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 THE 
 
 NATUEE AND ORIGIN 
 
 <)K THE 
 
 HOUSE OE LOEDS. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN TifE 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 Reprinted from the Manchester Guardian, 
 
 MANCHESTER: 
 
 GUARDIAN PRINTING WORK8, '■',. CROSS STREET 
 
 1884.
 
 THE 
 
 NATURE AND ORIGIN 
 
 OF THE 
 
 HOUSE OF LORDS. 
 
 BY 
 EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D., 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 [Reprinted from the "Manchester Guardian."] 
 
 I- 
 
 THE House of Lords has lately drawn to itself a larger share of the 
 attention of the nation than any other element in the Constitu- 
 tion. And that attention has been far from being wholly of an 
 admiring or approving kind. The House has passed a certain vote, 
 and from a great part of the nation, we of course hold from the 
 greater part of the nation, a cry has at once gone up demanding the 
 abolition or the sweeping reform of the House which has passed it. 
 This is in itself a fact to be noticed. It is not often that a demand 
 is made for the abolition of one branch of the Constitution in any 
 country, merely because that branch has given offence in a particular 
 case. We cannot conceive a cry being raised on the same grounds 
 for the abolition either of the Crown or of the House of Commons. 
 The distinction is felt at once ; a cry for the abolition of the House 
 of Commons sounds indeed like a contradiction in terms. The fact is 
 that we feel instinctively, what reason and experience confirm when 
 we come to think, that the House of Lords holds a position in the Con- 
 stitution wholly different from that of either of the other branches. 
 With neither of them could any man deal so lightly. For it stands to 
 reason that in every state there must be some kind of executive govern .
 
 2 
 
 ment; in every free state there must be both some kind of executive 
 government and some kind of popular assembly. It does not follow 
 that either need take the exact shape which they take among our- 
 selves, but both must exist in some shape. Without the House of 
 Commons, or some other assembly of the same kind, there could not 
 be freedom ; without the Crown or some other power to do its work, 
 there could not be order. But it is at least conceivable that both 
 freedom and order might go on, although the House of Lords were 
 abolished and no other power of any kind put in its place. In other 
 words, the House of Lords is not practically on a level with the other 
 two powers. The other two are essential. The House of Lords may 
 be venerable, it may be ornamental, it may even be highly useful ; 
 but it is not essential. It might be swept away and nothing put 
 in its place without a return to chaos. If we swept away either 
 of the other powers and did not put something else in its place, 
 chaos would return. 
 
 Something like this line of thought is silently implied in what is 
 in itself so singular a phenomenon as the present demand for abolition 
 or sweeping change in one of' the great powers of the State, and that 
 on the ground of a single vote which has given offence. It is not 
 said that the vote is either illegal or unprecedented ; it can be called 
 unconstitutional only in a somewhat strained sense of that flexible 
 word. The House gives offence, and it is at once either to be de- 
 stroyed or to have its distinguishing constitution altogether changed- 
 In itself this seems somewhat hasty dealing. No doubt this one 
 vote is in truth rather the occasion than the cause of an indignation 
 so deeply felt. The real cause is not this vote taken by itself, but 
 this vote coming after a long series of other votes. Yet it is certain 
 that, up to the time of the present vote, there was no violent or 
 outspoken popular feeling against the House of Lords. There may 
 have been a deep or a widespread feeling ; but if so, it was so deep 
 or so wide that it did not come to the surface. We may be quite 
 sure that, if the Lords had passed the Franchise Bill, even by a 
 small majority, there would have been no cry for the abolition or 
 the sweeping reform of their House, at least till they gave offence 
 about some other matter. The cause may, and doubtless does, lie 
 much deeper than the occasion ; but the occasion has at least been 
 startling in the suddenness of the results which it has called forth. 
 
 If I may speak of myself, I am in nowise surprised that the out- 
 break has come ; I have rather been wondering for many years that 

