erely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. But
even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident, from
time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to
a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to think how much conservative
ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men
who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords
consisted of clever men. There is one really good defence of the House
of Lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using
it; and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper
strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible
defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the
clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in
the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed
their power to accident. Of course, there would be many answers to such
a contention, as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no
longer a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers, or
that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so leave the
chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with
hobbies. But on some occasions the House of Lords, even under all
these disadvantages, is in some sense representative. When all the
peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule
Bill, for instance, those who said that the peers represented the
English people, were perfectly right. All those dear old men who
happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question,
the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born
paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really
represent the English people--that is to say, it was honest, ignorant,
vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong. Of course,
rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than
the haphazard hereditary method. While we are about having any kind of
democracy, let it be rational democracy. But if we are to have any
kind of oligarchy, let it be irrational oligarchy. Then at least we
shall be ruled by men.

But the thing which is really required for the proper working of
democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic
philosophy, but the democratic emotion. The democratic emotion, like
most elementar