The prerogatives of the Senate do, indeed, render our legislative system more complex, and for that reason possibly more cumbersome, than the British; for our Senate can do more than the House of Lords. It can not only question and stay the judgment of the Commons, but may always with perfect safety act upon its own judgment and gainsay the more popular chamber to the end of the longest chapter of the bitterest controversy. It is quite as free to act as is any other branch of the government, and quite as sure to have its acts regarded. But there is safety and ease in the fact that the Senate never wishes to carry its resistance to the House to that point at which resistance must stay all progress in legislation; because there is really a "latent unity" between the Senate and the House which makes continued antagonism between them next to impossible--certainly in the highest degree improbable. The Senate and the House are of different origins, but virtually of the same nature. The Senate is less democratic than the House, and consequently less sensible to transient phases of public opinion; but it is no less sensible than the House of its ultimate accountability to the people, and is consequently quite as obedient to the more permanent and imperative judgments of the public mind. It cannot be carried so quickly by every new sentiment, but it can be carried quickly enough. There is a main chance of election time for it as well as for the House to think about. By the mode of its election and the greater length of the term by which its seats are held, the Senate is almost altogether removed from that temptation to servile obedience to the whims of popular constituencies to which the House is constantly subject, without as much courage as the Senate has to guard its virtue. But the men who compose the Senate are of the same sort as the members of the House of Representatives, and represent quite as various classes. Nowadays many of the Senators are, indeed, very rich men, and there has come to be a great deal of talk about their vast wealth and the supposed aristocratic tendencies which it is imagined to breed. But even the rich Senators cannot be said to be representatives of a class, as if they were all opulent wool-growers or great land-owners. Their wealth is in all sorts of stocks, in all sorts of machinery, in all sorts of buildings, in possessions of all the sorts possible in a land of bustling commerce and money-making industries. They have made their money in a hundred different ways, or have inherited it from fathers who amassed it in enterprises too numerous to imagine; and they have it invested here, there, and everywhere, in this, that, and everything. Their wealth represents no class interests, but all the interests of the commercial world. It represents the majority of the nation, in a word; and so they can probably be trusted not to neglect one set of interests for another; not to despoil the trader for