and waiters bowed before him.  The present Duke sneaks away from a railway station, smoking a cigar, in a brougham.”  The aristocracy cannot lead the old life if they would; they are ruled by a stronger power.  They suffer from the tendency of all modern society to raise the average, and to lower—­comparatively, and perhaps absolutely, to lower—­the summit.  As the picturesqueness, the featureliness, of society diminishes, aristocracy loses the single instrument of its peculiar power.

If we remember the great reverence which used to be paid to nobility as such, we shall be surprised that the House of Lords as an assembly, has always been inferior; that it was always just as now, not the first, but the second of our assemblies.  I am not, of course, now speaking of the middle ages:  I am not dealing with the embryo or the infant form of our Constitution; I am only speaking of its adult form.  Take the times of Sir R. Walpole.  He was Prime Minister because he managed the House of Commons; he was turned out because he was beaten on an election petition in that House; he ruled England because he ruled that House.  Yet the nobility were then the governing power in England.  In many districts the word of some lord was law.  The “wicked Lord Lowther,” as he was called, left a name of terror in Westmoreland during the memory of men now living.  A great part of the borough members and a great part of the county members were their nominees; an obedient, unquestioning deference was paid them.  As individuals the peers were the greatest people; as a House the collected peers were but the second House.

Several causes contributed to create this anomaly, but the main cause was a natural one.  The House of Peers has never been a House where the most important peers were most important.  It could not be so.  The qualities which fit a man for marked eminence, in a deliberative assembly, are not hereditary, and are not coupled with great estates.  In the nation, in the provinces, in his own province, a Duke of Devonshire, or a Duke of Bedford, was a much greater man than Lord Thurlow.  They had great estates, many boroughs, innumerable retainers, followings like a Court.  Lord Thurlow had no boroughs, no retainers; he lived on his salary.  Till the House of Lords met, the dukes were not only the greatest, but immeasurably the greatest.  But as soon as the House met, Lord Thurlow became the greatest.  He could speak, and the others could not speak.  He could transact business in half an hour which they could not have transacted in a day, or could not have transacted at all.  When some foolish peer, who disliked his domination, sneered at his birth, he had words to meet the case:  he said it was better for any one to owe his place to his own exertions than to owe it to descent, to being the “accident of an accident”.  But such a House as this could not be pleasant to great noblemen.  They could not like to be second in their own assembly (and yet