if you cannot make yourself in any degree useful, and are thereby keeping out a better man, you can, and should, resign your seat.'

Now in the Lords this argument cannot apply. There, except in the case of newly created or Scotch and Irish representative peers, who are in a different position, a member's seat not only does not depend on his own choice or that of any elective body, but he has no voice in the matter. Directly his father (or family predecessor) dies, he becomes ipso facto, whether he likes it or not, a member of the House of Lords, and this position he cannot resign under any circumstances whatever. True he may never take his seat,' or attend the House, or even call himself by his proper title-in short, he may ignore his position, but he cannot alter it, or the civil disabilities which it entails by way of barring him from almost any civil employment. This, it seems to me, is a great hardship in the case of those men who really wish to make themselves useful in the world, and who are unable to extricate themselves from their somewhat false position. And it is not only a great hardship in many individual cases, but it is very bad policy. In these days of trial and inquiry we ought not to lose sight of the fact that individuals and institutions are mostly judged of, not by their intrinsic, but by their logical merit. An institution or a custom may have the plea of immemorial usage to speak for it; it may work very well now; it may do an immense deal of practical good every day; nay, its removal may obviously be productive of much serious evil. But if it cannot be supported by strict logical argument, if its advantages cannot be shown in plain black and white, if they do not lie obviously on the surface so as to commend themselves to the superficial admiration of the ignorant mob, that institution or that custom is certainly doomed. Now the great complaint of the day is, as above mentioned, the undue stress of work laid on the shoulders of Parliament, who cannot keep pace with it; and here we have one House working day after day and night after night, to the detriment of its own health and vigour, and still getting into arrears, while the other House does literally next to no work at all, and its members consequently scarcely ever attend, with the exception of those who are officially obliged to do so.

It is not my purpose to examine all the old threadbare arguments for and against a House of Lords. It may or may not be a vitally important part of our constitution. If it is the former, the sooner its advantages and practical working capabilities are made more obvious, the more lasting is its continuance likely to be. At present its position is a curious one. As a debating club, or rather a court of inquiry, it is admirable; as a Chamber, it is next door to a nonentity; as a public office, worthless.

What must strike every observer is that its strength is so much wasted. Its members are almost all of them men of honour, high feeling, and in a responsible position of life. They have, I suppose,

universally received a high and liberal education, and there are many and many of them who, if they were allowed to do so, and were to receive the smallest encouragement, would gladly come forward and take a useful share of public business, and train into good public servants, instead of being driven by the present system, too often it is to be feared, into habits of idleness.

'The independent peers will not attend,' say their detractors. The answer is conclusive. They do not attend because there is nothing for them to do, and they are not allowed to do anything.

That this complaint is no mere chimera is, I think, sufficiently shown by the fact of it having been a subject of actual debate, and also of more than one question addressed to the Government by the Opposition. I am perfectly aware that there have been, and are, exceptional cases of young independent peers rising to eminence in the House, but in almost every such case they have been aided by their great personal wealth and consequent influence on the constituencies, which has rendered them very undesirable persons for any government to treat with disrespect. Of course those peers who have already sat and made a reputation in the House of Commons will, no doubt, always continue their influence in the Lords; but these cases obviously do not fall within the limits of the present argument. They have been given fair play on entering Parliament, and have made brilliant use of their talents, and when they retire from the former scene of their labours their works follow them. It is a significant fact, that almost all the present ministry in the Lords, with the exception of the late Colonial Secretary, have previously sat and made their mark in the other House. There are again a few instances of men who have entered Parliament for the first time in the Upper House, and by dint of extraordinary talent and readiness have taken the House by storm, and established a position which they owe neither to personal influence nor favouritism. Such men will always rise in whatever society they may be placed; but at the same time there are many and many men who may not be of transcendent genius, or possess that rare faculty of being able to make a brilliant impression the first time they come forward, but who nevertheless have in them the making of good useful public men by means of judicious training and encouragement.

Is there, then, no remedy for all this? I am inclined to think the remedy lies in the hands of the Government, and might be applied with very little difficulty.

I would make two suggestions:

1. That more bills should originate in the House of Lords than at present.

It is sometimes said that the House of Commons would be jealous of this, and would exert pressure against such a plan. I cannot see on what grounds. Money bills could not of course originate else

where than in the Commons; but why should not the latter be relieved of a part of other business which not only is a severe burden and hindrance, but which is itself, in consequence of pressure of time, too often hurried over without proper attention being given to it? Witness the innumerable Acts of Parliament which are the scoff and delight of lawyers and the bane of many practical men of business, whose faults are mostly due to their never having been properly considered before they passed into law.

