Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  XXIV. OF SECOND CHAMBERS.

  A Second Chamber acts as a drag. Progress is always uphill work. So we are at pains to provide a drag beforehand — for an uphill journey.

  There, in one word, you have the whole philosophy of Second Chambers.

  How, then, did the nations of Europe come to hamper their legislative systems with such a useless, such an illogical adjunct? In sackcloth and ashes, let us confess the truth — we English led them astray: on us the shame; to us the dishonour. Theorists, indeed (wise after the fact, as is the wont of theorists), have discovered or invented an imaginary function for Second Chambers. They are to preserve the people, it seems, from the fatal consequences of their own precipitancy. As though the people — you and I — the vast body of citizens, were a sort of foolish children, to be classed with infants, women, criminals, and imbeciles (I adopt the chivalrous phraseology of an Act of Parliament), incapable of knowing their own minds for two minutes together, and requiring to be kept straight by the fatherly intervention of Dukes of Marlborough or Marquises of Ailesbury. The ideal picture of the level-headed peers restraining the youthful impetuosity of the representatives of the people from committing to-day some rash act which they would gladly repent and repeal to-morrow, is both touching and edifying. But it exists only in the minds of the philosophers, who find a reason for everything just because it is there. Members of Parliament, I have observed, seem to know their own minds every inch as well as earls — nay, even as marquises.

  The plain fact of the matter is, all the Second Chambers in the world are directly modelled upon the House of Lords, that Old Man of the Sea whom England, the weary Titan, is now striving so hard to shake off her shoulders. The mother of Parliaments is responsible for every one of them. Senates and Upper Houses are just the result of irrational Anglomania. When constitutional government began to exist, men turned unanimously to the English Constitution as their model and pattern. That was perfectly natural. Evolutionists know that evolution never proceeds on any other plan than by reproduction, with modification, of existing structures. America led the way. She said, “England has a House of Commons; therefore we must have a House of Representatives. England has also a House of Lords; nature has not dowered us with those exalted products, but we will do what we can; we will imitate it by a Senate.” Monarchical France followed her lead; so did Belgium, Italy, civilisation in general. I believe even Japan rejoices to-day in the august dignity of a Second Chamber. But mark now the irony of it. They all of them did this thing to be entirely English. And just about the time when they had completed the installation of their peers or their senators, England, who set the fashion, began to discover in turn she could manage a great deal better herself without them.

  And then what do the philosophers do? Why, they prove to you the necessity of a Second Chamber by pointing to the fact that all civilised nations have got one — in imitation of England. Furthermore, it being their way to hunt up abstruse and recondite reasons for what is on the face of it ridiculous, they argue that a Second Chamber is a necessary wheel in the mechanism of popular representative government. A foolish phrase, which has come down to us from antiquity, represents the populace as inevitably “fickle,” a changeable mob, to be restrained by the wisdom of the seniors and optimates. As a matter of fact, the populace is never anything of the sort. It is dogged, slow, conservative, hard to move; it advances step by step, a patient, sure-footed beast of burden; and when once it has done a thing, it never goes back upon it. I believe this silly fiction of the “fickleness” of the mob is mainly due to the equally silly fictions of prejudiced Greek oligarchs about the Athenian assembly — which was an assembly of well-to-do and cultivated slave-owners. I do not swallow all that Thucydides chooses to tell us in his one-sided caricature about Cleon’s appointment to the command at Sphacteria, or about the affair of Mitylene; and even if I did, I think it has nothing to do with the question. But on such utterly exploded old-world ideas is the whole modern argument of the Second Chamber founded.

  Does anybody really believe great nations are so incapable of managing their own affairs for themselves through their duly-elected representatives that they are compelled to check their own boyish ardour by means of the acts of an irresponsible and non-elective body? Does anybody believe that the House of Commons works too fast, and gets through its public business too hurriedly? Does anybody believe we improve things in England at such a break-neck pace that we require the assistance of Lord Salisbury and Lord St. Leonards to prevent us from rushing straight down a steep place into the sea, like the swine of Gadara? If they do, I congratulate them on their psychological acumen and their political wisdom.

  What the Commons want is not a drag, but a goad — nay, rather, a snow-plough.

