life makes so much complexity necessary that an artificial addition is sure to do harm:  you cannot tell where the needless bit of machinery will catch and clog the hundred needful wheels; but the chances are conclusive that it will impede them some where, so nice are they and so delicate.  But though beside an ideal House of Commons the Lords would be unnecessary, and therefore pernicious, beside the actual House a revising and leisured legislature is extremely useful, if not quite necessary.

At present the chance majorities on minor questions in the House of Commons are subject to no effectual control.  The nation never attends to any but the principal matters of policy and State.  Upon these it forms that rude, rough, ruling judgment which we call public opinion; but upon other things it does not think at all, and it would be useless for it to think.  It has not the materials for forming a judgment:  the detail of bills, the instrumental part of policy, the latent part of legislation, are wholly out of its way.  It knows nothing about them, and could not find time or labour for the careful investigation by which alone they can be apprehended.  A casual majority of the House of Commons has therefore dominant power:  it can legislate as it wishes.  And though the whole House of Commons upon great subjects very fairly represents public opinion, and though its judgment upon minor questions is, from some secret excellencies in its composition, remarkably sound and good; yet, like all similar assemblies, it is subject to the sudden action of selfish combinations.  There are said to be 200 “members for the railways” in the present Parliament.  If these 200 choose to combine on a point which the public does not care for, and which they care for because it affects their purse, they are absolute.  A formidable sinister interest may always obtain the complete command of a dominant assembly by some chance and for a moment, and it is therefore of great use to have a second chamber of an opposite sort, differently composed, in which that interest in all likelihood will not rule.

The most dangerous of all sinister interests is that of the executive Government, because it is the most powerful.  It is perfectly possible—­it has happened and will happen again—­that the Cabinet, being very powerful in the Commons, may inflict minor measures on the nation which the nation did not like, but which it did not understand enough to forbid.  If, therefore, a tribunal of revision can be found in which the executive, though powerful, is less powerful, the Government will be the better; the retarding chamber will impede minor instances of Parliamentary tryanny, though it will not prevent or much impede revolution.