in leisurely fashion into the House, filled with the assumption that there would be ample opportunity for them to carry on the debate. Even yet, however, all was not over. According to the procedure of the House, it was not enough that the motion for the third reading of the {167} Bill should be carried. It was still necessary to propose the motion that the Bill do now pass. The moment this motion was proposed the torrent of opposition, frozen up for a too-short interval, began to flow again in full volume. The nature of the formal motion gave opportunity for renewed attacks on the whole purpose of the Bill, and all the old, familiar, outworn arguments were repeated by orator after orator from the Tory benches. But this, too, had to come to an end. The House was no longer in committee, and each member could only speak once on this final motion. Of course, there could be motions for adjournment, and on each such motion, put as an amendment, there would be opportunity for a fresh debate; but the leaders of the Opposition were beginning to see that there was nothing of much account to be done any longer in the House of Commons, and that their hopes of resisting the progress of reform must turn to the House of Lords. So the Reform Bill passed at last through the House of Commons, and then all over the country was raised the cry, "What will the Lords do with it?" Soon the temper of the more advanced Reformers throughout the country began to change its tone, and the question eagerly put was not so often what will the Lords do with the Bill? but what shall we do with the House of Lords? At every great popular meeting held throughout the constituencies an outcry was raised against the House of Lords as a part of the constitutional system, and no speaker was more welcome on a public platform than the orator who called for the abolition of the hereditary principle in the formation of legislators. One might have thought that the agitation which broke out all over the country, and the manner in which almost all Reformers seemed to have taken it for granted that the hereditary Chamber must be the enemy of all reform, might have put the peers on their guard and taught them the unwisdom of accepting the imputation against them, and thus proving that they had no sympathy with the cause of the people. But the great majority of the Tory peers of that day had not yet risen to the idea that there could be any {168} wisdom in any demand made by men who had no university education, who had not what was then described as a stake in the country. The voice of the people was simply regarded as the voice of the rabble, and the Tory peers had no notion of allowing themselves to be guided by any appeal coming from such a quarter. [Sidenote: 1831--The Reform Bill in the Lords]