There is another reason.  The House of Lords, being an hereditary chamber, cannot be of more than common ability.  It may contain—­it almost always has contained, it almost always will contain—­ extraordinary men.  But its average born law-makers cannot be extraordinary.  Being a set of eldest sons picked out by chance and history, it cannot be very wise.  It would be a standing miracle if such a chamber possessed a knowledge of its age superior to the other men of the age; if it possessed a superior and supplemental knowledge; if it descried what they did not discern, and saw truly that which they saw, indeed, but saw untruly.

The difficulty goes deeper.  The task of revising, of adequately revising the legislation of this age, is not only that which an aristocracy has no facility in doing, but one which it has a difficulty in doing.  Look at the statute book for 1865—­the statutes at large for the year.  You will find, not pieces of literature, not nice and subtle matters, but coarse matters, crude heaps of heavy business.  They deal with trade, with finance, with statute-law reform, with common-law reform; they deal with various sorts of business, but with business always.  And there is no educated human being less likely to know business, worse placed for knowing business than a young lord.  Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply.  But it does not look as if it did.  It is difficult to convince a young man, who can have the best of pleasure, that it will.  A young lord just come into 30,000 pounds a year will not, as a rule, care much for the law of patents, for the law of “passing tolls,” or the law of prisons.  Like Hercules, he may choose virtue, but hardly Hercules could choose business.  He has everything to allure him from it, and nothing to allure him to it.  And even if he wish to give himself to business, he has indifferent means.  Pleasure is near him, but business is far from him.  Few things are more amusing than the ideas of a well-intentioned young man, who is born out of the business world, but who wishes to take to business, about business.  He has hardly a notion in what it consists.  It really is the adjustment of certain particular means to equally certain particular ends.  But hardly any young man destitute of experience is able to separate end and means.  It seems to him a kind of mystery; and it is lucky if he do not think that the forms are the main part, and that the end is but secondary.  There are plenty of business men falsely so called, who will advise him so.  The subject seems a kind of maze.  “What would you recommend me to read?” the nice youth asks; and it is impossible to explain to him that reading has nothing to do with it, that he has not yet the original ideas in his mind to read about; that administration is an art as painting is an art; and that no book can teach the practice of either.