with the Duke Uzes, the most ancient peer of the Parliament; to claim as many pages and horses to their carriages as an elector; to be called monseigneur by the first President; to discuss whether the Duke de Maine dates his peerage as the Comte d’Eu, from 1458; to cross the grand chamber diagonally, or by the side—­such things were grave matters.  Grave matters with the Lords were the Navigation Act, the Test Act, the enrolment of Europe in the service of England, the command of the sea, the expulsion of the Stuarts, war with France.  On one side, etiquette above all; on the other, empire above all.  The peers of England had the substance, the peers of France the shadow.

To conclude, the House of Lords was a starting-point; towards civilization this is an immense thing.  It had the honour to found a nation.  It was the first incarnation of the unity of the people:  English resistance, that obscure but all-powerful force, was born in the House of Lords.  The barons, by a series of acts of violence against royalty, have paved the way for its eventual downfall.  The House of Lords at the present day is somewhat sad and astonished at what it has unwillingly and unintentionally done, all the more that it is irrevocable.

What are concessions?  Restitutions;—­and nations know it.

“I grant,” says the king.

“I get back my own,” says the people.

The House of Lords believed that it was creating the privileges of the peerage, and it has produced the rights of the citizen.  That vulture, aristocracy, has hatched the eagle’s egg of liberty.

And now the egg is broken, the eagle is soaring, the vulture dying.

Aristocracy is at its last gasp; England is growing up.

Still, let us be just towards the aristocracy.  It entered the scale against royalty, and was its counterpoise.  It was an obstacle to despotism.  It was a barrier.  Let us thank and bury it.

CHAPTER III.

THE OLD HALL.

Near Westminster Abbey was an old Norman palace which was burnt in the time of Henry VIII.  Its wings were spared.  In one of them Edward VI. placed the House of Lords, in the other the House of Commons.  Neither the two wings nor the two chambers are now in existence.  The whole has been rebuilt.

We have already said, and we must repeat, that there is no resemblance between the House of Lords of the present day and that of the past.  In demolishing the ancient palace they somewhat demolished its ancient usages.  The strokes of the pickaxe on the monument produce their counter-strokes on customs and charters.  An old stone cannot fall without dragging down with it an old law.  Place in a round room a parliament which has been hitherto held in a square room, and it will no longer be the same thing.  A change in the shape of the shell changes the shape of the fish inside.