 
 it has not come before. There is something in the present position 
 of the House of Lords so wholly anomalous, so utterly at cross 
 purposes to the other principles of our received Constitution, so yet 
 more at cross purposes to our received ways of looking at things, 
 that the real wonder is that it has lasted so long, and has had so 
 little said against it. Englishmen, to be sure, are, taking them as a 
 whole, not fond of change for the sake of change ; to stir them up 
 strongly against a thing there must be something much worse to be 
 said against it than that it sins against some theoretical rule of 
 consistency. Mere variety, mere irregularity, is never looked on as 
 a fault ; it is rather felt to be a kind of merit, as being picturesque 
 and venerable, and a sign of antiquity. And there is no healthier 
 feeling than this, so long as it does not go so far as to defend real 
 practical abuses. It is this feeling of reverence for the past, this 
 feeling, often of a mere unwillingness to change which does not take 
 so definite a shape as that of reverence for the past, to which we 
 owe the great blessing that Ave have been for age after age able to 
 work reforms without undergoing revolutions. It is no unwhole- 
 some doctrine in the long run, though it is one that may easily make 
 eager spirits chafe, that, in order to justify change, it is not enough to 
 show that there might be something better than the existing state of 
 things, but that it must be shown that the existing state of things is 
 positively bad. The House of Lords has reaped the full advantage 
 of this state of feeling, combined with another. Many of us who see 
 plainly enough the evils of that House are by no means convinced 
 that, if we abolished it altogether, or changed its character after any 
 other pattern, we might not bring in worse evils. Besides the rule, 
 Let well alone, there is the other rule which suggests the wisdom of 
 bearing the ills to which we are used, unless they are utterly 
 intolerable. There is further the manifest fact that the House of 
 Lords is after all only obstructive ; it hinders and delays things that 
 we wish for, but it does not and cannot do any active harm. The 
 House has often delayed the passage of just, liberal, and tolerant 
 measures, but it does not itself directly oppress or persecute any- 
 body. If there is no special reason to love it, there is no very strong 
 reason actively to hate it. The charm of its traditional dignity 
 covers a good many lesser offences. In short, the House has in its 
 favour the greatest of all presumptions, namely, that it exists. 
 How great an advantage this is in a land of precedent like ours 
 words would almost fail to tell.
 
 But as soon as we look at the matter from any point of view of 
 reason and consistency, doubts at once begin to press upon us, 
 doubts which, now that a popular expression of them has come at 
 last, have perhaps taken a more vigorous shape because they have 
 so long been consciously or unconsciously pent up. The House of 
 Lords is what is popularly called a "Second Chamber." The 
 question comes, Is there any need of a Second Chamber at all 1 If 
 there should be one, ought it not to take some shape wholly different 
 from that of the House of Lords 1 We have, it may be argued, 
 brought two elements of the Constitution into singular harmony 
 with one another ; here is a third which stands out between them, 
 like an incongruous fragment hanging on from another state of 
 things. The doctrine is established that the will of the people is to 
 rule ; the really supreme power is in the hands of that branch of the 
 Legislature which the people choose. The existence of hereditary 
 kingship is no contradiction to this principle, for hereditary kingship 
 has been ingeniously turned into a means for carrying out the will 
 of the people more thoroughly and more speedily than can be done 
 with any other form of executive. It is because there is a hereditary 
 king behind, a king who accepts whatever ministers his people give 
 him, that we can change the actual ruler when we choose, and can 
 keep him on as long as we choose, in a way that cannot be done 
 when he is elected for so many years and no longer. Thus the 
 Crown and the House of Commons pull together by a system of 
 silent understandings which perhaps on the whole works better than 
 some system which on paper would look more self-consistent. But 
 then comes the House of Lords between the two. Here we meet 
 with the hereditary principle face to face. In the case of the Crown 
 we do not come across it in the same way. It may fairly be argued 
 that, though hereditary succession might be absurd in the case of a 
 king who was himself to govern, it is practically the best way of 
 appointing a king who is only to reign. But the Lords do not 
 merely reign ; they govern. That is, so far as their authority goes, 
 they exercise it for themselves and not by the advice of others. 
 Such and such powers are put into the hands of a body of men, the 
 mass of whom find their way to the post which confers those powers 
 by the right of birth and by nothing else. And those powers they 
 actually use, subject to no check except a vague feeling that they 
 must not go too far in using them. It is acknowledged that there is 
 a point at which the Lords must knock under to the people. But
 
 5 
 
 that point cannot be fixed beforehand j it must be found out by tact 
 in each case. The whole root of the present controversy lies in this, 
 that the Lords had hoped that that point, the point where the 
 necessity of knocking under comes in, might have proved to be 
 further off than the people have ruled that it shall be. 
 
 The peculiar nature of the question on which the Lords have thus 
 run counter to the national will has had a good deal to do with the 
 matter. The Lords have often thrown out measures which have 
 passed the Commons ; they have sometimes thrown out over and 
 over again measures which have passed the Commons by large 
 majorities. And though there has in all such cases been more 
 or less of disappointment and of open grumbling, there has 
 been no such general outburst of indignation as we have seen 
 in the present case. People are more angry this time at a 
 first rejection than they have been at other times at a third 
 or fourth. This comes from a feeling that, of all possible kinds of 
 measures, this is the kind of measure about which the Lords have the 
 least right to stand in the way of the national will. On some 
 questions the judgment of the Lords may be as good as that of the 
 Commons. On questions which do not touch either party politics or 
 the powers of the Lords themselves, it is very likely that it will be 
 as good. Most questions which the Lords debate at all are debated 
 with the highest ability by some of the first men in the country, and, 
 if no peers voted save those who join in the debate, a vote of the 
 House of Lords would always be entitled to very high respect. 
 Sometimes it really is so ; and in many other cases where we cannot 
 say that it is so, where those who think and care about the matter 
 will condemn the action of the Lords in throwing out this or 
 that bill, yet those who think and care deeply are so few that 
 no general agitation follows. But here the Lords have stepped in to 
 meddle with a matter which seems of all things to be the special 
 affair of the House of Commons and of those who choose that 
 House. It seems hardly handsome that men whose political position 
 is secured to themselves and to their children should step in and say 
 that a large body of their countrymen shall not be allowed to receive 
 any political position at all. It is not exactly putting their hands 
 into other men's pockets j but it is saying that other men shall have 
 nothing put into their pockets, while their own pockets are full to 
 overflowing. It is this meddling on the part of a privileged body 
 with something which concerns all the rest of the nation excep
 
 themselves which has called forth this special burst of indignation, 
 one which has certainly had nothing like it for the last three and 
 fifty years, if it had anything like it then. 
 
