doubt that the discretionary power of making
peers would have been far better in Lord Grey's hands than in the
king's. It was the uncertainty whether the king would exercise it, and
how far he would exercise it, that mainly animated the opposition. In
fact, you may place power in weak hands at a revolution, but you cannot
keep it in weak hands. It runs out of them into strong ones. An
ordinary hereditary sovereign--a William IV., or a George IV.--is unfit
to exercise the peer-creating power when most wanted. A half-insane
king, like George III., would be worse. He might use it by
unaccountable impulse when not required, and refuse to use it out of
sullen madness when required.

The existence of a fancied check on the Premier is in truth an evil,
because it prevents the enforcement of a real check. It would be easy
to provide by law that an extraordinary number of peers--say more than
ten annually--should not be created except on a vote of some large
majority, suppose three-fourths of the Lower House. This would ensure
that the Premier should not use the reserve force of the constitution
as if it were an ordinary force; that he should not use it except when
the whole nation fixedly wished it; that it should be kept for a
revolution, not expended on administration; and it would ensure that he
should then have it to use. Queen Anne's case and William IV.'s case
prove that neither object is certainly attained by entrusting this
critical and extreme force to the chance idiosyncrasies and habitual
mediocrity of an hereditary sovereign.

It may be asked why I argue at such length a question in appearance so
removed from practice, and in one point of view so irrelevant to my
subject. No one proposes to remove Queen Victoria; if any one is in a
safe place on earth, she is in a safe place. In these very essays it
has been shown that the mass of our people would obey no one else, that
the reverence she excites is the potential energy--as science now
speaks--out of which all minor forces are made, and from which lesser
functions take their efficiency. But looking not to the present hour,
and this single country, but to the world at large and coming times, no
question can be more practical.

What grows upon the world is a certain matter-of-factness. The test of
each century, more than of the century before, is the test of results.
New countries are arising all over the world where there are no fixed
sources of reverence; which ha