the old race.  An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.  He is sent abroad for show as well as for substance; he is to represent the Queen among foreign courts and foreign sovereigns.  An aristocracy is in its nature better suited to such work; it is trained to the theatrical part of life; it is fit for that if it is fit for anything.  But, with this exception, an aristocracy is necessarily inferior in business to the classes nearer business; and it is not, therefore, a suitable class, if we had our choice of classes, out of which to frame a chamber for revising matters of business.  It is indeed a singular example how natural business is to the English race, that the House of Lords works as well as it does.  The common appearance of the “whole House” is a jest—­a dangerous anomaly, which Mr. Bright will sometimes use; but a great deal of substantial work is done in “Committees,” and often very well done.  The great majority of the peers do none of their appointed work, and could do none of it; but a minority—­a minority never so large and never so earnest as in this age—­do it, and do it well.  Still no one, who examines the matter without prejudice, can say that the work is done perfectly.  In a country so rich in mind as England, far more intellectual power can be, and ought to be, applied to the revision of our laws.

And not only does the House of Lords do its work imperfectly, but often, at least, it does it timidly.  Being only a section of the nation, it is afraid of the nation.  Having been used for years and years, on the greatest matters to act contrary to its own judgment, it hardly knows when to act on that judgment.  The depressing languor with which it damps an earnest young peer is at times ridiculous.  “When the Corn Laws are gone, and the rotten boroughs, why tease about Clause IX. in the Bill to regulate Cotton Factories?” is the latent thought of many peers.  A word from the leaders, from “the Duke,” or Lord Derby, or Lord Lyndhurst, will rouse on any matters the sleeping energies; but most Lords are feeble and forlorn.

These grave defects would have been at once lessened, and in the course of years nearly effaced, if the House of Lords had not resisted the proposal of Lord Palmerston’s first Government to create peers for life.  The expedient was almost perfect.  The difficulty of reforming an old institution like the House of Lords is necessarily great; its possibility rests on continuous caste and ancient deference.  And if you begin to agitate about it, to bawl at meetings about it, that deference is gone, its particular charm lost, its reserved sanctity gone.  But, by an odd fatality, there was in the recesses of the Constitution an old prerogative which would have rendered agitation needless—­which would have effected, without agitation, all that agitation could have effected.  Lord Palmerston was—­now that he is dead, and his memory can be calmly viewed—­as firm a friend to an aristocracy, as thorough an aristocrat,