 Out of this single vote of the House of Lords it has come that the 
 House of Lords itself is now put on its trial. It is dangerous to risk 
 any conjectures as to what may come of the present movement ; 
 much must depend on the conduct of the House of Lords in the 
 coming autumn session. But things can hardly be for the future 
 quite as they have been hitherto. The question of the House of 
 Lords has once been stirred, and things cannot go on as if it never 
 had been stirred. A peace of some kind may be patched up, and 
 any constitutional change may be staved off for the present; but the 
 thought of change has been brought before men's minds, and it will 
 come into their minds all the more easily in time to come. The outcry 
 against the Lords will be raised again on smaller provocation than it 
 has been raised this time. This is therefore a good time to go to 
 the root of the matter, and to search and look what the House of 
 Lords really is and how it came to be what it is. Such questions 
 are never unpractical in a land like ours, where we have never broken 
 with the past, and where precedent goes for more than abstract 
 consistency. The wisdom of our forefathers is an excellent thing to 
 follow whenever we follow it in the sj>irit of our forefathers. Only 
 when we refuse to make changes which are shown to be really 
 needful, we are assuredly not doing what our forefathers did in any 
 of those past ages to which we should most naturally go for examples. 
 To go back to the forms of any past age is commonly impossible, 
 and it would be foolish if it were possible. But from the broad 
 principles even of very remote ages we may often learn a great deal. 
 The principles are commonly lasting, while the forms change from 
 one time to another. To reform an institution on its old lines, to 
 get rid of later corruptions in which it has parted off from its original 
 nature and objects, is often a most practical kind of reform, at once 
 thoroughly radical and thoroughly conservative. Before we make 
 up our minds what should be done with the House of Lords, it may 
 be well to spend a little time in seeing how the House of Lords came 
 into being, and how it grew into its present shape.
 
 II- 
 
 What is the House of Lords ? We may at once answer that it is 
 one of the Houses of Parliament alongside of the House of Commons, 
 that the two have a co-ordinate authority, and that no measure that 
 needs the consent of Parliament has that consent until both Houses 
 have agreed to it. And yet I am not quite sure whether everyone fully 
 takes in the fact that the House of Lords is part of the Parliament. 
 We sometimes get into a way of speaking as if Parliament consisted 
 wholly of the House of Commons, and as if the House of Lords was 
 something outside Parliament. At any rate I am sure that many 
 would say that a dissolution of Parliament affects only the House of 
 Commons, and does not touch the House of Lords. They would be 
 surprised to be told that at a dissolution of Parliament the House of 
 Lords is dissolved just as much as the House of Commons. And in 
 a rough practical way it is true that a dissolution does not touch the 
 House of Lords j that is, it does not touch it in the same way in 
 which it touches the House of Commons. It is not absolutely 
 certain that a new House of Commons will contain any one of the 
 members of the old one ; it is practically quite certain that a good 
 many of its members will be different. But though the House of 
 Lords is as much dissolved by the dissolution as the House of 
 Commons, yet, when Parliament comes together again, the vast 
 majority of the members of the new House of Lords must be the same 
 as the members of the old one. Yet the new House of Lords is not 
 altogether the same body of men as the old. Sixteen of its members, 
 namely, the representative peers of Scotland, chosen for each 
 Parliament, may always actually be different men from the members 
 of the old House ; and, if they happen to be the same men, they 
 sit by a freshly acquired right, just as the members of the 
 House of Commons do. It is well then to remember that the 
 House of Lords is not a continuous body of the same men sitting 
 for ever. It is a body which comes to an end and begins again 
 along with the House of Commons ; and it is always possible that 
 some of its members in a new Parliament may be men who have 
 displaced some of its members in the old one. 
 
 Let us again ask, What is the House of Lords ? Many people, I
 
 8 
 
 am sure would answer at once that it is the hereditary branch of 
 the Legislature, distinguished from the House of Commons, which is 
 the elective branch. And if one went on further to ask, What is the 
 object and purpose of this hereditary branch of the Legislature ? 
 they would most likely answer that it is designed to act as a 
 "Second Chamber," as a correcting and revising body, whose 
 business it is to check hasty action on the part of the elective branch. 
 And they mi^ht go on to say that it is well suited for this purpose, 
 because it is a hereditary branch, because it is not responsible to any 
 constituencies like the House of Commons, and is therefore less 
 likely than the House of Commons to be carried away by every 
 blast of popular feeling. They would add that, though the House 
 is in this way free from immediate responsibility to the people, yet 
 it is still fully amenable to confirmed public opinion, that it repre- 
 sents the matured will of the nation, as distinguished from its 
 momentary fancies. 
 
