134 THE BRITISH APPROACH TO POLITICS

are used in practice, and the general desirability of having two
Houses.

THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

The Lords of Parliament—i.e., persons entitled to sit in the
House of Lords—can be classified as follows:—(i) The Lords
Spiritual:—the two Archbishops, the Bishops of London,
Winchester and Durham, and twenty-one other Bishops in order
of seniority. These hold their seats only as long as they are
Bishops, £nd the right to sit is not hereditary. (2) The Lords
Temporal, (a) Princes of the Royal Blood; these are few in number
and take no part in the work of the House, (6) English Peers and
Peers of the United Kingdom, totalling about 700. Their right to
sit is hereditary, but if, in the absence of male heirs, a woman
succeeds to a Peerage, she is not entitled to. sit. Peers who are
under 21, or mentally incapable, are also excluded. The Peers
are divided into Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts and Barons,
in order of precedence, but this is only a ceremonial distinction.
When a new Peer takes his seat, he is usually led up the floor of
the House by two Peers of the same rank; but all, irrespective of
rank, can take an equal share in the work, (c) Sixteen Represent-
ative Peers, elected at the beginning of each Parliament by the
holders of Scottish Peerages, i.e., those created for the Kingdom
of Scotland alone, before the 1707 Act of Union, (d) Twenty-eight
Representative Peers who have been elected for life by the
holders of Irish Peerages. Since most of Ireland is now outside
the United Kingdom, there will be no further elections to fill
vacancies caused by death, so that this group of Peers will in time
vanish, (e) Not more than seveli Lords of Appeal in Ordinary,
usually called Law Lords. These are distinguished lawyers who
have been made Barons for life—the only example of non-
hereditary Peerage—so that they may sit in the House of Lords
and enable it to perform its duties as a law court.

The earliest Peers were all great landowners; later it became
usual to confer Peerages on men whose wealth came from