The next defect is even more serious:  it affects not simply the apparent work of the House of Lords but the real work.  For a revising legislature, it is too uniformly made up.  Errors are of various kinds; but the constitution of the House of Lords only guards against a single error—­that of too quick change.  The Lords—­ leaving out a few lawyers and a few outcasts—­are all landowners of more or less wealth.  They all have more or less the opinions, the merits, the faults of that one class.  They revise legislation, as far as they do revise it, exclusively according to the supposed interests, the predominant feelings, the inherited opinions, of that class.  Since the Reform Act, this uniformity of tendency has been very evident.  The Lords have felt—­it would be harsh to say hostile, but still dubious, as to the new legislation.  There was a spirit in it alien to their spirit, and which when they could they have tried to cast out.  That spirit is what has been termed the “modern spirit”.  It is not easy to concentrate its essence in a phrase; it lives in our life, animates our actions, suggests our thoughts.  We all know what it means, though it would take an essay to limit it and define it.  To this the Lords object; wherever it is concerned, they are not impartial revisers, but biassed revisers.

This singleness of composition would be no fault; it would be, or might be, even a merit, if the criticism of the House of Lords, though a suspicious criticism, were yet a criticism of great understanding.  The characteristic legislation of every age must have characteristic defects; it is the outcome of a character, of necessity faulty and limited.  It must mistake some kind of things; it must overlook some other.  If we could get hold of a complemental critic, a critic who saw what the age did not see, and who saw rightly what the age mistook, we should have a critic of inestimable value.  But is the House of Lords that critic?  Can it be said that its unfriendliness to the legislation of the age is founded on a perception of what the age does not see, and a rectified perception of what the age does see?  The most extreme partisan, the most warm admirer of the Lords, if of fair and tempered mind, cannot say so.  The evidence is too strong.  On free trade, for example, no one can doubt that the Lords—­in opinion, in what they wished to do, and would have done, if they had acted on their own minds—­were utterly wrong.  This is the clearest test of the “modern spirit”.  It is easier here to be sure it is right than elsewhere.  Commerce is like war; its result is patent.  Do you make money or do you not make it?  There is as little appeal from figures as from battle.  Now no one can doubt that England is a great deal better off because of free trade; that it has more money, and that its money is diffused more as we should wish it diffused.  In the one case in which we can unanswerably test the modern spirit, it was right, and the dubious Upper House—­the House which would have rejected it, if possible—­ was wrong.