ABOUT THE PEERS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 23, 28 January 1911, Page 12

ABOUT THE PEERS.

In the Welter of the preseflt election, writes the London correspondent of the Argus, the good deeds of the Upper House are wholly forgotten. Tho chief crime alleged against its members i* that they are eons of their fathers, and haye inherited their fathers' conservatism; that they are fossilised by long descent. But it is surprising, when one looks into their family recoros, how few of their number can claim a longer pedigree than, say, 400 years ; aid, also, what a very large proportion of Liberal commoners promoted to the "Upper House, since Mr. Gladstone's day, havd become Unionist peers. At election time, and especially on the present occasion, we are ail invited to rise ahd curse the peers, especially those who come under Mr. Lloyd George's polite description of the more " cheesy." But they are few indeed who go back to the Domesday Book. There are more men of Norman t descent out of the peerage than in it. .Lord St. John pf Bletsoe, to whom Mf. George specifically alluded, I^h a clear pedigree to .Norman times; so has the Earl of Galloway J and Lord Forrers Is still the lord of a manor which is written down against his ancestor's name in Domesday Book, as part of the reward won by a Norman spearman. A story is told of the preseht Lord St. John's father, which Shows how little i he attended to his Parliamentary duties. He strolled by mistake ihto the House of Commons, and sat upon the front Treasury bench! The present Viscouht Peel, one of the whips, was also on the Government seat. He was mystified by this stranger asking him whether the gentleman across the table (Mi*. Raikes) was Lord Salisbury. Presently tho doorkeeper approached, and it was revealed to the noble lord that he had gone into the Lower House, under the impression that he was Within his own Chamber. There are many men of Norman descent ataong the commoners who wete made peers by Queen Victoria. _ The peers no longer cap their pedigrees against each other, as in the days when the Duke of Norfolk's ancestor taunted the Duke of Marlborough's ancestor with being a descendant of grazier forefathers. These men of noble blood, who ait in the Upper House, even those who are the product of Royal indiscretions, are much the same as all other men, save, perhaps, that they are a little more gouty. As business men their committee work is quite as well done as the committee work of the Commons, and they have the great advon* tage of being free of all caucus ihflUehcs. A contemporary reminds U* an this appropriate moment of the description giVen by the great Bishop Wilberforce ("Soapy Sam") of the relations of the two Houses. He said: "I can only compare our two great legislative chambers to a clock, of which the House of Commons is the mainspring and the House of Lords the pendulum— a pendulum which wags, wagß, wftgg, tho while it keeps the mainspring ih order, and prevents the clock from running away." There was a great change in the composition of society in this country after the Wars of the Rdfies. Old peerages were wiped out oh the battlefield of at the block ; others lost their estates, and the families sank into the middle and trading classes. It is hot easy to ttace them in these days, for, till the sixteenth century, or later, the spelling of family hames was not uniform. Different branches adopted variants. The late Sir William Harcourt boasted that he descended from tho Plam>agertets. It is not many years since a Liverpool baker proved his direct descent from a Plantagenet King. " Moon," a common name among West of England farm labourers, ie, says the Globe, a contraction of the famous " De' Mohuns," who held sixty castles under the Conqueror. In Dorsetshire to-day there is a farm labourer working the lahd once held by his forefathers, who were baronets, and by right of birth he cah Claim to be " Sir John." A close examination of the peerage as it now stands, since the great infusion of men fi'om the ranks of commerce, finance, and trade, will show that the aristocratic caste is hot screened from the common herd by a rigid barrier of birth. Men of very humble origin have been the founders of the newer nobility of the last 100 years. And it should atso i be remembered that the class distinctions ih England are but a shadow of what can be witnessed in the older countries, such as Germany and Austria.