These are great merits:  and, considering how difficult it is to get a good second chamber, and how much with our present first chamber we need a second, we may well be thankful for them.  But we must not permit them to blind our eyes.  Those merits of the Lords have faults close beside them which go far to make them useless.  With its wealth, its place, and its leisure, the House of Lords would, on the very surface of the matter, rule us far more than it does if it had not secret defects which hamper and weaken it.

The first of these defects is hardly to be called secret, though, on the other hand, it is not well known.  A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it”—­to look at it not on a great party field-day, or at a time of parade, but in the ordinary transaction of business.  There are perhaps ten peers in the House, possibly only six; three is the quorum for transacting business.  A few more may dawdle in or not dawdle in:  those are the principal speakers, the lawyers (a few years ago when Lyndhurst, Brougham, and Campbell were in vigour, they were by far the predominant talkers) and a few statesmen whom every one knows.  But the mass of the House is nothing.  This is why orators trained in the Commons detest to speak in the Lords.  Lord Chatham used to call it the “Tapestry”.  The House of Commons is a scene of life if ever there was a scene of life.  Every member in the throng, every atom in the medley, has his own objects (good or bad), his own purposes (great or petty); his own notions, such as they are, of what is; his own notions, such as they are, of what ought to be.  There is a motley confluence of vigorous elements, but the result is one and good.  There is a “feeling of the House,” a “sense” of the House, and no one who knows anything of it can despise it.  A very shrewd man of the world went so far as to say that “the House of Commons has more sense than any one in it”.  But there is no such “sense” in the House of Lords, because there is no life.  The Lower Chamber is a chamber of eager politicians; the Upper (to say the least) of not eager ones.

This apathy is not, indeed, as great as the outside show would indicate.  The committees of the Lords (as is well known) do a great deal of work and do it very well.  And such as it is, the apathy is very natural.  A House composed of rich men who can vote by proxy without coming will not come very much. [Footnote:  In accordance with a recent resolution of the House of Lords proxies are now disused.—­Note to second edition.] But after every abatement the real indifference to their duties of most peers is a great defect, and the apparent indifference is a dangerous defect.  As far as politics go there is profound truth in Lord Chesterfield’s axiom, that “the world must judge of you by what you seem, not by what you are”.  The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.  An assembly—­a revising assembly especially—­which does not assemble, which looks as if it does not care how it revises, is defective in a main political ingredient.  It may be of use, but it will hardly convince mankind that it is so.