if it agrees, it is superfluous." An able exponent
of this doctrine, within recent years, is Sir
Charles Dilke.]

*108. The Breach Between the Lords and the Nation.*--The indictments
which have been brought against the House of Lords have been sweeping
and varied. They have been based upon the all but exclusively
hereditary character of the membership, upon the meagerness of (p. 103)
attendance at the sittings and the small interest displayed by a
majority of the members, and upon the hurried and frequently
perfunctory nature of the consideration which is accorded public
measures. Fundamentally, however, the tremendous attack which has been
levelled against the Lords has had as its impetus the conviction of
large masses of people that the chamber as constituted stands
persistently and deliberately for interests which are not those of the
nation at large. Prior to the parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth
century the House of Commons was hardly more representative of the
people than was the upper chamber. Both were controlled by the landed
aristocracy, and between the two there was as a rule substantial
accord. After 1832, however, the territorial interests, while yet
powerful, were not dominant in the Commons, and a cleavage between the
Lords, on the one hand, and the Commons, increasingly representative
of the mass of the nation, on the other, became a serious factor in
the politics and government of the realm. The reform measures of 1867
and 1884, establishing in substance a system of manhood suffrage in
parliamentary elections, converted the House of Commons into an organ
of thoroughgoing democracy. The development of the cabinet system
brought the working executive, likewise, within the power of the
people to control. But the House of Lords underwent no corresponding
transformation. It remained, and still is, an inherently and
necessarily conservative body, representative, in the main, of the
interests of landed property, adverse to changes which seem to menace
property and established order, and identified with all the forces
that tend to perpetuate the nobility and the Anglican Church as
pillars of the state. By simply standing still while the remaining
departments of the governmental system were undergoing democratization
the second chamber became, in effect, a political anomaly.[149]

[Footnote 149: Dickinson, Development of Parliament