One of the most striking, for Peers perhaps most ominous,
passages in this speech was that in which Mr. Gladstone, in the strength of his fifty years of experience, described the habitual action of the Lords. So far from representing the "permanent, as opposed to the fleeting," opinion of the country, out of the twelve Parliaments since 1832, the Peers have been opposed to the Representatives in ten and during the latter half of another, and have agreed with them only in one. The House in its corporate action was "most unfortunate." It five times rejected the Bill for Municipal Reform in Ireland. It rejected the early Compensation Bill for Disturbance, brought in by the late Lord Derby, in 1845 ; it rejected Mr. Gladstone's Bill of 1880 with the same object ; and it rejected the Jewish Disabilities Bill year after year six times. It threw out the Ballot Bill, after twenty-five nights had been spent on it in the Commons ; and the Bill for the Repeal of the Paper Duty, in the latter case with. the result that it was sent up again as part of an eutire financial scheme which could not be rejected, and from that day to this, there never has been a financial debate in the House of Lords. Therefore, said Mr. Gladstone, "I cannot say that the legislative action of the House of Lords has, for the last fifty years, been a benefit or a blessing to the country." Yet, if it has been neither, it must, as a cause of delay, have been an injury to the country.
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