 Now whatever we say of all this latter part of our supposed 
 answer, there undoubtedly is some rough practical truth in the 
 former part. The House of Lords is a branch of the Legislature a 
 large majority of whose members do hold their seats simply by 
 hereditary right. And, as a matter of fact, the powers of the House 
 have come to consist very much in revising the work of the House 
 of Commons. Sometimes perhaps it improves that work ; sometimes 
 perhaps it spoils it; sometimes perhaps it delays, sometimes it 
 altogether hinders it ; in any case it reconsiders something which has 
 been considered before by the Lower House. Now it is of course 
 open to anyone to maintain that this is an useful function, and that 
 a body wholly or mainly hereditary is better suited than any other 
 to discharge that useful function. This is a political proposition 
 which may be argued for and against, like any other political 
 proposition. But the danger is that this political proposition 
 may get mixed up with a historical proposition which has no 
 ground whatever. Many people unconsciously think that the House 
 of Lords must always have been a hereditary body, and could never 
 have been anything else. They think, perhaps quite unconsciously, 
 that it must have come into being as a* hereditary House. Perhaps 
 they even think that it must have been designed from the beginning 
 to act as what is called a " Second Chamber," as a body created to 
 stand in some kind of relation to another body, perhaps purposely 
 designed to act as a check on it.
 
 Now to all this it might be enough to answer that the House of 
 Lords is not, and, save for a few years in the seventeenth century, 
 never was, a purely hereditary body ; that it was not called into 
 being to act as a check on the House of Commons, because it 
 was in being before the House of Commons ; that its powers 
 to this day are in no way confined to checking the House of 
 Commons, but that they are, except in one or two points, co-ordinate 
 with those of the House of Commons. Each House has one special 
 power of its own. The Commons only can bring in a money bill ; 
 that money bill the Lords must either accept or reject ; they cannot 
 amend it. On the other hand, the ancient judicial powers of 
 Parliament have always been exclusively kept by the Lords, the 
 elder branch of Parliament ; the Commons, the younger branch, 
 have never acquired any share in them. With these exceptions, the 
 powers of the two Houses are exactly the same. Bills may be 
 brought in in either House, and each House can pass, throw out, or 
 amend the bills that come from the other. If we choose to say, by 
 a very misleading use of words, that the Lords have a veto on the 
 acts of the Commons, it is equally true to say that the Commons 
 have a veto on the acts of the Lords. It is true, as a matter of fact, 
 that the most important legislation now seldom begins in the Lords, 
 so that things commonly look as if the main business of the Lords 
 was to revise the acts of the Commons. But this is simply because, 
 as things have come to be at present, it is commonly more convenient 
 that important legislation should begin in the Commons. This 
 practical convenience has nothing to do with the inherent powers of 
 the two Houses ; still less has it anything to do with the historical 
 origin of either House and the objects for which either came into 
 being. 
 
 It may be answered that everybody knows all this, and in a 
 certain sense everybody does know it. Nobody can really believe that 
 the House of Lords is a purely hereditary House, as long as bishops 
 sit there by virtue of their offices and Scottish and Irish representative 
 peers sit there by election. But people none the less practically 
 think otherwise. They go on talking about the "hereditary House " — 
 perhaps admiring it as such, perhaps loathing it — till they fancy that 
 to be hereditary is the inherent essence of the House of Lords. So 
 nobody can really believe that the House of Lords, which can at any 
 moment originate bills, and which not uncommonly does originate 
 bills, really exists only to revise and, if need be, to veto the acts of
 
 10 
 
 the House of Commons. But people none the less talk — that is, they 
 practically think — as if it were so. Ninety-nine out of a hundred 
 disputants on either side would attack the House of Lords and 
 would defend it, as being a hereditary House whose business it is to 
 act as a " Second Chamber," and to revise the acts of the House of 
 Commons. One side might shrink with horror from anything that 
 could be called " revolutionary •" to the other side that name might 
 have some charms. But both sides would allow that there was, for 
 good or for evil, something " revolutionary " in the thought of a 
 House of Lords which should not be hereditary. One side would 
 hold that the wisdom of our forefathers had ordained a hereditary 
 House of Lords ; the other side might be careless as to whether our 
 forefathers did ordain anything of the kind ; but they would hold 
 that, if they did so ordain, it was a sign not of their wisdom but of 
 their folly. 
 
