The Lords passed this Bill with amendments which the Commons refused to accept, and the Parliament Bill was returned to the Lords in August. But, as in 1832, the Prime Minister announced that he had received guarantees from the Crown that peers should be created to secure the passage of the Bill if it was again rejected; and to avoid the making of some three or four hundred Liberal peers, Lord Lansdowne--following the example of the Duke of Wellington--advised the Conservatives in the House of Lords to refrain from opposition. The result of this abstention was that the Lords' amendments were not persisted in, and the Bill passed the Lords on August 10th, 1911, by 131 to 114 votes. By this Parliament Act the Lords' veto is now strictly limited. The Lords may reject a Bill for two sessions, but if the Commons persist, then the Bill passes into law, whether the Lords approve or disapprove. The real grievance against the House of Lords, from the democratic standpoint, has been that its veto was only used when a Liberal government was in power. There is not even a pretence by the Upper House of revising the measures sent from the Commons by a Conservative ministry; yet over and over again, and especially in the last five years, Liberal measures have been rejected, or "amended" against the will of the Commons, by the Lords after the electors have returned the Liberals to power. The permanent and overwhelming Conservative majority in the Lords acts on the assumption that a Liberal ministry does not represent the will of the people, an assumption at variance with the present theory of democratic government, and in contradiction to the constitutional practice of the Crown. The great size of the House of Lords makes the difficulty of dealing with this majority so acute. In 1831 the creation of forty peerages would have been sufficient to meet the Tory opposition to the Reform Bill; to-day it is said that about four hundred are required to give the Liberals a working majority in the Lords. The rapid making of peers began under George III., but from 1830 to the present day Prime Minister after Prime Minister has added to the membership of the House of Lords with generous hand. Satire, savage and contemptuous, has been directed against the new peers by critics of various opinions, but still the work of adding to the House of hereditary legislators goes gaily on, and Liberal Prime Ministers have been as active as their Tory opponents in adding to the permanent Conservative majority in the Lords; for only a small minority of Liberal peers retain their allegiance to the Liberal Party. Thackeray gave us his view of the making of peers in the years when Lord Melbourne and his Whig successors were steadily adding to the Upper House. (Between 1835 and 1841 Melbourne made forty-four new peers, and twenty-eight more were added by 1856.)