Owing to very curious circumstances English parties have not alternated in power, as a good deal of speculation predicts they would, and a good deal of current language assumes they have.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
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Consequently, each continuously-governing party has had the means of modifying the Upper House to suit its views.
The profuse Tory creations of half a century had made the House of Lords bigotedly Tory before the first Reform Act, but it is wonderfully mitigated now.
Whether the English Peerage be or be not predominantly now Tory, it is certainly not Tory after the fashion of the Toryism of 1832.
It is not from men of large wealth that a very great impetus to organic change should be expected.
The addition of a contrasting mass would have excited the old leaven, but the delicate infusion of ingredients similar in genus, though different in species, has modified the new compound without irritating the old original.
He, as the head of the predominant party, is the proper person to modify gradually the permanent chamber which, perhaps, was at starting hostile to him; and, at any rate, can be best harmonised with the public opinion he represents by the…
Hardly any contrived constitution possesses a machinery for modifying its secondary house so delicate, so flexible, and so constant.
The catastrophic creation of peers for the purpose of swamping the Upper House is utterly different.
It is a power only to be used on great occasions, when the object is immense, and the party strife unmitigated.
This is the conclusive, the swaying power of the moment, and of course, therefore, it had better be in the hands of a power both capable and impartial, than of a Premier who must in some degree be a partisan.
The value of a discreet, calm, wise monarch, if such should happen to be reigning at the acute crisis of a nation's destiny, is priceless.
He may prevent years of tumult, save bloodshed and civil war, lay up a store of grateful fame to himself, prevent the accumulated intestine hatred of each party to its opposite.
But of large thought and comprehensive statesmanship she was as destitute as Mrs.
He was a very conscientious king, but at the same time an exceedingly weak king.
It is a strange instance of high-placed weakness and conscientious vacillation.
A more striking example of well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be found in history.
No one who reads it carefully will doubt that the discretionary power of making peers would have been far better in Lord Grey's hands than in the king's.
In fact, you may place power in weak hands at a revolution, but you cannot keep it in weak hands.
An ordinary hereditary sovereign--a William IV., or a George IV.--is unfit to exercise the peer-creating power when most wanted.
A half-insane king, like George III., would be worse.
He might use it by unaccountable impulse when not required, and refuse to use it out of sullen madness when required.
The existence of a fancied check on the Premier is in truth an evil, because it prevents the enforcement of a real check.
Queen Anne's case and William IV.'s case prove that neither object is certainly attained by entrusting this critical and extreme force to the chance idiosyncrasies and habitual mediocrity of an hereditary sovereign.
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.
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