 Most of this confusion comes from not taking in the peculiar 
 character of English constitutional history. As a rule, none of our 
 great political institutions were ever, strictly speaking, enacted. 
 The powers of King, Lords, and Commons certainly never were 
 they grew up of themselves by force of circumstances. They cannot 
 be said to be eternal and immemorial ; for we can trace them up to 
 their early beginnings. But they were not enacted by particular 
 men with particular political objects. There was not any moment 
 when the English people, or any English king or lawgiver, came to 
 the conclusion that it would be a good thing to have a Parliament of two 
 Houses, rather than, like some other nations, a Parliament of one, three, 
 or four. Still less did they go on to settle that one of those Houses 
 should be hereditary and the other elective ; least of all did they 
 decree that the hereditary House should act as a " Second Chamber " 
 to the elective House. The whole thing came by accident, by force 
 of circumstances, by whatever name we choose to give to the gradual 
 working of historical causes. Speaking roughly, we may say that in 
 the twelfth century only the germs of our present constitution were 
 in being. In the thirteenth the germs had grown into elements ; 
 representation and election had come into play; but the several 
 elements had not as yet found their places ; everything is in a state 
 of constant shifting; one experiment is tried after another. It 
 would be no very great stretch of language to say that one experi- 
 ment gave rise to the House of Lords and another to the House of 
 Commons. The reign of Edward I. is the time when things began
 
 11 
 
 to settle themselves down j he may fairly be called the founder of 
 both Houses as distinct Houses ; but he certainly had no conviction 
 of the special merits of the system of two Houses ; for he undoubtedly 
 meant to have three. That is, the clergy were meant to form a 
 separate House, as they did in France and many other countries. 
 The system of two Houses which so many nations have borrowed 
 from us may be in itself good or bad — that is, it may have worked 
 well or ill in practice — but it never was ordained among us with the 
 object of working in any particular way. For it never was ordained 
 at all ; it came about by the sheer accident that the clergy could not 
 be got to attend as a regular estate of Parliament, at both Lords 
 and Commons were got to attend. 
 
 The distinction of Lords and Commons came about in this wise. The 
 exact constitution of our most ancient assemblies is a puzzling subject. 
 It is puzzling for this reason, that, as it was strictly immemorial, we 
 have no record of its enactment, and as everybody at the time under- 
 stood it, no one made it his business formally to describe it. But I 
 have myself little doubt that in the earliest times every freeman 
 had a right to appear in person and to cry Yea or Nay in the 
 assembly of the nation. But it stands to reason that this was a 
 right which could not be exercised except by the great men of the 
 realm and by those who lived near to the place where the 
 assembly was held. At least from the Norman Conquest onwards, 
 our kings took to summoning particular men to the assemblies, some- 
 times in great numbers, sometimes in small. Now it is a universal 
 law that, when a practice of summons comes in, it gradually comes 
 to act as the shutting out of those who are not summoned. In the 
 thirteenth century, from the Great Charter onwards, we distinctly 
 see two classes of persons, those who are summoned each man 
 personally, and those who are summoned in a body. Here we 
 have the first rude distinction of Lords and Commons. The 
 summoning in a body soon grows into a summons to send elected 
 representatives. The shires first send representatives, then the 
 boroughs, till by the end of the thirteenth century we have, 
 thanks to Earl Simon and King Edward, a House of Commons 
 essentially of the same nature as that which we have now. By a 
 kindred process, or rather through another side of the same process, 
 the House of Lords came into being; more strictly, the ancient 
 assembly took the shape of the House of Lords, while the House 
 of Commons grew up as a new thing by its side. While the
 
 12 
 
 freemen in general were summoned to appear by representatives, 
 the great men of the land were still summoned to appear in their 
 own persons. Those who came in answer to the personal summons and 
 those who came as elected representatives gradually parted into two 
 distinct bodies, or rather perhaps two branches of one body. They 
 became in short two Houses. One was the House of the great men, of 
 the Lords, or, by a name of later date borrowed from France, the 
 Peers. The other was the House of Commons, that is the representa- 
 tives of the various communes or communities of freemen throughout 
 the land, shires, cities, and boroughs. But who were these 
 great men, lords, peers, and so forth ? Assuredly not a purely 
 hereditary body ; that the House of Lords is not even now. 
 Assuredly not even a body mainly hereditary, not a body to which 
 the hereditary succession of any part of it was at all necessary, at all 
 part of its essential being. The spiritual lords, who are in their own 
 nature not hereditary, long outnumbered the temporal lords, and 
 the temporal lords were in their origin no more hereditary than the 
 spiritual. But things, from the Crown downwards, have a way of 
 becoming hereditary whenever they can ; the spiritual lords could 
 not become hereditary ; the temporal lords could, and therefore did. 
 The kings continued to send the personal summons to Parliament to 
 such persons as they thought good ; but there were some classes of 
 persons to whom they could not well help sending it. The bishops 
 and the earls were in their several ways men of such importance that 
 the king could not venture to leave them out, if he had been so 
 inclined. A failure to summon a bishop or an earl is exceedingly 
 rare, and it must be explained on some personal ground in the 
 particular case. The bishops were and are in the strictest sense an 
 official class ; but then the earls were in the beginning an official 
 class just as much. An earldom was in the beginning not a mere 
 rank, but a great office, a local government. The kernel of the 
 House of Lords therefore consisted of the great officers of the 
 kingdom, spiritual and temporal. Outside the ranks of the bishops 
 and earls, the king sent his personal summons to other persons, spiritual 
 and temporal. Besides the bishops, he always summoned some abbots, 
 often some other churchmen. A few of the greatest abbots were 
 summoned as regularly as the bishops ; among the lesser abbots the 
 king seems to have had a very free choice. So, besides the earls, 
 the king always summoned some of the barons, that is the highest 
 class of landowners under the earls ; but among the barons too he
 
