officer in a somewhat disorganized army, and his ambition at the outset
never soared beyond a colonelcy.

He was nearly fifty when he entered Mexico City at the head of a
revolutionary force. Romance and adventure were behind him, although
personal peril still dogged his steps. He had to forget that he was a
soldier, and to be born again as leader and politician, a maker and not
a destroyer. In that capacity he had absolutely no experience of public
affairs, but such as he had gained in a smaller way in early years
spent in Oaxaca. Yet Diaz became a ruler, and a diplomat, and assumed
the courtly manners of a prince.

Paradoxical as it may seem, his overthrow is the result of a revolution
mainly pacific in its nature, and in substance a revolt of public
feeling against abuses that have become stereotyped in the system of
government by the too long domination of one masterful will. The
military rising was but its head, spitting fire. Behind was an immense
body of opinion, in favor of effecting the retirement of the President
by peaceful means, and with all honor to one who had served his country
well.

In 1908 General Diaz had stated frankly, in an interview granted to an
American journalist, that he was enjoying his last term of office, and
at its expiration would spend his remaining years in private life.
There is no reason to doubt that this assurance represented his settled
intention. The announcement was extensively published in the Mexican
Press, and was never contradicted by the President himself. Then rumors
gained currency that Diaz was not unprepared to accept nomination for
the Presidency for an eighth term. The statement was at first
discredited, then repeated without contradiction in a manner that could
hardly have failed to excite alarm. At length came the fatal
announcement that the President would stand again.

Hardly had the bell of Independence ceased ringing out in joyous clang
on September 15, 1910, in celebration of free Mexico's centenary,
hardly had the gorgeous _fetes_ for the President's birthday or the
homage paid him by the whole world run their course, when the spark of
discontent became a blaze. He had mistaken the respect and regard of
his people for an invitation to remain in office.

By the time the Presidential election approached, signs of agitation
had increased. A political party rose in direct hostility, not so much
to General Diaz himself or Limantour, as to the Vice-President, who, as
next in the succession, in the event of the demise of the President,
would have been able to rivet the autocracy on the country.

Corral was the Vice-President. What little I saw of him I liked; but
then he had hardly taken up the reins of power. He did not make himself
popular; in fact, a large part of the country hated and distrusted him.
But for that, probably nothing would have been heard of the troubles
which ensued. As the party anxious for the introduction of new blood
into the Government increased in vigor, the people showed themselves
more and more determined to get rid of Corral. They wanted a younger
man than Diaz in the President's chair: they wanted, above all, the
prospect of a better successor.

But the official group whose interests depended on the maintenance of
the Diaz regime was, for the moment, too powerful, and it succeeded in
inducing the President to accept reelection.

To the general hatred of this group on the part of the nation, Madero
owed his success. He was almost unknown, but the malcontents were
determined to act, and to act at once, and they could not afford to
pick and choose for a leader. As a proof that the country thought less
of the democratic principles invoked than of the destruction of the
official "cientificos," may be cited the fact that it at first placed
all its trust and confidence in General Reyes, who is just as despotic
and autocratic as General Diaz, but has at the same time, to them, a
redeeming quality--his avowed opposition to the gang. Reyes refused to
head the insurrection, and it was then Madero or nobody.

In the spring of 1910 Francis I. Madero came to the front. He was a man
of education, of fortune, of courage, and a lawyer by profession. He
had written a book entitled the _Presidential Succession_, and although
without experience in the management of State affairs, he had shown
that he had the courage of his convictions. He consented to stand
against Diaz in a contest for the Presidency of the Republic.

The malcontents had found their leader. Madero not only accepted
nomination, but began an active campaign, making speeches against the
Diaz administration, denouncing abuses, more especially the retention
of office by the Vice-President and the tactics of Limantour, and
showing the people that as General Diaz was then eighty years of age,
and his new term would not expire until 1916, Corral would almost
certainly succeed to the inheritance of the Diaz regime.

Energetic, courageous, and outspoken, Madero had full command of the
phraseology of the demagog. His only shortcoming in the eyes of his own
party was that he had not been persecuted by the Government. The
officials, alas, soon supplied this deficiency. A few days before the
Presidential election in July, 1910, when making a speech in Monterey,
Madero was arrested as a disturber of the peace and thrown into prison,
where he was kept until the close of the poll.

