has declared the only legislative qualifications of peers to consist in their being the first-born of persons possessing as little qualifications as themselves. While another politician cynically observes that they represent nobody but themselves, and enjoy the full confidence of their constituents. The House of Lords has long been the butt of the political satirist, and parliamentary reformers have attacked it for years patiently and persistently, hitherto without much success. "We owe the English Peerage to three sources," said a character in "Coningsby"; "the spoliation of the Church; the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts; and the borough-mongering of our own times." And this bitter criticism is often quoted to prove the weakness of any form of hereditary government. The suggestion that heredity can confer any peculiar qualifications, rendering a person more fit than his fellows for parliamentary power, is no doubt illogical, but not more so perhaps than a thousand other ideas which govern the affairs of men. The form of government by majority, for instance,--which Pope called "the madness of the many for the gain of a few"--is obviously open to criticism. Hereditary legislation has, at any rate in the eyes of its supporters, the merit of having answered well enough in practice, and, however theoretically indefensible, is not more so than hereditary kingship. The Sovereign does not inherit sagacity any more than the Duke of Norfolk, as Lord John Russell justly observed, and it would be unwise as well as unsafe to hang the Crown on the peg of an exception. It is as well, however, to remember that the Sovereign is a constitutional monarch whose powers nowadays are much restricted, whereas the Lords have the right to exercise a legislative veto the use of which kings have long since resigned. Talent is not hereditary. No man chooses a coachman, as the first Lord Halifax once remarked, because his father was a coachman before him. But the descendant of a long line of coachmen is likely to know more about the care of horses than the grandson of a pork butcher, however eminent; and the scion of a race of legislators is at least as fully qualified for the duties of a legislator as many a politician whose chief reason for entering Parliament is the desire to add the letters M.P. to his name. Nevertheless, as has been recently pointed out by tactless statisticians, the great men of the past have but seldom bequeathed their admirable qualities to their _eldest_ sons, and in a list of modern statesmen will be found but few of the names once famous in English history.