late Lord Salisbury, speaking in 1895 on a Debate on the Finance Bill, said:— This House by custom takes no share whatever in the forces by which Governments are displaced or inaugurated, and it takes no share whatever in that which is the most important part of the annual constant business of every legitimate body, the provision of funds by which the Service is to be carried on. And lastly I come to the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. BALFOUR

I knew that was coming.

Mr. HALDANE

The right hon. Gentleman said:— The House of Lords does not interfere with the general financial policy of the country…. We all know that the power of the House of Lords thus limited, and rightly limited as t think, in the sphere of legislation and administration is still further limited by the fact that it cannot touch those Money Bills which, if it, could deal with, no doubt, it could bring the whole executive machinery of the country to a standstill.

Mr. BALFOUR

Hear, hear.

Mr. HALDANE

If the right hon. Gentleman says "Hear, hear," how can he defend the present state of things? I have great admiration for his acuteness of mind and his tremendous debating power, but I should like to know how he is going to get out of his position.

HON. MEMBERS

"Wait and see. "

Mr. HALDANE

To sum up the whole matter, it seems to me that I have given at any rate some substantial ground for the proposition that this Resolution is, in the first place, declaratory merely, and, in the second place, declaratory of a principle which is essential in a Constitution which, unlike the constitution of foreign countries, subordinates the Executive in the House of Commons alone to the principle of giving the House of Commons the exclusive control of finance. I regret the necessity for putting it down in writing. It is not our fault. I now pass to the Resolution itself. The Resolution contemplates that Money Bills should be defined in the Statute in a narrower sense than is sometimes used. It is confined to the subjects mentioned in the Definition Clause, which excludes the rating question. The second thing it contemplates is that the Speaker should have a statutory position which enables him to exercise judgment upon these matters, and which should preclude the question of party bias or controversy about taxes. The Resolution contemplates that the Money Bill should go to the House of Lords, that it is only to be considered there, and that it should not be amended or rejected. That is the object of the Resolution, and I submit it simply affirms the existing custom and constitution and merely gives it a legal written expression and a legal sanction which are essential to the position to-day. I regret the necessity for that. The custom which we, are trying to establish by this Resolution is essential, and unless it be observed the administration of public business will never emerge properly from the confusion into which it has been thrown. That is what it all comes to.

Financial legislation stands, and must stand, on a special footing. Other legislation is, in the view which I hold, best carried on with the aid of a revising chamber. I am for two Chambers for general legislation; but the second must be an instrument really fitted for its work, which is to revise, sympathetically, the legislative policy, rather than lay it down. With the Commons House—representing as it does not merely numbers but localities— must remain the initiative and the sovereign power. What those who think as I do desire to see is a Second Chamber which will possess real authority to revise and delay, because it will be a real though second mirror of the mind of the nation. I am not going to argue that afresh—I should not be in order if I did. But that is the principle that underlies the whole scheme which we are presenting to the House, and of which what we are discussing to-day is a part which can only be fully understood in the light of the whole of which it forms a part. The policy is a single policy. It is, in my view, not Veto Resolutions, and then, as a separable part, a reconstituted Second Chamber! It is both. The two form organic parts of one whole. The necessities of a situation which is ruled, not by logic, but by the methods of Parliament, have prescribed the scheme of taking Veto first. The sudden and unexpected action of the House of Lords made imperative rapid action and the preliminary steps which these Resolutions embody. Do not let us on this account fall into the mistake of thinking that we can separate the policy into two independent parts.

If we do not firmly lay down as the foundation of that policy the abolition of the hereditary principle; if we are silent as to our ideal, if we allow our case to go by default, we shall, when it is too late, find the hereditary principle entrenched by our adversaries behind a so-called reform of the House of Lords. Spine day the swing of the pendulum will place them in power, and that with what is, and will remain even under these Resolutions, while our opponents are in power, the single-Chamber system of to-day. They will claim in the form of a strengthened hereditary Chamber to have made the change which we delayed to make, and they will seek to do two things—to repeal the Veto and by limiting the Prerogative of the Crown to create peers, to destroy our only means of asserting in an extreme case the sovereignty of the people. Therefore, I say let us beware of falling into an obvious snare. Those who think you can get on by leaving the hereditary Chamber alone, and simply placing its powers under a statutory restriction, which can be repealed as readily as it can be enacted, will stumble in the ditch in their desire to avoid the quag. The only secure policy seems to me to keep firm ground and pursue the path which is obvious. The principle of a democratic versus an hereditary basis, and of carrying this principle to its full and practical conclusions, is one too great and too strong in its claim to possess and hold the field, to be displaced even by the accompaniment of any unreal reform. Once launched, it cannot be gone back on or be replaced by anything smaller. Therefore I say our efforts ought not to fall short of this single, indivisible and far-reaching policy. So only shall we entrench ourselves—so only shall we successfully appeal to the nation.

But whether or not I carry with me all hon. Members in this expression of my own strong conviction, on the terms of this Resolution there is no room for doubt on this side of the House. Even were such a Second Chamber constituted it would not control the Executive and it therefore would not, for the reasons I have given, interfere in finance. This Resolution thus depends on a principle which is true whatever view may be taken on those other matters to which I have referred. You cannot split up the sovereign authority over finance. If you do you paralyse the Executive Government, which can look only to one master—that from which it derives its life and authority. Attempts at checks will always be called for by timid people, but these checks will never be really effective. The history of finance from 1624 to 1678 and from 1861 to 1909 proves that proposition. Moreover, these checks, even if they could be made real, would cost too much. They fail on the balance of the advantages, and they tend to diminish the sense of responsibility of ' Ministers and of this House. I have no fear of revolution or of confiscatory finance, unless the nation has, contrary to the habit of its mind, determined on such a policy. If it did so determine no check could effectively restrain it. If it has not so determined no such legislation will pass. There is an old French saying that "there is someone who is more able than Talleyrand, more able than Napoleon, c'est tout le monde." The people are in the long run greater and wiser than any Minister, or than any Ministry, or than any Parliament. The history of the develoment of our Constitution is the history of that truth. The nation seems to superficial observers to be indifferent to the action of its representatives, yet it does very really observe and attend, and neither Member nor Minister can venture for long to controvert its sovereign will. The real restraining force lies in no Statute and no Chamber of Parliament. It lies in the force which, with us, overbears individuals and caucuses alike—the silent and yet irresistible tide of public opinion, the fashioning force which guides and restrains Parliament, which is the source of all political energy, and the foundation of all sovereignty in the Constitution of the State.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I do not know what reflection will be uppermost in the mind of the Committee after the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. There are many reflections which suggest themselves, but I know he introduced a Resolution of so little consequence that the Government thought it could be passed by the House in a day and a half, and he has been forced to occupy more than an hour of our time. And when I say introduced the Resolution, I select my words with care, because he has not explained it. That is a task which still devolves upon some other Minister to perform. There was very much that was interesting in the right hon. Gentleman's speech, but if he will permit me to say so, there was much which was obscure. There was much in it as to which I had difficulty in seeing his reason for introducing, and there was a great deal absent from it which I should have thought it was his business to introduce. The passages to which he himself appeared to attach most importance were not absolutely the last observations, but the penultimate observations, which he evidently prepared and delivered with great care and verbal accuracy. They were not germane to this Resolution; they had nothing to do with that which is germane to any Resolution which the Government is moving. They were, on the contrary, a reason for moving the Resolutions which were foreshadowed in the King's Speech, and were foreshadowed in the Prime Minister's declaration, but which are not now produced because hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway on one side of the House or the other have told the Government they must not touch them.

The scheme of the Government, said the Secretary of State for War, is one and indivisible; you cannot separate it. Restriction of the powers of the House of Lords is inseparably connected with its constitutional powers. But this one and indissoluble whole in this organic union has been broken by the Government before it has ever been presented to the consideration of the House, and the two parts of their scheme, the destructive and the constructive, are separated in order that the destructive may be carried, while the constructive are only talked of. The constructive part is retained in the speeches of right hon. Gentlemen to salve the consciences of the Secretary of State for War and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and to save them from that death, and worse than death, which, according to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is to fall, unless the idea of a reformed Second Chamber is adhered to, but except for the purpose of giving these two right hon. Gentlemen a shadow of an excuse for retaining office when the policy to which they are committed is not going to be carried out, and except for the purpose of deceiving the people, who are liable to deception, because they are not able to give the same constant attention that we are obliged to do in this House, the references to reform are not worth the breath with which they are spoken, and will have no more permanent effect upon our legislation. I pass from the reforms, which are talked of by the Government, but which the House of Commons is not allowed to discuss, to the Resolution which the Secretary of State has moved. The right hon. Gentleman said in his opening passages, when he deplored the necessity for putting any part of the Constitution into written language, that for his part, but for the violent action taken by the House of Lords last autumn, he would have been content to leave things as they were. He assents. Then why did he vote for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Resolutions? The right hon. Gentleman says that it was only the action of the House of Lords of last year that forced him reluctantly to concur in the course which the Government is taking now. Did he not concur in a similar Resolution? What are these Resolutions except Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Resolutions.

The PRIME MINISTER

This Resolution was never dreamed of by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

5.0 P.M.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I am not sure whether I caught his observation, but I understood the Prime Minister to say that these Resolutions were never dreamt of by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

The PRIME MINISTER

No; I said this Resolution. When Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman's Resolution was proposed everyone on both sides of the House, and no one more clearly than the Leader of the Opposition, admitted that a Resolution of this kind dealing with finance was unnecessary.

Mr. BALFOUR

I have already contradicted that statement more than once. Hon. Gentlemen are perfectly justified in quoting my words, but they are not justified in saying that their interpretation of those words is the correct interpretation.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I understand the right hon. Gentleman's point He says that the words of the Secretary of State referred only to this Re- solution. The subsequent Resolutions are the Campbell - Bannerman Resolutions over again, but the financial Resolution is a new one. But that is wholly irrelevant to the Secretary of State's point, and though the Secretary of State thinks it is not, that can only be because he has forgotten what his own point was. His own point was that he regretted the necessity for a written Constitution. But for the action of the House of Lords last November he would have been no party to introducing a written Constitution.

Mr. HALDANE

I was speaking only of this Resolution. Is it likely that I, who had witnessed the rejection of the Plural Voting Bill and half a dozen things last Session, should have said I was content with the action of the House of Lords?

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

That is not what the right hon. Gentleman said. The right hon. Gentleman contends that he was speaking on this Resolution, but I have already pointed out that a good deal of his speech was off the Resolution. But what was it, then, the right hon. Gentleman said? It was that but for the breach of the Constitution last autumn he would have been content to go on as we were. The right hon. Gentleman recognises his words.

Mr. HALDANE

You cannot take a sentence out of my speech and twist it like that. I was speaking of finance and of this Resolution, and I carefully abstained from going into the wider question.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

No, the right hon. Gentleman was neither speaking of finance nor of this Resolution. He was speaking of written and unwritten constitutions, and he said that but for the breach of the Constitution last autumn by the House of Lords he would have been content to leave things as they were—to leave the Constitution unwritten.

Mr. HALDANE

The right hon. Gentleman remembers an early passage in my speech. I spoke of the preliminary skirmishing over this Resolution, and not over the other Resolutions.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

Was the right hon. Gentleman speaking about the necessity for importing a written Constitution? Was he expressing his regret that a written Constitution should become necessary?

