sheltered every
privilege."

No further mention of the Bright scheme was made for some time. Six
years of Conservative rule (1886-1892) diverted the attention of
Liberals as a party in opposition to other matters, and the Lords
subsided, as they always have done in such periods, into an entirely
innocuous, negligible, and utterly useless adjunct of the Conservative
Government.

In the brief period between 1892-1895, the animus against the House of
Lords was kindled afresh. Several Liberal Bills were mutilated or lost,
and the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill served to fan the flames
into a dangerous blaze. The Bright plan was recalled by Lord Morley. "I
think," he said (at Newcastle on May 21, 1894), "there will have to be
some definite attempt to carry out what Mr. Bright at the Leeds
Conference of 1883 suggested, by which the power of the House of
Lords--this non-elected, this non-representative, this hereditary, this
packed Tory Chamber--by which the veto of that body shall be strictly
limited." Mr. Gladstone, too, in his last speech in the House of
Commons on the wrecking amendments which the Lords had made on the
Parish Councils Bill, dwelt on the fundamental differences between the
two Houses, and said that "a state of things had been created which
could not continue," and declared it to be "a controversy which once
raised must go forward to an issue."

But by far the most formidable, the most vigorous, the most animated,
and, at the time, apparently sincere attack was contained in a series
of speeches delivered in 1894 by Lord Rosebery, who was then in a
position of responsibility as leader of the Liberal party. If, as
subsequent events have shown, he was unmoved by the underlying
principle and cause for which his eloquent pleading stood, anyhow we
must believe he was deeply impressed by the prospect of his personal
ambition as the leader of a party being thwarted by the contemptuous
action of an irresponsible body. His words, however, stand, and have
been quoted again and again as the most effective attack against the
partizan nature of the Second Chamber:--"What I complain of in the
House of Lords is that during the tenure of one Government it is a
Second Chamber of an inexorable kind, but while another Government is
in, it is no Second Chamber at all... Therefore the result, the effect
of the House of Lords as it at present stands, is this, that in one
case it acts as a Court of Appeal, and a packed