Of course, there would be many answers to such a contention,
as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no longer
a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers,
or that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so
leave the chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old
gentlemen with hobbies. But on some occasions the House of Lords,
even under all these disadvantages, is in some sense representative.
When all the peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone's
second Home Rule Bill, for instance, those who said that the
peers represented the English people, were perfectly right.
All those dear old men who happened to be born peers were at that moment,
and upon that question, the precise counterpart of all the dear old
men who happened to be born paupers or middle-class gentlemen.
That mob of peers did really represent the English people--that is
to say, it was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost unanimous,
and obviously wrong. Of course, rational democracy is better as an
expression of the public will than the haphazard hereditary method.
While we are about having any kind of democracy, let it be
rational democracy. But if we are to have any kind of oligarchy,
let it be irrational oligarchy.
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