Lord Carnarvon spoke again in the Town Hall at Newbury
on Monday night, urging against the pamphlet called "The Peers and the People" some very curious pleas. He said that the House of Lords was Whig till the French Revolution, and then became Tory when the nation generally reflected the- reaction which the excesses of the Revolution caused; and he-
claimed for the Lords that they reflected faithfully "the temper of the nation and the times." This means that on almost every question on which there was a majority against improve- ment in the Commons, there was a much greater majority in the Lords ; that they resisted the mollification of a horrible
penal code, for instance, with a bitterness far greater than the-
Conservative House of Commons itself. Lord Carnarvon is keen against misrepresentation ; can he really answer it to his historical conscience to say—what he intends us to gather from his speech,—that between 1832 and Mr. Gladstone's accession to power, the House of Lords was in sympathy with the House of Commons ? It defeated even Lord Palmerston's most Liberal proposal,—we were about to say his only genuinely Liberal proposal,—the creation of Life Peers, and it threw its whole weight uniformly into the scale of the Conservative
home-policy. True, it has been much more Tory since the House of Commons became,—under Mr. Disraeli's hands,—
the register of working-class as well as of middle-class opinion.
That we do not deny at all. But that is the essence of the case for a reform of the Upper House. It will not do to have-
the Constitution torn asunder by Houses pulling different ways.
Yet hear Lord Carnarvon :—" If there was one institution in this country which was popular, it was the House of Lords. It was emphatically the people's House ; for unlike foreign aristocracies, it had no class, it had no caste, it had no privileges, it had no rights which it did not share fully with the people." Did "topsy-turvy world" ever before master so completely the imagination of a public speaker ?
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