The election resulted, as usual, in a triumphant majority for General
Diaz, though votes were recorded, even in the capital itself, for the
anti-reelectionist leader.

As soon as opportunity offered, Madero escaped to the United States,
and from that vantage-ground kept up a correspondence with his friends
and partizans. Though the election had been held in July, the
inauguration of the President did not take place until December, 1910.
A fortnight before that date, a conspiracy, at which Madero probably
connived, was discovered in Puebla. The first victim was the Chief of
the Police at Puebla. He was shot dead by a woman who at his knock had
opened the door of a house wherein the revolutionists were holding a
meeting. The revolution had begun. Risings took place in different
parts of the Republic, but were quickly quelled, with the exception of
one in the State of Chihuahua, where the rebels had a special grievance
against the all-powerful family of the great landowner, General
Terrazas. These large landed proprietors are a subject of hatred to the
new Socialist party.

Trouble followed trouble in the north, which, be it remembered, runs to
a distance of over a thousand miles from Mexico City itself. But
nothing very serious occurred, until suddenly, in the early weeks of
1911, President Taft mobilized a force of 20,000 American troops to
watch the Mexican frontier. From that time events developed rapidly
till the end of the Diaz regime in May. One thing became clear, that
the revolution was rapidly making its way to victory, and that Diaz,
prostrate with an agonizing disease, an abscess of the jaw, was in no
condition to rally his disheartened followers in person. He saved his
honor, as the phrase goes, by a declaration that he would not retire
from office until peace was declared, and he kept his word. He was too
ill to leave his simple home in one of the chief streets of the city,
where he lived less ostentatiously than many of his fellow citizens,
but this did not prevent the mob from firing upon his home. On the
afternoon of May 25, 1911, he resigned, and Senor De La Barra, formerly
Minister at Washington, became provisional President until the next
election, fixed for October.

Madero was the hero of the hour. He entered Mexico City in triumphal
procession, June 7, 1911. His entrance was preceded by the most severe
earthquake the capital had known in years. Many buildings were wrecked
and some hundreds of people killed. An arch of the National Palace
fell, one beneath which Diaz had often passed.

Three days after signing his abdication, General Diaz was well enough
to leave Mexico City. In the early hours of the morning three trains
drew up filled with his own solders and friends, in the middle one of
which the ex-President, his wife, the clever and beautiful Carmelita,
Colonel Porfirio Diaz, his son, with his young wife, several children,
and their ten-days-old baby, were seated. Along the route the train
came upon a force of seven hundred rebels. A sharp encounter ensued.
The revolutionists left thirty dead upon the field; the escort, which
numbered but three hundred, lost only three men. The old fighting
spirit returned to the old lion, and, unarmed, the ex-President
descended from his car and took part in the engagement. He entered
Mexico City fighting, and he has left her shores with bullets ringing
in the air. This was but the second time that Diaz had left the land of
his birth.

His work is now imperishable. Mexicans, I am sure, will regret the
pitiful circumstances under which his fall has come about, and he will
live long in the hearts of his countrymen. Nothing can alter the fact
that he made modern Mexico. It was no easy task; the Mexicans are a
cross-breed of Spaniards and countless Indian tribes. There are still
half a million Aztecs. Diaz has given this strange mixed race
education, and a high order of education for such a people; he has
brought his country to a financial position in which the Government
can, or could, borrow all the money it wanted at four per cent.
Railways intersect the land in every direction. The largest financial
interests are American, the next in importance are British. Except
Germany, no other foreign country has much capital invested in Mexico.

Thus closes one of the most wild and romantic episodes of the world's
history--a peasant boy who became a soldier, a general who became a
President--a President who became a great autocrat, who raised a
country from obscurity to greatness, and was finally driven from power
by the very people he had educated, and to whom he had brought vast
blessings.

The great Diaz in his eighty-first year has passed from power, the
power he used so well. Verily a moving spectacle from first to last.

DOLORES BUTTERFIELD[1]

[Footnote 1: Reproduced by permission from the _North American
Review_.]

In contemplating the present situation in Mexico there is a tendency of
late to deplore the Madero revolution and the overthrow of Diaz, and to
overlook the fact that the Diaz regime itself not only made and forced,
by its political abuses, the revolution that overthrew it, but, by its
economic abuses, prepared the country for the anarchy now rife in it;
and also that it is the very same ring of men who surrounded Diaz and
finally rendered his rule unbearable who are now financing and
fomenting the present rebellion against a Government not in sympathy
with them nor subservient to their interests.

