have the temerity to enter a
serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American
commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless
ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to
surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and
every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the
American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those
teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is
generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly
uninformed.

My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking
Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large
question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in
the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost
invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked
superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger
aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that
such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and
thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate
or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective
membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.

Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the
present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American
readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of
Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe,
Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts,
Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn
(Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount
Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.
Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the
ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something
of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be known to the
intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English
readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit
that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among
the members of the House of Commons or from among the membe