Walter Bagehot

The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.

The democratic passions gain by fomenting a diffused excitement, and by massing men in concourses; the aristocratic sentiments gain by calm and quiet, and act most on men by themselves, in their families, and when female influence is not…

The overt electioneering power of the Lords does not at all equal its real social power.

The selfish instinct of the mass of peers on this point is a keener and more exact judge of the real world than the fine intelligence of one or two of them.

If the House of Peers ever goes, it will go in a storm, and the storm will not leave all else as it is.

It would probably sweep all titles before it--at least all legal titles--and somehow or other it would break up the curious system by which the estates of great families all go to the eldest son.

That system is a very artificial one; you may make a fine argument for it, but you cannot make a loud argument, an argument which would reach and rule the multitude.

The thing looks like injustice, and in a time of popular passion it would not stand.

Much short of the compulsory equal division of the Code Napoleon, stringent clauses might be provided to obstruct and prevent these great aggregations of property.

But then, too, few things are less likely than an outbreak to destroy the House of Lords--my point is, that a catastrophe which levels one will not spare the other.

For the sake of keeping the headship of the plutocracy, and through that of the nation, they should not offend the plutocracy; the points upon which they have to yield are mostly very minor ones, and they should yield many great points…

I cannot look on life peerages in the way in which some of their strongest advocates regard them; I cannot think of them as a mode in which a permanent opposition or a contrast between the Houses of Lords and Commons is to be remedied.

Now the House of Lords will never consent to a very numerous life peerage without a storm; they must be in terror to do it, or they will not do it.

And if the storm blows strongly enough to do so much, in all likelihood it will blow strongly enough to do much more.

If the revolution is powerful enough and eager enough to make an immense number of life peers, probably it will sweep away the hereditary principle in the Upper Chamber entirely.

But in politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the regular and plain probabilities.

To speak mathematically, we may easily miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our minds with its cusps and conjugate points.

Most clever men who are in such a good place as the House of Lords plainly is, will be very unwilling to lose it if they can help it; at the clear call of a great duty they might lose it, but only at such a call.

And it does not take a clever man to see that systematic opposition of the Commons is the only thing which can endanger the Lords, or which will make an individual peer cease to be a peer.

The greater you make the SENSE of the Lords, the more they will see that their plain interest is to make friends of the plutocracy, and to be the chiefs of it, and not to wish to oppose the Commons where that plutocracy rules.

But in the present English world such a House of Lords would soon lose all influence.

The English people would think it grossly anomalous if their elected assembly of rich men were thwarted by a nominated assembly of talkers and writers.

Sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by, and a peerage of genius would not compare with it in power.

But it is not unnatural that persons of high rank and of great ability should be unwilling to bend to persons of lower rank, and of certainly not greater ability.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.