Lords on most days looks so unlike what it ought to
be, that most people will not believe it is what it ought to be. The
attendance of considerate peers will, for obvious reasons, be larger
when it can no longer be overpowered by the NON-attendance, by the
commissioned votes of inconsiderate peers. The abolition of proxies
would have made the House of Lords a real House; the addition of life
peers would have made it a good House.

The greater of these changes would have most materially aided the House
of Lords in the performance of its subsidiary functions. It always
perhaps happens in a great nation, that certain bodies of sensible men
posted prominently in its Constitution, acquire functions, and usefully
exercise functions, which at the outset, no one expected from them, and
which do not identify themselves with their original design. This has
happened to the House of Lords especially. The most obvious instance is
the judicial function. This is a function which no theorist would
assign to a second chamber in a new Constitution, and which is matter
of accident in ours. Gradually, indeed, the unfitness of the second
chamber for judicial functions has made itself felt. Under our present
arrangements this function is not entrusted to the House of Lords, but
to a Committee of the House of Lords. On one occasion only, the trial
of O'Connell, the whole House, or some few in the whole House, wished
to vote, and they were told they could not, or they would destroy the
judicial prerogative. No one, indeed, would venture REALLY to place the
judicial function in the chance majorities of a fluctuating assembly:
it is so by a sleepy theory; it is not so in living fact. As a legal
question, too, it is a matter of grave doubt whether there ought to be
two supreme courts in this country--the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council, and (what is in fact though not in name) the Judicial
Committee of the House of Lords. Up to a very recent time, one
committee might decide that a man was sane as to money, and the other
committee might decide that he was insane as to land. This absurdity
has been cured; but the error from which it arose has not been
cured--the error of having two supreme courts, to both of which as time
goes on, the same question is sure often enough to be submitted, and
each of which is sure every now and then to decide it differently. I do
not reckon the judicial function of the House of Lords as one of its
true subsid