  No; the plain truth of the matter is this: all the Second Chambers in the world owe their existence, not to any deliberate plan or reason, but to the mere accident that the British nobles, not having a room big enough to sit in with the Commons, took to sitting separately, and transacted their own business as a distinct assembly. With so much wisdom are the kingdoms of the earth governed! How else could any one in his senses have devised the idea of creating one deliberative body on purpose to mutilate or destroy the work of another? to produce from time to time a periodical crisis or a periodical deadlock? There is not a country in the world with a Second Chamber that doesn’t twice a year kick and plunge to get rid of it.

  The House of Lords was once a reality. It consisted of the ecclesiastical hierarchy — the bishops and mitred abbots; with the official hierarchy — the great nobles, who were also great satraps of provinces, and great military commanders. It was thus mainly made up of practical life-members, appointed by merit. The peers, lay and spiritual, were the men who commended themselves to the sovereign as able administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditary element choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbots disappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of a shire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last to be a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House of Landlords. And the English people submitted to the claim of irresponsible wealth or irresponsible acres to exercise a veto upon national legislation. The anomaly, utterly indefensible in itself, had grown up so slowly that the public accepted it — nay, even defended it. And other countries, accustomed to regard England — the Pecksniff among nations — as a perfect model of political wisdom, swallowed half the anomaly, and all the casuistical reasoning that was supposed to justify it, without a murmur. But if we strip the facts bare from the glamour that surrounds them, the plain truth is this — England allows an assembly of hereditary nobodies to retard or veto its legislation nowadays, simply because it never noticed the moment when a practical House of administrative officers lapsed into a nest of plutocrats.

  Mend or end? As it stands, the thing is a not-even-picturesque mediæval relic. If we English were logical, we would arrange that any man who owned so many thousand acres of land, or brewed so many million bottles of beer per annum, should ipso facto be elevated to the peerage. Why should not gallons of gin confer an earldom direct, and Brighton A’s be equivalent to a marquisate? Why not allow the equal claim of screws and pills with coal and iron? Why disregard the native worth of annatto and nitrates? Baron Beecham or Lord Sunlight is a first-rate name. As it is, we make petty and puerile distinctions. Beer is in, but whiskey is out; and even in beer itself, if I recollect aright, Dublin stout wore a coronet for some months or years before English pale ale attained the dignity of a barony. No Minister has yet made chocolate a viscount. At present, banks and minerals go in as of right, while soap is left out in the cold, and even cotton languishes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer put up titles to auction, while abolishing the legislative function of the Lords, there would be millions in it. But as we English are not logical, our mending would probably resolve itself into fatuous tinkering. We might get rid of the sons, but leave the fathers. We might flood
the Lords with life peers, but leave the veto. Such tactics are too Britannic. “Stone dead hath no fellow!”

  XXV. A POINT OF CRITICISM.

  A few pages back, I ventured to remark that in Utopia or the Millennium the women of the community would probably be supported in common by the labour of the men, and so be secured complete independence of choice and action. When these essays first appeared in a daily newspaper, a Leader among Women wrote to me in reply, “What a paradise you open up to us! Alas for the reality! The question is — could women ever be really independent if men supplied the means of existence? They would always feel they had the right to control us. The difference of the position of a woman in marriage when she has got a little fortune of her own is something miraculous. Men adore money, and the possession of it inspires them with an involuntary respect for the happy possessor.”

  Now I got a great many letters in answer to these Post-Prandials as they originally came out — some of them, strange to say, not wholly complimentary. As a rule, I am too busy a man to answer letters: and I take this opportunity of apologising to correspondents who write to tell me I am a knave or a fool, for not having acknowledged direct their courteous communications. But this friendly criticism seems to call for a reply, because it involves a question of principle which I have often noted in all discussions of Utopias and Millennia.