Mr. HALDANE

This Resolution.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

No, not this Resolution, but a written Constitution. This Resolution imports a written Constitution, but so does the Campbell-Bannerman Resolution three or four years before the breach of the Constitution which now the right hon. Gentleman puts forward as his sole justification. Now what is the breach of the Constitution? It is this. He alleges—and this, I think, is what the major portion of his speech comes to—that the House of Lords had no constitutional right to reject a Finance Bill. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that there is a distinction between legal right and constitutional right. I do not challenge that point. But he contends that the House of Lords has no constitutional right to reject a Finance Bill. How does he prove that? He prefaces his examination of statements by various statesmen who have dealt with the subject by stating that these old Resolutions are sometimes worded in a very curious fashion, that they are often obscure, and, indeed, that it takes a great deal of skill to read into them the meaning which he wishes them to import. I do not mean to say that he said that, but that is the inference I draw from the language in which he spoke. We have often heard of judge-made law, and sometimes, for a layman, it is difficult to understand how so much law is judge-made. The right hon. Gentleman would adorn the Bench. His knowledge and his talent amply fit him for such n position; but after I have heard him deal with precedents and Resolutions and declarations of this House I tremble to think how the meaning of the House would be perverted and how much judge-made law there would be if he ever occupied a prominent position in our highest courts. He is unable to bring a single clear declaration from any Resolutions of the House of Commons or any of our procedure to prove that the House of Lords have not the right to reject the Budget, and that stands a record in our proceedings, that we have admitted that they have. It would require strong evidence to show, if the language were curious and obscure, as he says, that it was admitted by everybody under cover of that curious and obscure language that the other House had no power to reject Money Bills. How can you twist language which he calls obscure, which on his own contention, from his own point of view, is obscure, but which I think is plain, so as to controvert other language directly in an opposite sense which is perfectly plain.

The right hon. Gentleman before he examined any of these precedents tried to fortify his case by preparing the ground with a disquisition on sovereignty. It carried me back to my undergraduate days, when we had lectures on international law and other matters of that kind, and we were questioned as to where sovereignty resided in the Constitution of the United States, or the Constitution of the "United Kingdom, or in other Constitutions. It was very interesting and very relevant in the lecture room, but was it very pertinent to our discussion to-day 1 Did it prove anything? Was it even intended to prove anything? Was it not rather intended to put us in a receptive frame of mind so that by this long and involved disquisition we should really have already been brought to the idea that the case for the House of Commons claim, as now put forward by the Government, was already more than half made before a single precedent was touched or a single really pertinent fact was investigated? I really cannot say that his general claim about sovereignty was either pertinent to the discussion in itself or was very well founded as expounded by him. He used, for instance, this argument. It is clear that the sovereignty of this country resides in the House of Commons, because up to this time taxes have been collected on a mere Resolution of the House of Commons. You can collect taxes in this country on a mere Resolution of the House of Commons to-day. You might be collecting the Income Tax at this moment, and you could and you would be if you had given half a day, or even an hour, to the discussion of the Income Tax Resolutions. [An HON. MEMBER: "They are collecting them from the Civil Service."] That is an act of mere violent authority such as right hon. Gentlemen like to exercise. They have the Civil servants under their control. They say, "We will not take the money from the taxpayer outside. He might refuse to pay, and then to litigate might be a very long and costly proceeding. We will pay our own servants with Income Tax deducted, and we will leave them to litigate, and as it is a very long and costly proceeding they are not likely to do it." I quite agree. They take the tax, but they do not take it under cover of a House of Commons Resolution.

Mr. HALDANE

We treat ourselves in the same way.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I have not an exalted opinion of the Government, but I did not suppose they paid their own salaries in full without deducting the tax. I never should have suggested that. As a matter of fact, you could collect taxation on a Resolution of the House of Commons to-morrow, you ought to be collecting it today on such a Resolution, and it is mere wilfulness and pride that prevents you from doing it, and costs the country so much money in consequence. In this matter a Resolution has no permanent force unless it be embodied in a Bill, and unless that Bill passes through all its stages in both Houses. And the effect of the rejection of the Bill in the House of Lords is exactly the same as the rejection of the Bill in our House. We have had experience of it. The right hon. Gentleman talks as if no tax had ever been rejected by Parliament before which had prior to its sanction by Act of Parliament been collected on the strength of a Resolution. He has only to go back to 1885, when the Budget of Mr. Gladstone's Government was defeated in this House, and the taxation collected on a Resolution had to be refunded by those from whom it had been taken. Did that invalidate collection by Resolution? Did it produce a deadlock? No. Because the men of those times did not mean to have a deadlock, and there would be no financial deadlock at this moment unless the Government had studied to create one. This reference to Resolutions, and the little value that the right hon. Gentleman attaches to them when he deals with finance, throws some light upon the value which we ought to attach to the Resolutions which we are now considering. When we were discussing the Budget Resolutions last year, Ministers complained bitterly that we spent so much time. When we pointed out that the Resolutions were very extreme they said, as the right hon. Gentleman said just now, "The Resolutions say that, but we do not mean that. These Resolutions are only to found a Bill upon, and they can be restricted and limited in any respect you wish when the Bill comes before you." Let us remember that these Resolutions commit this House to nothing. They only cause Ministers to produce a Bill. They do not even commit Ministers to proceed with the Bill, and I understand, from what the Prime Minister said yesterday, that he does not intend to do so. I wish he would tell us what he intends to do. On 21st February, in the Debate on the Address, he said:— ''We propose to proceed in the first instance by Resolutions—Resolutions, I need not say, to be em- bodied and earned into law in a Bill of which they will form the foundations, and embodied and carried through this House in that Bill in the course of the present. Session. The right hon. Gentleman told us, I think, within a week of that day, and he has repeated it since, that the Government have changed their policy in one respect and one respect only. He said they now intended to send the Resolutions up to the House of Lords. He repeatedly said that was the only change. When did the right hon. Gentleman decide not to proceed with the Bill unless the House of Lords passed the Resolutions?

The PRIME MINISTER

On 28th February.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I shall take the statement which was made on 28th February. That was the speech in which he said this was the only change which had been made in the policy of the Government since 21st February. He said he meant to send the Resolutions up to the House of Lords. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will explain that when the time comes.

The PRIME MINISTER

I will.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I quite accept that.

The PRIME MINISTER

I am sure the right hon. Gentleman does not expect me to interrupt him by making an explanation now.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I think it is for the convenience of both sides of the House that the right hon. Gentleman should make it in his own time. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman will explain why this change took place in the Government's intentions, why he told the House on 28th February that there was one change, and one change only, which did not concern this House at all, but the other place, namely, as to the presentation of the Resolutions in the other place, and why he left us in ignorance as to the vital change in our own procedure, namely, that unless the House of Lords passed the Resolutions he did hot intend to proceed with a Bill in this House.

I return to the speech of the Secretary of State for War. He showed, according to his view, that sovereignty rested in the House of Commons. Put in popular language I suppose that is a statement which all of us will concur in, namely, that if the representatives of the people clearly and evidently express the settled will of the people what they do must prevail. No check can stop it; no safeguards can prevent it; no Second Chamber can prevent it. Once the will of the people is clear under our present system the will of the people does prevail, and that is all that is meant by the right hon. Gentleman's argument that sovereignty rests in this House. What more do you want? [Laughter.] Yes, what more do you want? I know perfectly well that that is what you wish to call the attention of the country to. [Cheers.] It is admitted by your cheers that once the will of the country is clear it must prevail, that no Second Chamber can stop it, and that no check or safeguards can prevent it. What more do you want? What you want is to carry things upon which the will of the country is not clear. Your complaint is not that the House of Lords rejects a Bill which represents the settled or clear will of the people, but that it declines to pass a Bill upon which the mind of the people is not yet clear. The more unpopular the Bill is, and the less likely it is to commend itself to the people, the greater the grievance felt by hon. Gentlemen opposite. I observed in an able organ, the "Westminster Gazette," a little time ago this argument put in reference to the Licensing Bill. That journal admitted—and we have heard the same admission quoted from speeches of hon. Members on the other side of the House— that the Licensing Bill was not a popular Bill, though they thought it a good Temperance Bill. Then they said it was the business of the House of Lords to facilitate the passage of that Bill which was unpopular so that a reform which the people want might be carried. That is the difference between the Government and ourselves.

It is not a question as to whether the will of the people should prevail. We do not deny that the will of the people should prevail. We wish it to prevail. We are the creatures of the will of the people as much as any other body in the House. We draw our strength from the people. We are content to appeal to them and to abide by their judgment when it is deliberately given. The people have a right to be consulted on great issues on which they have never expressed an opinion, and your claim to be a democratically-governed country is a farce unless you are prepared to recognise that right of the people, and to have some security in the Constitution that that right shall be ob- served. That observation applies not merely to the finance Resolution, but to the whole scope of the Government Resolutions. It applies equally to both the first and second Resolutions, but the Secretary of State for War raises a special claim for the first Resolution. I rather gathered from the tone of his speech that personally he did not very much care about the Second Resolution, and that it was the first on which he found it easier to make his stand and to make his speech. I am not going through all the precedents to which he alluded. They were examined every one of them, by my right hon. and learned Friend (Sir R. Finlay) the other day, and nothing that the Secretary of State for War said has in any way shaken the case which he made out. The right hon. Gentleman flitted from precedent to precedent, from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, and back again into the sixteenth century, till neither he nor we seemed to know what century we were in. But he did not deal exhaustively with any precedent, and he did not set to work to disprove in any particular instance the case which had been made out by my right hon. and learned Friend. The Secretary of State for War flatters himself that he disproved the case as regards 1671. I am willing to take him on that particular precedent. What happened? There was a conference between the two Houses. The Lords stated their reasons and the Commons stated theirs. The Lords alleged that there was to be a check and balance in the Constitution between the two Chambers, and the Commons admitted: "Your Lordships have a negative voice to the whole." That is the precedent of 1671 which the Secretary of State for War chooses from among those he mentioned as conclusive in his favour.

Mr. HALDANE

Later on in the same period the Commons said that they would not assent to the Lords' power to interfere in any way.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

The right hon. Gentleman has persuaded himself, but I think he will find it difficult to persuade other men that the meaning which he tries to import into the Commons' language is the meaning the Commons intended to convey. Nowhere does he find a clear and distinct statement of the case as he wishes to put it, and we can point again and again to conclusive statements by the Commons against the case as he wishes to put it. It is not merely in 1671 the view was expressed about negative to the whole. Coming to 1860, the latest occasion, was there any denial on the part of the Commons in that year of the right of the Lords to negative the whole? The Secretary of State for War read an observation from Lord John Russell. May I read another. In 1862 Lord John Russell said:— The Noble Earl (Earl Derby) says that the House of Commons has the right to include all the Supplies of the year in one Bill, and that your Lordships can, if you please, reject that Bill. There can be no doubt respecting these two positions-the right of the Commons to include all the Supplies of the year in one Bill and the right of the Lords to reject the Bill.

Mr. HALDANE

The legal right.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

He did not say the legal right. He said the right.

Mr. HALDANE

Lord John Russell concurred in the Minority Report in which they negative everything but the legal right.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

I prefer Lord John Russell speaking for himself to Lord John Russell concurring in a Minority Report, when I have not myself read the Report. I have known other right hon. Gentlemen concur in a great deal which I do not think exactly represented their own opinions. The Secretary of State for War concurs in these Resolutions. He concurs in the action of the Government in separating reform from the Veto; but speaking for himself in the concluding passages of his speech, he repeated in almost equally strong and impressive language the declaration of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that the two questions are inseparably connected. I prefer the man speaking for himself to the man concurring in what may be said by others. And Mr. Gladstone, who was again cited by the right hon. Gentleman, the protagonist of that struggle, himself never put the Claim of the Commons where the Secretary for State tries to put it.

Mr. JONATHAN SAMUEL

He did.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

He never did. He recognised the right of the House of Lords to reject the. Bill.

Mr. JONATHAN SAMUEL

He did not.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

And not only that, but he strongly advised that the right to amend a Finance Bill should be preserved. He said that the time might come when it would be important that that right should be exercised as a defence against tacking; and to say that Mr. Gladstone, when he went so far as to assert the right of the House of Lords to amend and to express the hope that the right to amend should be preserved—a right which is by far the more doubtful of the two rights— denied the right to reject, is absurd. But suppose he admitted the right to amend only. This Resolution does not allow the right to amend. This Resolution goes beyond what even Mr. Gladstone asked, and is an assertion of the Commons rights to restriction on the House of Lords beyond any put forward by responsible people at that time. The other authorities which the right hon. Gentleman cited had, I think, all been cited previously, and all dealt with seriatim by my colleagues and friends in this House. The right hon. Gentleman, I think, has not been a very constant attendant at these Debates.

