gentlemen? As members of this House everybody respected and liked them; but they were looked upon as decent sort of mediocrities of the ordinary quality, which was converted, in course of time, into administrative Ministers. Take another class. Why were brewers selected as peers? Simply because they, of late, had accumulated very large fortunes by the sale of intoxicating liquors, and for no other reason. The names of Guinness, Bass, and Allsopp had been long household words in every public house in the country, but who ever heard of them as {240} politicians? Yet these gentlemen were considered to be the very best men in the country to be converted into hereditary peers. Another class who made money were the financiers. Lord Rothschild inherited a large fortune, and had increased that fortune, and no doubt spent his money in the most honourable way; but Lord Rothschild did nothing in the House of Commons in any way to distinguish himself. With brewers, when one was made a peer another must be made a peer for advertisement. So with financial houses; when a Rothschild was made a peer, it was necessary to fish up some one of the name of Baring, and one was converted into Lord Revelstoke--a gentleman who, though probably eminent in city circles, was hardly known to any one in that House, and who had never taken part in politics. So much for the composition of the House of Lords.... Deducting representative peers from Scotland and Ireland, and deducting members of the Royal family, and deducting bishops and archbishops, he found 470 peers sitting as hereditary peers in the House of Lords. He found that those peers had annually distributed among them £389,163, amounting on an average to £820 each (salaries from appointments under Civil List)--these rich men who would, with one accord, protest against the payment of members of the House of Commons. These were the rich men who were found at public meetings denouncing members from Ireland as a wretched crew, because, being mainly poor men, they received enough to enable them to live from their constituents. The peers were almost as careful of their relations as of themselves. In a valuable publication he saw it put down that, from 1874 to 1886, no fewer than 7000 relatives of peers had had places of emolument under the Government.... In the other House there were 120 Privy Councillors, of whom he ventured to say the majority had never heard. Orders had to be found for these gentlemen. Almost every one of them had a decoration. There were three decorations which were absolutely made for peers and for no other {241} body--the Garter, the Order of St. Patrick, and the Thistle. Walpole had declined a decoration 'because,' he said, 'why bribe myself?' Lord Melbourne said of the Garter that its pleasing feature was that there was 'no nonsense of merit about it.' An impression existed that private Bill legislation was more independent in the House of Lords than in that House. He