Porfirio Diaz attained the presidency of Mexico thirty-five years ago
by overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada. He put an end to brigandage, which was
at that time wide-spread. Such bandits as he could not buy he
exterminated. His political opponents he also bought or exterminated,
so that without the slightest disturbance to the national peace he
could be unanimously reelected whenever his term expired. Out of
bankruptcy he established credit; he put up schools; he invited foreign
capital into his country and made it possible for foreign capital to go
in; and so he gradually built up a material progress which won him the
name of "nation-builder." There were railroads and telegraphs; the
cities were graced with beautiful edifices, with theaters and parks,
with electricity and asphalt. There was the appearance of a
civilization and progress, which, considering the time in which it was
compassed, was indeed marvelous.

But all this was only a shell and a semblance. The economic condition
of the Mexican lower classes was not touched--the process of
"nation-building" seemed not to include them. In the shadow of a modern
civilization stalked poverty and ignorance worthy of the Middle Ages.
And it was notorious that in the capital city itself, under the very
eyes of the central Government, was where the very worst conditions and
the most glaring extremes of poverty and wealth were to be seen. On the
one hand, splendid _paseos_ lined with magnificent palaces, where, in
their automobiles, the pleasure-seeking women of the rich displayed
their raiment worth thousands of dollars; and, on the other, streets
filled with beggars, their clothes literally dropping off them in
filthy rags, reeking with the typhus which for years has been endemic
in the City of Mexico.

Let it be said to Diaz's credit that he did try, in a measure, at first
to better those conditions. Hence the public schools which, though
inadequate for the scattered rural population, have accomplished much
in the cities. He also attempted years ago a division of the lands, but
dropped it when he saw that the great landowners were stronger than he
and that to persist might cost him the Presidency.

It was natural and inevitable that a Government in which there was
never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt.
Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an
absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon
of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic
and disinterested--as to a great extent he undeniably was. These men
were the Cientificos.

The term is, of course, not their own. It was applied to them by the
Anti-reelectionists, meaning that they were scientific grafters and
exploiters. The full-fledged Cientifico was at once a tremendous
landholder and high government official. To illustrate, the land of the
State of Chihuahua is almost entirely owned by the Terrazas family. In
the days of Diaz, Don Luis Terrazas was always the governor, being
further reenforced by his relative, Enrique C. Creel, high in the Diaz
ministry. In Sonora the land was held by Ramon Corral, Luis Torres, and
Rafael Izabal. These three gentlemen, who were called "The Trinity,"
used to rotate in the government of the state until Corral was made
vice-president, when Torres and Izabal took turn about until the death
of the latter shortly before the Madero revolution. In every state
there was either one perpetual governor or a combine of them.

Thus in each state a small group of men were the absolute masters
politically, economically, and industrially. They made and unmade the
laws at their pleasure. For instance, Terrazas imposed a prohibitory
tax upon cattle which forced the small owners to dispose of their
stock, which he, being the only purchaser, bought at his own price,
after which he repealed the law. They adjusted taxation to suit
themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short
of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and
especially upon enterprise and improvements. They practised peonage,
though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the
Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as
well. They drew public salaries for perverting the government to their
private benefit and enrichment; and as the dictator grew older and
surrendered to his satellites more and more of his once absolute power,
the conditions became so intolerable, and the tyranny and greed of the
Cientificos so shameless and unbridled (infinitely more so in the
southern than in the northern states), that it would have been a
reversal of the history of the world if there had been no revolution.

In 1910 the aged Diaz declared his intention of resigning. Perhaps he
even intended to keep that promise when he made it; but if so, the
Cientificos, who knew that his prestige and the love of the nation for
him were their only shield, induced him to think better of it. The
strongest of the opposing parties was the Anti-reelectionist party. It
embodied the best elements and the best ideals of the country and from
the first was the one of which the Diaz regime was most afraid.