Mr. HALDANE

I have read them.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

Then the right hon. Gentleman was at very little trouble to find quotations from the speeches. The hon. Member for Oxford University (Lord Hugh Cecil) had with signal success vindicated Lord Salisbury against the allegation made against him that he had given up the right of the House of Lords to reject a Finance Bill, and had shown how absolutely incompatible that idea was with the whole tone and argument of the speech from which that single passage was taken. If the right hon. Gentleman had followed the controversy he would have seen that the quotation from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was used not once or twice, but half a dozen times; and as my right hon. Friend has already dealt with that, I am not going to refute an argument which has been already once or twice refuted on that point. I assert that after this Debate which we have had during the last few days it is clearer than it was before that the constitutional right of the House of Lords to reject a Money Bill, if they thought fit, is one which has never been disputed by any competent authority until the present dispute, and has been admitted by this House repeatedly on every or nearly every occasion on which the two Houses have come into conflict on matters of finance. It is a right which admittedly cannot be exercised without some inconvenience, and which is not to be exercised lightly or without just cause. I venture to say that to destroy that right on no good cause shown is to destroy one of the greatest safeguards against oppression and one of the most necessary checks on the tyranny of a majority in this House which has not a majority in the country that any of us can conceive. The right hon. Gentleman says that this power has never been exercised. Is that a sufficient reason for assuming that the power does not exist? Let us consider. We need not go further back than the reign of Queen Anne. She is dead, as the right hon. Gentleman previously mentioned. He admits that since that time several Money Bills have been rejected in another place, but he says that that was in cases where the tax was insignificant in amount, but the principle involved was very important. He said that in all these cases there was a small tax but a large principle, and he said later that there was some principle which overtopped the tax. Is he quite sure that that was not the case with the last Budget? The right hon. Gentleman does not challenge the right of the House of Lords to reject a Lottery Bill where the object of the Lottery Bill is to raise revenue. He considers—and it is rather curious— that, though apparently a perverted and mischievous House of Commons has done its best to pervert the morals of the people, a non-representative hereditary Second Chamber can reject the measure. When the right hon. Gentleman thinks that the principle overtops the tax he does not complain of the House of Lords rejecting a Bill. Looking at his own Bill, what about the valuation of agricultural land? There is a big principle underlying that. How much tax is there to follow? There is a big principle underlying the whole of the Land Tax, the principle of whether we shall nationalise the land—whether we shall take a step in that direction. That is why hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway like it. That is why, as one of them has told us, the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed it. How much revenue would that raise— £50,000?

Mr. POINTER

It will grow.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

Did not the principle overtop the tax? Was not there a very large principle and a very little tax in that case? Could you have an instance more clearly coming under the definition of the Secretary of State himself of cases in which the House of Lords are clearly entitled to reject a' proposal? Then he says it did not stand alone: it was the whole finance of the year that was rejected, and not any particular tax. The Prime Minister. I noticed by his cheer, attaches great importance to that subject. The whole finance of the year was put into one Bill, in order to make it difficult for the House of Lords to reject it, in order to make difficult the legal and constitutional right which was admitted by that very fact. If it were not admitted, as the Prime Minister said, the Commons would not have thought it necessary to put all the finance of the year into one Bill. They would have simply said: "We will make as many Bills as we choose. We will go on in our old accustomed way, and you shall pass them because you have no constitutional right to reject them." They did not say that. They said that the power to reject is still regarded with suspicion or jealousy. They did not say there is no power to reject, but that the exercise of the power is to be regarded with peculiar jealousy. Of course it is and always will be. Admittedly, it is not a power to be lightly exercised. In order that it shall not be lightly exercised but only on the gravest cause shown, and only in great emergencies, the House of Commons at that time decided to combine all the finances in one Bill, in order to make the exercise of the power more difficult, but not to make it impossible. Then the right hon. Gentleman says, "Now that you have it in one Bill there is no precedent for its rejection." There could not be a precedent before 1861, because 1861 is the first time in which that was done.

Mr. HALDANE

In 1785.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

It was the first time it was established as a regular practice. It may have been in the finance of any particular year convenient; or owing to the nature of the finance, that is to say because they only needed to deal with a portion of it, they may have required only one Bill in previous years. But the regular union of the whole finance of the year in one Bill only began in 1861. Are you prepared to assert that a right which was recognised by the Commons in 1861 dies before 1910. because it has not been exercised in the mean time, that right being a right which by common accord of all parties is only to be used on the rarest occasions and on the gravest provocations? Do you want the House of Lords to reject the Finance Bill once a year in order to retain their rights, just as a landowner shuts a right of way once a year to preserve himself against encroachment? Of course they do not. They wait for the grave emergency which it was foreseen was possible, though probably everybody hoped it would never occur; and it is only when that grave emergency occurs that they do exercise their undoubted rights. How far will the Government carry the argument that a right which is not used for sixty years ceases to exist—a right which they confess is a legal right, but which they say is not constitutional? When was the right of the Crown to create peers in order to make a majority in the House of Lords last used? Was it within sixty years? It was not within one hundred years. [Hon. Members: "Yes."]

Mr. CATHCART WASON

1832 and 1711.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

This is not a history class; but if the hon. Member will read any history of the time he will see that is not so.

Mr. CATHCART WASON

The threat was used.

Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

It has not been used for sixty years or one hundred years. It has not been used for very nearly two hundred years. If sixty years is sufficient to extinguish one constitutional right the Government must consider whether another constitutional right which has not been used for nearly 200 years is still in existence, and can be fairly appealed to by them. For my part, though I think that the Constitution is clear on these Resolutions, I attach quite as much importance to their practical bearing on our affairs to-day as to their historical origin and justification. I wish that the right hon. Gentleman had told us a little more about the Resolution itself. The second Resolution we shall come to later. What does this Resolution mean? The right hon. Gentleman says it means, though it is not stated in the Resolution, that Money Bills, as defined in the Resolution, should go to the House of Lords. I wonder why? They are not to be altered, they are not to be amended, they are not to be rejected; a Vote upon them is null and of no effect. Why are they sent to the House of Lords at all? Why do the Gov- ernment in their projects for dealing with the House of Lords multiply sham on sham instead of proceeding boldly with their work of destruction. Upon my word, I much prefer the attitude of hon. Members below the Gangway opposite, who frankly admit that they do not want the House of Lords, that they do not mean it to have any power, and therefore feel it to be a useless encumbrance. I have a great deal more sympathy with their view, which is, at any rate, plain and frank, than I have with the attitude of the Government, which appears to me obscure, hesitating, and deceptive. I wish the right hon. Gentleman had explained a little more fully what the Government mean by this Resolution. I thought that that was what he rose to do. He said that the case for the Resolution had been stated in the two or three days' Debate which preceded this Debate, and that we are now to come to the Resolution itself. But the right hon. Gentleman never got to the Resolution—I beg the right hon. Gentleman's pardon, that is not verbally accurate. He did get to the Resolution, but only to look at it and to leave it. He devoted only about two minutes to this problem, to the meaning of the Resolution, out of his hour-long speech. He says the Resolution is intended to restrict the meaning of Money Bills more closely than we do in ordinary parlance. For instance, a Money Bill under this Resolution he says will not include any Bill dealing with rating. I do not see that in the Resolution itself; I should be glad if the right hon. Gentleman would point it out to me. What I do see is that fourteen settled subjects are enumerated, each of which would constitute a Money Bill separately, and all of which together would constitute a Money Bill. Then, as if that were not sufficient, there is added these words, "or matters incidental to those subjects or any of them." When you have defined as a Money Bill, to be dealt with only by this House, and passed on the sole authority of this House, provisions dealing with the "imposition, repeal, remission, alteration, or regulation of taxation; charges on the Consolidated Fund or the provision of money by Parliament; Supply; the appropriation, control, or regulation of public money, the raising or guarantee of any loan or the repayment thereof; or matters incidental to those subjects or any of them," I should have thought that would have dealt with nine-tenths of the legislation likely to come before the House of Commons in the course of the next few years. But some doubt exists upon this matter. Some high constitutional authorities take a different view. The hon. Member for King's Lynn (Mr. Gibson Bowles), for instance, has examined this Resolution with some care, and his views on this matter are not to be lightly set aside. I wish the right hon. Gentleman had referred to them. The hon. Member for King's Lynn has studied the Resolution, and whilst I believe he thought it went too far in some respects, he observed we have passed two Bills this Session which in popular estimation would be considered Money Bills, but to neither of which did he think this Resolution would apply. One was the Consolidated Fund Bill, and the other the East India Loans Bill. Do the Government mean the Resolution to apply to these two Bills or not? I know charges on the Consolidated Funds are mentioned, but would the Resolution apply to those Bills, or would it not? Are there not matters in those Bills not incidental to the subject of them, and, therefore, are sufficient to take them outside the Resolution. Before we go on with the Resolution, we must have some explanation from the Government with regard to what the Resolution really means, and what its scope is. The hon. Member for King's Lynn went on to say that even the Budget itself last year would not be a money Bill under this Resolution. I very much agree with him. Is that the view of the Government, or is it not? Do they mean the Budget Bill should come under the Resolution, or do they not? Of course they do. The quarrel arose out of the rejection of the Budget, and it is in order to be able to pass things incidental to finance which in their essence, nature and motive, are not financial, that the Government is now seeking to change the Constitution. It is because by that means you can establish single-Chamber tyranny, it is because by that means you can carry out by a majority of this House, however obtained and however little representative of the real opinion of the country, the most fundamental changes as regards property, as regards industry, as regards the whole social and national life, that I protest against the passing of a Resolution of this kind, to which I shall continue to offer, or to any Bill that may be founded upon it, all the opposition in my power.

Mr. GEORGE GREENWOOD

I cannot help thinking that hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite are entitled to a large measure of our sympathy, and to a good deal of our commiseration, because they are condemned, by the exigencies of the situation, to argue in derogation of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that you are in reality advocating the humiliation and degradation of this House. For what will happen if this Resolution is not carried into effect? If it be not carried into law, the House of Lords will have made good their claim to reject a Finance Bill whenever they please. What will be the result of that? The result will be that they will be able to force a dissolution whenever they please, or whenever, of course, a Liberal Government was in power. We know that they would not do so when a Tory Government was in power. Having that power to force a dissolution whenever they pleased, by that method they would usurp the Prerogative of the Crown to dissolve Parliament, and they would virtually repeal the Septennial Act. What is the use of a Septennial Act, or a Quinquennial or a Triennial Act, or any Act to limit the length of Parliament, if the House of Lords, whenever they pleased, by the simple expedient of rejecting the Budget, could compel an appeal to the people, because no Government can be carried on unless the taxes are levied? I have heard in the course of these Debates the claim made openly by the Leader of the Opposition and hon. and right hon. Gentleman opposite that the Lords have the right now to force a dissolution, and to refer a measure to the people whenever they like. I do not think it will be denied that the claim is now made that the Lords have the right to exercise a sort of referendum to the people whenever they choose to say that measures have not been adequately considered by the people. Appeal has been made by the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Austen Chamberlain), and also by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Dulwich (Mr. Bonar Law), to the authority of Mr. Gladstone. What would Mr. Gladstone have said, and what was his view of this claim made by the House of Lords, to refer measures passed by the House of Commons to the people whenever they please. With the House's permission I will read what Mr. Gladstone said at Edinburgh in the year 1893. He was then speaking of certain pleas which had been made to justify the House of Lords, or to excuse them in throwing out the Home Rule Bill.

The CHAIRMAN

I do not quite see how this bears on the Resolution before the House, which deals with financial measures.

Mr. GREENWOOD

I put it in this way. The claim is made, by the rejection of the Budget, that the Lords can force a dissolution and refer the question to the people. I wanted to give Mr. Gladstone's opinion upon that claim, and to state what Mr. Gladstone said—I was coming to the question of the Budget—namely, that it would be outrageous that the Lords should have the power of forcing a dissolution. Mr. Gladstone said:— But there is a third plea, and that is that the House of Lords is entitled, and indeed. I think they say bound by their duty, to require reference to the people to be made by a dissolution. Now, my first observation upon that is this. It is not the doctrine of the Constitution. The Constitution provides that if a responsible Ministry advises a dissolution there ought to be a dissolution at the risk of the responsible Ministry; and they know that if the House of Commons passes an address for a dissolution its vote is strong enough to bring about a dissolution, and dissolutions have been repeatedly brought about by the vote of the House of Commons. But there is no such thing upon record in any period of our history as a dissolution brought about by a vote of the House of Lords; and not only is it a gross and monstrous innovation, but an odious new-fangled doctrine, and of those odious and new-fangled doctrines no men are fonder than the modern Tories, except another class, the modern Unionists. They are fond of these new-fangled doctrines; but in addition to its being a new-fangled doctrine of allowing the House of Lords to have the prerogative of bringing about a dissolution, it is nothing less than high treason if this is to continue to be a self-governing country, because the House of Lords would regulate every matter where it chooses to take up a question, and would at the same time regulate the course of public business. 6.0 P.M.

