There are two modes in which the power of our executive to create Peers—­to nominate, that is, additional members of our upper and revising chamber—­now acts:  one constant, habitual, though not adequately noticed by the popular mind as it goes on; and the other possible and terrific, scarcely ever really exercised, but always by its reserved magic maintaining a great and a restraining influence.  The Crown creates peers, a few year by year, and thus modifies continually the characteristic feeling of the House of Lords.  I have heard people say, who ought to know, that the English peerage (the only one upon which unhappily the power of new creation now acts) is now more Whig than Tory.  Thirty years ago the majority was indisputably the other way.  Owing to very curious circumstances English parties have not alternated in power, as a good deal of speculation predicts they would, and a good deal of current language assumes they have.  The Whig party were in office some seventy years (with very small breaks) from the death of Queen Anne to the coalition between Lord North and Mr. Fox; then the Tories (with only such breaks), were in power for nearly fifty years, till 1832; and since, the Whig party has always, with very trifling intervals, been predominant.  Consequently, each continuously-governing party has had the means of modifying the Upper House to suit its views.  The profuse Tory creations of half a century had made the House of Lords bigotedly Tory before the first Reform Act, but it is wonderfully mitigated now.  The Irish Peers and Scotch Peers—­being nominated by an almost unaltered constituency, and representing the feelings of the majority of that constituency only (no minority having any voice)—­present an unchangeable Tory element.  But the element in which change is permitted has been changed.  Whether the English Peerage be or be not predominantly now Tory, it is certainly not Tory after the fashion of the Toryism of 1832.  The Whig additions have indeed sprung from a class commonly rather adjoining upon Toryism, than much inclining to Radicalism.  It is not from men of large wealth that a very great impetus to organic change should be expected.  The additions to the Peers have matched nicely enough with the old Peers, and therefore they have effected more easily a greater and more permeating modification.  The addition of a contrasting mass would have excited the old leaven, but the delicate infusion of ingredients similar in genus, though different in species, has modified the new compound without irritating the old original.

This ordinary and common use of the peer-creating power is always in the hands of the Premier, and depends for its characteristic use on being there.  He, as the head of the predominant party, is the proper person to modify gradually the permanent chamber which, perhaps, was at starting hostile to him; and, at any rate, can be best harmonised with the public opinion he represents by the additions he makes.  Hardly any contrived constitution possesses a machinery for modifying its secondary house so delicate, so flexible, and so constant.  If the power of creating life peers had been added, the mitigating influence of the responsible executive upon the House of Lords would have been as good as such a thing can be.