Now by its very name this party was pledged to no reelection, and yet
it so far compromised with the regime as to nominate Diaz for
President, only repudiating Corral, who was odious to the entire
nation. However, the Cientificos saw that this was to be the entering
wedge, and they promptly prepared to crush the new political faction.
Anti-reelectionists were arrested right and left; their newspapers were
suppressed, the presses wrecked, and the editors thrown into prison.
But the party's blood was up. It did not dissolve. It did not nominate
Corral. Instead it struck Porfirio Diaz's name from its ticket and
tendered to Francisco Madero, Jr., not the vice-presidential but the
presidential nomination. The bare fact that he accepted it speaks
volumes for his courage.

Francisco Madero was born October 4, 1873. He was educated from
childhood in the United States and Europe; and upon returning to his
country, imbued with the advanced ideas of the most broad-minded men of
the most enlightened countries in the world, it was perhaps only
natural that he should resent the conditions which he saw in his own
country. The Madero family owns great tracts of land in Coahuila,
besides properties in other states. Madero introduced modern methods
and modern machinery in the management of his estates. Already a
millionaire, he made more millions, at the same time doing much toward
the betterment of conditions for his own immediate dependents among the
lower class.

Madero first attracted attention by writing _The Presidential
Succession in 1910_. The Cientifico clique laughed at him as a
visionary. Suddenly they awoke to the fact that his book, with its
calm, dispassionate logic and democratic tone, was doing them more harm
than a thousand soldiers, and they suppressed its publication. It was
the writing of this book that led to Madero's nomination for President
by the Anti-reelectionist party when every one else had failed it.

Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free
republic and began what he called his democratic campaign. He went from
city to city, delivering speeches and laying his platform before the
people. He was called "the apostle of democracy," and the multitudes
followed him like an apostle indeed. But he did not carry out his
democratic campaign without sacrifice and risk. When he passed through
Hermosillo, Sonora, the hotel-keepers closed their-doors to him.
Torres, feudal lord of the state, had given out the necessary hint and
Madero, for all his millions, could find no apartments for himself and
his wife until a Spaniard--relying upon the fact of being a foreigner--
offered them lodgings, "not wishing to lend himself to so ignoble an
intrigue." This was but one city of many. In all places he had the most
tremendous difficulty in renting halls for his addresses. Frequently he
was reduced to speaking in tumble-down sheds or mule-yards or vacant
lots, the local authorities often hiring rowdies to create disturbances
at his meetings. He was ridiculed, he was threatened, he was
persecuted, but he went on unafraid.

Just before and during the elections every known Maderista, from Madero
down, was arrested on charges of "sedition." Things came to such a pass
that in the city where I lived some sixty prominent Maderistas were
arrested at two o'clock one morning without warrants and on no charge,
it being noteworthy that the men arrested were almost without exception
some of the best and most honorable men in the state. And this happened
at the same hour of the same day in every city in Mexico. But in spite
of the fact that many votes were lost to Madero through intimidation or
actual imprisonment, so strong a vote was registered for the Madero
electors that fraud was resorted to to cover his gains. The result of
the elections was that Diaz and Corral were _unanimously_
reelected--the former for his eighth term and the latter for his
second.

The Anti-reelectionists then appealed to Congress and the Senate to
annul the elections, alleging fraud and intimidation. Without the
slightest pretense of considering or investigating these charges
Congress and Senate--long the mouthpieces of Cientificismo--ratified
the elections as just and legal. Every peaceful measure to bring about
justice in the elections and insure the free expression of the nation's
will was now exhausted. The only recourse left to the people by the
Cientifico regime was war. Their leader at the polls became their
leader in the preparations for that war.

In the midst of this riot of tyranny, while the nation yet seethed with
indignation at the outrageous electoral farce imposed upon it, the
first Centennial of Mexican independence was being celebrated before
the foreign diplomats with unprecedented pomp and display. The
Anti-reelectionists declared that Liberty was dead and that instead of
celebrating they were going to don deep mourning. They were thus a mark
for all manner of persecutions from petty annoyances to the most
unprovoked armed attacks. Some students were fired upon by troops while
they were carrying wreaths to the monument of the boy heroes of
Chapultepec; a young lawyer was arrested for making a speech beneath
the statue of Juarez; and in Tlaxcala a procession of unarmed working
men was fired upon and ridden down by _rurales_, several men and a
woman being killed. Consecrating hypocritical hymns to liberty that did
not exist and heaping with wreaths the tombs and monuments of the
heroes of Mexico, while violating all the ideals for which those heroes
died, drunk with the power they had wielded so long, the Cientificos
pressed blindly on, following the path that Privilege has taken since
the beginning of history and which has only one end.

