Note 56 — Chapter II · DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION

Letter to Lord Lyndhurst. So, too, in his early Spirit of Whiggism. In a speech of 1865 he defines an Estate as “a political body invested with political power for the government of the country and for the public good,” and “therefore a body founded upon privilege and not upon right,” and “in the noblest and properest sense of the term an aristocratic body.” Under the Plantagenets it was at one time mooted whether the Law should not be raised into such an “Estate.” He says the same in a letter of explanation to Lord Malmesbury.