roud of continuity, as ourselves
that a feudal assembly of titled persons, with so long a history and
so many famous names, should have survived to exert an influence upon
public affairs at the present time. We see how often in England the
old forms are reverently preserved after the forces by which they are
sustained and the uses to which they were put and the dangers against
which they were designed have passed away. A state of gradual decline
was what the average Englishman had come to associate with the House
of Lords. Little by little, we might have expected, it would have
ceased to take a controversial part in practical politics. Year by
year it would have faded more completely into the past to which it
belongs until, like Jack-in-the-Green or Punch-and-Judy, only a
picturesque and fitfully lingering memory would have remained.

And during the last ten years of Conservative government this was
actually the case. But now we see the House of Lords flushed with the
wealth of the modern age, armed with a party caucus, fortified,
revived, resuscitated, asserting its claims in the harshest and in the
crudest manner, claiming to veto or destroy even without discussion
any legislation, however important, sent to them by any majority,
however large, from any House of Commons, however newly elected. We
see these unconscionable claims exercised with a frank and undisguised
regard to party interest, to class interest, and to personal interest.
We see the House of Lords using the power which they should not hold
at all, which if they hold at all, they should hold in trust for all,
to play a shrewd, fierce, aggressive party game of electioneering and
casting their votes according to the interest of the particular
political party to which, body and soul, they belong.

It is now suggested--publicly in some quarters, privately in many
quarters--that the House of Lords will not only use without scruple
their veto in legislation but they propose to extend their
prerogatives; they are going to lay their hands upon finance, and if
they choose they will reject or amend the Budget. I have always
thought it a great pity that Mr. Gladstone made a compromise with the
House of Lords over the Franchise Bill of 1884. I regret, and I think
many of my hon. friends in the House of Commons will regret, looking
back upon the past, that the present Government did not advise a
dissolution of Parliament upon the rejection of the Education Bill in
1