 13 
 
 had a very free choice. Some abbots and some barons were always 
 summoned, but not always the same abbots or the same barons. The 
 king personally summoned one man to a certain Parliament, just as 
 the electors of a shire or borough sent another man as their repre- 
 sentative in that Parliament j but neither king nor electors pledged 
 themselves to send that man to every future Parliament, much less 
 to send his son after him. In short, the one House of Parliament 
 was in idea no more hereditary than the other. Only there were 
 tendencies which helped the growth of the hereditary doctrine in the 
 House of Lords, while there were none such in the House of 
 Commons. Our next business will be to see what those tendencies 
 were, and how they gradually brought about the present state of 
 things,
 
 14 
 
 XXX 
 
 Certainly there is no assembly of men in the world which has so 
 utterly changed its character as the House of Lords. Whatever it 
 has turned into now, there can be no doubt that it is the House of 
 Lords which continues by personal succession the ancient assembly 
 in which, as I hold, every freeman had a place. The House of 
 Commons is the younger body which has sprung up by the side of 
 the older one. Historically it is not the House of Lords but the 
 House of Commons which is the " Second Chamber." The change 
 from a gathering of all the freemen of the land, first into a gathering 
 of officers of state and other chief men, and secondly into a body 
 consisting mainly of hereditary peers, is striking, but it is really not 
 wonderful. As I have said already, everything that can become 
 hereditary has, especially in certain states of society, a tendency to 
 do so. But before we look at the stages by which this happened, 
 it may not be amiss to compare the House of Lords in its earlier 
 state, say under Edward the First, with another English institution 
 which has some points in common with it. 
 
 The institution that I mean is the Court of Quarter Sessions in 
 each county. The magistrates of an English county form a kind of 
 local Parliament, a Parliament of one House, a Parliament, some 
 might say, of Lords without any Commons. Now the magistrates, 
 as everyone knows, are neither elective nor hereditary, but are 
 appointed by the Crown. They are moreover liable to be struck off 
 the commission by the Crown. Yet everybody feels that they are 
 something altogether unlike ordinary officials of Government. No 
 doubt the fact that the magistrates are unpaid is the great cause of 
 this difference; but it should be remembered that the "Great 
 Unpaid " do not stand alone ; unpaid service is in England the rule 
 for all persons and bodies who hold any kind of local authority, great 
 or small. With regard to the magistrates, though their places 
 are not hereditary, not even necessarily held for life, yet there are 
 persons in every county who could hardly be left out of the 
 commission; there are cases in which it would be thought strange 
 indeed if the son did not succeed the father, even if he is not already
 
 15 
 
 put on the commission alongside of his father. Men of established 
 position in the county, owners of large estates, heads of ancient 
 families, are put on the commission as a matter of course, unless 
 there is some very strong reason indeed why they should not be put 
 there. Outside this there is another range, that of smaller land- 
 owners, newer comers, whose position is not in the same way assured, 
 and among whom those who direct the choice of the Crown have a 
 good deal of discretion. Now this state of things has much in 
 common with the earlier state of the House of .Lords, when the kings 
 summoned whom they would, but when there were many persons 
 whom they could hardly help summoning. Now if the office of 
 justice of peace, which has a certain tendency to become practically 
 hereditary, had ever become formally hereditary, the change would 
 have been exactly the same as that which happened in the case of the 
 temporal peerage. There were several reasons why it should do so 
 in one case and not in the other ; but the mere process would have 
 been the same. When the House of Lords began to take its present 
 shape, the earldoms had already become hereditary, as they had a 
 tendency to be from very early times. There was always a tendency 
 to appoint the son of the last earl, as there was a tendency to 
 elect the son of the last king; as the hereditary feeling 
 grew, as the earldom gradually sank from an office into a 
 mere rank and possession, it naturally became strictly heredi- 
 tary. When barons began to be summoned, the same law applied to 
 their baronies ; when a baron was summoned to one Parliament 
 there was at least a kind of presumption in favour of summoning 
 him to another ; there was even a kind of presumption in favour 
 of summoning his son after him. This presumption grew into an 
 established risrht. It came to be held that a writ of summons once 
 received and acted on gave, both to the man to whom it was sent 
 and to his heirs after him, a right to a summons to all future 
 Parliaments. This doctrine seems to have been fully established in 
 the course of the fourteenth century. In that century too the 
 kings took to creating new ranks of peerage, as duke, marquess, and 
 afterwards viscount. These were created by patent, and the kings also 
 began to create earls and barons by patent. These creations by patent 
 were hereditary or for life at the king's pleasure ; but the hereditary 
 doctrine grew and grew, and patents for life soon became the excep- 
 tion. By the middle of the fifteenth century, at the latest, we may 
 say that the temporal peerage had become a hereditary body; a life-
 
