the second reading is carried without it by nine, and then the king refuses to make peers, or at least enough peers when a vital amendment is carried by Lord Lyndhurst, which would have destroyed, and was meant to destroy the Bill.  In consequence, there was a tremendous crisis and nearly a revolution.  A more striking example of well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be found in history.  No one who reads it carefully will 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.