These are some of the causes and circumstances that made the revolution
of 1910-11--not all of them, for there must be remembered in addition
the Yaqui slave traffic, the contract-labor system of the great
southern haciendas, and a dozen other iniquities, greater and lesser,
which also contributed to precipitating the revolt. It was fortunate
that that revolt was captained by a man of Francisco Madero's _type_--a
man who knew how to win the world's sympathy for his cause and how to
make his subordinates merit that sympathy by their observance of the
rules of civilized warfare.

The actual armed contention of the Madero revolution was singularly
brief, culminating in the capture of Ciudad Juarez, which was followed
by the resignation of Diaz and Corral. There can be no doubt that the
dictatorship could have held together for a considerable time longer
and that Diaz surrendered before he actually had to. But he could
probably see by this time that it was inevitable in any case, and he
was willing to sacrifice his personal pride and ambition sooner than
necessary to avoid bloodshed in Mexico if he could. And also he had it
upon his conscience, and it was brought home to him by the mobs outside
his palace, that he was not the constitutional President of Mexico, but
the tool of the betrayers of her Constitution. That he had been
shamelessly deceived and played upon by the impassable cordon of
Cientificos about him is easy to judge. His message of resignation was
one to touch any heart, combining pathos with absolute dignity.

The resignation of Diaz and Corral was taken by many to signify the
complete surrender of the old regime and the triumph of the revolution.
Indeed, for the moment it so appeared. But although the Cientificos
were ousted from direct political control, their wealth and power and
the tremendous machinery of their domination were still to be contended
with before the revolution could follow up its political success with
the economic reforms which were its real object.

Madero had pledged himself primarily to the division of the lands. He
realized that only by the abolition of the landed aristocracy, and an
equitable distribution among moderate holders for active development of
the huge estates, held idle in great part or worked by peons, could the
progress and prosperity of the nation be put upon a solid basis. He
knew exactly what the remedy was and, though a landed aristocrat
himself by birth and inheritance, was not afraid of it.

As soon as he was elected to the presidency he set a committee of
competent, accredited engineers to work appraising property values in
the different states, and great tracts of hundreds of thousands and
millions of acres, previously assessed at half as many thousands as
they were worth millions, were revalued and reassessed at their true
inherent value. The _haciendados_ raised a frightful cry. They tried
threats, intrigue, and bribery. It was useless; the revaluation went
on. The new administration reclaimed as national property all that it
could of the _terrenos baldios_, or public lands, which under Diaz had
been rapidly merging into the great estates. It established a
government bank for the purpose of making loans on easy terms, and thus
assisting the poor to take up and work these public lands in small
parcels. Even before becoming President, Madero had advised the working
men to organize and demand a living wage, which they did. He attacked
the lotteries, the bull-fights, the terrible pulque trust, the
unbridled traffic of which, more than any other one factor, has
contributed to the degradation of the lower classes. He began to extend
the public-school system.

From the first the Cientificos hampered and impeded him. To foment a
counter-revolution they took advantage of the fact that in various
parts of the country there were disorderly bands of armed men
committing numerous depredations. These men had risen up in the shadow
of the Maderista revolution, and at its close, instead of laying down
their arms, they devoted themselves to the looting of ranches and
ungarrisoned isolated towns. Of these brigands--for they were neither
more nor less, whatever they may have called themselves then or may
call themselves now--the most formidable was Emiliano Zapata. His
alleged reason for continuing in arms after the surrender of the
dictatorship was that his men had not been paid for their services.
President De la Barra paid them, but their brigandage continued. And at
the most critical moment Pascual Orozco, Jr., Madero's trusted
lieutenant, in command of the military forces of Chihuahua, issued--on
the heels of reiterated promises of fealty to the Government--a
_pronunciamiento_ in favor of the revolution and delivered the state
which had been entrusted to his keeping to the revolutionists, at whose
head he now placed himself.

The new malcontents declared that Madero had betrayed the revolution,
and that they were going to overthrow him and themselves carry out the
promises he had made. This sounds heroic, noble, and patriotic, but
will not bear close inspection. In the first place, many of the
revolutionists with whom the new faction allied itself had been in arms
since before Madero was even elected--a trivial circumstance, however,
which did not seem to shake their logic. Moreover, as any honest,
fair-minded person must have recognized, the promises of Madero were
not such as he could fulfil with a wave of his hand or a stroke of his
pen. They were big promises and they required time and careful study
for their successful undertaking and the cooperation of the people at
large against the public enemies, whereas Madero was not given time nor
favorable circumstances nor the intelligent cooperation of any but a
small proportion of the population.