 16 
 
 peerage was a rare exception. But the House of Lords was still 
 neither wholly nor chiefly a hereditary body. Down to the dissolu- 
 tion of monasteries the official lords, the spiritual lords, outnumbered 
 the hereditary peers. When the abbots lost their seats, the scale 
 was turned the other way. Since that time the hereditary peers 
 have gone on increasing almost daily, while the number of official 
 lords, spiritual or temporal, was not increased from the time of 
 Henry the Eighth to the present reign. In this way a body of men 
 which still is not wholly hereditary, which, so far as it is hereditary, 
 has become so only by a series of tendencies and accidents, without 
 any set purpose or any formal enactment, has come to be looked on 
 as if the accidental hereditary element in it was the very essence of 
 its nature, the object for which it was brought into being. 
 
 It must always be borne in mind that it is the personal summons 
 to Parliament which is the essence of peerage. Whatever else the 
 peer has, titles, precedence, any personal privileges that either 
 law or custom gives him, all has gathered round this one essential 
 centre. This is what has made the English peerage so utterly 
 different from any continental nobility. Nobility, so far as it can be 
 said to exist in England at all, is attached to the possession of a 
 hereditary seat in Parliament and to nothing else. It is the writ of 
 summons to Parliament which is held to " ennoble the blood," what- 
 ever that means. For, as everyone knows, there is in England no 
 nobility in the sense which the word bears in other lands. With 
 us the children of the peer are commoners. Certain men have 
 become hereditary legislators and hereditary judges, and that is all > 
 and whatever may be said against this system, it is at any rate a far 
 smaller evil than the abiding and exclusive caste from the growth of 
 which it saved us. For it should never be forgotten that it is the 
 growth of the English peerage which has hindered the growth of any 
 real nobility in England. One man in each generation has been set 
 up so high that he cannot share his privileges even with his own 
 children. 
 
 After the fifteenth century it would be hard, till the present reign, 
 to find a distinct case of a temporal lord with a seat in Parliament 
 being created for life only. And in the seventeenth century the 
 House of Lords did for a few years become a purely hereditary body. 
 This was when the seats of the bishops were taken away by an Act 
 of the Long Parliament. This must be distinguished from the Act 
 which followed seven years later, by which the House of Lords was
 
 17 
 
 abolished altogether. This last Act was an irregular ordinance of 
 the House of Commons — or of so much of it as was left — while the 
 Act which took away the bishops' votes was a regular Act of Par- 
 liament, passed in due form by King, Lords, and Commons. There- 
 fore at the Eestoration of Charles II., when his first Parliament 
 came together, the House of Lords consisted of temporal peers only, 
 and another Act of his second Parliament restored to the bishops the 
 seats which the Act of the Long Parliament had taken from them. 
 That is to say, the House again ceased to be purely hereditary. Since 
 that time the Unions with Scotland and Ireland have brought in two 
 new classes of peers, Scottish representative peers elected for each 
 Parliament and Irish representative peers elected for life. It is plain 
 that neither of these classes of peers are hereditary, as far as their 
 seats in Parliament are concerned ; the Scottish peers are not even 
 Lords of Parliament for life. Still their position takes the hereditary 
 principle for granted. Though they sit by virtue of election, yet 
 they are elected by a purely hereditary body as representatives of 
 that body only. The peers of Scotland indeed are the most purely 
 hereditary body in the land, as the Crown cannot increase their 
 number. 
 
 Now it should be again borne in mind that the whole position 
 of the Lords, all their rights, powers, and privileges, came, like 
 most other things, not by enactment, but by gradual usage. In 
 this, as in other matters, a custom grows up, a custom which gets 
 the practical force of law, which is never formally established by 
 legislation, but which is pretty sure some time or other to be 
 taken for granted in some Act of Parliament. That the King's 
 writ and the King's patent should confer the parliamentary and 
 other rights of peerage was never formally ordained by any 
 Act of Parliament, but many Acts of Parliament have taken it 
 for granted. Now when things get gradually established in this 
 way, it is always open to people of different ways of thinking to 
 speak of them in different ways. What one calls natural growth and 
 healthy development another may call corruption or usurpation. And 
 in many cases we must leave people of different ways of thinking, pro- 
 vided only that both sides have got up the facts accurately, to judge of 
 the facts according to the turns of their several minds. But when a 
 certain body of men go on, age after age, making inferences, laying 
 down rules, which are altogether in their own interest and not at all in 
 the interests of the other powers of the State, we are tempted to call
 
