ABSTRACT
The House of Lords is not an impartial and objective body which takes an independent and detached view of the public opinion it encounters. Its composition makes it, and is intended to make it, a fundamental part of the institutional strategy of the Right. It is intended to see that, as Lord Balfour once put it, in office or out of it, the Conservative Party is permanently in power. The fact is that the whole theory of a referendum misconceives what an electorate is for. It forms a view upon a general web of political tendency; it returns men to vote for or against the large pattern of that web. The House of Lords was never rationally defensible after about 1867; but until 1906 there was never an urgent need to defend it, and it had become one of those significant institutions which, like the Albert Memorial, the authors take for granted.
