The Sun.
London, England, 1831-06-18 00:00:00

HOUSE OF LORDS-REFORM.

(From the Times.)
We do not understand how any person can main-
tain so absurd a charge as the one we have heard
made agvin3t his Majesty's Ministers, of a determi-
nation to force " the Bill" upon the House of Lords
by the creation of five Peers. The supposition is
ridiculous; because it is clear the Bill cannot be disap-
proved of by a large majority of the Peers, if five new
ones will turn the scale. But we are disposed to take
much higher ground, and we say that Ministers,
coming into office after long exclusion from political
power, owe it to their party and the principles
which they profess to place the House of Lords in
a condition fairly to discuss any question of import-
ance, and to counteract the preponderance given to
any one set of political opinions in the House of
Lords, by the circumstance of the party professing
them having long possessed and exercised the pri-
vilege of adding their own friends and partisans to
its ;lumbers. A Peer, the hereditary counsellor of
the Crown, uninfluenced by popular feeling or tem-
porary excitement, may be the most impartial judge
of political matters; and so may, perhaps, the House
of Lords collectively, in a long series of years; but
it is quite clear that at any given period, when one-
party has for fifty or sixty years had the exclusive
possession of political power, and when all, or
nearly all, the additions to the Peerage which
have been made are in this one sense, that
the House of Lords must have a decided bias
in favour of the opinions of the dominant party.
If then, at the end of such a period of years, an
adverse party comes into power, it stands at mani-
fest disadvantage in the House of Lords. In the
House of Commons it probably has a decided ma-
jority of its own way of thinking, or it would not
have come into power at .all ; or, if this be not the
case, a dissolution will give it that majority, if it be
popular in the country ; but in the house f Lords
there is no mode of counteracting the undue advan-
tage possessed by the party which has long had
power, except by doing, to a certain extent, that
which their adversaries have done for many years—
namely, adding friends of their own to the Peerage.
And such a step, we say, is indispensably called for,
in order to secure fair and impartial discussion in that
branch of the Legislature. These remarks have been
suggested to us by observing that the Peers of old
creation were generally favourable—while a majority
of those of recent date, especially since 1800, were
unfavourable—to Reform. It is quite extraordinary
to what an extent this observation holds good; and
it may not be uninteresting to our readers to see
some convincing proofs of the fact in the lists sub-
joined, for the accuracy of which we have good
grounds for vouching, though perhaps an error or
two may have been involuntarily made. We have
taken the oldest and most recent Peers of each de-
gree ; and it is satisfactory, for the line of argument
we have adopted, to find a very large majority of
the oldest Peers of each rank supporters of the IMi-
nisterial Bill of Reform, while amongst the more
recent Peers a very considerable majority is against
it. There are 19 Pukes of the nine of the oldest
creation, seven are favourable, two against; of the