refusing his royal assent to a measure passed by
the two Houses, merely because no sovereign since William III. had so
exercised his royal prerogative. And against the authority of Mr. Pitt
and Lord Grey he quoted that of Lord John Russell, who, in 1851, had
offered a life peerage to an eminent judge, who, though he had declined
the offer, had been influenced in his refusal by no doubt of the right
of the crown to make it.

On the expediency of the measure its opponents had urged that it would
effect a remodelling of the House of Peers, a total change of its
constitution, by the introduction of a second and distinct class of
peerages; and Lord Campbell, with a not unbecoming jealousy for what he
regarded as the interests of his brother lawyers, argued that it would
"henceforth prevent any lawyer, however eminent he might have been as an
advocate, whatever services he might have rendered to the state in the
House of Commons, whatever fame or fortune he might have acquired, from
aspiring to an hereditary peerage, or to becoming the founder of a
family, since, to make a distinction between the Chancellor and the
Chief-justice, between one Chancellor or Chief-justice and another, when
coming into the Upper House, as to the tenure of their honors, would be
intolerable; all must be under the same rule, 'no son of theirs
succeeding.'" And Lord Lyndhurst closed his argument by drawing a
comparison between the House of Lords and the French Senate: "It was but
a few weeks since he had read an official comment in the _Moniteur_,
coming from the highest source, on the inefficiency, the want of
patriotism, energy, and the backwardness to fulfil the high destinies to
which they were called, that characterized that illustrious body, the
Senate of France. He had no disposition to cut down our tribunal to that
life interest on which the Senate of France is based, as he believed the
hereditary character of the House of Lords to be one from which great
and important advantages are derived.... The hereditary principle," he
added, "is intwined in every part of our constitution; we in this House
enjoy our hereditary rights in common with the crown; we mutually
support and assist each other, and we form a barrier and defence to
protect both those branches of the constitution against any by whom they
may be assailed."

As Lord Granville had made the expediency of any measure the quality
which, combined with legality, was sufficient to establ