nt for the Liberal Party to leave open, because they are
supported by Catholics and Nonconformists, and to bring in an
Education Bill to satisfy those two extremes is not to solve a
problem, but to solve a double acrostic. So that Bill was not passed.
Upon a measure which it would be inconvenient to the Liberal Party to
leave open the House of Lords rejected all compromise. Upon a measure
which it would be inconvenient for the Conservative Party to leave
open, they submitted at once--their action being irrespective of
merits in either case. That, I suppose, is what the Leader of the
Opposition called "an averaging machinery."

I press these points in order to justify me in making this statement,
that the House of Lords, as it at present exists and acts, is not a
national institution, but a Party dodge, an apparatus and instrument
at the disposal of one political faction; and it is used in the most
unscrupulous manner to injure and humiliate the opposite faction. When
Conservative Members go about the country defending a Second Chamber,
let them remember that this is the kind of Second Chamber they have to
defend, and when they defend the veto let them remember that it is a
veto used, not for national purposes, but for the grossest purposes of
unscrupulous political partisanship.

I have dealt with the issues between Houses, and I come to that
between Parties. Great changes in a community are very often
unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the
State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of
institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet
there will be one institution which under pretentious forms is only
the husk of reality, and another which under a humble name is in fact
the operative pivot of the social system. Constitutional writers have
much to say about the estates of the realm, and a great deal to say
about their relation to each other, and to the Sovereign. All that is
found to be treated upon at length. But they say very little about the
Party system. And, after all, the Party system is the dominant fact in
our experience. Nothing is more striking in the last twenty-five years
than the growth and expansion of Party organisation, and the way in
which millions of people and their votes have been woven into its
scope.

There are two great characteristics about the Party institutions of
this country: the equipoise between them, and their almost