permitted to express a hope that the necessary dissolution of parliament within six months of a demise of the Crown will not long be thought congenial to the spirit of our modern government. _Peerage bill._--A far more unanimous sentence has been pronounced by posterity upon another great constitutional question, that arose under George I. Lord Sunderland persuaded the king to renounce his important prerogative of making peers; and a bill was supported by the ministry, limiting the House of Lords, after the creation of a very few more, to its actual numbers. The Scots were to have twenty-five hereditary, instead of sixteen elective, members of the house; a provision neither easily reconciled to the union, nor required by the general tenor of the bill. This measure was carried with no difficulty through the upper house, whose interests were so manifestly concerned in it. But a similar motive, concurring with the efforts of a powerful malcontent party, caused its rejection by the Commons.[344] It was justly thought a proof of the king's ignorance or indifference in everything that concerned his English Crown, that he should have consented to so momentous a sacrifice; and Sunderland was reproached for so audacious an endeavour to strengthen his private faction at the expense of the fundamental laws of the monarchy. Those who maintained the expediency of limiting the peerage, had recourse to uncertain theories as to the ancient constitution, and denied this prerogative to have been originally vested in the Crown. A more plausible argument was derived from the abuse, as it was then generally accounted, of creating at once twelve peers in the late reign, for the sole end of establishing a majority for the court; a resource which would be always at the command of successive factions, till the British nobility might become as numerous and venal as that of some European states. It was argued that there was a fallacy in concluding the collective power of the House of Lords to be augmented by its limitation, because every single peer would evidently become of more weight in the kingdom; that the wealth of the whole body must bear a less proportion to that of the nation, and would possibly not exceed that of the lower house, while on the other hand it might be indefinitely multiplied by fresh creations; that the Crown would lose one great engine of corrupt influence over the Commons, which could never be truly independent, while its principal members were looking on it as a stepping-stone to hereditary honours.[345]