The work which the Duke of Wellington in part performed has now, therefore, to be completed also.  He met the half difficulty; we have to surmount the whole one.  We have to frame such tacit rules, to establish such ruling but unenacted customs, as will make the House of Lords yield to the Commons when and as often as our new Constitution requires that it should yield.  I shall be asked, How often is that, and what is the test by which you know it?  I answer that the House of Lords must yield whenever the opinion of the Commons is also the opinion of the nation, and when it is clear that the nation has made up its mind.  Whether or not the nation has made up its mind is a question to be decided by all the circumstances of the case, and in the common way in which all practical questions are decided.  There are some people who lay down a sort of mechanical test; they say the House of Lords should be at liberty to reject a measure passed by the Commons once or more, and then if the Commons send it up again and again, infer that the nation is determined.  But no important practical question in real life can be uniformly settled by a fixed and formal rule in this way.  This rule would prove that the Lords might have rejected the Reform Act of 1832.  Whenever the nation was both excited and determined, such a rule would be an acute and dangerous political poison.  It would teach the House of Lords that it might shut its eyes to all the facts of real life and decide simply by an abstract formula.  If in 1832 the Lords had so acted, there would have been a revolution.  Undoubtedly there is a general truth in the rule.  Whether a bill has come up once only, or whether it has come up several times, is one important fact in judging whether the nation is determined to have that measure enacted; it is an indication, but it is only one of the indications.  There are others equally decisive.  The unanimous voice of the people may be so strong, and may be conveyed through so many organs, that it may be assumed to be lasting.

Englishmen are so very miscellaneous, that that which has really convinced a great and varied majority of them for the present may fairly be assumed to be likely to continue permanently to convince them.  One sort might easily fall into a temporary and erroneous fanaticism, but all sorts simultaneously are very unlikely to do so.

I should venture so far as to lay down for an approximate rule, that the House of Lords ought, on a first-class subject, to be slow?—­ very slow—­in rejecting a Bill passed even once by a large majority of the House of Commons.  I would not of course lay this down as an unvarying rule; as I have said, I have for practical purposes no belief in unvarying rules.  Majorities may be either genuine or fictitious, and if they are not genuine, if they do not embody the opinion of the representative as well as the opinion of the constituency, no one would wish to have any attention paid to them.  But if the opinion of the nation be strong and be universal, if it be really believed by members of Parliament, as well as by those who send them to Parliament, in my judgment the Lords should yield at once, and should not resist it.