rliament; (3)
the adoption by the House of Lords of the principle of Lord Rosebery's
projected scheme of upper chamber reform; (4) the interruption and
postponement of the contest by reason of the death of Edward VII.; (5)
the failure of the Constitutional Conference in the summer of 1910;
(6) the adoption by the second chamber of the reform resolutions of
Lord Lansdowne; (7) the dissolution of Parliament, after an existence
of but ten months, to afford an opportunity for a fresh appeal to the
country on the specific issue of second chamber reform; (8) the
elections of December, 1910, and the assembling of the new parliament
in January, 1911; and (9) the re-introduction and the final enactment,
in the summer of 1911, of the Government's momentous Parliament Bill.
At the December elections the contending forces were so solidly
entrenched that the party quotas in the House of Commons remained all
but unchanged. Following the elections they stood as follows:
Liberals, 272; Unionists, 272; Nationalists, 76; Independent
Nationalists (followers of William O'Brien), 8; and Laborites, 42. The
Unionists gained substantially in Lancashire, Devonshire, and
Cornwall, but lost ground in London and in several boroughs throughout
the country. Still dependent upon the good-will of the minor parties,
the Government addressed itself afresh to the limitation of the veto
power of the Lords and to the programme of social amelioration which
during the recent months of excitement had been accorded meager
attention. Effort in the one direction bore fruit in the Parliament
Act, approved by the crown August 18, 1911; while upon the other side
substantial results were achieved in the enactment, December 16, 1911,
of a far-reaching measure instituting a national system of insurance
against both sickness and unemployment.[229]

[Footnote 228: See pp. 108-111.]

[Footnote 229: On the elections of December, 1910,
see P. Hamelle, La crise anglaise: les elections de
decembre 1910, in _Revue des Sciences Politiques_,
July-Aug., 1911; E. T. Cook, The Election--Before
and After, in _Contemporary Review_, Jan., 1911;
Britannicus, The British Elections, in _North
American Review_, Jan., 1911; and A. Kann, Les
elections anglaises, in _Questions Diplomatiques et
Colonial