more than four persons shall have seats in the House at one time as peers for life.”  Such an arrangement would have introduced a new practice, but not a new principle, since the annexation of a seat in the House of Lords to certain offices had existed from time immemorial in the case of the bishops.  And the bill was carried in the House of Lords, but defeated in the Commons by a motion to refer it to a committee, which was adopted by a small majority, in a not very full House,[292] toward the end of the session.

Those who look at the question apart from all preference of one minister or one party to another will, probably, be of opinion that the decision of the committee, that a life peerage thus created by the crown could not confer a seat in Parliament, was conformable to the most legitimate view of the constitution.  It was, indeed, matter of history that in the Middle Ages the crown had exercised its prerogative in many ways which it had since abandoned.  Boroughs had been enfranchised, and again disfranchised, apparently from no motive but pure caprice; writs of summons had been withheld from peers.[293] But no one would have justified the repetition of such acts now.  And common-sense, as well as recognized usage, favored the doctrine that long disuse was a sufficient and lawful barrier against their revival.  That the power of conferring life peerages with a seat in Parliament—­of which, perhaps, the only undeniable instances were the cases of the brothers of Henry V., whose royal blood would in those days, probably, have been held to warrant an exception in their favor—­had not been exercised for full four hundred years, was admitted; and the assumption that so long a disuse of a power was tantamount to a tacit renunciation of it, is quite compatible with a loyal and due zeal for the maintenance of other parts of the prerogative which have suffered no such abatement.

If, however, we consider the expediency of the measure, or, in other words, the possible advantage that might ensue from the existence of a power to create life peerages with a seat in Parliament, opinions will probably be more divided.  We have seen that Lord Derby allowed that there might be advantages in such an exercise of power under certain limitations; and the existing system does, undoubtedly, appear open to improvement in certain cases.  At present the only mode of rewarding naval or military commanders who have performed brilliant and useful service, or a Speaker of the House of Commons, whose public career, though less showy and glorious, may at times have been scarcely less valuable, and has certainly been by far more irksome, is the grant of a peerage with a pension for lives.  Without the peerage they cannot have the pension.[294] And, consequently, many most distinguished officers, whose conspicuous merits well deserved conspicuous honors, have gone unrewarded except by some promotion of knighthood, which carries with it no substantial benefit; while the descendants