Though these reasonings however are not destitute of considerable weight, and the unlimited prerogative of augmenting the peerage is liable to such abuses, at least in theory, as might overthrow our form of government; while, in the opinion of some, whether erroneous or not, it has actually been exerted with too little discretion, the arguments against any legal limitation seem more decisive. The Crown has been carefully restrained by statutes, and by the responsibility of its advisers; the Commons, if they transgress their boundaries, are annihilated by a proclamation; but against the ambition, or, what is much more likely, the perverse haughtiness of the aristocracy, the constitution has not furnished such direct securities. And, as this would be prodigiously enhanced by a consciousness of their power, and by a sense of self-importance which every peer would derive from it after the limitation of their numbers, it might break out in pretensions very galling to the people, and in an oppressive extension of privileges which were already sufficiently obnoxious and arbitrary. It is true that the resource of subduing an aristocratical faction by the creation of new peers could never be constitutionally employed, except in the case of a nearly equal balance; but it might usefully hang over the heads of the whole body, and deter them from any gross excesses of faction or oligarchical spirit. The nature of our government requires a general harmony between the two houses of parliament; and indeed any systematic opposition between them would of necessity bring on the subordination of one to the other in too marked a manner; nor had there been wanting within the memory of man, several instances of such jealous and even hostile sentiments as could only be allayed by the inconvenient remedies of a prorogation or a dissolution. These animosities were likely to revive with more bitterness, when the country gentlemen and leaders of the commons should come to look on the nobility as a class into which they could not enter, and the latter should forget more and more, in their inaccessible dignity, the near approach of that gentry to themselves in respectability of birth and extent of possessions.[346]