24. Of Second Chambers - Page 2

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