In 1831 the creation of forty peerages would have been sufficient to meet the Tory opposition to the Reform Bill; to-day it is said that about four hundred are required to give the Liberals a working majority in the Lords.

The rapid making of peers began under George III., but from 1830 to the present day Prime Minister after Prime Minister has added to the membership of the House of Lords with generous hand.

Satire, savage and contemptuous, has been directed against the new peers by critics of various opinions, but still the work of adding to the House of hereditary legislators goes gaily on, and Liberal Prime Ministers have been as active as their Tory opponents in adding to the permanent Conservative majority in the Lords; for only a small minority of Liberal peers retain their allegiance to the Liberal Party.
Thackeray gave us his view of the making of peers in the years when Lord Melbourne and his Whig successors were steadily adding to the Upper House.
(Between 1835 and 1841 Melbourne made forty-four new peers, and twenty-eight more were added by 1856.) "A man becomes enormously rich, or he jobs successfully in the aid of a Minister, or he wins a great battle, or executes a treaty, or is a clever lawyer who makes a multitude of fees and ascends the bench; and the country rewards him for ever with a gold coronet (with more or less balls or leaves) and a title, and a rank as legislator.

'Your merits are so great,' says the nation, 'that your children shall be allowed to reign over us, in a manner.

It does not in the least matter that your eldest son is a fool; we think your services so remarkable that he shall have the reversion of your honours when death vacates your noble shoes.'" J.H.Bernard, in his "Theory of the Constitution" (1835), was no less emphatic:-- "As the affair is managed now, the peerage, though sometimes bestowed as the reward of merit, on men who have adorned particular professions, is yet much more frequently--nine times out of ten--employed by the minister of the day as his instrument to serve particular views of public policy; and is often given to actual demerit--to men who hire themselves out to do his commands through thick and thin.