But experience induced Lord Grey to believe that this unanimous opinion might be fallacious. The nominated chamber, the life peerage of our colonies, should have been a check to democracy. It was the raison d'étre of its existence. But where was this check? It was not to be found in the legislative council. Its members had little or no weight, and they excited great jealousy. It was in fact a failure. Lord Grey very fairly accepted the results gained by experience. He admitted that there was much in a single chamber to object to, but practice had shown it was superior to a popular assembly connected with a chamber of Crown nominees. Lord John Russell, in the House of Commons, took the same view, and pointed to the dissensions in Canada. The bill was indeed an abandonment of the attempt so often tried to establish a life peerage in the colonies as a check to democracy. A check, as Lord Grey explained, was what was wanted; and a life peerage, so far as colonial experience teaches us, has been tried as a check and failed.

Mr. Mills, in his interesting work on colonial constitutions, takes the same view as Lord Grey. The legislative councils were, he says, an attempt to plant a life peerage in the colonies. The idea was attractive and plausible, but entirely illusory, as was shown by an experience in some cases extending over two centuries. Still stronger language is used by Mr. Lowe. According to him, there is nothing so mischievous as the nomination of Crown nominees. They represent nobody; they have not the slightest affinity to an aristocratic institution; they are the scapegoats of the Constitution; the target of every attack; the butt of every jest.* And now, before quitting this branch of the subject, we may perhaps be allowed to quote a passage from Mr. Merivale's volume on colonies and colonisation; especially as his words might apply to other life peerages than merely those of the colonies. He says:-"The upper house or council in a colonial assembly is a very feeble check indeed when composed of members for life nominated by the Crown; antagonism between the two houses soon arises, in which the council must give way, and must lose its force and credit accordingly. Nor are nominee councillors good legislators. They have this great defect-they are responsible to no one. They have no constituencies. The Crown which has appointed them has no hold on them after their appointment. They have no 'order,' no esprit de corps.'

Thus, as in France so in the colonies, the life peerage has beer. a failure. Reasons may, indeed, be offered to explain this failure,

The populations of the colonies are scarce and busy. Life in them presents many of its most primitive features. Each man is intently engaged on his own interests. The flocks which he tends upon the boundless plain, the sugar canes which he cultivates in the plantations, the stores from which he sells supplies to the people, all devour his energies and his time. He has leisure for none of the liberal studies which are usually to be found only after wealth has accumulated for several generations. These drawbacks, it may be said, will not be found in England. In England will be found the men, the wealth, and the leisure in which the colonies are deficient. But the hereditary peerage already gives us these men, who are born to wealth and leisure, without the invidious practice of having to select them; why then attempt, not only to change the system, but to introduce into it that very element which, in the colonies, has been the cause of failure? But if a distinction can in some respects be drawn between an English and colonial life peerage, it will still have one fault, the greatest of all faults, in common-weakness. You may fill the House of Lords with men of stainless character, of intelligence as great as education and self-improvement can give, with time to employ their generous impulses and their high intelligence for the good of the country, but all this will avail nothing, as long as they have not got material power. The great noble who, centuries ago, was asked to show his title for his land, answered by unsheathing his sword. The force of democracy will ignore the title of virtue or learning. Her title to power is derived from power, and power will be the only title which she will respect. Neither integrity nor ability can prevail against her. They can govern only by moral suasion, and alas! for moral suasion when it is confronted by an ignorant and infatuated multitude.

And now we may briefly recite our arguments, and state some of the conclusions which we draw from them. We have tried to show, then, that in countries most like our own, where a life peerage has been tried, it has failed. It failed in old France, and it failed in young colonies, and it failed in both for the same reason; because it was not strong enough to check democracy. If a life peerage is ever established in England, either as a part of the hereditary chamber, or no a substitute for it, it will be for the purpose of creating an efficient checking power to democracy. But France and the Colonies show that a life peerage forms no check to democracy; therefore we say that the presumption is life peerage would fail in England. We have also endeavoured to show from arguments drawn from division lists, and other materials, that that portion of the House of Lords which is most akin to a life peerage has imbibed, to a smaller extent, a sympathy with the progressive spirit of the age than has the heredi

tary portion of the House of Lords. We have, therefore, suggested the entire abolition of one section of this portion of the peerage, and an alteration in respect to another portion which will considerably neutralise its conservative action, while at the same time affording it a more complete representation. Conversely, we show that the hereditary peerage seems more susceptible of the current popular feeling than the rest of the House of Lords; we therefore propose that the hereditary peerage, as the most satisfactory part of the Upper House, should be left alone. These are our main arguments and conclusions, and, as will have been seen, we have tried to confine ourselves, as much as possible, to facts, merely drawing inferences without asking for explanations.

