If you examine carefully the lists of members, especially of the most prominent members, of either side of the House, you will not find that they are in general aristocratic names.
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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Considering the power and position of the titled aristocracy, you will perhaps be astonished at the small degree in which it contributes to the active part of our governing assembly.
The spirit of our present House of Commons is plutocratic, not aristocratic; its most prominent statesmen are not men of ancient descent or of great hereditary estate; they are men mostly of substantial means, but they are mostly, too…
We have to frame such tacit rules, to establish such ruling but unenacted customs, as will make the House of Lords yield to the Commons when and as often as our new Constitution requires that it should yield.
I answer that the House of Lords must yield whenever the opinion of the Commons is also the opinion of the nation, and when it is clear that the nation has made up its mind.
But no important practical question in real life can be uniformly settled by a fixed and formal rule in this way.
Whenever the nation was both excited and determined, such a rule would be an acute and dangerous political poison.
It would teach the House of Lords that it might shut its eyes to all the facts of real life and decide simply by an abstract formula.
If in 1832 the Lords had so acted, there would have been a revolution.
Whether a bill has come up once only, or whether it has come up several times, is one important fact in judging whether the nation is determined to have that measure enacted; it is an indication, but it is only one of the indications.
The unanimous voice of the people may be so strong, and may be conveyed through so many organs, that it may be assumed to be lasting.
One sort might easily fall into a temporary and erroneous fanaticism, but all sorts simultaneously are very unlikely to do so.
I should venture so far as to lay down for an approximate rule, that the House of Lords ought, on a first-class subject, to be slow--very slow--in rejecting a Bill passed even once by a large majority of the House of Commons.
Majorities may be either genuine or fictitious, and if they are not genuine, if they do not embody the opinion of the representative as well as the opinion of the constituency, no one would wish to have any attention paid to them.
But if the opinion of the nation be strong and be universal, if it be really believed by members of Parliament, as well as by those who send them to Parliament, in my judgment the Lords should yield at once, and should not resist it.
As a theoretical writer I can venture to say, what no elected member of Parliament, Conservative or Liberal, can venture to say, that I am exceedingly afraid of the ignorant multitude of the new constituencies.
But a dissension between the Lords and Commons divides that resisting power; as I have explained, the House of Commons still mainly represents the plutocracy, the Lords represent the aristocracy.
The main interest of both these classes is now identical, which is to prevent or to mitigate the rule of uneducated numbers.
But to prevent it effectually, they must not quarrel among themselves; they must not bid one against the other for the aid of their common opponent.
The two great bodies of the educated rich go to the constituencies to decide between them, and the majority of the constituencies now consist of the uneducated poor.
In all countries new wealth is ready to worship old wealth, if old wealth will only let it, and I need not say that in England new wealth is eager in its worship.
Satirist after satirist has told us how quick, how willing, how anxious are the newly-made rich to associate with the ancient rich.
Nothing can be more politically useful than such homage, if it be skilfully used; no folly can be idler than to repel and reject it.
The worship is the more politically important because it is the worship of the political superior for the political inferior.
At an election the non-titled are much more powerful than the titled.
Politicians like Walter Bagehot
