earls of earldoms, barons of baronies.  Then they were in a way enthroned, representing all the people of the territories they dominated, the people they led in war and ruled in peace.  They came together as magnates of the land, sitting in an Upper House as Lords of the shire, even as the Knights of the shire sat in the Commons.  And this continued long after the feudal system had passed away, carried on not only by the force of tradition, but by a sentiment of respect and real affection; for these feelings were common enough until designing men laid themselves out to destroy them.

Many things combined to make the last phase pass quickly.  It was impossible that the Peerage could long survive the Reform Bill, for it took from the great families their pocket boroughs, and so much of their influence.  And there followed hard upon it the educational effect of new facilities for exchange of ideas, the railway trains, the penny post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom.  But above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men.  Once divorced from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators by inheritance.  Should we summon to a conclave of the nations a king who had no kingdom?  But the pity of it!  Not only the break with eight centuries of history—­nay, more, for when had not every king his council of notables?—­not only the loss of picturesqueness and sentiment and lofty mien, but the certainty, the appalling certainty, that, when an aristocracy of birth falls, it is not an aristocracy of character or intellect, but an aristocracy—­save the mark—­of money, which is bound to take its place.

Five short years and four rejected measures.  Glance back over it all.  The wild blood on both sides, and the cunning on one.  The foolish comfortable words spoken in every drawing-room throughout the United Kingdom.  “Yes, they are terrible:  what a lot of harm they would do if they could.  Thank God we have a House of Lords.”  Think now that this was commonplace conversation only three short years ago.  And all the time the ears of the masses were being poisoned.  Week after week and month after month some laughed but others toiled.  The laughers, like the French nobles before the Revolution, said contemptuously, “They will not dare.”  Why should they not?  There were men among them for whom the Ark of the Covenant had no sanctity.  And then, when the combinations were complete, when those who stood out had been kicked—­there can be no other word—­into compliance, the blows fell quickly.  A Budget was ingeniously prepared for rejection, and, the Lords falling into the trap, the storm broke, with its hurricane of abuse and misrepresentation.  We had one election which