Mr. Gladstone's authority is, I think, admitted on all sides of the House, and the quotation I have read shows clearly that he entirely repudiates the arrogant claim, as we call it, of the House of Lords to force a dissolution. I come to what Mr. Gladstone said in regard to Finance. I do not know where the quotation was taken from, nor exactly on what occasion it was that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for East Worcestershire said that Mr. Gladstone had laid it down that the House of Lords had the right of rejecting a Budget Bill to guard against certain contingencies, but I know what Mr. Gladstone did say at Edinburgh, in 1893. He was speaking then of the rejection by the Lords of the Bill to repeal the paper duties, and he was giving an account of what he did then to circumvent the action of the Lords. He said:— The House of Commons had got then into the habit of sending to the House of Lords separately its financial proposals. We know that at a prior period the House of Commons had sent up the financial proposals in the form of a Budget, but they had dropped that apparently. Mr. Gladstone continued:— The consequence was that those proposals, taken one by one, were at the mercy of the House of Lords. The House of Commons adopted a remedy beautifully simple. They determined to combine for the future all their financial proposals in one Bill, and any Assembly that threw out that Bill would have stopped Supplies and deranged the whole services of the country. They knew very well that the House of Lords was not likely to enter upon a proceeding so obviously quixotic. He did not use the word "unconstitutional" I admit. Since the year 1861 all the financial proposals have been joined in one Finance Bill. Let the House mark what followed:— The consequence has been that the House of Lords, during these two-and-thirty years, has been totally and absolutely excluded from all influence whatever upon the finances of the country. But Mr. Gladstone did think it might be possible for the House of Lords in some curious manner nevertheless to reject a Finance Bill. I would like to point out the vast difference there is between rejecting a Bill like the Bill to remit the Paper Duty and the claim to reject the Bill for Supplies far the year. By the Bill the House of Lords rejected in 1860 they did not refuse Supplies. On the contrary, they refused to be allowed to be taken off, and very characteristically, an extremely odious tax. How very different it is when they raise the claim to refuse the whole Supplies in the Finance Bill. Mr. Gladstone never for one moment, although he only uses the word "quixotic," contemplated that the Lords could do anything so outrageous as to reject a Budget. He says further on:— Gentlemen, if it should ever happen in the vicissitudes and complications of political affairs that the House of Lords, by some accidental or collateral process‥‥ He never contemplated this frontal attack, he never dreamed that they would reject a Finance Bill. He continued:— Should be the means of bringing about a Dissolution, you may depend upon it that the people will not consider the question of Irish Government alone, but will mix up with it another question on which the Lords may bitterly, when too late, lament they ever raised the issue. It seems to me that to quote Mr. Gladstone as though he would have given the sanction of his great name to the rejection by the Lords of the Supplies of the year shows at any rate a large amount of audacity on the part of hon. Members who do so. It is perfectly true he does not actually say it would be unconstitutional. He does not even use the word "unconstitutional." He said he would not anticipate the Lords would do anything so quixotic as to reject the Supplies for the year, and, as shown by the sentence I have just read, he never entertained the idea that Lord Lansdowne, for instance, desired to play the part of the Knight of Salamanca, or Lord Halsbury to appear in the rôle of Sancho Panza. He thought it absolutely impossible that the Lords would have ever taken this outrageous course. But they have done so—they have asserted their legal right. None can say that the legal right does not exist. This Resolution says that their legal right should be taken away from them, and that for all future time they should be debarred by law from exercising that legal right which, as we say, is an outrage on the Constitution.

How is that law to be carried into effect? As a humble Member of this House, having given a great deal of attention to this question for a good many years, I can only say that I do most sincerely hope, and I believe a great many Liberals and Radicals think with me upon this question, that if these Resolutions are rejected by the Lords, then at any rate the Government will not hesitate to resort once more to the precedent of 1832. I say, Why not? The last election was fought upon this issue. I put it into my address as the one great and supreme issue, the question of Peers and People. I told my agent to head every bill with the question of Peers and People, and I never made any speech without devoting the first part of it to the quarrel of the Peers and the People. Therefore I say the election was fought on that issue. I venture to say that the Government in one respect are in a better position than were Lord Grey and Lord Brougham in the year 1832, because in 1832 the peers had done nothing unconstitutional. They had merely rejected a Franchise Bill. We as Radicals and Liberals should entirely object to ask for the exercise of the Royal Prerogative in ordinary measures of legislation, but the case is very different when you ask that Prerogative to be exercised in order to limit for all time the powers of the Peers in order to clip their wings and to extract their fangs. Then I think no Liberal in this House can have any abjection to that Prerogative being exercised. It has been said that even in those days there were very grave doubts as to whether Lord Grey would have carried his threat into execution. I know that Lord Brougham, in his "Constitutional History," written thirty years afterwards, shakes his head in a most portentous manner, and asks himself if Lord Lyndhurst had not run away whether they would have resorted to such a strong measure as that. But Lord Campbell, who wrote the "Life of Lord Brougham," says he has not the slightest doubt whatever that if Lord Lyndhurst had not given way that Lord Grey would have created those peers, and that there was a list of fifty, including sons of peers and elderly gentlemen and bachelors not likely to have a family, ready to be created. I find that Lord Brougham, in his "Constitutional History" cites the precedent of Queen Anne's time, and states that the Prerogative has upon several occasions been exercised, referring to the fact that Lord Oxford carried a question of importance by the sudden creation of twelve peers, in the reign of Queen Anne. I know that the Noble Lord the Member for Oxford University (Lord Hugh Cecil) tells us Lord Oxford was impeached for that. As a matter of fact he was not impeached for that. There was an article of impeachment concerning that, but nobody cared twopence about that. What Oxford and Bolingbroke were impeached for was for high treason, and the high treason alleged was that they had wished to secure the city of Tournai for the French people. The whole thing collapsed; and we know that they never were impeached. Therefore that is a perfectly good precedent as well as the precedent of 1832. So far as the Liberals are concerned, I do not see why we should have the slightest objection to that course being taken. On the contrary, I think there is a most urgent wish amongst the rank and file of Liberals and Radicals throughout the country that if these Resolutions are rejected there should be a Bill, no doubt, drafted, but why should not the Government then take that Bill limiting the Veto of the Lords to the Sovereign and ask for assurances that if that Bill is carried through this House—

The CHAIRMAN

The hon. Member is now discussing the general question, which is not in order on this Resolution.

Mr. GREENWOOD

I will not pursue it further if it is not in order. I was trying to show the means whereby this Resolution ought to be carried into law, and the Resolution states that the Veto of the House of Lords with regard to finance ought to be limited by law. I was indicating the way in which we hope that may be secured. I know it is said, and I have seen it said in the Press that there is an air of unreality over these proceedings. I find that the Tories in the newspapers speak of these Resolutions as if they were unreal, and they have been described on the other side as a farce. They speak of the speech of the Prime Minister as being merely "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." If they choose to lay that flattering unction to their souls, we need not grudge it them; but I think that as time goes on it will be found that there is a great deal of reality, and somewhat grim reality, in these proceedings. It will be found that this issue is a very real one, that this fight having been joined must be fought to a finish, and that this beacon, having been once kindled, will never be extinguished until it has lighted to victory one party or the other. I think it requires very little prescience to see, as between Commons, on the one hand, and Coronets, on the other, upon which side that victory must ultimately rest.

Sir ALFRED CRIPPS

I wish to comment upon certain constitutional matters referred to by the Minister for War. In the first place, concerning the difference between what is called legal right and constitutional right, there has been some misapprehension as to the real importance of the legal right. I am not aware of any legal right involved except that of the taxpayer, that no tax can be taken out of his pocket without the assent and concurrence of the three estates of the Realm. The legal right means that at the present time the taxpayer has that security, whereas, if this Resolution is passed, he will not have it in the future. As I understand, without going into detail, the great constitutional struggle in the past, from the time of Henry IV., through Tudor and Stuart times, and even at a more recent date, has been the struggle of the taxpayer that money shall not be taken out of his pocket except under the authority of a Statute sanctioned by the three estates of the Realm. In my opinion, from that point of view, we are taking a reactionary position by depriving the taxpayer of the very great security which he now has before anything can be taken from him for public or national purposes. Why should that security be taken away? Every word of the speech of the Minister for War, I should say, showed the importance of retaining that security as it at present exists. I am not going into a discussion as to the use by philosophers of the term "sovereignty." I think the right hon. Gentleman was sufficiently accurate in his statement that the virtue of sovereignty exists in this House at the present time. But that is not an argument for extending our powers. In my view it would be a strong argument for maintaining the limitations which now exist. I think I shall carry the right hon. Gentleman with me in saying that in this respect the history of the matter in the past is a struggle on the part of the person charged with the payment against the aggressions of the Executive or Sovereign power. As to precedents, although I speak from a constitutional lawyer's point of view, I do not think that old precedents have much to do with our immediate discussion. Many of those precedents are, in my opinion, quite inapplicable to modern times. I will not quote a single precedent earlier than the year 1832, because in that year the relations between the two Houses were in substance entirely altered. But if we look back, not merely to the question of privilege between the two Houses, which is a comparatively unimportant point, but to the substance of the matter and see what the struggle was, it will be found that it was mainly based on the principle that no taxpayer shall be deprived of his money for public or national purposes without the tax having been sanctioned by an Act of Parliament passed by the three estates of the realm.

I do not want to discuss what is meant in this discussion by the Veto of the Crown. We all agree that the Crown in exercising its Veto follows the advice of the Prime Minister, who must have the support of a majority in this House. Therefore the Veto of the Crown and the Veto of this House as regards, at any rate, matters of finance, are very much the same. But the House of Lords is independent. It is the one independent body at this moment protecting the taxpayer against the aggressions—the sometimes extravagant aggressions—which we find practised from time to time in this House. This House, as a whole, is not an Assembly which concerns itself minutely with economy in matters of taxation. Indeed, one might say exactly the contrary, and that the tendency in modern times is for the influence of this House to be towards the increase of taxation in many directions. I am not saying that that is wrong. I realise as much as many people that with the great multi- plicity of modern social requirements it is almost essential to have a large public expenditure. I do not find any fault with that at all. But when you come to the question now under consideration, namely, whether you shall take away the only safeguard of the subject, which is the necessity of the concurrence of the Second Chamber before taxation can be levied, I say, most earnestly, that you can hardly have a greater interference with what in the history of our Constitution has been the test, and touchstone of liberty and freedom than to place the subject at the mercy of this House alone, with its chance majority, and take away the protection which he at present enjoys. The Minister for War spoke of the "silent voice of the people." Where I join issue with his argument is on this point. Without the protection and security of the Second Chamber, which at any rate ought to be in reserve, we do not have in matters of taxation the considered opinion of the people. We merely have the voice of a majority, or, as I should put it, the ukase of the Cabinet, which the majority of this House supports for the time being. Has anyone ever heard of the House of Commons as a House bringing forward a proposal of taxation? We have heard a good deal about the initiative of the House of Commons, and about voluntary Grants, which are not applicable to modern conditions. But what is the present procedure? Members of this House are under a special disability in matters of finance. No one except a Minister of the Crown can bring forward a proposal for taxation. What we really have in matters of finance is not an expression of views of this House in the sense of representing the views of the people. We have a proposal brought forward by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a Member of the Ministry. No Member can bring forward any other proposal, and the question is always whether the majority will accept the proposal so brought forward or not. It is Cabinet Government in the extremest form. Originally this provision was introduced for purposes of economy. It was thought that if Members could get up and propose individuality to impose taxation upon the public, a greater amount would be voted than was consistent with the public good or national prosperity. This House, therefore, so far as its Members are concerned, is under a special disability as regards finance. All we have is the ukase put forward by the Ministry or Cabinet for the time being, and that Ministry or Cabinet can, owing to the conditions of party Government, save in the most exceptional cases, rely on obtaining, not even the considered assent of the majority, but an assent secured by the use of party methods. Is that a satisfactory condition?