The reforms we have suggested have been those which the natural want of the House of Lords seems mostly to demand. They are those which, we hope, would not only preserve, but purify, a principle which has existed with the greatest advantages for so many centuries. What these reforms might foreshadow it is impossible to say. Where democracy is all-powerful it may be that a single chamber in a highly educated country, where men of all classes can work shoulder to shoulder, instead of face to face, may be proved not unsuccessful. Both English opinion and foreign analogy are against such an experiment. But foreign analogy is of value according to circumstances only. Foreign analogy can illustrate-what, indeed, we should have thought self-evident that the greater power will not consent to be ruled or thwarted by the smaller power; but it cannot prove that the greater power may not be educated so that its own affairs may safely be left to its own management. We are well aware, however, that on the subject of a single chamber the opinion of all parties has been nearly identical-that the Whigs have agreed with the Tories; that Fox and Pitt, Burke and Brougham, have all condemned it; that in France it was unable to direct the fury of the French revolution; that in Rhode Island and Carolina it was equally inefficient in times of peace; and yet, without abandoning the position which we first laid down-that political experiments should, if possible, be based upon political experience -we have a firm conviction that foreign analogies should not be admitted too blindly into English history; that England is far ahead of every other country and every colony in political progress; that she is a pioneer in the unexplored regions of the political future; that before her the knotted forest of political problems shall fall; that behind her shall crowd the nations of the world, to tread in the path which she has laid open to peace and good government.

But these large questions are questions of the future. What

is wanted now, or will be wanted on the first occasion of public importance which divides the two Houses, is some sort of organic reform. The House of Lords will have to submit to what the House of Commons has already submitted, to what every institution in the country has submitted, or it will be the sufferer. Nobody appreciated the position of the House of Lords more clearly than Canuing. Canning objected to the reform of the House of Commons because it would involve the fate of the House of Lords. He prophesied that the reformers would leave untouched the House of Lords, not from feelings of friendship, but from feelings of the bitterest enmity, because they knew that an unreformed House of Lords could not live side by side with a reformed House of Commons. "It is therefore," to use his own spirited words, "unnecessary for the reformers to declare their hostility to the Crown-it is, therefore, utterly superfluous for them to make war upon the peerage; they know, let their principles have but full play, the peerage would be to the constitution which they assail but as the baggage to the army, and the destruction of them but as the gleanings of the battle. They know that the battle is with the House of Commons as already constituted, and that that once overthrown, and another popular assembly constituted on their principles as the creature and depository of the people's power, and the unreasoning instrument of the people's will, that there would not only be no chance, but there would be no pretence, of any other branch of the constitution." Thus spoke Canning before the Reform Bill; and yet the old House of Lords still lingers beside a House of Commons a second time reformed.

Canning was indeed wrong. The Crown and the Lords still exist, though very different in power to what they were when he spoke. A long train of events has broken the strength of the Upper Chamber. Its independence has been threatened both. by the Crown and by the people. Speakers and writers have discussed its death and its successor while it is still living. Some would destroy it outright; some would strengthen it; some would weaken it; some would deck it out with the semblance of power. It may be remembered how in Spanish history was performed the dethrouement of Henry IV., how the chair of state was raised on the broad plain of Avila, and how the effigy of the king was placed upon it. The crown was placed on its head, the royal robes were thrown over its shoulders, the sword and sceptre placed in its hands, while thousands thronged to behold the novel spectacle. But at length came the great officers of state who cast the crown from the head, the sceptre from the

* Stapleton's "Canning." Canning's speech at Liverpool.

hand, and the effigy headlong into the dust, and Henry IV. was declared deposed. And thus it will be with the House of Lords if it refuses to re-invigorate itself by reforms, and if too strong a veneration for its own past history prevents it from making changes which are essential to its strength. If it cannot conquer this fatal weakness it may still continue to exist in name and in form, and it may still be draped with the pomp which belonged to it in the days of its prime, but it will not be the House of Lords which has played so conspicuous a part in the creation of English history. It will, indeed, be very little more than its effigy. It may have all the pre-eminence that titles can give; it may hold in its hands all the rights which its predecessors have ever exercised; it may be endowed with any new power which the people may choose to bestow; but if it is unable to reform itself, if its power is not of itself, its titles, rights, and powers will be as unable to protect it from the rough hand of democracy as were the symbols of royalty to defend the poor abused effigy on the plain of Avila.

ART. II. THE MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS WORSHIP OF THE ANCIENT JAPANESE.

1. Commentary on the Rituals. Mabuchi: 1768.

2. New Exposition of the General Purification. Motowori: 1795.

3. Correct Text of the Rituals. Hirata: No date.

THE

HE Europeans who visited Japan in the latter half of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries were chiefly merchants engaged in the pursuit of wealth, or Catholic missionaries who devoted their lives to the conversion of the natives to the Christian religion. It is not to be wondered at that the information which they gave concerning the country should have consisted chiefly of descriptions of manners and customs then prevalent, or of current political events, and that their investigations into the language should have produced nothing but a few grammars and dictionaries, the necessary implements of their daily pursuits. Even if they had been inclined to look below the surface, they would in those days have discovered little. The remains of the ancient literature, laws, and history were hidden away in the Buddhist monasteries, in the charge of priests who were uniformly unfriendly to the professors