as as useful as its energy.
Just as the knowledge that his men CAN strike makes a master yield in
order that they may not strike, so the knowledge that their House could
be swamped at the will of the king--at the will of the people--made the
Lords yield to the people.

From the Reform Act the function of the House of Lords has been altered
in English history. Before that Act it was, if not a directing Chamber,
at least a Chamber of Directors. The leading nobles, who had most
influence in the Commons, and swayed the Commons, sat there.
Aristocratic influence was so powerful in the House of Commons, that
there never was any serious breach of unity. When the Houses
quarrelled, it was as in the great Aylesbury case, about their
respective privileges, and not about the national policy. The influence
of the nobility was then so potent, that it was not necessary to exert
it. The English Constitution, though then on this point very different
from what it now is, did not even then contain the blunder of the
Victorian or of the Swiss Constitution. It had not two Houses of
distinct origin; it had two Houses of common origin--two Houses in
which the predominant element was the same. The danger of discordance
was obviated by a latent unity.

Since the Reform Act the House of Lords has become a revising and
suspending House. It can alter bills; it can reject bills on which the
House of Commons is not yet thoroughly in earnest--upon which the
nation is not yet determined. Their veto is a sort of hypothetical
veto. They say, We reject your Bill for this once or these twice, or
even these thrice: but if you keep on sending it up, at last we won't
reject it. The House has ceased to be one of latent directors, and has
become one of temporary rejectors and palpable alterers.

It is the sole claim of the Duke of Wellington to the name of a
statesman, that he presided over this change. He wished to guide the
Lords to their true position, and he did guide them. In 1846, in the
crisis of the Corn-Law struggle, and when it was a question whether the
House of Lords should resist or yield, he wrote a very curious letter
to the late Lord Derby:--

"For many years, indeed from the year 1830, when I retired from office,
I have endeavoured to manage the House of Lords upon the principle on
which I conceive that the institution exists in the Constitution of the
country, that of Conservatism. I have invariably objected to all
violent and extreme m