I agree with what the Minister for War said as regards the unwritten Constitution. He said that it was statesman-made. I hope it will not be statesman-unmade. I willingly apply to him the epithet "statesman"; I do not wish in a matter of this kind to introduce any element of personal controversy. The great fault of an unwritten Constitution is the ease with which a mere majority can intervene and alter it in most material and vital respects. But I believe the argument of the right hon. Gentleman could well be turned against him. If you have a written Constitution, such as you have in the United States, there are safeguards against its alteration from time to time. You require a specified majority, and you have to overcome the special protection provided. So far as we are concerned, we have no such protection. The only protection we have is the good sense of this House, and the good sense of statesmen and parties on both sides. I protest most -strongly against an amendment of the unwritten Constitution being introduced, not in response to a demand from the House at large, which was always the case in old days when constitutional Resolutions were passed and adopted, but in response merely to a demand made by a majority under special conditions, such as obtained during the late General Election, and are obtaining in the House at the present time. One may, I should have thought, say that it has been made quite clear, following the controversy of 1860, that the power of rejection of Money Bills is in the House of Lords. Of course, no one doubts that legally they have a right to reject, but I mean constitutionally or conventionally. It is quite impossible to say, as has already been pointed out, that if that right existed and was recognised in 1860—I need not go back to earlier precedents—that any non-user since that time can have affected that right either conventionally or constitutionally. Indeed, I would go further. If a great body, such as the House of Lords or the House of Commons, have duties imposed upon them in the public or national interest I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman would say that it is even capable or possible that they could lose them by mere non-user. But non-user does not exist in this case. In 1860 there were thirty-six precedents introduced in Finance or Money Bills voted in the House of Lords. One knows if you take out particular speeches of particular Ministers or particular statesmen you will find special passages seeming to support the opposite but the result of the discussion then in the House of Commons was, I believe, a unanimous Resolution affirming and sanctioning the claim of the House of Lords not to amend or to alter Money Bills, but to reject them as a whole. I should have thought after what took place in 1860 the question of constitutional or conventional limitations would not have arisen. I beg to say, in answer to the right hon. Gentleman, that what was done in the reign of Henry IV. affects me very little at the present time. It matters little, too, what happened in revolutionary periods in England or when matters had settled down again. It has no great bearing upon present questions. For this reason: the whole political atmosphere has altered entirely since those days. In those days there was a struggle by this House in order to obtain what the right hon. Gentleman called "virtual sovereignty." The House of Commons wanted to be assured of the control of the purse. The position is altered.

You have got virtual sovereignty, and what we have to struggle for is against the despotism to which we may be subjected if the absolute power of the purse is given to the same body which has the virtual sovereignty as regards the Executive at the present time. The right hon. Gentleman opposite, I am sure, will follow me in this, that those old contests were between the House of Commons and the Executive. However far we go back—it was always occurring—the Executive authority pressing its rights, on the one side, as against the House of Commons, who were the representative body, on the other. It was in that contest, and in the course of that contest, that the House of Commons said: "In order that we may have the sovereignty or that portion of the sovereignty to which we are entitled, we must have the power of finance to which we are making claim." One appreciates that position. The argument tells exactly the opposite way at the present time. I think the taxpayer ought to have some security against the executive power and the sovereignty which are now consoli- dated and possessed by Members of this House. I approach this point of view, as I say, not on the privilege of this House or on the privilege of the House of Lords in this matter—privileges are an old discussion, which have really very little vital interest under modern conditions. I approach the matter from the point of view of the subject or the taxpayer. I say at the present time that the subject or the taxpayer has security that no tax or rate collector can call upon him without showing his authority, given by Statute, and confirmed by the three estates of the Realm. What is this House of Commons doing at the present time? It is taking away these securities which our forefathers fought and suffered for.

That is the whole question? In the old days the question was whether the Executive power should impose the taxation in its own right, or whether the subject was protected, because before any taxation could be levied it was necessary to pass an Act of Parliament and to have Statutory power. We shall have the same difficulties arising again, because I myself look with alarm on what has been called "the corrupting influence of irresponsibility" so-called by Mill, which this House is claiming for itself at the present time. I have been dealing so far with the case which is put forward by the right hon. Gentleman the Minister for War. When we look to the future, what is the real outlook 1 Does anyone here doubt that in the future the most important questions from every point of view will be questions which raise financial considerations and financial issues? Look where you like into these constitutional authorities which have been quoted. Take Mr. Bagehot, whom we all read, and who was quoted by the Prime Minister. What does he say? "You cannot draw distinctions in modern times between financial power and ordinary legislative power." That is one of the old metaphysical distinctions, if I may put it so, of the time when politics dealt with different matters to what they do at the present day. Why should this House be infallible in matters of finance as distinct from other questions of legislation? In whatever direction we look I do not think we can shut our eyes to the fact that in the future the most important questions which will come before this House will necessarily be matters of finance. No one has ever denied that the initiative exists in this House. No one has ever denied the powers which have been claimed for this House so long as the powers of rejection is left to the House of Lords. I do not know whether—an hon. Gentleman opposite laughs; I do not know if he intends in any sense to refute what I am saying? Does he deny, or does anyone deny, the power of initiation in this House?

The only claim made for the House of Lords is the power of rejection. They ought to have that power in order to protect the taxpayer and" the subject. That is the point of view from which I look at the matter, much more than the question of privilege as between the two Houses. They ought to have it, because in the future questions of finance will be of primary importance, and ought to be decided, not by a chance majority of this House, but by the considered will of the people exercised in a regular and constitutional way.

Mr. F. G. HINDLE

In rising to speak for the first time I ask the indulgence of the House, and I propose to be brief. I understand that the Resolution before the House proposes to deal with the question as to whether the claim of the House of Lords to reject Finance Bills is one which ought to be resisted. The proposal of the Government is, as I understand it, that they are simply restoring that control over finance which this House has always exercised. On the other hand, the House of Lords claim the power to reject Finance Bills, but only, as it has been put on several occasions, in cases of great emergency. I do not propose to go into the authorities which have been cited on both sides in this matter. I rather fall in with the views expressed by the hon. and learned Gentleman who has just sat down, that we are more concerned with what is expedient at present than what has, perhaps, been the case in the past. At all events, one thing is clear: that in the past the House of Lords have never really exercised this power which they now claim. This country has been governed under our present Constitution for more than 200 years without the actual exercise of this power, and it is certainly a novelty at the present time of day to introduce it as an actual practical working part of the Constitution. Certainly for 200 years if, indeed, ever in the history of this country, we have not seen any Finance Bill embodying all the money which might be provided for the service of the year rejected by the House of Lords. Since 1860 we have never seen even a single tax either rejected or amended. The Lords have now seized this power. The question is, How are we to deal with the situation?

We may be told that the power is only to be used in case of emergency. But who are to be the judges of that emergency? If the Lords themselves are to be the judges it simply amounts to this, that they can put this power into actual practice whenever it seems to them to be expedient to do so. Opinions may well differ upon a question of that kind. We have seen that in 1846 the Duke of Wellington, who was then leading the House of Lords, did not consider that such a question as the drastic alteration in the fiscal system of the country as the repeal of the Corn Laws and the introduction of Free Trade was an emergency great enough to call into use this power of the House of Lords. We have also seen that when Mr. Gladstone introduced his Succession Duties—duties equally as odious to the House of Lords as any of the Land Taxes proposed by the Budget—that even then it was not considered that an emergency had arisen such as to call for the exercise of this power. The same argument applies to the Bill introduced by Sir William Harcourt in 1894, providing for the imposition of the Death Duties. Under these circumstances, I consider that the claim of the House of Lords to force a right of this kind practically amounts to enforcing it whenever it pleases. We have already heard that this necessarily involves a right on their part to compel a dissolution whenever they please. This seems to me to be really one of the most serious aspects of the question. Unquestionably, if the Lords have the power to send this House back to the constituencies whenever it pleases them, they would be usurping the Prerogative which has always been considered one of the most ancient and valuable Prerogatives of the Crown. We have heard from the hon. and learned Gentleman who has just sat down that the Prerogatives of the Crown have now, to use the words of a great constitutional authority, become the privileges of the people. Any way in which the Prerogatives of the Crown are lessened practically lessens the authority of this House, which controls the Minister who wields these Prerogatives by his advice as a responsible Minister of the Crown. Therefore, I think we are bound to resist to the utmost any power which can be assumed by the House of Lords which would interfere and give them the power of dissolution. To give a power of dissolving this House whenever it pleases to the House of Lords to choose the exact moment which seems to them most fit in order to bring their political friends back to power, is to give them an advantage which is almost like allowing an opponent to choose the trumps in a game of cards. It is a power which handicaps most seriously the party which is opposed to the House of Lords. We all know that if the psychological moment is taken there is always a time in the lifetime of every Parliament when it would be to its detriment to go to the country. An hon. Member on the other side said yesterday that rather than trust the majority of this House he would trust the despotic power of a king like Charles I., because, in the first place, he was a more picturesque personality, and in the second place, because he had only one head and one neck. I would also rather trust a despotic hereditary king like Charles I. with arbitrary powers than I would trust an hereditary but irresponsible House of Lords. A hereditary and despotic king would not have the same personal interest in financial matters of taxation that Members of the House of Lords, who represent only one class in the community, have. For my part I would as soon trust the financial control of this kind to any 600 men whom I might find walking down the street. In them you would certainly get a few Liberals and Tories, rich men and poor men, men of all classes of religion, and certainly I think you will get a far better sample in that rough and tumble gathering of the average of the community than you would get in the House of Lords. We are told that if we deprive the House of Lords of this Chamber of their own it would be a case of taxation without representation. I do not know. They have no votes at the present time for Members of this House, but they have influence upon the election of Members of this House.

I heard an hon. Member on the other side only two or three days ago tall us, with a great flourish, that in the Division in the Southern part of England which he represents he got I do not know how many Noble Lords upon his side. They were swarming all over the place, and he told us, with great satisfaction, he considered he owed his election to that. How after that can we be told that Members of the House of Lords have no representation in this House 1 More than that. If so happened that in the very first hours of the assembling of this Parliament a most valuable privilege was given to the Members of the House of Lords which they had not had for many hundreds of years. In. the future they can take a more active part in the election of Members to this House. I confess that as a new Member. I was not perfectly sensible at the time of what exactly was being done when this privilege was accorded to the Lords. I did not realise that we were to be deprived of the opportunity of voting upon that question until the matter was practically decided between the two Front Benches. I feel it is a valuable privilege, and I heard it declared so a few days after in the House of Lords. One of the Noble Lords pointed out, with great force and truth, that although the peers had interfered at the election on previous occasions, although they had gone about and made speeches, it was always before the time the writs were issued, when the electors were by no means disposed to listen to arguments and they were by no means so interested in political questions as they were at the time of the heat of the contest. Therefore he advised his brother peers to take full advantage of this privilege given them by the House of Commons, and he urged that in future they should bring to bear upon elections for the House of Commons the great influence their ample possessions and their social positions in the country, enabled them to exercise with the electors. I think that, having received that privilege, it would be very unjust and unfair that they should also be allowed to have absolute power practically over finance.

