xion of the House of Lords. From the time
of the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George II. in 1760, the Lords
were Whiggish, and the majority of English nobles held Whig principles.
They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of
the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the
Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons
when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers,
the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and
complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share in the Second Partition
Treaty of 1699, and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the
Tory Commons and the Whig Lords. An attempt was made by the Commons to
impeach Walpole on his fall in 1742, but the Lords threw out a Bill
proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable,
and the King made Walpole a peer. George III., by an unsparing use of his
prerogative, changed the character and politics of the Upper House. His
creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own "pocket"
boroughs in the House of Commons, and lawyers who supported the Royal
prerogative.[69]

From George III.'s time onward there has always been a standing and
ever-increasing majority of Tory peers in the House of Lords. And while the
actual number of members of the Upper House has been enlarged enormously,
this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. Liberal and Tory
Prime Ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the
peerage--no less than 376 new peers were created between 1800 and 1907; but
comparatively few Liberals retained their principles when they became
peers, and two of the present chiefs of the Unionist Party in the House of
Lords--Lords Lansdowne and Selborne--are the sons of eminent Liberals.

So it has come about that while the House of Commons has been steadily
opening its doors to men of all ranks and classes, and in our time has
become increasingly democratic in character, the House of Lords, confined
in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous
assembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active
politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are Conservatives.

This change in the House of Lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of
George III., when the Whig ascendancy in Parliament had passed. Bu