 18 
 
 that process corruption or usurpation rather than healthy growth or 
 development. Now this is what the House of Lords has been doing 
 ever since it began to be a distinct House of Lords. The Lords laid 
 down the rule that the King's writ " ennobled the blood " and 
 bestowed a hereditary seat in Parliament, a thing which nobody 
 would have found out from the writ itself. They laid down in the 
 seventeenth century that a peerage could not be alienated or 
 surrendered to the Crown, as peerages had sometimes been 
 surrendered in older times, and as it plainly is sometimes expedient 
 that they should be. And when, in the present reign, Sir James 
 Parke was, according to ancient precedents, created a peer for life 
 only, the Lords, in defiance of law, in defiance of history, in defiance 
 of the clear rights of the Crown and of the manifest expediency of the 
 case, had the matchless impudence to refuse to Lord Wensleydale, 
 a baron of the realm, as lawfully created as any of them, his 
 lawful seat in their House. This and that insignificant duke, 
 marquess, earl, viscount, or baron, thought it fine to turn up his 
 nose at a great lawyer of whose advice King Edward would have 
 been glad, because forsooth his "blood " had not been "ennobled." 
 And more shameless still, great lawyers, who, one would have 
 thought, must have known the law on which they were trampling, 
 were, in the lowest spirit of upstarts, fiercest of all to maintain the 
 imaginary rights of their own " noble " blood, " ennobled " as it was 
 but yesterday. The body which thus disloyally, almost rebelliously, 
 flouted the Crown has no right to claim respect on any grounds of 
 antiquity or traditional dignity, when, in the like spirit, they turn 
 round and flout the people. They have, to be sure, their " noble 
 blood," strange effect of King Edward's writs of summons. Let us 
 wait and see what their " noble blood " can do for them, when they 
 have turned every other power of the State against them. 
 
 My object is to state facts, not to propose schemes of change. 
 But the whole story may, I think, give us some cautions in thinking 
 out our schemes of change. When a body has changed so widely 
 from its earliest constitution and objects as the House of Lords has 
 done, we shall certainly not be sinning against the wisdom of our 
 forefathers if we hold that it may not be amiss to make it go through 
 a few more changes. And if we make it, as we are not unlikely to 
 do if we change it at all, somewhat more like what King Edward 
 meant it to be and somewhat less like what the Lords have contrived 
 to make it themselves, the wisdom of our forefathers will least of all
 
 19 
 
 complain of us for that. But the same sound rule will teach us that 
 it will be well, in any reforms, to break as little as possible with the 
 past, to let forms, traditions, titles, go on wherever they do not involve 
 the sacrifice of anything more important, to reform on the old lines, to 
 reform, as far as maybe, the existing body, rather than to pull down the 
 existing body and set up a new one. One might be inclined to say that 
 the hereditary element came in by fair growth of circumstances, but that 
 it was usurpation and corruption which has gone so far to shut out 
 all other elements. Even since the rejection of Lord Wensleydale in 
 his first estate — for he did come in at last when duly " ennobled," 
 that is, when a new patent took in his children, of whom he had 
 none — the House has yielded to expediency, and has admitted certain 
 temporal lords who are not hereditary. There are the Lords of Appeal 
 of Ordinary, official lords, whose position is wonderfully anomalous, 
 but who at most are Lords of Parliament for life, and who are not 
 necessarily even that. The principle then has been yielded ; all that 
 is needed may be only to carry it further, and perhaps to carry 
 further the principle on which the Scottish and Irish representative 
 peers are chosen. But the time has hardly come to suggest 
 details. I will make only one remark more. It may be needful 
 to reform, it may be needful to abolish, any institution; it can 
 never be needful to degrade any institution. I say this almost 
 with effort ; it goes so against one's feelings to go right in the teeth 
 of one so honoured as Mr. Bright. Yet I must say that of all the 
 proposals that have been made the worst seems to me to be that 
 which would leave the existing constitution of the House, but would 
 formally narrow its powers. This would be, not to reform, but to 
 degrade; it would be to keep an element of the constitution, and to set 
 a brand upon it. The analogy which has been suggested with the 
 Crown does not hold. The Crown has not been degraded ; it has 
 not been branded ; its powers have not been taken away ; it keeps 
 them all, the right of summoning peers for life among them \ all that 
 has been done is that, in that system of silent understandings 
 which we call the Constitution, it has come to be understood 
 that some of the powers of the Crown shall not be exercised 
 at all, and that the rest shall be exercised only by the advice 
 of Ministers approved by the House of Commons. Since our great 
 Conservative revolution, since the deliverer of 1688 brought back 
 the state of things established by the deliverer of 1399, the position 
 of the Crown has been in many things practically changed ; but the
 
 20 
 
 Crown has never been put to an open shame, as by this scheme it is 
 proposed to put the House of Lords. If it must come to this, it 
 would be far better to get rid of that House altogether. But those 
 who have an Englishman's natural clingings to a long and unbroken 
 political past will hope that some means may be found to reform 
 without sweeping away. 
 
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