bt for office on the most secure
terms and at the shortest notice, would voluntarily run unusual risks
in order to be able to fight a decisive battle upon exceptionally
unfavourable ground. In common with most of us who are here to-night,
I hold that the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would be
a constitutional outrage. I do not think we are entitled at this stage
to assume that such an outrage will be committed. We cannot credit
such intentions, even though we read them every day brutally and
blatantly affirmed by a powerful Party Press. We do not credit such
intentions. We are, however, bound to be fully prepared against all
contingencies. The necessary precautions must be taken. The fighting
machine must undergo all those preliminary processes necessary for a
rapid and efficient mobilisation. And the ground on which a great
battle might take place, the theatre of war, must be scanned
beforehand with military foresight. And that is being done.

But those who lightly estimate the crisis which will follow the
rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords must be either strangely
unimaginative or else they must be strangely ignorant of British
history and of the British Constitution. The control of finance by
the representative Assembly is the keystone of all that constitutional
fabric upon which and within which all of us here have dwelt safely
and peacefully throughout our lives. It is by the application of the
power of the purse, and by the application of the power of the purse
almost alone, that we have moved forward, slowly and prosaically, no
doubt, during the last two hundred years, but without any violent
overturn such as has rent the life and history of almost every other
considerable country, from a kind of mediaeval oligarchy to a vast
modern democratic State based on the suffrages of six million or seven
million electors, loyal to the Crown, and clothed with all the stately
forms of the venerable English monarchy. Finance has been the
keystone. Take finance away from the House of Commons, take the
complete control of financial business away from the representative
Assembly, and our whole system of government, be it good, bad, or
indifferent, will crumble to pieces like a house of cards.

The rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would not merely be
a question of stopping a money Bill or of knocking out a few taxes
obnoxious to particular classes; the rejection of the Budget by the
Hous