If the House of Peers ever goes, it will go in a storm, and the storm will not leave all else as it is.  It will not destroy the House of Peers and leave the rich young peers, with their wealth and their titles, to sit in the Commons.  It would probably sweep all titles before it—­at least all legal titles—­and somehow or other it would break up the curious system by which the estates of great families all go to the eldest son.  That system is a very artificial one; you may make a fine argument for it, but you cannot make a loud argument, an argument which would reach and rule the multitude.  The thing looks like injustice, and in a time of popular passion it would not stand.  Much short of the compulsory equal division of the Code Napoleon, stringent clauses might be provided to obstruct and prevent these great aggregations of property.  Few things certainly are less likely than a violent tempest like this to destroy large and hereditary estates.  But then, too, few things are less likely than an outbreak to destroy the House of Lords—­my point is, that a catastrophe which levels one will not spare the other.

I conceive, therefore, that the great power of the House of Lords should be exercised very timidly and very cautiously.  For the sake of keeping the headship of the plutocracy, and through that of the nation, they should not offend the plutocracy; the points upon which they have to yield are mostly very minor ones, and they should yield many great points rather than risk the bottom of their power.  They should give large donations out of income, if by so doing they keep, as they would keep, their capital intact.  The Duke of Wellington guided the House of Lords in this manner for years, and nothing could prosper better for them or for the country, and the Lords have only to go back to the good path in which he directed them.

The events of 1870 caused much discussion upon life peerages, and we have gained this great step, that whereas the former leader of the Tory party in the Lords—­Lord Lyndhurst—­defeated the last proposal to make life peers, Lord Derby, when leader of that party, desired to create them.  As I have given in this book what seemed to me good reasons for making them, I need not repeat those reasons here; I need only say how the notion stands in my judgment now.

I cannot look on life peerages in the way in which some of their strongest advocates regard them; I cannot think of them as a mode in which a permanent opposition or a contrast between the Houses of Lords and Commons is to be remedied.  To be effectual in that way, life peerages must be very numerous.  Now the House of Lords will never consent to a very numerous life peerage without a storm; they must be in terror to do it, or they will not do it.  And if the storm blows strongly enough to do so much, in all likelihood it will blow strongly enough to do much more.  If the revolution is powerful enough and eager enough to make an immense number of life peers, probably