“Upon the important occasion and question now before the House, I propose to endeavour to induce them to avoid to involve the country in the additional difficulties of a difference of opinion, possibly a dispute between the Houses, on a question in the decision of which it has been frequently asserted that their lordships had a personal interest; which assertion, however false as affecting each of them personally, could not be denied as affecting the proprietors of land in general.  I am aware of the difficulty, but I don’t despair of carrying the bill through.  You must be the best judge of the course which you ought to take, and of the course most likely to conciliate the confidence of the House of Lords.  My opinion is, that you should advise the House to vote that which would tend most to public order, and would be most beneficial to the immediate interests of the country.”

This is the mode in which the House of Lords came to be what it now is, a chamber with (in most cases) a veto of delay with (in most cases) a power of revision, but with no other rights or powers.  The question we have to answer is, “The House of Lords being such, what is the use of the Lords?”

The common notion evidently fails, that it is a bulwark against imminent revolution.  As the duke’s letter in every line evinces, the wisest members, the guiding members of the House, know that the House must yield to the people if the people is determined.  The two cases—­that of the Reform Act and the Corn Laws—­were decisive cases.  The great majority of the Lords thought Reform revolution, Free-trade confiscation, and the two together ruin.  If they could ever have been trusted to resist the people, they would then have resisted it.  But in truth it is idle to expect a second chamber—­a chamber of notables—­ever to resist a popular chamber, a nation’s chamber, when that chamber is vehement and the nation vehement too.  There is no strength in it for that purpose.  Every class chamber, every minority chamber, so to speak, feels weak and helpless when the nation is excited.  In a time of revolution there are but two powers, the sword and the people.  The executive commands the sword; the great lesson which the First Napoleon taught the Parisian populace—­the contribution he made to the theory of revolutions at the 18th Brumaire—­is now well known.  Any strong soldier at the head of the army can use the army.  But a second chamber cannot use it.  It is a pacific assembly composed of timid peers, aged lawyers, or, as abroad, clever litterateurs.  Such a body has no force to put down the nation, and if the nation will have it do something it must do it.

The very nature, too, as has been seen, of the Lords in the English Constitution, shows that it cannot stop revolution.  The Constitution contains an exceptional provision to prevent it stopping it.  The executive, the appointee of the popular chamber and the nation, can make new peers, and so create a majority in the peers; it can say to the Lords, “Use the powers of your House as we like, or you shall not use them at all.  We will find others to use them; your virtue shall go out of you if it is not used as we like, and stopped when we please.”  An assembly under such a threat cannot arrest, and could not be intended to arrest, a determined and insisting executive.