I support the Government proposals, first, because I am sent here expressly to do so. I have come here, I might almost say, for nothing else. It was practically the only question which was debated in my Constituency. I represent a Lancashire constituency with 18,000 electors containing an intelligent artisan population whose opinions upon this question are as much entitled to respect as any other constituents in the country. We have no fewer than 4,000 to 5,000 freehold workmen who own their own houses, and sometimes one or two more. They take an intelligent interest in this question, and follow the Debates in this House; and at the meetings that took place there this was the one question above all others that interested them. They realised that the question at issue was whether they were any longer to remain a self-governing country, and upon that issue, for the first time in twenty-five years, they gave us a majority where there had always been a Tory majority. I came therefore to speak on behalf of that constituency, and I know the same applies to many other constituencies. I conclude by saying that I do hope the Prime Minister and the Cabinet will persevere with this measure, and will carry it on with enthusiasm and good heart. If they do they may rely, I assure them, on the enthusiastic support of the great mass of the industrial population of the North of England and upon the great mass of the population in the swarming hives of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Sir WILLIAM ANSON

As this may be the only time or occasion upon which the House of Commons will be allowed to discuss the most important matters in this Resolution I desire to say a few words. This Resolution proposes to do three things. It proposes to take away from the House of Lords a right which the House of Lords has always held, it proposes to confer upon this House a right which it does not possess, and it proposes to impose duties upon Mr. Speaker that will entirely alter the character of his exalted office. Speaking of the first of those rights, it is impossible to avoid reference to the mode in which the Question has been discussed inside the House and outside the House. The House of Lords possesses rights which have been denied by many persons, including the Prime Minister. My right hon. Friend the Member for St. Andrew's University {Sir Robert Finlay) complained, and I think very justly, that the Prime Minister, speaking at Birmingham, asserted that the noninterference of the Lords in finance, was an inviolable custom unbroken for a period of 300 years. I must express my entire concurrence with my right hon. Friend that language of that sort used by the Prime Minister would be repeated upon thousands of platforms, and made to convey an altogether false impression of the right of the House of Lords which we now propose to take away—a right they exercise, and rightly exercised last year. My right hon. Friend told us that so far from this custom having been an inviolable custom, this House in 1671 admitted the right of the House of Lords to reject a Money Bill, and that the House of Lords had exercised that right. The Attorney-General replied and referred to the precedents of 1628 and 1640, and he went on to say that in 1628 the right of the Lords to assent to a Money Bill had been struck out of the preamble.

The ATTORNEY-GENERAL (.Sir William Robson)

What I said was that the words in the Preamble which expressed the assent of the Lords to a grant of the Commons were struck out. The consent of the Lords to the Bill before it became law is a very different thing.

Sir WILLIAM ANSON

The right hon. Gentleman said:— Still they claimed a right to assent to the Grant. In 1628 Coke, Glanville and Sheldon, and a strong Committee of the House of Commons were appointed to draft a new Preamble and they struck out those words which expressed the assent of the Lords to a Grant of the Commons. If anybody will take the trouble to read the Preamble of the Finance Bill of last year they will see they are expressly excluded from any share in the Grant. Up to 1625 the Lords had appeared in the preamble to the Bill as parties to the Grant, and in 1625 the Commons struck this out of the preamble. What happened in 1628 had nothing to do with the question of assent or rejection. In 1628 the Lords pointed out that, contrary to precedent, the Commons had altered the preamble, and the Commons appointed this distinguished1 Committee to explain that they were only carrying out what had always been intended and that the Grant was the Grant of the House of Commons agreed to by the Lords. That was all that happened, in 1628. It was merely making the form of the Subsidy Bill correspond with the arrangement made in the reign of Henry IV., when the Commons were much disturbed because the Lords discussed the question of Supply over their heads, and they said if things went on like that there would probably be no Supply at all, and then this arrangement was made. The Commons should make the Grant and the Lords agreed to the Grant; until the House of Lords agreed, and not till then, was the Bill to become law, and the Grant was to be communicated to the King by the Spokesman of the Commons. That is what has been done to the present day. The House of Commons initiates the Grant, the Grant goes up to the Lords, and they have the right to assent to it or to reject it, the Appropriation Bill which places the money at the disposal of the Crown is brought here by the Clerk, it is taken to the Bar of the House of Lords, handed to the Clerk of Parliament, and receives the Royal Assent. That is all that happened in 1628. Immemorial custom was expressed in the preamble. What happened in 16401 The House of Lords took the strange course of sending down to the House of Commons a message that it would be desirable at once to proceed with Supply before other business. The Commons declined to do so, and the Lords withdrew their request with something like an apology.

7.0 P.M.

Then the Lords claim a right that they have never given up, namely, the right to amend, and we have always questioned that right. The Attorney-General suggested that in 1671, when this question of amendment was raised, this House, through its Attorney-General, admitted the right to reject a Bill, merely in order to pass on to the matter then in dispute, namely, the right to amend. He tried to show that the admission was of the existence of a bare legal right, and that it was unimportant. That is not what happened in 1671; the constitutional question was raised by the Lords that the two Houses were respectively checks upon one another, and that they would cease to be so if the House of Lords gave up the power of amendment, and the Commons answered: "So they are still, for your Lordships have a negative to the whole." As for the precedents cited in 1860, the Attorney-General has told us that the Lords possessed a right to regulate trade, and that the cases of Money Bills amended or rejected by them could be explained on that ground. But, in truth, they did not come into the finance scheme for the year. They were, as the Secretary of State for War described them, Bills in which there was very little finance and a good deal of principle. I wish to say another word in regard to the Attorney-General's argument last evening, and I do so because this is the only discussion we shall have, and Ministers may go about the country repeating his statement to the disadvantage of the House of Lords. The Attorney-General said that the House of Lords, although it was very regardless of custom when it ran against its own interests, was always ready to insist upon custom where it was to its advantage, and he cited the Wensleydale case, in which he asserted that the House of Lords set up a custom of not more" than 200 years. When the Attorney-General says that, it looks as though he was making up his history as he went along, and I defy him to find even an arguable instance for 400 years back.

Sir W. ROBSON

I said I was not sure of the length of time. I mentioned 200 years as being within my recollection, but I was uncertain without having had an opportunity of verifying originals. I did not anticipate I should have had to follow that precise argument, and I was not sure of the precise number of years.

Sir W. ANSON

Then I think it would have been better if the Attorney-General had not touched the subject at all, because he suggested that the House of Lords was eager and ready to set up custom when it suited the interest of that House, although they were regardless of it when it ran against their interest. I will defy him to find even an arguable case of a life peer, who was a lord of Parliament as such, for 400 years before the Wensleydale case; and the highest authority on our mediæval history, the late Bishop Stubbs, said that it was doubtful if any authentic case of such a peerage existed. Now we come to 1860 when Mr. Gladstone proposed to repeal the Paper Duty, and he budgetted for a loss of £750 on account of that repeal. The House of Lords, however, said that that duty should not be repealed, and they took this action based upon their undoubted right to reject a Money Bill. Did the House of Commons persist in that tax? Certainly not, because they acted as if they had admitted the right. All they said was that this was a privilege which was seldom used, and one which was regarded with peculiar jealousy; but the right was not insisted upon. But Mr. Gladstone said rather more than that, for he stated that the House of Lords had the power of amendment. In the following year all the taxes of the year were put into one Bill, and there was a good deal of discussion upon this novel procedure, because it was held that it was an invasion of the right of the Lords to reject. This is what Mr. Gladstone said:— The House of Lords has never given up the power of amendment, and I must say that I think they are perfectly right in declining to record against themselves this or any such limitation of their privileges, because cases might arise in which, from the illegitimate incorporation of elements not financial into financial measures, it might be wise and just for the Lords to fall back upon the assertion of the whole breadth of their privileges, according to the largest version they have taken of them. Did the Budget and the circumstances of last year make it wise and just for the Lords to fall back upon the whole breadth of their privileges? I think the Attorney-General cited Lord St. Aldwyn as an authority for the statement that there was nothing in the Finance Bill that could be reasonably construed into anything but finance. Lord St. Aldwyn is an authority to whose opinion I would readily bow, but I prefer the opinion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on his own Bill to the opinion of Lord St. Aldwyn. I propose to read two extracts not from speeches made on the platform, but from an article written by the right hon. Gentleman which appeared in the "Nation." He wrote:— A proposal, or rather a series of proposals, which embodies much of the Liberal plan for dealing with the social problems which confront statesmenship throughout the world. The new State valuation must be the basis of all plans of communal purchase. On this basis municipalities ought to buy the land which is essential to the development of their towns. And the State would also buy up the land necessary to the policy of recreating rural life in England. Here we have set before us as an element in the Finance Bill measures which point to a scheme for nationalising or municipalising the land of the country, and I maintain that the Lords were right in giving the country the opportunity of pronouncing on this policy. I shall be told that the Land Tax and Income Tax Acts created a great number of officials whose duty it is to collect those Taxes. My contention is that those persons, having been appointed for no other purpose than to collect the Revenue, did not embody any policy, and that there was no lurking behind the Land Tax and the Income Tax the idea of taxing anybody out of existence to enable the State and local authorities to acquire land and to take it out of private ownership and put it into the hands of municipalities and the State. I maintain that this is a case of a Budget in which matters not financial were incorporated into a Finance Bill, and I think it was wise and just for the Lords to fall back upon their full powers to give the people of this country an opportunity of saying whether they did or did not approve of the policy contained in the Budget.

To pass to the next great change which the Resolution contemplates, we are to determine, through our chief officer, what is a Finance Bill and what is not, and, if it is determined to be a Finance Bill, the Lords are to have no opportunity of touching it in any way. The House of Lords are to be disabled by law from rejecting or amending a Money Bill. I suppose that means—and I have no doubt that it will be contended that it means— they must not hold it up. That is an extension of the privileges of this House. When our privileges have touched upon private rights the Courts have always been strenuous in contesting their extension. Where they touch the other House, a trial of strength arises in which one House sets up its right against the other House. But this privilege which we now claim touches the rights of the general public; it touches the right of the general public to have some knowledge of the policy which may be embodied in a Finance Bill and some voice in its practical application. Finance, as was pointed out by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kingston (Mr. Cave) and by the hon. Member for Sheffield (Mr. James Hope), is, in the words of the Prime Minister, a very flexible weapon. It may include a great deal which is ostensibly finance, but which really affects great social changes in the country. The public is to be disabled, if the House of Commons so pleases, from having any chance of an appeal to it as to the propriety of the changes which may be embodied in the Finance Bill. We are to determine what Bills are Finance Bills and what Bills are not.

There is another class of Bills to which attention has not been directed. The hon. and learned Member for Kingston gave us an opportunity of seeing how we might have a Finance Bill which might disestablish the Church or which might nationalise the railways. I will take another case. The House of Commons has in other branches of legsilation shown itself extremely jealous of; its privileges. If the House of Lords put in Amendments to a Bill which is not a Finance Bill, but which may in some way or other be a charge upon the people, those Amendments are not—I think unfortunately—discussed here upon their merits. Someone asks whether they touch our privileges. Mr. Speaker says they do, and whether the Amendment is a good or a bad one, this House puts it aside without discussion.

Mr. GIBSON BOWLES

In the case of the Asylums Officers Bill last November this House did not put aside the Amendments of the House of Lords. It accepted thirty of them, although they touched upon finance and were "privilege" Amendments.

Sir W. ANSON

I am obliged to the hon. Member, and I am glad to hear that this House did waive its privileges in a matter where it was undoubtedly to the advantage of the public that it should waive them. There were other occasions when it declined to waive them, and when I think it would have been to the advantage of the public that they should have waived them. I would ask whether the Education Bills of 1902 and 1906 might not, under this Resolution, have been entirely excluded from the consideration of the Lords. In 1902 Lord Davey, a great legal authority, seriously argued, inasmuch as the main purpose of the Bill was the allocation of a Grant whether from the Treasury or from the rates to certain schools, whether that really did not permeate the whole Bill in such a way as to take it out of the cognisance of the Lords altogether. The Duke of Devonshire said he thought not. The House of Lords went on to make certain Amendments, the Bill came down here, and, with the exception of one Amendment, this House raised no difficulty. The matter was again seriously argued in 1906. Mr. Speaker then ruled that the Lords were not excluded from discussing and amending the Education Bill of that year, but, as this House is now very much in the way of extending its privileges, it is quite possible that not merely might the Finance Bill be made to include matters not financial, but a Bill not a Financial Bill might also be regarded, under the ruling of some future Speaker, as containing matter which takes it out of the cognisance of the-House of Lords.

