Mark again that the form of government which political writers call _bi-cameral_, that is to say, where the Legislative Assembly consists of two Chambers or Houses, arose out of one of the accidents of English History. The merits of that form of government are now freely under discussion, but it is assumed on both sides that the only choice lies between one chamber and two; no one proposes to have three or four(52). But most of the continental bodies of Estates consisted, as we have seen, of three Houses; in Sweden, where the peasants, the small freeholders, were important enough to be separately represented alongside of the Nobles, Clergy, and Citizens, there were till lately four(53). The number two became the number of our Houses of Parliament, not out of any conviction of the advantages of that number, but because it was found impossible to get the Clergy in England habitually to act, as they did elsewhere, as a regular member of the parliamentary body. They shrank from the burthen, or they deemed secular legislation inconsistent with their profession. Thus, instead of the Clergy forming, as they did in France, a distinct Estate of the Legislature, we got a Parliament of two Houses, Lords and Commons, attended by a kind of ecclesiastical shadow of the Parliament in the shape of the two Houses of the ecclesiastical Convocation. Thus, for all practical purposes, there were only two Estates in the English Parliament, Lords and Commons. Thus the phrase of the Three Estates, which had a meaning in France, became meaningless in England. For centuries back there has been no separate Estate of the Clergy; some of their highest members have belonged to the Estate of the Lords, and the rest to the Estate of the Commons. Hence has arisen a common but not unnatural misconception, a misconception as old as the days of the Long Parliament, as to the meaning of the phrase of the Three Estates. Men constantly use those words as if they meant the three elements among which the legislative power is divided, King, Lords, and Commons. But an Estate means a rank or order or class of men, like the Lords, the Clergy, or the Commons. The King is not an Estate, because there is no class or order of Kings, the King being one person alone by himself. The proper phrase is the King and the three Estates of the Realm. But in England, as I have already shown, the phrase is meaningless, as we have in truth two Estates only(54).