ense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history
to look out for and read for--if he has not found it--it was that
the kings of England all the way from the Norman Conquest down to
the times of Charles I. had appointed, so far as they knew, those who
deserved to be appointed, peers. They were all Royal men, with minds
full of justice and valour and humanity, and all kinds of qualities
that are good for men to have who ought to rule over others. Then
their genealogy was remarkable--and there is a great deal more in
genealogies than is generally believed at present.

I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid
people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will
see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in
mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the
family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that
it goes for a great deal--the hereditary principle in Government as in
other things; and it must be recognised so soon as there is any fixity
in things.

You will remark that if at any time the genealogy of a peerage
fails--if the man that actually holds the peerage is a fool in these
earnest striking times, the man gets into mischief and gets into
treason--he gets himself extinguished altogether, in fact. (Laughter.)

From these documents of old Collins it seems that a peer conducts
himself in a solemn, good, pious, manly kind of way when he takes
leave of life, and when he has hospitable habits, and is valiant in
his procedure throughout; and that in general a King, with a noble
approximation to what was right, had nominated this man, saying "Come
you to me, sir; come out of the common level of the people, where
you are liable to be trampled upon; come here and take a district of
country and make it into your own image more or less; be a king under
me, and understand that that is your function." I say this is the most
divine thing that a human being can do to other human beings, and no
kind of being whatever has so much of the character of God Almighty's
Divine Government as that thing we see that went all over England, and
that is the grand soul of England's history.

It is historically true that down to the time of Charles I., it was
not understood that any man was made a peer without having a merit in
him to constitute him a proper subject for a peerage. In Charles
I.'s time it grew to be kn