  For my generous critic seems to take it for granted that women are not now dependent on the labour of men for their support — that some, or even most of them, are in a position of freedom. The plain truth of it is — almost all women depend for everything upon one man, who is or may be an absolute despot. A very small number of women have “money of their own,” as we quaintly phrase it — that is to say, are supported by the labour of many among us, either in the form of rent or in the form of interest on capital bequeathed to them. A woman with five thousand a year from Consols, for example, is in the strictest sense supported by the united labour of all of us — she has a first mortgage to that amount upon the earnings of the community. You and I are taxed to pay her. But is she therefore more dependent than the woman who lives upon what she can get out of the scanty earnings of a drunken husband? Does the community therefore think it has a right to control her? Not a bit of it. She is in point of fact the only free woman among us. My dream was to see all women equally free — inheritors from the community of so much of its earnings; holders, as it were, of sufficient world-consols to secure their independence.

  That, however, is not the main point to which I desire just now to direct attention. I want rather to suggest an underlying fallacy of all so-called individualists in dealing with schemes of so-called Socialism — for to me your Socialist is the true and only individualist. My correspondent’s argument is written from the standpoint of the class in which women have or may have money. But most women have none; and schemes of reconstruction must be for the benefit of the many. So-called individualists seem to think that under a more organised social state they would not be so able to buy pictures as at present, not so free to run across to California or Kamschatka. I doubt their premiss, for I believe we should all of us be better off than we are to-day; but let that pass; ’tis a detail. The main thing is this: they forget that most of us are narrowly tied and circumscribed at present by endless monopolies and endless restrictions of land or capital. I should like to buy pictures; but I can’t afford them. I long to see Japan; but I shall never get there. The man in the street may desire to till the ground: every acre is appropriated. He may wish to dig coal: Lord Masham prevents him. He may have a pretty taste in Venetian glass: the flints on the shore are private property; the furnace and the implements belong to a capitalist. Under the existing régime, the vast mass of us are hampered at every step in order that a few may enjoy huge monopolies. Most men have no land, so that one man may own a county. And they call this Individualism!

  In considering any proposed change, whether imminent or distant, in practice or in day-dream, it is not fair to take as your standard of reference the most highly-favoured individuals under existing conditions. Nor is it fair to take the most unfortunate only. You should look at the average.

  Now the average man, in the world as it wags, is a farm-labourer, an artisan, a mill-hand, a navvy. He has untrammelled freedom of contract to follow the plough on another man’s land, or to work twelve hours a day in another man’s factory, for that other man’s benefit — provided always he can only induce the other man to employ him. If he can’t, he is at perfect liberty to tramp the high road till he drops with fatigue, or to starve, unhindered, on the Thames Embankment. He may live where he likes, as far as his means permit; for example, in a convenient court off Seven Dials. He may make his own free bargain with grasping landlord or exacting sweater. He may walk over every inch of English soil, with the trifling exception of the millions of acres where trespassers will be prosecuted. Even travel is not denied him: Florence and Venice are out of his beat, it is true; but if he saves up his loose cash for a couple of months, he may revel in the Oriental luxury of a third-class excursion train to Brighton and back for three shillings. Such advantages does the régime of landlord-made individualism afford to the average run of British citizen. If he fails in the race, he may retire at seventy to the ease and comfort of the Union workhouse, and be buried inexpensively at the cost of his parish.

  The average woman in turn is the wife of such a man, dependent upon him for what fraction of his earnings she can save from the public-house. Or she is a shop-girl, free to stand all day from eight in the morning till ten at night behind a counter, and to throw up her situation if it doesn’t suit her. Or she is a domestic servant, enjoying the glorious liberty of a Sunday out every second week, and a walk with her young man every alternate Wednesday after eight in the evening. She has full leave to do her love-making in the open street, and to get as wet as she chooses in Regent’s Park on rainy nights in November. Look the question in the face, and you will see for yourself that the mass of mothers in every community are dependent for support, not upon men in general, but upon a single man, their husband, against whose caprices and despotism they have no sort of protection. Even the few women who are, as we say, “independent,” how are they supported, save by the labour of many men who work to keep them in comfort or luxury? They are landowners, let us put it; and then they are supported by the labour of their farmers and ploughmen. Or they hold North-Western shares; and then they are supported by the labour of colliers, and stokers, and guards, and engine-drivers. And so on throughout. The plain fact is, either a woman must earn her own livelihood by work, which, in the case of the mothers in a community, is bad public policy; or else she must be supported by a man or men, her husband, or her labourers.