There is this other question. The guillotine works very freely in these modern times. Many Bills which pass through this House go up to the other place with large portions of them wholly undiscussed. I admit that the Budget of last year was very fully discussed, but it might not be so always. This appetite for power grows with its satisfaction, and, when this House has acquired exclusive control over Finance, and when the Government has got a majority with which it can deal as it pleases, it may be possible that the guillotine which was withheld from the Finance Bill last year will come into brisk operation. That would preclude proper discussion in this House. What would be the object of the House of Lords, with its powers limited and restrained as is proposed by this Resolution, discussing the Bill? What self-respecting people will take part in a sort of debating society discussion as to the merits or demerits of a Finance Bill? The guillotine would prevent discussion in this House, and discus- sion in the other House would be useless. What opportunity, therefore, will the people have of knowing what their representatives are doing in the all-important question of finance? The privileges of this House have been misused in the past. When we had a single-Chamber Government, the arbitrariness of the House of Commons revolted the people. We know there have been times since then, in the eighteenth century, when the privileges of this House were used in a way which invaded private rights. We are now pursuing the same path. We are claiming powers which we have not possessed hitherto. We are going in the next Resolution to claim all practical control over all legislation of every sort, and in finance we are going to exclude the other House even from the opportunity of discussion.

Lastly, we come to the mode in which this Resolution affects the position of Mr. Speaker. The impartiality of the Speaker has been the admiration of all constitutional students. That a man who belongs to, and has worked with one of the two great parties of the State, should, when placed in the Speaker's chair, be so judicial and impartial that neither side ever questions his decisions, is, I think, a monument to the character of our public life. But that has not always been so. The Speaker's impartiality is a development of the last 150 or 160 years. Until the eighteenth century the Speaker was the nominee of the Crown, and very frequently held a Government office in addition to the Speaker's chair. What are we doing now? We are making a written Constitution. The Secretary of State for War admitted it. We are putting our Constitution in writing. States, which have a written Constitution usually leave it to the highest court to interpret their Constitution. We are proposing that our own officer—a man chosen by one of the two great parties in the State— should be the man to interpret our Constitution in a matter in which this House is extremely interested, and in which one party will be predominately interested in his giving a decision one way.

I claim we are not only depriving the other House of the rights it possesses and' arrogating to ourselves privileges which are very liable to be misused, but we are assigning to our great officer, to an office which has hitherto been the pride of the House, duties which it is almost impossible for him to discharge without some derogation from that character of impar- tiality which the Chair has hitherto always enjoyed. I have learned to admire our Constitution because of its adaptability in the hands of public-spirited and capable men to the changing needs of successive generations; but what we are proposing to do now is to stereotype in a legislative form the ambitions of this House, to acquire these privileges, to retain them, and to injure the character of the Speaker's chair by the duties which you impose upon him. After all, who exercises the powers of this House? It is the Government of the day, and it is to the Government of the day that you are assigning these powers. There can be no question that when the House of Commons assumes rights it assumes them for the benefit of the Government of the time, and you are creating this oligarchy not merely in general legislation, but in the all-important matter of finance. I believe, if these Veto Resolutions become a part of our law and a part of our Constitution, we shall live to regret it.

The ATTORNEY-GENERAL (Sir William Robson)

We are always glad to hear the hon. Baronet upon any question of constitutional law, but he has used some very strong language about those who have preceded him in the Debate. He charged me with making up my history as I went along, and said I perverted facts, and that my remarks had very slight foundation in history. Let me take the first instance which he gave of my inaccuracy. He said I have attached undue importance to the events of 1628. He rather supported, as I understood, the proposition of the right hon. and learned Member for the Edinburgh and St. Andrew's Universities (Sir Robert Finlay) that what took place in that year was of slight and trivial importance, and that anyone who attempted to give it a significance was perverting history. Before dealing with that year let me go back to another date mentioned by the hon. Baronet. The first important struggle between the Commons and the Lords in relation to finance took place, as the hon. Baronet has reminded us, in 1407. The Lords then assumed to intermeddle with the initiative of financial proposals. The Commons were greatly disturbed, to use the language recorded at the time, and they protested that the Lords had no right to meddle. They made a grievance of it. That grievance reached the ears of the King, and the King, to relieve their anxiety, laid down by virtue of his Prerogative, a rule which thereafter prevailed, that the Lords and Commons should assent before the Grant was made to the King, but that the Commons should make their own Grant, and that they should do so without the interference or control of the Lords, but when the Lords had assented to the Grant then it should be laid before the King. Now that Act of Indemnity of the Lords and Commons w as intended as a relief to the Commons; it was intended as a concession to the Commons, and it has since been made the basis of the claim on the part of the Lords to a right of rejection. As a result of long controversy the Preamble of Bills containing Supply had a very different form from that which obtains now. The Lords are mentioned in the Preamble; they were first mentioned as assenting to the Grant; they were afterwards mentioned as consenting to the Bill. That prevailed for a considerable time, but always with the protest of the Commons. It protested occasionally and sometimes effectively. In 1628 the Commons altered the Preamble of the Bill. The hon. Baronet speaks of that as if it were some trifle which nobody noticed at the time. I cannot imagine such a distinguished authority putting forword such an extraordinary suggestion. It was the subject of great controversy at the time, and that controversy resulted in the appointment of a Committee which contained three of the greatest men that then adorned political life in England—Coke, Selden, and Glanville. They decided in a manner hostile to the claims of the Lords. Their decision was accepted as being hostile. It was to the effect that the Lords had no right to assent to the Grant, and that all they had a right to do was to consent to the Bill. It was not the Lords who made the Grant. The Commons granted, and the Lords assented to the Grant. Those words will be found in the preamble of the Act of 1363. They reported that the House of Commons preamble should be altered so as to strike out the assent to the Grant altogether, and leave only the consent to the Bill—a most important distinction, which was really in the mind of Lord Chatham when, as Mr. Pitt, in this House he spoke of the significance of the Lords passing a Money Bill. He said they could only give consent to the Bill. They did not assent to the Grant, because the Grant is the money of the Commons alone. It is their own money, and they give it. The Lords do not assent to the Grant; all that they do is to co-operate in giving that Grant in a legal form. It was in 1628 that Coke, Selden, and Glanville reported and said that, although the Lords assented to the Grant, they became parties to the Bill only in order that the law courts might act on it. How anybody can say that what took place in 1628 was unimportant passes my comprehension. The hon. Member for the Edinburgh University made a curious charge against the Prime Minister because of his reference to the events of 1628. The hon. Baronet said that in 1671 there was a time when the Lords had a right to reject these Bills. We have not denied that as a matter of law the House of Lords is technically entitled to refuse assent to a Bill. We have no remedy for that, and, as Lord Palmerston pointed out in 1860, if a Bill is sent up there and comes back again there are no means by which we can remedy that which we believe to be a grievance. But it is a technical right only. May I deal with the question of what is legal and what is constitutional? I quite expected the hon. Member would have dealt with that point, and there is some significance in his omitting to do so, for I do not believe there is a greater authority on the subject. Let me take another great authority. What did Lord Lyndhurst say in the Wensleydale case? He was dealing with a claim put forward on the part of the Government of the day relative to the right of the Crown to appoint life peers. There was no doubt whatever that the Crown had appointed a life peer, but the hon. Baronet said no life peer had ever sat in the House, and he said it on the authority of Lord Bishop Stubbs, whom I should not like to contradict or qualify without very careful or minute research. The statement surprises me because I have been looking at instances where persons already peers and already sitting in the House have had life peerages conferred upon them. Yet the hon. Baronet stated that no life peers had sat in the House.

Sir WILLIAM ANSON

No life peers have sat in the House in virtue of the patent limiting the peerage to the term of life.

Sir WILLIAM ROBSON

That is an additional qualification. I am not quite sure Bishop Stubbs is right when he says that no peer has sat in the House by virtue of his life peerage. I want the House to understand exactly what the controversy was. Is it constitutional for the Crown to exercise its legal right of appointing life peers? Nobody denied that the Crown had the right. Lord Lyndhurst said about that:— The Crown may legally appoint a peer for life. Assuming that to be the case, it does not follow that every exercise of such a prerogative is consistent with the principles of the Constitution. The Sovereign may, if he thinks proper, by his Prerogative, create 100 peers, with descendible qualities, in the course of a day. That would be consistent with the Prerogative and strictly legal, but everybody must feel and everybody must know that such an exercise of the undoubted privilege of the Crown would be a flagrant violation of the principles of the Constitution. In other words, here is admittedly a legal right denounced by a great Tory lawyer as being grossly unconstitutional. That is all important in our discussion. You may have a legal right to throw out a Bill; you may have a legal right, but it may be wrong and foolish to exercise it. In another part of his speech Lord Lyndhurst goes on to speak of usage as being the true basis of our Constitution. I think he said not only had the Lords the legal right, but by mere constitutional custom that legal right continually asserted in an Act of Parliament might be one which, nevertheless, it was not proper to exercise. In other words, the constitutional law may be merely supplementary to the technical law of the court, or may absolutely supersede it. Therefore, when the Lords undertook to reject the Finance Bill they had to show not merely legal right, but legal right which they are entitled to exercise, but also a right in accordance with the constitutional usage of the country. Admittedly they could not show it. They cannot show it because if they had been able to do so they would have shown it in the course of this Debate. They have not cited one single precedent to justify their action. The hon. Baronet, dealing with the Bill of 1860, as the nearest case in point of a Bill in which the Lords proposed to interfere with the necessary financial arrangements of the country. May I point out they exercise a general Veto on legislation, they claim to control the trade, or share it with this House, whether the trade was being controlled or taxed in other ways. They claim to be entitled to have a voice in all these matters because we are entitled. They made regulations for the commerce of the country, but they never said we are entitled to interfere or share with you in Supply. In other words, although they did occasionally interfere with some small Bills which had the form of Money Bills, they did not do so on finan- cial grounds. They left the complete control of finance to the Commons. It is therefore advisable to bear in mind the distinction between Money Bills and Finance Bills. So far as finance is concerned, the Lords have never claimed to interfere, and they never have interfered, but they have simply dealt with some few Bills, which, although they touched upon taxation, were not primarily for the purpose of raising revenue, but were for some distinct and other puropse. I think if that is borne in mind, in addition to the fact of what took place in I860, hon. Members will see the distinction. In the year 1860 there was, as the hon. Baronet has pointed out, a reference to the alleged right of rejection by the House of Peers, and the second Resolution of Lord Palmerston dealt with that right. He said it was one which had been exercised in certain cases, but which the Commons regarded with peculiar jealousy. He did not deny that the Lords might have the power of rejecting Money Bills, but what did that refer to? That was upon the assumption that the Lords had no right to reject the Finance Bill. He recognised that which I have just laid down as a perfectly clear proposition, namely, that the general right of Veto possessed by the House of Lords, wholly irrespective of finance, might extend and might have extended to some Bills, nevertheless, which were concerned with taxation, but he never admitted any more than I have admitted; and he went on to say that the Commons have always regarded that power on the part of the House of Lords with peculiar jealousy. The exact words which he used were cryptic words, and puzzled the Parliament of that day, and I daresay will puzzle Parliament now. He said:— That although the Lords have exercised the power to reject Bills of several descriptions referring to taxing by negativing the whole, yet the exercise of that power by them has not been frequent, and is justly regarded by this House with peculiar jealousy as affecting the lights of the Commons to grant Supplies and to provide the "Ways and Means for the service of the year And he went on to say that the House required for the future to prevent the undue exercise of that power by the Lords and to secure to the Commons their rights in regard to taxation and Supply and had in its own hands powers with regard to them. What did that mean? It meant we can very easily deprive you of any right to touch any Bill relating to taxation if we make it part of a purely financial scheme dealing with the Supplies for the year, because no controversy arises whether the Budget as a Bill is financial or not. As long as these measures were sent up as separate measures, like the Paper Duty, the Lords were able to say: "Oh, we may reject this Bill because, although it deals with taxation, it also deals with a great object of public policy, and therefore it comes under our general Veto and therefore we are not prevented from dealing with it by the Resolution of the House of Commons." The House of Commons by their third Resolution in effect said we will stop this argument, we will put these Bills together so as to make them a purely financial scheme.

Sir ROBERT FINLAY

What they were trying to do was to make it difficult for the House of Lords to exercise their admitted right.

