of a child of alien birth in so
unlikely a spot as St. Hospital) would surely be on Corona's track
before long. But Brother Bonaday hated the prospect of sending her
to the parish school, while he possessed no money to send her to a
better. Moreover, he obeyed a lifelong instinct in shying away from
the call to decide.

"But we were talking about the House of Lords," he suggested feebly.
"The hereditary principle--"

Brother Copas inhaled his snuff, sideways eyeing this friend whose
weakness he understood to a hair's-breadth. But he, too, had his
weakness--that of yielding to be led away by dialectic on the first
temptation.

"Aye, to be sure. The hereditary--principle, did you say?
My dear fellow, the House of Lords never had such a principle.
The hereditary right to legislate slipped in by the merest slant of a
side wind, and in its origin was just a handy expedient of the sort
so dear to our Constitution, logically absurd, but in practice saving
no end of friction and dispute."

"You will grant at any rate that, having once adopted it, the Lords
exalted it to rank as a principle."

"Yes, and for a time with amazing success. That was their capital
error. . . . Have you never observed, my good Bonaday, how fatally
miracles come home to roost? Jonah spends three days and three
nights in the whale's belly--why? Simply to get his tale believed.
_Credo quia impossibile_ seldom misses to work well for a while.
He doesn't foresee, poor fellow, that what makes his fortune with one
generation of men will wreck his credit with another. . . . So with
the House of Lords--though here a miracle triumphantly pointed out as
happening under men's eyes was never really happening at all.
That in the loins of every titled legislator should lie the germ of
another is a miracle (I grant you) of the first order, and may vie
with Jonah's sojourn in the whale's belly; nay, it deserved an even
longer run for its money, since it persuaded people that they saw the
miraculous succession. But Nature was taking care all the time that
it never happened. Actually our peerages have perished, and new ones
have been born at an astonishing rate; about half of them at this
moment are younger than the great Reform Bill. A shrewd American
remarked the other day, that while it is true enough a son may not
inherit his father's ability, yet if the son of a Rothschild can keep
the money his father made he must in these days of liquid securities