overcome by the threat of a swamping creation of peers, having first, in its wisdom, brought the nation to the verge of a civil war. As a matter of course, it resisted the progress of religious liberty, because the privileged Church was an outwork of the privileged class. As a matter of course, it resisted, as a noble historian is compelled to confess, the extension of Habeas Corpus and of personal liberty. As a matter of course, it resisted the removal of restraints on the press. As a matter of course, it

resisted the introduction of the ballot. All these were measures and movements which threatened political privilege. But the House of Lords has also resisted common measures of humanity, such as the abolition of the Slave Trade, and the reform of Criminal Law. Romilly's Bill for the abolition of the death punishment in cases of petty theft was thrown out by the Lords, and among the thirty-two who voted in the majority on that occasion were seven bishops.

'On all subjects about which popular opinion was not strongly excited, including many of the greatest importance to national progress, Reformers have abstained from moving, because they despaired of overcoming the resistance of the House

of Lords. To make legislation on any important question possible, it is necessary to get a storm sufficient to terrify the Peers. Thus all important legislation is made violent and revolutionary, and this is your Conservative institution!

'The House of Lords is spoken of as a seat of deliberate wisdom, whose measures undergo maturer consideration than in the less Conservative assembly-a fast nobleman of twenty-one being supposed to be a graver personage than a popular representative at sixty. No popular measures in the House of Lords undergoes any real consideration whatever. Every one of them is condemned before its arrival there—condemned from its very birth: and the discussion in the House of Lords is no discussion, but a mere wavering of the balance between hate and fear. If fear preponderates, the measure lives, and we are called upon to admire the wisdom and tact of the concession. Only oligarchic measures, such as gagging bills and coercion bills, are favoured from their birth, and pass by acclamation.

'Hereditary aristocracy has of late entered on a new phase. As in the Tudor epoch it became an oligarchy of landlordism, now it has become

an oligarchy of wealth. The new nobility in this case are the capitalists who, after a temporary antagonism caused by the Corn Laws, and a certain amount of coy resistance on social grounds, have been recognised by the landowners, and in their turn are decking themselves with the titles of feudal barons, ordering Norman pedigrees with their equipages and liveries, doubling the crush and the deliquescence at St. James's, and thinking it a part of their rights as millionaires to make public honour and national government their family property, and to hand them down with the other fruits of successful speculation, to their aristocratically educated sons.

'We are asked what we would put in the place of the House of Lords. Is it necessary to put anything in its place? Is a second Chamber really necessary or desirable? Ontario does very well without one. Quebec is moving to get rid of hers. The Upper Chamber in the Dominion Parliament of Canada is almost a nullity. In Victoria the second Chamber produced a deadlock, which probably would have been repeated in Ontario, if a rivalry of chambers had been added to a rivalry of parties in the constitutional

crisis through which the province has just passed. The Upper Chamber is supposed to be a check on unwise legislation. The House of Lords, in a superficial study of which the whole theory of second Chambers seems to have had its source, is a check with a vengeance, because it represents an interest separate from, and adverse to that of the nation. But you cannot really divide the national will. Power will unite somewhere; and it is better to unite with it the full measure of responsibility.

'If the object is to guard against precipitation, that object would be best secured by good legislative forms, and possibly by giving a minority, amounting to a certain proportion of the House, the power of suspending for a certain period the operation of a measure, so as to give time for calmer consideration, and for a possible change of national opinion.'

IV.

The most profound theoretical statement on the subject comes from Mr. John Stuart Mill, who, in his admirable Vindication of the French Revolu

tion of 1848, in reply to Lord Brougham and others,' expresses the following opinions :—

The arguments for a second Chamber, when looked at from one point of view, are of great force, being no other than the irresistible arguments for the necessity or expediency of a principle of antagonism in society-of a counterpoise somewhere to the preponderant power in the State. It seems hardly possible that there should be permanently good government, or enlightened progress, without such a counterpoise. It may,

however, be maintained, with considerable appearance of reason, that the antagonism may be more beneficially placed in society itself than in the legislative organ which gives effect to the will of society; that it should have its place in the powers which form public opinion, rather than in that whose proper function is to execute it; that, for example, in a democratic State the desired counterbalance to the impulses and will of the comparatively uninstructed many lies in a strong and independent organisation of the class whose special business is the cultivation of knowledge, and will better embody itself in Universities than in Senates or Houses of Lords.

D