AT THE CROSS ROADS

WE are all very fond of saying, or of singing on occasion, that "Britons never will be slaves" of priding ourselves that we live under a free Constitution, where the laws are made by the people for the people, where the Government are the servants and not the masters of the nation, and no one dare infringe the rights and liberties which have been handed down to us from our forefathers, or we will know the reason why. All of which are very beautiful and gratifying sentiments, worthy of a nation with a history such as ours: and the theories on which they are based are most comfortable and cheering but do the facts accord with them? They have no doubt done so in times perhaps not so very long past: but are we not now contenting ourselves rather too largely with the theories, without troubling ourselves whether or not they have ceased to be anything more?

If we can exert ourselves to the extent at least of taking stock of our present position, it is to be feared we shall find sufficient to disquiet even the most contentedly disposed amongst us. Our boasted Constitution has, at any rate for the time being, to all intents and purposes gone by the board. Our Constitution has, indeed, always been characterized by a certain vagueness and elasticity which have rendered it, on the whole, more easy of working than if it were a hard-and-fast written Constitution, such as some countries possess, outside the four corners of which no Minister dare venture: but we must not allow ourselves to be deluded into the error of accepting this vagueness and elasticity, which are merely incidentals to it, as its main and essential features. What we ought not to forget is that our Constitution rests and depends for its endurance on certain definite and bedrock foundations, and that if we continue to allow those foundations to be tampered with as they have been of late years there will be an end of the structure for good and all.

The chief of those foundations is the principle that the government of the country shall be vested in Crown, Lords, and Commons: in the Crown, as deputed by the peoplefor we must remember amongst other things that our Monarchy is elective, albeit for greater convenience' sake vested in a single family-to wield the supreme executive power in the Lords, as recruited, in principle at least,

from amongst the wisest and most experienced of the nation, and therefore entrusted with the duty of weighing and modifying, confirming, referring back, or rejecting the proposals for the exercise of the executive power sent up for their judgment by the Commons: and in the Commons, as directly chosen by the people to voice their wishes and grievances, to initiate measures for the respective fulfilment or redress of the same, and to hold the purse-strings as a guarantee for such fulfilment or redress. Truly we have here something of which to be proud: a system of government the most perfectly democratic-in the right meaning of the word, that all classes are evenly represented, and none can act without, or to the detriment of, the others-that has ever been devised: a system which has won the admiration of, and served as a pattern to, the free nations throughout the world: a system under whose fostering spirit of liberty and justice we have ourselves grown to be the great nation that we are, In theory, once more, it has been handed down to us intact: but what has it become in reality?

Little by little, under one more or less plausible pretext or another, our Sovereigns have had what is their undoubted share in the government of the nation filched from them, until now the occupant of the throne has become little if anything more than a mere figure-head, with some personal influence perhaps, but with far less actual say in the conduct of the Empire over which he is supposed to rule than is enjoyed by the Presidents of the United States during their comparatively ephemeral periods of office. The reduction of the Lords to an equal state of impotence came a few years ago with the iniquitous Parliament Act, passed by a time-serving and venal majority through the Commons, and only submitted to by its victims themselves under threats of what would have amounted to a gross infraction not only of their own privileges, but, according to our true Constitution, of the prerogatives of the Crown. There remain to us, then, as the one ostensibly effective element of our Constitutional machine, the Commons, who, in view particularly of their so recent arrogation to themselves of the sole right, as the direct representatives of the people, to legislate for it, might be expected at the same time to show a due regard for its rights and liberties in their turn. Let us examine into the manner in which they are fulfilling that expectation.

The average Member's duty to his country in general and his constituents in particular has in these latter days

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become entirely secondary to his duty to his party chief. So long as his chief can, if in power, be kept there, or, if out of it, can be manoeuvred in again, it has not mattered to what extent he has sacrificed his conscience or his sense of right, how far he has broken his promise to or betrayed the confidence of those whom he professes to represent, or in what mean tricks or subterfuges -dignified, or otherwise, under the name of party strategy "-he has allowed himself to be involved. Further, with so many dependent as they now are on their membership for their reputations, or even, under recent " constitutional" or strategical "conditions, their incomes: with so many entertaining hopes of favours to come in the form of offices or titles: and with so many, again, dreading the expense to be incurred by their being obliged to seek re-election, it has become an easy matter, in the comparatively rare event of a threatened breakaway, for the leader of the party which is in to bring his followers back to heel by the mere threat of a dissolution. The party which is out," being for the time practically helpless, of course does not require to be reckoned with at all.

