to the
House of Commons. Never, since Walpole's time, has the House of Lords
exercised any real influence over the political life of England. This
was not Walpole's doing; it was the doing of time and change, of
altered conditions and new forces. But Walpole saw the coming change,
and bent all the energies of his robust intellect to help and forward
it. Pulteney is in the same sense the author of {285} the modern
principle of Parliamentary opposition; but there is no reason to
believe that Pulteney saw what he was doing as clearly as Walpole did.
Until the beginning of Pulteney's brilliant career, the opposition
between parties had been mainly a competition for the ear and the favor
of the sovereign. Thus Harley strove against Marlborough, and
Bolingbroke against Harley, and the Whigs against Harley and
Bolingbroke. But the course of action taken by Pulteney against
Walpole converted the struggle into one of party against party, inside
and outside of the House of Commons. The object sought was the command
of a majority in the representative assembly. Pulteney showed how this
was to be obtained by the voices of the public out-of-doors as well as
by the votes of the elected representatives in Westminster. Walpole
had made it clear that in the House of Commons the battle was to be
fought; Pulteney showed that in the House of Commons the victory was to
be gained, not by the favor of the sovereign, but by the co-operation
of the people.

We have said in a former chapter that Pulteney's form of procedure,
become now a component part of our whole Parliamentary system, brings
with it some serious disadvantages from which, for the present, it is
not easy, it is not even possible, to see any way of escape. The
principle of government by party will some time or other come to be put
to the challenge in English political life. For the present, however,
we have only to make the best we can of it; and no one in his senses
can doubt that it was an immense advance on the system of back-stairs
influence and bedchamber intrigue, the policy, to use the great Conde's
expression, "of petticoats and alcoves," which prevailed in the days
when Mrs. Masham was competing with Sarah Jennings, and later still,
when Walpole was buying his way back to power through the influence of
the sovereign's wife, in co-operation with the sovereign's paramour.

The student of English history will have to turn with {286} close
attention to the reig