In the parliament that passed these laws the greater proportion were college men. I suppose probably three-fourths of the members of both houses had been at the university. Now that the question of the abolition of the House of Lords is occupying much attention, we sometimes hear of it as a mediaeval institution. It is spoken of as an inheritance from an earlier and ruder time. I wonder how much the people who talk thus know about the realities. They must be densely ignorant of what the House of Lords used to be. At the present moment there are in the English House of Lords 627 members, only {425} 75 of whom do not owe their position directly or solely to the accident of birth. Even about half of this seventy-five can only be selected from the hereditary nobility of Scotland and of Ireland. In the Middle Ages it was quite different. Until the reformation so-called the Lords Spiritual formed a majority of the House of Lords. They consisted not only of the bishops but of the abbots and priors of monasteries and the masters of the various religious and knightly orders. This upper chamber of the olden time was elected in the best possible sense of the word. They were usually men who had risen from the ranks of the people and who had been chosen because of their unselfishness to be heads of religious houses and religious orders. There were abuses by which some of these Lords Spiritual obtained their places by what we now call pull, but the great majority of them were selected for their virtues, and because they had shown their power to rule over themselves had been chosen to rule over others. They were men who could own nothing for themselves and families, and in whom every motive, human and divine, appealed to make life as happy as possible for others. They were all of them university men. Compare for a moment the present House of Lords with that House of Lords and you will see the difference between the old time and the present. No wonder England was merry England, no wonder historian {426} after historian has declared that the people were happier at this time than they have ever been before or since, no wonder men had leisure to make great monuments of genius in architecture, in the arts and in literature. No wonder the universities, in the form in which they have been useful to mankind ever since, were organized in this century; no wonder all our rights and liberties come to us. Great generations of the university men nobly did their work.