utes together, and requiring to be
kept straight by the fatherly intervention of Dukes of Marlborough or
Marquises of Ailesbury. The ideal picture of the level-headed peers
restraining the youthful impetuosity of the representatives of the
people from committing to-day some rash act which they would gladly
repent and repeal to-morrow, is both touching and edifying. But it
exists only in the minds of the philosophers, who find a reason for
everything just because it is there. Members of Parliament, I have
observed, seem to know their own minds every inch as well as earls--nay,
even as marquises.

The plain fact of the matter is, all the Second Chambers in the world
are directly modelled upon the House of Lords, that Old Man of the Sea
whom England, the weary Titan, is now striving so hard to shake off her
shoulders. The mother of Parliaments is responsible for every one of
them. Senates and Upper Houses are just the result of irrational
Anglomania. When constitutional government began to exist, men turned
unanimously to the English Constitution as their model and pattern. That
was perfectly natural. Evolutionists know that evolution never proceeds
on any other plan than by reproduction, with modification, of existing
structures. America led the way. She said, "England has a House of
Commons; therefore we must have a House of Representatives. England has
also a House of Lords; nature has not dowered us with those exalted
products, but we will do what we can; we will imitate it by a Senate."
Monarchical France followed her lead; so did Belgium, Italy,
civilisation in general. I believe even Japan rejoices to-day in the
august dignity of a Second Chamber. But mark now the irony of it. They
all of them did this thing to be entirely English. And just about the
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