The House of Lords was once a reality. It consisted of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy--the bishops and mitred abbots; with the
official hierarchy--the great nobles, who were also great satraps of
provinces, and great military commanders. It was thus mainly made up of
practical life-members, appointed by merit. The peers, lay and
spiritual, were the men who commended themselves to the sovereign as
able administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditary
element choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbots
disappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of a
shire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last to
be a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House of
Landlords. And the English people submitted to the claim of
irresponsible wealth or irresponsible acres to exercise a veto upon
national legislation. The anomaly, utterly indefensible in itself, had
grown up so slowly that the public accepted it--nay, even defended it.
And other countries, accustomed to regard England--the Pecksniff among
nations--as a perfect model of political wisdom, swallowed half the
anomaly, and all the casuistical reasoning that was supposed to justify
it, without a murmur. But if we strip the facts bare from the glamour
that surrounds them, the plain truth is this--England allows an assembly
of hereditary nobodies to retard or veto its legislation nowadays,
simply because it never noticed the moment when a practical House of
administrative officers lapsed into a nest of plutocrats.

Mend or end? As it stands, the thing is a not-even-picturesque mediaeval
relic. If we English were logical, we would arrange that any man who
owned so many thousand acres of land, or brewed so many million bottles
of beer per annum, should _ipso facto_ be elevated to the peerage. Why
should not gallons of gin confer an earldom direct, and Brighton A's be
equivalent to a marquisate? Why not allow the equal claim of screws and
pills with coal and iron? Why disregard the native worth of annatto and
nitrates? Baron Beecham or Lord Sunlight is a first-rate name. As it is,
we make petty and puerile distinctions. Beer is in, but whiskey is out;
and even in beer itself, if I recollect aright, Dublin stout wore a
coronet for some months or years before English pale ale attained the
dignity of a barony. No Minister has yet made chocolate a viscount. At
present, banks and minerals go in as of right, wh