ound it when a judge; but he never did find
it. He never looked for it. He was a great partisan, and he applied a
capacity of argument, and a faculty of intellectual argument rarely
equalled, to support the tenets of his party. The proposal to create
life peers was proposed by the antagonistic party--was at the moment
likely to injure his own party. To him this was a great opportunity.
The speech he delivered on that occasion lives in the memory of those
who heard it. His eyes did not at that time let him read, so he
repeated by memory, and quite accurately, all the black-letter
authorities, bearing on the question. So great an intellectual effort
has rarely been seen in an English assembly. But the result was
deplorable. Not by means of his black-letter authorities, but by means
of his recognised authority and his vivid impression, he induced the
House of Lords to reject the proposition of the Government. Lord
Lyndhurst said the Crown could not now create life peers, and so there
are no life peers. The House of Lords rejected the inestimable, the
unprecedented opportunity of being tacitly reformed. Such a chance does
not come twice. The life peers who would have been then introduced
would have been among the first men in the country. Lord Macaulay was
to have been among the first; Lord Wensleydale--the most learned and
not the least logical of our lawyers--to be the very first. Thirty or
forty such men, added judiciously and sparingly as years went on, would
have given to the House of Lords the very element which, as a
criticising chamber, it needs so much. It would have given it critics.
The most accomplished men in each department might then, without
irrelevant considerations of family and of fortune, have been added to
the Chamber of Review. The very element which was wanted to the House
of Lords was, as it were, by a constitutional providence, offered to
the House of Lords, and they refused it. By what species of effort that
error can be repaired I cannot tell; but, unless it is repaired, the
intellectual capacity can never be what it would have been, will never
be what it ought to be, will never be sufficient for its work.

Another reform ought to have accompanied the creation of life peers.
Proxies ought to have been abolished. Some time or other the slack
attendance of the House of Lords will destroy the House of Lords. There
are occasions in which appearances are realities, and this is one of
them. The House of