As a matter of fact, Madero himself, far from overstating the benefits
of the revolution led by him or making unwise promises of a Utopia
impossible of realization, addressed these words to the Mexican people
at the close of that conflict: "You have won your political freedom,
but do not therefore suppose that your _economic_ and social liberty
can be won so suddenly. This can only be attained by an earnest and
sustained effort on the part of all classes of society."

It is to be feared that for long years to come Mexico must stand judged
in the eyes of the world by the disgraceful and uncivilized conduct of
the various rebels, or so-called rebels, and simon-pure bandits who are
contributing to the revolt and running riot over the country; but there
is, nevertheless, in Mexico a class of people as educated, as refined,
as honorable as those existing anywhere. And these people--the
_obreros_ (skilled working men) and the professional middle class, as
well as the better elements of the laboring classes, are supporting
Madero--not all in the spirit of his personal adherents, but because
they realize the tremendous peril to Mexico of continued revolution. In
1911 the revolution was necessary--the peril had to be incurred,
because nothing but arms could move the existing despotism; but none of
the pretended principles of the revolution can now justify that peril
when the man attacked is the legal, constitutional, duly elected
President, overwhelmingly chosen by the people, and venomously turned
upon immediately following his election without being given even an
approach to a fair chance to prove himself.

All the better elements of the country realize that Madero no longer
represents an individual or even a political administration. He
represents the civilization of Mexico struggling against the unreined
savagery of a population which has known no law but abject fear, and
having lost that fear and the restraint which it imposed upon it,
threatens to deliver Mexico to such a reign of anarchy, rapine, and
terror as would be without a parallel in modern history. He represents
the dignity and integrity of Mexico before the world.

Whatever the outcome, whether it triumphs or fails, the new
administration, assailed on every side by an enemy as treacherous and
unscrupulous as it is powerful, and making a last stand--perhaps a vain
one--for Mexico's economic liberty and political independence, merits
the support and comprehension of all the progressive elements of the
world.




FALL OF THE ENGLISH HOUSE OF LORDS

GREAT BRITAIN CHANGES HER CONSTITUTION BY RESTRICTING THE POWER OF THE
LORDS

A.D. 1911

ARTHUR PONSONBY SYDNEY BROOKS CAPTAIN GEORGE SWINTON

On August 10, 1911, the ancient British House of Lords gathered in
somber and resentful session and solemnly voted for the "Parliament
Bill," a measure which reduced their own importance in the government
to a mere shadow. This vote came as the climax of a five-year struggle.
The Lords have for generations been a Conservative body, holding back
every Liberal measure of importance in England. Of late years the
Liberal party has protested with ever-increasing vehemence against the
unfairness of this unbalanced system, by means of which the
Conservatives when elected to power by the people could legislate as
they pleased, whereas the Liberals, though they might carry elections
overwhelmingly, were yet blocked in all their chief purposes of
legislation.

When the Liberals found themselves elected to power by a vast majority
in 1905, they were still seeking to get on peaceably with the Lords,
but this soon proved impossible. In January of 1910 the Liberals
deliberately adjourned Parliament and appealed to the people in a new
election. They were again returned to power, though by a reduced
majority; yet the Lords continued to oppose them. Again they appealed
to the people in December of 1910, this time with the distinct
announcement that if re-elected to authority they would pass the
"Parliament Bill" destroying the power of the Lords. In this third
election they were still upheld by the people. Hence when the Lords
resisted the Parliament Bill, King George stood ready to create as many
new Peers from the Liberal party as might be necessary to pass the
offensive bill through the House of Lords. It was in face of this
threat that the Lords yielded at last, and voted most unwillingly for
their own loss of power.

Of this great step in the democratizing of England, we give three
characteristic British views--first, that of a well-known Liberal
member of Parliament, who naturally approves of it; secondly, that of a
fair-minded though despondent Conservative; and thirdly, that of a
rabid Conservative who can see nothing but shame, ruin, and the extreme
of wickedness in the change. He speaks in the tone of the "Die-hards,"
the Peers who refused all surrender and held out to the last, raving at
their opponents, assailing them with curses and even with fists, and in
general aiding the rest of the world to realize that the manners of
some portion of the British Peerage needed reform quite as much as
their governmental privileges.