  My day-dream was, then, to make every woman independent, in precisely the same sense that women of property are independent at present. Would it give them a consciousness of being unduly controlled if they derived their support from the general funds of the body politic, of which they would be free and equal members and voters? Well, look at similar cases in our own England. The Dukes of Marlborough derive a heavy pension from the taxes of the country; but I have never observed that any Duke of Marlborough of my time felt himself a slave to the imperious taxpayer. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is justly the recipient of a Civil List annuity; but that hasn’t prevented his active and essentially individualist brain from inventing Land Nationalisation. Mr. Robert Buchanan very rightly draws another such annuity for good work done; but Mr. Buchanan’s name is not quite the first that rises naturally to my lips as an example of cowed and cringing sycophancy to the ideas and ideals of his fellow-citizens. No, no; be sure of it, this terror is a phantom. One master is real, realisable, instant; but to be dependent upon ten million is just what we always describe as independence.

  THE END

  The Mediterranean

  ITS STORIED CITIES AND VENERABLE RUINS

  CONTENTS

  I. THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

  II.
ALGIERS

  III. MALAGA

  IV. BARCELONA

  V. MARSEILLES

  VI. NICE

  VII. THE RIVIERA

  VIII. GENOA

  IX. THE TUSCAN COAST

  X. VENICE

  XI. ALEXANDRIA

  XII. MALTA

  XIII. SICILY

  XIV. NAPLES

  I. THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

  Portals of the ancient world — Bay of Tangier at sunrise — Tarifa — The Rock of Gibraltar — Wonders of its fortifications — Afternoon promenade in the Alameda Gardens — Ascending the Rock — View from the highest point — The Great Siege — Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast — The rock of many names.

  The “Pillars of Hercules!” The portals of the Ancient World! To how many a traveller just beginning to tire of his week on the Atlantic, or but slowly recovering, it may be, in his tranquil voyage along the coasts of Portugal and Southern Spain, from the effects of thirty unquiet hours in the Bay of Biscay, has the nearing view of this mighty landmark of history brought a message of new life! That distant point ahead, at which the narrowing waters of the Strait that bears him disappear entirely within the clasp of the embracing shores, is for many such a traveller the beginning of romance. He gazes upon it from the westward with some dim reflection of that mysterious awe with which antiquity looked upon it from the East. The progress of the ages has, in fact, transposed the center of human interest and the human point of view. Now, as in the Homeric era, the Pillars of Hercules form the gateway of a world of wonder; but for us of to-day it is within and not without those portals that that world of wonder lies. To the eye of modern poetry the Atlantic and Mediterranean have changed places. In the waste of waters stretching westward from the rock of Calpe and its sister headland, the Greek of the age of Homer found his region of immemorial poetic legend and venerable religious myth, and peopled it with the gods and heroes of his traditional creed. Here, on the bosom of the wide-winding river Oceanus, lay the Islands of the Blest — that abode of eternal beauty and calm, where “the life of mortals is most easy,” where “there is neither snow nor winter nor much rain, but ocean is ever sending up the shrilly breezes of Zephyrus to refresh man.” But for us moderns who have explored this mighty “river Oceanus,” this unknown and mysterious Atlantic to its farthest recesses, the glamor of its mystery has passed away for ever; and it is eastward and not westward, through the “Pillars of Hercules,” that we now set our sails in search of the region of romance. It is to the basin of the Mediterranean — fringed with storied cities and venerable ruins, with the crumbling sanctuaries of a creed which has passed away, and the monuments of an art which is imperishable — that man turns to-day. The genius of civilization has journeyed far to the westward, and has passed through strange experiences; it returns with new reverence and a deeper awe to that enclave of mid-Europe which contains its birthplace, and which is hallowed with the memories of its glorious youth. The grand cliff-portal which we are approaching is the entrance, the thoughtful traveller will always feel, to a region eternally sacred in the history of man; to lands which gave birth to immortal models of literature and unerring canons of philosophic truth; to shrines and temples which guard the ashes of those “dead but sceptered sovereigns” who “rule our spirits from their urns.”