Lords. But the defeat of the
Budget in November 1909 immediately opened a line of attack wholly
unconnected with Ireland, and over the most favourable ground that could
have been selected for the assault.

Nothing could have been more skilful than the tactics employed by the
Liberal leaders. Concentrating on the constitutional question raised by
the alleged encroachment of the Lords on the exclusive privilege of the
Commons to grant supply, they tried to excite a hurricane of popular
fury by calling on the electorate to decide between "Peers and People."
The rejected Finance Bill was dubbed "The People's Budget." A "Budget
League" was formed to expatiate through the constituencies on the
democratic character of its provisions, and on the personal and class
selfishness of the Peers in throwing it out. As little as possible was
said about Ireland, and probably not one voter in ten thousand who went
to the poll in January 1910 ever gave a thought to the subject, or
dreamed that he was taking part in reversing the popular verdict of 1886
and 1895. Afterwards, when it was complained that an election so
conducted had provided no "mandate" for Home Rule, it was found that in
the course of a long speech delivered by Mr. Asquith at the Albert Hall
on the 10th of December there was a sentence in which the Prime Minister
had declared that "the Irish problem could only be solved by a policy
which, while explicitly safeguarding the supreme authority of the
Imperial Parliament, would set up self-government in Ireland in regard
to Irish affairs." The rest of the speech dealt with Tariff Reform and
with the constitutional question of the House of Lords, on which the
public mind was focused throughout the election.

In the unprecedented deluge of oratory that flooded the country in the
month preceding the elections the Prime Minister's sentence on Ireland
at the Albert Hall passed almost unnoticed in English and Scottish
constituencies, or was quickly lost sight of, like a coin in a
cornstack, under sheaves of rhetoric about the dear loaf and the
intolerable arrogance of hereditary legislators. Here and there a
Unionist candidate did his best to warn a constituency that every
Liberal vote was a vote for Home Rule. He was invariably met with an
impatient retort that he was attempting to raise a bogey to divert
attention from the iniquity of the Lords and the Tariff Reformers. Home
Rule, he was told, was dead and buried.

On the 19th o