Some of its members will presumably have brains, and thus they,
at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy within the social one.
They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of their intellect,
and they will rule the country by virtue of their aristocracy.
Thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the images
of God, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are neither
gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like Mr. Balfour
or Mr. Wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called
merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman.
But even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident,
from time to time some of the basically democratic quality which
belongs to a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to think how much
conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House
of Lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that
the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really
good defence of the House of Lords, though admirers of the peerage
are strangely coy about using it; and that is, that the House
of Lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men.
It really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible
body to point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed
their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked
by the average man in the Lords, who owed their power to accident.
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