have given to the House of Lords the very element which, as a criticising chamber, it needs so much.  It would have given it critics.  The most accomplished men in each department might then, without irrelevant considerations of family and of fortune, have been added to the Chamber of Review.  The very element which was wanted to the House of Lords was, as it were, by a constitutional providence, offered to the House of Lords, and they refused it.  By what species of effort that error can be repaired I cannot tell; but, unless it is repaired, the intellectual capacity can never be what it would have been, will never be what it ought to be, will never be sufficient for its work.

Another reform ought to have accompanied the creation of life peers.  Proxies ought to have been abolished.  Some time or other the slack attendance of the House of Lords will destroy the House of Lords.  There are occasions in which appearances are realities, and this is one of them.  The House of Lords on most days looks so unlike what it ought to be, that most people will not believe it is what it ought to be.  The attendance of considerate peers will, for obvious reasons, be larger when it can no longer be overpowered by the non-attendance, by the commissioned votes of inconsiderate peers.  The abolition of proxies would have made the House of Lords a real House; the addition of life peers would have made it a good House.

The greater of these changes would have most materially aided the House of Lords in the performance of its subsidiary functions.  It always perhaps happens in a great nation, that certain bodies of sensible men posted prominently in its Constitution, acquire functions, and usefully exercise functions, which at the outset, no one expected from them, and which do not identify themselves with their original design.  This has happened to the House of Lords especially.  The most obvious instance is the judicial function.  This is a function which no theorist would assign to a second chamber in a new Constitution, and which is matter of accident in ours.  Gradually, indeed, the unfitness of the second chamber for judicial functions has made itself felt.  Under our present arrangements this function is not entrusted to the House of Lords, but to a Committee of the House of Lords.  On one occasion only, the trial of O’Connell, the whole House, or some few in the whole House, wished to vote, and they were told they could not, or they would destroy the judicial prerogative.  No one, indeed, would venture really to place the judicial function in the chance majorities of a fluctuating assembly:  it is so by a sleepy theory; it is not so in living fact.  As a legal question, too, it is a matter of grave doubt whether there ought to be two supreme courts in this country—­the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and (what is in fact though not in name) the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords.  Up to a very recent time, one committee might decide that a man was sane as to