ARTHUR PONSONBY, M.P.

A great and memorable struggle has ended with the passage of the
Parliament Bill into law. In the calm atmosphere of retrospect we may
now look back on the various stages of this prolonged conflict, from
its inception to its completion, and further, with the whole scene
before us, we may reflect on the wider meaning and real significance of
the victory which has been gained on behalf of democracy, freedom, and
popular self-government.

In the progressive cause there can be no finality, no termination to
the combat, no truce, no rest. But we may fairly regard the conclusion
of this particular struggle as the achievement of a notable step in
advance and as the acquisition of territory that can not well be
recaptured. The admission of the Parliament Bill to the statute-book
marks an epoch and fills the hearts of those who are pursuing high
ideals in politics and sociology with great hopes for the future. The
long sequence of the events which have led up to this achievement has
not been smooth or without incident. There have been moments of
failure, of rebuff, and even of disaster. It would almost seem as if
the motive power which has carried the party of progress through the
storm and stress, and landed it in security, had been outside the
control of any one man or any set of men. Although distinguished men
have led and there have been many valiant workers in the field, a
movement that has extended over nearly a hundred years must have its
origin and energy deeper down than in any mere party policy. It is the
inevitable outcome of the steady but inexorable evolution of free
institutions among a liberty-loving people.

In order, first of all, to trace the course of the actual controversy
as it has been carried on in the House of Commons and in the country,
it is not necessary to go further back than 1883. In that year the
Lords had rejected the Franchise Bill, and it was then that Mr. Bright,
in a speech at Leeds dealing with the deadlocks between the two Houses,
sketched a plan which was really the essence and origin of the
principle adopted in the Parliament Act that has just become law. The
Lords had rejected many Liberal measures before then; attempts had been
made to get round or overcome their opposition; but not till then was
any practical method formulated for dealing with the serious and
permanent obstruction to progressive legislation. Mr. Bright himself
had condemned the peers and declared that "their arrogance and class
selfishness had long been at war with the highest interests of the
nation," and now he advocated a specific remedy, which he declared
would be obtained by "limiting the veto which the House of Lords
exercises over the proceedings of the House of Commons." The actual
plan was that a Bill rejected by the Lords should be sent up to them
again, "but when the Bill came down to the House of Commons in the
second session, and the Commons would not agree to the amendments of
the Lords, then the Lords should be bound to accept the Bill." This
method of procedure, it will be seen, was more expeditious and drastic
than the scheme in the Parliament Act.

Mr. Chamberlain joined vigorously in the campaign against the Peers.
Telling passages from his speeches are quoted to this day, such as when
he declared that "the House of Lords had never contributed one iota to
popular liberty and popular freedom, or done anything to advance the
common weal," but "had protected every abuse and sheltered every
privilege."

No further mention of the Bright scheme was made for some time. Six
years of Conservative rule (1886-1892) diverted the attention of
Liberals as a party in opposition to other matters, and the Lords
subsided, as they always have done in such periods, into an entirely
innocuous, negligible, and utterly useless adjunct of the Conservative
Government.

In the brief period between 1892-1895, the animus against the House of
Lords was kindled afresh. Several Liberal Bills were mutilated or lost,
and the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill served to fan the flames
into a dangerous blaze. The Bright plan was recalled by Lord Morley. "I
think," he said (at Newcastle on May 21, 1894), "there will have to be
some definite attempt to carry out what Mr. Bright at the Leeds
Conference of 1883 suggested, by which the power of the House of
Lords--this non-elected, this non-representative, this hereditary, this
packed Tory Chamber--by which the veto of that body shall be strictly
limited." Mr. Gladstone, too, in his last speech in the House of
Commons on the wrecking amendments which the Lords had made on the
Parish Councils Bill, dwelt on the fundamental differences between the
two Houses, and said that "a state of things had been created which
could not continue," and declared it to be "a controversy which once
raised must go forward to an issue."

