tribunal could it be summoned to answer? The Peers are now independent of the people, and would then be also independent of the Crown. There is hardly a great political reform known to modern England which, if the Peerage Bill had become law, would not have been absolutely rejected or else carried by a popular revolution. [Sidenote: 1720--The Irish House of Lords] Walpole attacked the Bill on every side. Such legislation, he insisted, "would in time bring back the Commons into the state of servile dependency they were in when they wore the badges of the Lords." It would, he contended, take away "one of the most powerful incentives to virtue, . . . since there would be no coming to honor but through the winding-sheet of an old decrepit lord and the grave of an extinct noble family." Walpole knew well his public and his time. He dwelt most strongly on this last consideration--that the Bill if passed into law would shut the gates of the Peerage against deserving Commoners. He asked indignantly how the House of Lords could expect the Commons to give their concurrence to a measure "by which they and their posterities are to be excluded from the Peerage." The commoner who, after this way of putting the matter, assented to the Bill, must either have been an unambitious bachelor, or have been blessed in a singularly unambitious wife. Steele, who, as we have seen, had fought gallantly against the Bill with his pen, now made a very effective speech against it. He showed that the {177} measure would, alter the whole constitutional position of the House of Lords, whether as a legislative chamber or a court of appeal. "The restraint of the Peers to a certain number will make the most powerful of them have all the rest under their direction, . . . and judges so made by the blind order of birth will be capable of no other way of decision." The prerogative, as Steele put it very clearly, "can do no hurt when ministers do their duty; but a settled number of Peers may abuse their power when no man is answerable for them, or can call them to account for their encroachments." The Bill was rejected by a majority of 269 votes against 177.