Properly speaking, he protested, Peers cannot be created.  You might as well put terriers into kennels and call them foxhounds.  Now and then a distinguished soldier or even a statesman could be ennobled without much harm; and he supposed there was something to be said for a learned man, and a writer or two, though he preferred them to be childless.  He had once published a book himself, with the Runnymede arms on the cover.  But the thought of making Lords by batches vulgarised the King’s majesty, and reversed the order of nature.  “Are we worse than Chinamen,” he asked, “that we seek to confer nobility on fellows sprung from unknown forefathers?” The Archbishop of Canterbury had appealed to the House to approach the question with mutual consideration and respect, high public spirit and common sense.  But on such a question consideration was dangerous, and common sense fatal.  He wished the Bishops had stuck to their own Convocation from Plantagenet times, instead of intruding their inharmonious white sleeves where they were not wanted.  He was sorry he had subscribed so handsomely to the restoration of Stennynge Church.  He ought to have ear-marked his contribution for the Runnymede aisle.

Worse still, the Archbishop had mentioned “the average voter in tramcar or railway train,” and the words had called up a haunting vision of disgust.  He often said that he had no objection to the working classes as such.  He rather liked them.  He found them intelligent and unpretentious.  He could converse with them without effort, and they always had the interest of sport in common.  He felt no depression in passing through the working quarters of the city, and at Stennynge he was well acquainted with all the cottagers and farmers alike.  In one family he had put out a puppy at walk; in another he had let off a man who had poached a pheasant when his wife was ill; in a third he had stood godfather to the baby when the father was killed falling from a stack.  He felt a kind of warmth towards the poor whenever he saw them upon his own estate.

But of the average voter, such as the Archbishop described, he could not think without pain and apprehension.  Coming to London from any part of the country, he always closed his eyes as the train entered the suburbs.  Those long rows of monotonous little houses—­so decent, so uneventful, so temporary—­oppressed him like a physical disease.  If he contemplated them, they induced violent dyspepsia, such as he had once incurred by visiting the Crystal Palace.  The consciousness that they were there, even as he passed through tunnels, lowered his vitality until he reached his town house or club in the centre of things.  Not even the considerable income he derived from land on the outskirts of a large manufacturing town consoled him for the horror of the town’s extension.  In those uniform houses—­in their railings, their Venetian blinds, indiarubber plants, and stained-glass panels to the doors—­he beheld the coming degradation of his country.