hen there, and the dogs barked. That was all.

It is not difficult to be wise after the event. Everybody knows now
that with the motley groups of growing strength arrayed against them it
behooved the Peers to walk warily, to look askance at the cloaks
trailed before them, to realize the danger of accepting challenges,
however righteous the cause might be. But no amount of prudence could
have postponed the catastrophe for any length of time, for indeed the
House of Lords had become an anachronism. Everything had changed since
the days when it had its origin, when its members were Peers of the
King, not only in name but almost in power, princes of principalities,
earls of earldoms, barons of baronies. Then they were in a way
enthroned, representing all the people of the territories they
dominated, the people they led in war and ruled in peace. They came
together as magnates of the land, sitting in an Upper House as Lords of
the shire, even as the Knights of the shire sat in the Commons. And
this continued long after the feudal system had passed away, carried on
not only by the force of tradition, but by a sentiment of respect and
real affection; for these feelings were common enough until designing
men laid themselves out to destroy them.

Many things combined to make the last phase pass quickly. It was
impossible that the Peerage could long survive the Reform Bill, for it
took from the great families their pocket boroughs, and so much of
their influence. And there followed hard upon it the educational effect
of new facilities for exchange of ideas, the railway trains, the penny
post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of
general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom. But
above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a
link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men. Once divorced
from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity
was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no
exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators by
inheritance. Should we summon to a conclave of the nations a king who
had no kingdom? But the pity of it! Not only the break with eight
centuries of history--nay, more, for when had not every king his
council of notables?--not only the loss of picturesqueness and
sentiment and lofty mien, but the certainty, the appalling certainty,
that, when an aristocracy of birth falls, it is not