to limit it and define it. To this the Lords object; wherever
it is concerned, they are not impartial revisers, but biassed revisers.

This singleness of composition would be no fault; it would be, or might
be, even a merit, if the criticism of the House of Lords, though a
suspicious criticism, were yet a criticism of great understanding. The
characteristic legislation of every age must have characteristic
defects; it is the outcome of a character, of necessity faulty and
limited. It must mistake some kind of things; it must overlook some
other. If we could get hold of a complemental critic, a critic who saw
what the age did not see, and who saw rightly what the age mistook, we
should have a critic of inestimable value. But is the House of Lords
that critic? Can it be said that its unfriendliness to the legislation
of the age is founded on a perception of what the age does not see, and
a rectified perception of what the age does see? The most extreme
partisan, the most warm admirer of the Lords, if of fair and tempered
mind, cannot say so. The evidence is too strong. On free trade, for
example, no one can doubt that the Lords--in opinion, in what they
wished to do, and would have done, if they had acted on their own
minds--were utterly wrong. This is the clearest test of the "modern
spirit". It is easier here to be sure it is right than elsewhere.
Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you
not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle. Now
no one can doubt that England is a great deal better off because of
free trade; that it has more money, and that its money is diffused more
as we should wish it diffused. In the one case in which we can
unanswerably test the modern spirit, it was right, and the dubious
Upper House--the House which would have rejected it, if possible--was
wrong.

There is another reason. The House of Lords, being an hereditary
chamber, cannot be of more than common ability. It may contain--it
almost always has contained, it almost always will
contain--extraordinary men. But its average born law-makers cannot be
extraordinary. Being a set of eldest sons picked out by chance and
history, it cannot be very wise. It would be a standing miracle if such
a chamber possessed a knowledge of its age superior to the other men of
the age; if it possessed a superior and supplemental knowledge; if it
descried what they did not discern, and saw truly that which they