Occasionally,
indeed, as was necessary to prevent a rupture with the Nationalists,
some perfunctory mention of Home Rule as a _desideratum_ of the future
was made on Ministerial platforms--by Mr. Churchill, for example, at
Manchester in May 1909. But by that date even the contest over Tariff
Reform--which had raged without intermission for six years, and by
rending the Unionist Party had grievously damaged it as an effective
instrument of opposition--had become merged in the more immediately
exciting battle of the Budget, provoked by Mr. Lloyd George's financial
proposals for the current year, and by the possibility that they might
be rejected by the House of Lords. This the House of Lords did, on the
30th of November, 1909, and the Prime Minister at once announced that he
would appeal to the country without delay.

Such a turn of events was a wonderful windfall for the Irish
Nationalists, beyond what the most sanguine of them can ever have hoped
for. The rejection of a money Bill by the House of Lords raised a
democratic blizzard, the full force of which was directed against the
constitutional power of veto possessed by the hereditary Chamber in
relation not merely to money Bills, but to general legislation. For a
long time the Liberal Party had been threatening that part of the
Constitution without much effect. Sixteen years had passed since Mr.
Gladstone in his last speech in the House of Commons declared that
issue must be joined with the Peers; but the emphatic endorsement by the
constituencies in 1895 of the Lords' action which he had denounced,
followed by ten years of Unionist Government, damped down the ardour of
attack so effectually that, during the four years in which the Liberals
enjoyed unchallengeable power, from 1906 to 1910, they did nothing to
carry out Gladstone's parting injunction. Had they done so at any time
when Home Rule was a living issue in the country an attack on the Lords
would in all probability have proved disastrous to themselves. For there
was not a particle of evidence that the electors of Great Britain had
changed their minds on this subject, and there were great numbers of
voters in the country--those voters, unattached to party, who constitute
"the swing of the pendulum," and decide the issue at General
Elections--who felt free to vote Liberal in 1906 because they believed
Home Rule was practically dead, and if revived would be again given its
_quietus_, as in 1893, by the House of