LORD HALSBURY
Weigh both systems in the balance, and at once it will be seen that it is not the principle of natural selection—which is hereditary—but the system of artificial election that will be found wanting.
There can be no more certainty of obtaining five hundred good legislators by election than by birth, and the advantages of birth and wealth in the composition of a Second Chamber are clearly shown in a sentence quoted by a former correspondent from Oliver's Life of Alexander Hamilton. It will bear repetition: "His aim was economic: Popular government may secure at a cheap price the services of a large number of men in easy circumstances, of superior education, and of family traditions of loyal service to the State."
J. McLure Hamilton.
February 22, 1910.
THE SINGLE CHAMBER AND ITS DANGERS.
To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.
SIR,
In his speech at Burnley on December 5th Mr. Asquith laid great stress upon the fact that the Veto of the Crown had been dead for two hundred years: and he followed the statement by asking his audience if the country had been any the worse without it. At the present juncture it might be reasonably urged that the government of the country could be better conducted by restoring the function of this technical part of the law of the land.
On the occasion of the inaugural dinner of the Agenda Club, at the Hotel Cecil, my neighbour—a young man—coolly remarked that an autocratic monarch could best solve the problems which are now baffling the ingenuity of both political parties: that party government was no longer either efficient or useful.
This may possibly be an extreme view, but it shows that the reaction against the proposed tyranny of an absolute Single Chamber is violent, and likely to be far-reaching in its effects.
All moderate men should not forget that the framers of the Constitution of the Republic of the United States were not beguiled by democrats of the Jeffersonian type into any such error as Single Chamber government. After long and careful consideration of all known Constitutions, both ancient and modern, they adopted the well-tried system of Great
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