medied. To be effectual in that way, life
peerages must be very numerous. Now the House of Lords will never
consent to a very numerous life peerage without a storm; they must be
in terror to do it, or they will not do it. And if the storm blows
strongly enough to do so much, in all likelihood it will blow strongly
enough to do much more. If the revolution is powerful enough and eager
enough to make an immense number of life peers, probably it will sweep
away the hereditary principle in the Upper Chamber entirely. Of course
one may fancy it to be otherwise; we may conceive of a political storm
just going to a life-peerage limit, and then stopping suddenly. But in
politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional
accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the
regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily
miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our
minds with its cusps and conjugate points.

Nor, on the other hand, can I sympathise with the objection to life
peerages which some of the Radical party take and feel. They think it
will strengthen the Lords, and so make them better able to oppose the
Commons; they think, if they do not say: "The House of Lords is our
enemy and that of all Liberals; happily the mass of it is not
intellectual; a few clever men are born there which we cannot help, but
we will not 'vaccinate' it with genius; we will not put in a set of
clever men for their lives who may as likely as not turn against us".
This objection assumes that clever peers are just as likely to oppose
the Commons as stupid peers. But this I deny. Most clever men who are
in such a good place as the House of Lords plainly is, will be very
unwilling to lose it if they can help it; at the clear call of a great
duty they might lose it, but only at such a call. And it does not take
a clever man to see that systematic opposition of the Commons is the
only thing which can endanger the Lords, or which will make an
individual peer cease to be a peer. The greater you make the SENSE of
the Lords, the more they will see that their plain interest is to make
friends of the plutocracy, and to be the chiefs of it, and not to wish
to oppose the Commons where that plutocracy rules.

It is true that a completely new House of Lords, mainly composed of men
of ability, selected because they were able, might very likely attempt
to make ability the predominant