2. That more facilities should be given to members of the House of Lords to take some part in official work. A most excellent provision now attaches to the appointments of lords-in-waiting, viz.: that they shall work in some Government department during their tenure of office. They thus often semi-officially represent the department to which they are attached in the House, have to answer questions, get up details, and so on, all of which are so many good openings for a young man if he chooses to avail himself of them. I would suggest that this arrangement be more extended, either by increasing the number of these Court appointments, or by some similar means giving facilities of working (without salary) in the various Government offices. If no salary were attached, there could be no possible jealousy on the part of the already existing employés who work under the regular system; or if it were felt that the non-receipt of pay would create too much independence, a nominal salary might be attached to the post, just sufficient to bind the holder.

-Or, again, this plan might be extended to other Court appointments besides those of the lords-in-waiting which are open to peers, and thus the Radical objection to sinecures would be met with great force. We have a strong Conservative government at presentpossibly its very strength may produce a more powerful reaction in future than many persons imagine. The above suggestions are, of course, mere crude outlines. I think the considerations which led to them are worthy perhaps of some notice; at all events it will hardly be denied that in this age of change and rapid reform, when the raison d'être of everything we are accustomed to and value is examined with more and more searching and too often malevolent scrutiny, we ought to be doubly on our guard lest the enemy not only root up the wheat with the tares, but do so with some show of reason.

ZOUCHE.

A FEW WORDS ON MR. FREEMAN.

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

SIR, Two years ago you admitted into the Nineteenth Century a series of short papers written by me on the Life and Times of Becket.' I was not proposing to myself to write a 'history' of that life or those times; my object was merely to draw attention to the volumes now appearing in the series of the Master of the Rolls containing new materials for Becket's Life,' and so far as I went into the details of the story I confined myself to the quarrel between Becket and Henry the Second, to the circumstances which led to the archbishop's murder and immediate canonisation, and to the condition of the Church which gave those events their peculiar significance. The political history of the time, and the early history of Becket in connection with it, would have required a volume to themselves. Such a volume I had no occasion to write, and that part of the subject, therefore, I passed over in a few pages.

These few pages have been criticised at elaborate length in the Contemporary Review by Mr. Freeman, whose unquestionable knowledge of the history of the twelfth century, if knowledge were all that was required, peculiarly fitted him for his task. I might complain, perhaps, that four-fifths of what I wrote, the essential portion of the matter, he has passed over without notice. But if he wished to attack me, he had a right to choose the weakest places, and I confess, with as much readiness as natural infirmity will allow, that in this preliminary sketch he has convicted me of having made one direct mistake, of having allowed two misprints of names to pass uncorrected, and of having expressed myself in three or four sentences in stronger language than I was entitled to use. I do not plead guilty to the charge of being ignorant of everything which I do not mention. I refrained from discussing irrelevant questions on which I had no call to enter, and because I wished-liberal as you were to me of your space-to reserve as much as possible of it for the purpose which I had immediately in hand. It was unnecessary, therefore, on Mr. Freeman's part to accuse me of not knowing what was to be found in children's elementary reading-books. Had this been

all, however, I should have taken my punishment silently. I might have thought that it exceeded the offence; that, in inflicting it, Mr. Freeman had made as many mistakes as I had; that my papers had not been republished, were not designed for republication, and had not received the benefit of the revision which very few review articles are not found to need before they are reproduced in another form. But when faults have to be admitted, the offender may not himself prescribe the measure of his retribution; he must take his medicine, and endeavour to benefit by it, without complaining that he has received an overdose of aloes.

Mr. Freeman has gone beyond the office of reviewer. He has used the occasion for an invective upon my whole literary life, and even my personal character and history; he has described me as dishonest, careless of truth, destitute of every reputable quality save facility in writing which I turn to a bad purpose, and hopeless of amendment.

Even this, however, I suppose that I should have borne from a natural unwillingness to trouble the public with a matter which is my own private concern, and from a sense that, by replying to Mr. Freeman's accusations, I might seem to acknowledge that he had primâ facie grounds for what he has done. But I have a reason for entering on my defence on this one occasion, which your readers will perhaps admit to be a valid one.

For twenty years my writings and myself have been the subject of attacks of an exceptionally unfavourable kind in the Saturday Review-attacks continued with a persistence which even persons the most favourably disposed towards me could not believe to be wholly without justification. The world attributed these articles to Mr. Freeman. I know not whether they were written by him or not, but they carried the weight of Mr. Freeman's reputation, while, as they were anonymous, I could not reply to them. I did indeed, many years ago, on an occasion of what I believed to be a very gross misrepresentation, ask the late editor of the Saturday Review to insert a short letter from me, but I was refused in language which showed that it would be useless for me to make another application. But Mr. Freeman has now adopted the most producible charges in these articles under his own name Having been so frequently reiterated, they perhaps appear to him as established facts; and few as they are in comparison with the whole mass of accusations which the Saturday Review has heaped upon me, I have an opportunity at last of showing what some at least of these criticisms are worth.

When my History of England was completed in 1869, the Reviewer, evidently the same person who had been so long busy with me, spoke of me as having been his victim for fourteen years. The word exactly expressed my condition. Victims are generally innocent and helpless. I knew myself to be guiltless of nine-tenths of