Compromise he despised as the artifice of lawyers and upstart
politicians. It had been a dagger in his heart to hear his leader
speaking of some readjustment between the two Houses as inevitable. He
denied the necessity, unless the readjustment augmented the power of the
Lords. Planting himself on Edward I's statute, he had vehemently
maintained the right of the Lords to control finance, though he was
willing to allow the commercial gentlemen in the Commons the privilege
of working out the figures of national income and expenditure. He now
regarded the threatened creation of Peers as a gross insult to public
decency. Properly speaking, he protested, Peers cannot be created. You
might as well put terriers into kennels and call them foxhounds. Now and
then a distinguished soldier or even a statesman could be ennobled
without much harm; and he supposed there was something to be said for a
learned man, and a writer or two, though he preferred them to be
childless. He had once published a book himself, with the Runnymede arms
on the cover. But the thought of making Lords by batches vulgarised the
King's majesty, and reversed the order of nature. "Are we worse than
Chinamen," he asked, "that we seek to confer nobility on fellows sprung
from unknown forefathers?" The Archbishop of Canterbury had appealed to
the House to approach the question with mutual consideration and
respect, high public spirit and common sense. But on such a question
consideration was dangerous, and common sense fatal. He wished the
Bishops had stuck to their own Convocation from Plantagenet times,
instead of intruding their inharmonious white sleeves where they were
not wanted. He was sorry he had subscribed so handsomely to the
restoration of Stennynge Church. He ought to have ear-marked his
contribution for the Runnymede aisle.

Worse still, the Archbishop had mentioned "the average voter in tramcar
or railway train," and the words had called up a haunting vision of