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This blind obedience on the part of their followers has reacted to the moral, or at least to the political detriment of the leaders in the case especially of those who have themselves adopted politics as a profession and not simply as a means of serving their country; but also, though perhaps to a lesser degree, in that of the more old-fashioned type of statesman. Nor indeed, however regrettable this may be, can it be looked upon as a matter for surprise. With their desires and decisions so consistently accepted as infallible with the Commons, or their majority there, which is all with which they need really concern themselves, reduced to the status of a mere machine for registering their decrees, it is only natural that, being what they are, and trained as they have been trained, our Prime Ministers should have come to regard themselves whilst in power, if not as actually possessed of that omniscience with which their devoted henchmen credit them, at all events as practically without limitations, moral, legal, or Constitutional, to their omnipotence. Try to disguise it from ourselves as we may, we have been drifting on for the last twenty years at least, with a considerable acceleration of the pace during the last ten of them, towards a state of things under which our system of so-called Parliamentary Government has become nothing more nor less than a barefaced Autocracy: that is, the rule of one man, who, though he may not always be the

same man, though he may not always be the central figure of the same party, is, while he occupies his place as Prime Minister, as absolute in fact as the whilom Czars of Russia.

It may be argued that the Prime Minister cannot be truly termed an autocrat, because he is only in office for a time, and is always liable to be turned out when the country is tired of him. But first of all it may be questioned whether, as things have been shaping themselves of late years, we can be sure of bettering our conditions by even such a change as is here implied. "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," and with all the constituent elements of our theoretical system of government reduced to impotence, there is every reason to anticipate that, even in the ordinary course of events, each Prime Minister, or Premier-the official assumption fifteen years ago of the latter more arrogantly sounding title in itself seems somewhat ominous-of the future may prove more despotic in his methods than his predecessors. We are even now in danger of losing that protection against arbitrary procedure on the part of our rulers, whoever they may be, which has been afforded us by a brave and upright Judiciary, the aim of most recent legislation having been to remove it outside the scope of the Law Courts and make the Department entrusted with the carrying of it into execution the final court of appeal in respect of it as well: we have had repeated instances of late years of Prime Ministers, in the event of an adverse division, flouting those very traditions of Parliament in which they are so ready to take refuge when it suits them: and, further, we cannot flatter ourselves with any too plentiful recollections of Prime Ministers having receded from a point of vantage bequeathed them by their predecessors, however hardly they may have fought against its achievement when themselves in Opposition.

And if we cannot rest wholly comfortable with the thought of what is likely to become of us in the ordinary course of events, how much more have we not cause for anxiety in respect of developments so much out of the ordinary as those to which our system of government has been subjected during the past few years? It may have been desirable, or even necessary, in view of the emergencies of the Great War in which we have been engaged, explicitly to sanction those pretensions to infallibility and omnipotence which we have winked at or lazily grumbled at, as the case may be, in our recent Prime Ministers: to give the holder of the office for the time being the free use of our purses, our property, our very homes to do what he liked

with them in executing whatever sehemes might seem to him advisable to fortify him in his position by an Act enabling him to override our privileges and infringe our liberties as British citizens in any way that he might consider justified by the circumstances: to deprive ourselves of that last remaining bulwark against the aggressions of our Ministers, the watchful jealousy of an Opposition, by the establishment of a so-called party truce: in short, to deliver ourselves over body and soul and helpless as instruments with which, for better or for worse, he might work his will. But it is at least questionable whether we would not have been more wise to pause and consider what kind of a man he was on whom we were conferring powers so exceptional, and indeed so unprecedented.

For this is no fanciful picture of the authority with which, as it were by universal acclamation, we have vested our present Prime Minister during the war. Can we reasonably expect, then, having regard to the previously existent tendencies on the part of our Prime Ministers towards absolutism, and our experience of Mr. Lloyd George's own temperamental peculiarities, that now he has once occupied so all-dominant a position he will willingly descend from it to take his part with the rest of us in the reinstatement of all our old safeguards? And even if we could credit him with a sufficiency of self-abnegation, we are certainly showing no anxiety to give him occasion to exercise it. Our present cult of Mr. Lloyd George can be described in no other way than as an obsession. Never before in our history has there been evident on the part of the nation in general, and Parliament in particular, such a spirit of abjectness to one man's will, of absolute cowedness before his commands, of almost imbecile adulation of his personality, of determination that, come what will, he and he alone must be kept in office as the only possible governor of the country. We have seen whither we have been passively drifting all these years past: now we seem to have determined actively to precipitate the final catastrophe. A little more and we shall find, as the outcome of our struggle in defence of liberty and good government for all nations, that, whatever we have done for others, we ourselves have put our necks irrevocably under a yoke as burdensome as, or perhaps more burdensome than, any which we have been fighting to remove.

It may be well here to inquire what Mr. Lloyd George has done to merit this virtual apotheosis. This may at first sight seem a somewhat unnecessary digression from our main subject: those of us to whom our present Prime