would be inadmissible; for, unless we were
prepared to bear our share of the burdens, we had no right to sit in
the taxing Assembly of the United Kingdom. The only House in which the
colonies, small or great, could be represented was the House of Lords;
and it appeared to me that, with a reformed House of Lords, this would
be quite practicable. An article in Fraser's Magazine, "Why not the
Lords, too?" had struck me much, and the lines on which it ran greatly
resemble those laid down by Lord Rosebery for lessening in number and
improving in character the unwieldy hereditary House of Peers; but
neither that writer nor Lord Rosebery grasped the idea that I made
prominent in an article I wrote for The Review, which was that the
reduction of the peers to 200, or any other number ought to be made on
the principle of proportional representation, because otherwise the
majority of the peers, being Conservative, an election on ordinary
lines would result in a selection of the most extreme Conservatives in
the body. My mother had pointed out to me that the 16 representative
Scottish peers elected by those who have not a seat as British peers,
for the duration of each Parliament, were the most Tory of the Tories,
and that the same could be said of the 28 representative peers for
Ireland elected for life. So, though the House of Lords contains a
respectable minority of Liberals, under no system of exclusively
majority representation could any of them be chosen among the 200. I
had the same idea of life peers to be added from the ranks of the
professions, of science, and of literature, unburdened by the weight
and cost of an hereditary title, that Lord Rosebery has; and into such
a body I thought that representatives of the great self-governing
colonies could enter, so that information about our resources, our
politics, and our sociology might be available, and might permeate the
press. But, greatly to my surprise, my article was sent back, but was
afterwards accepted by Fraser's Magazine. This was better for me, for
what would have been published for nothing in The Melbourne Review
brought me 8/15/0 from a good English magazine. I continued to write
for this review, until it ceased to exist, in 1885, literary and
political articles. The former included a second one on "George Eliot's
Life and Work," and one on "Honore de Balzac," which many of my friends
thought my best literary effort.

It was through Miss Martha Turner that I wa