But by far the most formidable, the most vigorous, the most animated,
and, at the time, apparently sincere attack was contained in a series
of speeches delivered in 1894 by Lord Rosebery, who was then in a
position of responsibility as leader of the Liberal party. If, as
subsequent events have shown, he was unmoved by the underlying
principle and cause for which his eloquent pleading stood, anyhow we
must believe he was deeply impressed by the prospect of his personal
ambition as the leader of a party being thwarted by the contemptuous
action of an irresponsible body. His words, however, stand, and have
been quoted again and again as the most effective attack against the
partizan nature of the Second Chamber:--"What I complain of in the
House of Lords is that during the tenure of one Government it is a
Second Chamber of an inexorable kind, but while another Government is
in, it is no Second Chamber at all... Therefore the result, the effect
of the House of Lords as it at present stands, is this, that in one
case it acts as a Court of Appeal, and a packed Court of Appeal,
against the Liberal party, while in the other case, the case of the
Conservative Government, it acts not as a Second Chamber at all. In the
one case we have the two Chambers under a Liberal Government, under a
Conservative Government we have a single Chamber. Therefore, I say, we
are face to face with a great difficulty, a great danger, a great peril
to the State." So vehement and repeated were Lord Rosebery's
denunciations that grave anxiety is said to have been caused in the
highest quarters.

But for the next ten years (1895-1905) the Conservatives were in
office, and again it was impossible to bring the matter to a head,
though the past was not forgotten. When the Liberals were returned in
1906 with their colossal majority, every Liberal was well aware that
before long the same trouble would inevitably arise, and that a
settlement of the question could not be long delayed. The record of the
House of Lords' activities during the last five years has been so
indelibly impressed on the public mind that only a very brief
recapitulation of events is necessary.

At the outset their action was tentative. This was shown by the
conferences and negotiations to arrive at a settlement on the Education
Bill, which was the first Liberal measure in 1906. But these broke
down, and defiance was found to be completely successful. Mr. Balfour,
the leader of the Conservative party, realized that although he was in
a small minority in the House of Commons, yet he could still control
legislation, and when he saw how effectively the destructive weapon of
the veto could be used he became bolder, and, as with all vicious
habits, increased indulgence encouraged appetite. Had Mr. Balfour
played his trump-card--the Lords' veto--with greater foresight and
restraint, it may safely be said that the House of Lords might have
continued for another generation, or, at any rate, for another decade,
with its authority unimpaired, though sooner or later it was bound to
abuse its power; but the temptation was too great, and Mr. Balfour
became reckless.

The three crucial mistakes on the part of the Opposition from the point
of view of pure tactics were: First, the destruction of the Education
Bill of 1906. In view of the historic attitude of the Lords to all
questions of religious freedom and general enlightenment, it was not
surprising that they should stand in the way of a greater equality of
opportunity for all denominations in matters of education. Six times
between 1838 and 1857 they rejected Bills for removing Jewish
disabilities; three times between 1858 and 1869 they vetoed the
abolition of Church Rates. For thirty-six years (1835-1871) the
admission of Nonconformists to the universities by the abolition of
tests was delayed by them. It was only to be expected, therefore, that
they would be deaf to the popular outcry that had been caused by the
Balfour Education Bill of 1902. But in the very first session of the
Parliament in which the Government had been returned to power by the
immense majority of 354, that they should immediately show their teeth
and claws was, from their own point of view, as events proved, a vital
error. Their second mistake was the rejection in 1908 by a body of
Peers at Lansdowne House of the Licensing Bill, which had occupied many
weeks of the time of the House of Commons. This was rightly regarded as
a gratuitous insult to the House of elected representatives. Finally,
their culminating act of folly was the rejection of the Budget in 1909.
It was an outrageous breach of acknowledged constitutional practise,
which alienated from them a large body of moderate opinion. In addition
to these three notable measures there were, of course, a number of
other Bills on land, electoral, and social reform that were either
mutilated or thrown out during this period. How could any politician in
his senses suppose that a party who possessed any degree of confidence
in the country would tamely submit to treatment such as this? While the
Lords proceeded light-heartedly with their wrecking tactics, the
Liberal Government slowly and cautiously, but with great deliberation,
took action step by step. A provocative move on the part of the Lords
was met each time by a counter-move, and thus gradually the final and
decisive phase of the dispute was reached.

After the loss of the Education Bill of 1906, the first note of warning
was sounded by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. "The resources of the
House of Commons," he declared, "are not exhausted, and I say with
conviction that a way must be found, and a way will be found, by which