preted by the highest judicial tribunal in the land.

When, therefore, we were suddenly called upon to decide the infinitely
delicate problems of the place, powers, and composition of a Second
Chamber in our governing system, the task proved as bewildering as it
was unappetizing. Any nation which regarded its Constitution as a vital
and familiar instrument would have heavily resented so gross an
infraction of it as the Lords perpetrated in rejecting the 1909 Budget.
But our own electorate, so far from punishing the party responsible for
the outrage, sent them back to the House over a hundred stronger, a
result impossible in a country with any vivid sense, or any sense at
all, of Constitutional realities, and only possible in Great Britain
because the people adjudged the importance of the various issues
submitted to them by standards of their own, and placed the
Constitutional problem at the bottom, or near the bottom, of the list.
In no single constituency that I have ever heard of was the House of
Lords question the supreme and decisive factor at the election of
January, 1910. It deeply stirred the impartial intelligence of the
country, but it failed to move the average voter even in the towns,
while in the rural parts it fell unmistakably flat.

Even at the election of December, 1910, when all other issues were
admittedly subordinate to the Constitutional issue, it was exceedingly
difficult to determine how far the stedfastness of the electorate to
the Liberal cause was due to a specific appreciation and approval of
the Parliament Bill and of all it involved, and how far it was an
expression of general distrust of the Unionists, of irritation with the
Lords, and of sympathy with the social and fiscal policies pursued by
the Coalition. That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of
the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all
political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their
proposals, may be freely granted. It was as near an approach to an _ad
hoc_ Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system.
Party exigencies, or at any rate party tactics, it is true, hurried on
the election before the country was prepared for it, before it had
recovered from the somnolence induced by the Conference, and before the
Opposition had time or opportunity to do more than sketch in their
alternative plan. But though the issue was incompletely presented, it
was undoubtedly