cepted matter. Popular
passion has not crossed the path, and no vivid imagination has been
excited to clear the matter up.

The House of Lords has the greatest merit which such a chamber can
have; it is POSSIBLE. It is incredibly difficult to get a revising
assembly, because it is difficult to find a class of respected
revisers. A federal senate, a second House, which represents State
unity, has this advantage; it embodies a feeling at the root of
society--a feeling which is older than complicated politics, which is
stronger a thousand times over than common political feelings--the
local feeling. "My shirt," said the Swiss state-right patriot, "is
dearer to me than my coat." Every State in the American Union would
feel that disrespect to the Senate was disrespect to itself.
Accordingly, the Senate is respected; whatever may be the merits or
demerits of its action, it can act; it is real, independent, and
efficient. But in common Governments it is fatally difficult to make an
UNpopular entity powerful in a popular Government.

It is almost the same thing to say that the House of Lords is
independent. It would not be powerful, it would not be possible, unless
it were known to be independent. The Lords are in several respects more
independent than the Commons; their judgment may not be so good a
judgment, but it is emphatically their own judgment. The House of
Lords, as a body, is accessible to no social bribe. And this, in our
day, is no light matter. Many members of the House of Commons, who are
to be influenced by no other manner of corruption, are much influenced
by this its most insidious sort. The conductors of the press and the
writers for it are worse--at least the more influential who come near
the temptation; for "position," as they call it, for a certain intimacy
with the aristocracy, some of them would do almost anything and say
almost anything. But the Lords are those who give social bribes, and
not those who take them. They are above corruption because they are the
corruptors. They have no constituency to fear or wheedle; they have the
best means of forming a disinterested and cool judgment of any class in
the country. They have, too, leisure to form it. They have no
occupations to distract them which are worth the name. Field sports are
but playthings, though some lords put an Englishman's seriousness into
them. Few Englishmen can bury themselves in science or literature; and
the aristocracy have less, per