Mr. Gladstone admitted, in reply, that he had suffered often
and much from the hereditary principle, and that he was no idolator of it. At the same time, he could not go so far as Mr. Labonchere and Sir Wilfrid Lawson in the opposite direction. He did not believe that men inherited their intellectual quali- ties wholly from their mothers. Surely Mr. Pitt inherited something from Lord Chatham ; and as for Lord Chancellors, we had had in our own history a father and son each becoming Lord Chancellor, and it was not rational to suppose that the son owed nothing of his capacity to his father. It was diffi- cult to imagine that the present Lord Derby owes nothing to his father, and that the present Lord Grey owes nothing to his father. It could hardly be denied, too, that if the House of Lords were abolished, a very considerable number of the Peers would at once le selected by the people to enter the Lower House ; and if it would be so, that at once established for the existing Upper House a claim to a certain amount of fitness for the task of legislation. At all events, at the present moment, when the Peers had been invited to co-operate with the House of Commons in passing a good Reform Bill, it was at least inopportune to fling this stone at their Lordships. The motion was negatived by 145 votes to 71; but there were some remarkable names,—amongst them Mr. Albert Grey's,—in the minority.
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