Sir WILLIAM ROBSON

The hon. Gentleman said that in his speech, but I think it is wholly without authority and wholly inaccurate. He has an idea that what was the meaning of that Resolution was to intimidate the House of Lords, and I say there is no ground whatever disclosed by the Debate in the House of Lords for that assertion, and it is negatived by what Lord Granville, who was a most important person at that time, said. It was resolved to make these Bills part of a purely financial scheme, and that was the reason why all the Bills were embodied in a single Budget Bill and why since that time we have had single Budget Bills. Of course, the hon. Gentleman is entitled to his opinion, which, no doubt, will be shared by hon. Gentlemen opposite, that all the Commons were thinking of was an intimidatory measure, but that was not the opinion expressed at that time and is not the opinion which will be gathered from a consideration of the Debate. There is no expression of opinion to that effect by the Government who framed the Resolutions, and no expression of that kind by those who were best acquainted with the meaning of them. Let me take the next point raised by the hon. Baronet, and here, again, I think his silence is much more expressive than his speech. He charges the Chancellor of the Exchequer with "tacking" in his Budget, or, although he may not have "tacked," with making his Budget the basis of policy. He says that is wrong, and you cannot make your Budget in that way.

Sir W. ANSON

I stated that matters which are not properly financial were introduced into a Finance Bill. I used the word "financial."

Sir W. ROBSON

I should like the hon. Baronet to say what matter in a Finance Bill is not financial. There is no need of anything in a Finance Bill to secure anything which is not essential to finance. Had there been, Mr. Speaker would have stopped it. But we have had to wait for the hon. Baronet to point out a case of "tacking," when the "tacking" would have been beyond the scope of the Bill, and the Orders of this House would have been sufficient to deal with such a case without the Orders of the other House. There is nothing in the Bill which can be called "tacking" by any stretch of the imagination. Then the hon. Baronet went on to accuse my right hon. Friend of making the Budget the basis of policy. He said, "You have a policy here which might lead to the municipalisation or nationalisation of the land."

Sir W. ANSON

I must call the attention of the hon. and learned Attorney-General to the fact that I never condemned the Chancellor of the Exchequer for anything he did. I only said, in the words of Mr. Gladstone, that his Budget was of such a character that it justified the Lords in exercising their undoubted right.

Sir W. ROBSON

Then I am a little at a loss to remember what all his observations were about when he was speaking of the basis of a policy. I do not know what they were about now, and, therefore, they need no answer. But I must say I wondered rather when he was condemning a Budget which embraces objects more than financial—

Sir W. ANSON

I did not condemn the Budget.

Sir W. ROBSON

You complained that the Budget contained objects other than financial objects.

Sir W. ANSON

I never complained. I was not going into the merits of the Budget excepting so far as they affected the rights of the Lords.

Sir W. ROBSON

I suppose the hon. Baronet means that when the Lords rejected it there was something wrong with regard to it, because I suppose we are not to believe that he blames the Lords for rejecting the Budget with which he has no complaint. I think I am entitled to say that he certainly did make observations against this Budget, on the ground that it was a basis of policy, and that is a ground of objection in regard to which he ought to have dealt with my observations to the House on a previous occasion, and he ought to have answered my own defence of the Budget in that regard. I say if it was wrong to make a Liberal Budget the basis of policy, it is wrong to make a Conservative Budget of that nature, and yet we are told that Conservative Budgets are to be framed in order to give Colonial Preference. Why did not the right hon. Baronet deal with that when he was handling this particular part of the subject? He spoke of the power of amendment possessed by the Lords, which, he said, he found referred to in every constitutional authority.

Sir W. ANSON

I quoted Mr. Gladstone.

Sir W. ROBSON

The hon. Gentleman quoted Mr. Gladstone with approval.

Sir W. ANSON

I did not express any opinion. I quoted Mr. Gladstone.

Sir W. ROBSON

If the hon. Baronet quoted Mr. Gladstone but expressed no opinion, and apparently now is a little diffident to tell us whether he approves of Mr. Gladstone or not—if he was just making an interesting reference to Mr. Gladstone, and never intended to express or convey any opinion whatever, then I do not think I shall trouble about answering that point further. The next point he made had reference to the hon. Member behind me, the Member for King's Lynn (Mr. Gibson Bowles). He spoke justifying the power of amendment by the Lords, and my hon. Friend the Member for King's Lynn helped him out, and said not long ago there was actually an acceptance by this House of thirty-six Amendments by the Lords in a Bill. Nobody has denied that the House of Lords made and frequently has made suggestions to the House of Commons which the latter has accepted, but a waiver of a privilege properly understood confirms that privilege. Amendments are submitted to this House by the Lords which are never insisted upon, and to-night on the Order Paper we have a Bill in which the Lords desire to suggest certain changes. What did they do? They did not make the amendment in the Bill, but they put the words in brackets, and suggested that the House of Commons should insert them in Committee. That is an assertion of our privilege to-day. It is a suggestion on their part, and yet the hon. Baronet gets up here to-day as a constitutional authority and has not troubled to consider such a case where we have accepted Amendments from the Lords in the way of a mere suggestion. That very strongly affirms and confirms our privileges. I must make one protest against the habit of hon. Members in making inconsistent and not very accurate charges against the House of which they are Members. We had two such speeches to-night, in one of which complaint was made of the despotism of the House of Commons, and the hon. Member spoke of the country as being under the heel of the House of Commons. This is, from one point of view, said to be an assembly of tyrants, a committee of public safety, and one Member called it a junta. Then another point of view was that of the Noble Lord (Lord Hugh Cecil), who tells us that we are not a deliberative assembly, and we are for ever cowed by our terror of our constituents. I wish hon. Members opposite would make up their minds which of these views is correct—whether we are a despotic Chamber or are afraid of our constituents. One or the other, we may be; we cannot be both.

8.0 P.M.

Sir JOHN ROLLESTON

It has been frequently mentioned in the course of the discussion, somewhat superfluously, I think, that this House is what the democracy makes it. I am sure that that part of the democracy which I represent would wish me to say how heartily they support the Leader of the Opposition in his expressed intention to oppose this and the other Resolutions at all points. The Solicitor-General last week said he was quite sure that this matter of the Second Chamber was mentioned and fully explained during the candidature of every Member on this side of the House. I, too, may say that the question was brought forward prominently by every Member on this side, and was made a leading point in their speeches and their addresses. In my own case certainly it was so, and I am, therefore, able to say that the opinion of the majority of the people in my Constituency was that the Second Chamber had deserved well of the country, and that although some reform of its constitution might perhaps be desirable, still, there was no hurry about it, inasmuch as the House of Lords never in practice refused legislation which was the clearly ascertained desire of the people. Indeed, I found further that the Chamber was regarded with feelings of the most profound gratitude for having delayed, even for a few months, the passage of the financial proposals of last year. I, therefore, am opposed to the Resolutions, but I think this would be a convenient opportunity, and it would tend to a much clearer perception of the great issue which is at stake, if the Government were to explain more fully what in their opinion may legitimately be included in a Finance Bill. We have been accustomed to believe that the Finance Bill proper was to make provision for the revenues for the service of the year, and one was naturally rather shocked last year to see proposals brought forward to create a large staff of valuers to value all the land in the country, at a cost of millions of money, not to produce revenue from the great bulk of that land, which is agricultural, but only from a small part of it which might be held to have prospective value, because something might perhaps happen which had not yet happened. I wish to inquire if we are likely to have regarded as finance in future such grotesque excursions into novel and experimental legislation as these, and with which the Second Chamber is to have no power to deal. If so no better argument can be produced against the Resolutions.

The Trades Disputes Bill has been mentioned in connection with the case against the House of Lords. I had a peculiar experience in regard to that Bill. I knew that the trades unions were very much in earnest in passing it. When it was brought forward some four years ago, I was contesting a seat in a Midland constituency. Right hon. Gentlemen opposite a few weeks previously had gone about the country explaining that they could not accept the Bill of the Labour party, but that they would introduce a Trade Disputes Bill of their own if returned to power. They were returned to power, and on the Wednesday of the concluding week of the Election, the poll being fixed for Friday, the Attorney-General came down to this House and, in a speech of great length and lucidity, explained how he could not accept the Bill of the Labour party, but that he had produced a Bill which he hoped would be acceptable. This was not well received in the constituency. It raised a commotion. The democracy, which was usually accepted locally as meaning the supporters of Members opposite, was very much upset, and one thousand men from one large factory met and expressed their intention of voting for the Tory candidate if the Government Bill was persevered with, and a report was made to headquarters in hot haste that unless something was done quickly an impregnable Liberal fortress might have to be surrendered. Our hopes were raised of winning the Election, but they were soon shattered, because on the day of our polling the Prime Minister gave away everything that his Law Officer had said, and promised the Bill of the Labour party. I thought it was rather greedy of the Government, considering the huge majority at their back, that they should make such a vast difference for the sake of one Liberal seat.

The CHAIRMAN

The hon. Member is now discussing a question which does not arise on the Financial Veto.

Sir JOHN ROLLESTON

Everyone knew how much in earnest the Labour party were about the Bill; the whole country knew it, and the House of Lords knew it, and whether they liked it or not, and there was no evidence that I know of that they did not like it—

The CHAIRMAN

The hon. Member knows he is out of order. He should not continue to discuss the matter.

Sir JOHN ROLLESTON

I am sure I am obeying the mandate of the democracy which I represent in voting against the Resolution.

Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD

We have listened to-day to an exceedingly interesting Debate upon a very interesting historical subject, whether this House did something in 1407 or did not do it, and whether it supplemented the 1407 action by effective action in 1628 or whether it did not do it. I should like to remind the learned Gentlemen who have been taking part in this discussion that at the present moment this Committee is considering a pressing political question. These precedents are very interesting for a lecture room at Oxford or the London University, and, properly subordinated to the subject under discussion, they are also very important to this Committee, but I do not care what happened in 1628 or in 1407. I am only interested in that subject in the same way that I am interested in the story why and how Charles I. happened once upon a time to lose his head. What we are interested in at the moment is this: Is the present position regarding Money Bills, or rather the claims that the House of Lords makes in respect to Money Bills, a position which this House can accept? As a matter of fact, the whole of our Constitution consists of a series of precedents. Were it not for that, there would be no Constitution at all, the King would still be the supreme governing authority and the supreme judicial authority, and in his own hands and in his own person would rest all the power associated with the Government of this country. We have made from time to time precedents of our own. The history of the Constitution is a series of introductions of precedents and introductions of actions which, up till the time they were introduced, had never been the subject of precedent at all. All we have to consider is, has that time come in respect to the power that the House of Lords asks to exercise regarding Money Bills?

There is one subsidiary question that I think might be considered. The Attorney-General has stated that if the Government of the day tried the method of tacking, the Speaker himself, armed with simply his present powers, would refuse to allow the tacking to come into operation, because it was inconsistent with the title of the Bill. I do not know whether that is a sound argument or not. It may be sound or it may be unsound. All I am concerned with is that the Attorney-General has offered it as a serious argument. If that argument is sound, it would be quite unnecessary to pass the Resolution in its present form, because that provision relating to the Speaker, according to the Attorney-General, is at present part of the operative Rules of this House. The right hon. Baronet (Sir William Anson) tried to make us frightened of the enormous change that is going to take place if this Resolution is passed and becomes operative by Statute. As a matter of fact, the Speaker now apparently has the right to say that certain Clauses introduced into a Finance Bill, which are not essentially Clauses for the levying of the necessary revenue, must be ruled out of order, because they are not in accordance with the title of the Rill. All the power given him by this Bill is precisely that power. The Speaker cannot, unless we alter the Rules of the House, accept as being in order any provision incidental or otherwise to a Finance Bill which is not properly included in the title of the Bill. Although this is part— and I object to it in that respect—of a written Constitution, I think it is very much better that the judicial authority that should carry this written Constitution into operation and should guard it, should be an officer of this House, and not judges outside this House. We are not bound to go the whole hog in this respect. If the time has come when the ordinary operations of what one might call Parliamentary etiquette fail to preserve the House from mere partisan fights across the floor, and certain privileges of this House require to be maintained and guarded by statute, surely it is very much better that those statutory provisions should be interpreted by an officer of this House in touch with the life of the House than by men outside, however great their eminence, who are not in touch with the public life of the country. That is the great objection to the Supreme Court of the United States being the supreme authority in certain parts of the Constitution.

And, it being a Quarter-past Eight of the clock, further proceeding was postponed, without Question put, in pursuance of Standing Order No. 4.

Committee to sit again to-morrow (Thursday).