Lords and their friends, and such reforms as were talked of to pacify the poor were easily deferred, on the plea that the country had no money to finance them. Thus there was no occasion for the Lords to interfere. Nor were they moved when at last, owing to the South African War, reckless finance, and the approach of a great trade depression, it became necessary to look for new sources of revenue. The "Tariff Reform" scheme, well calculated to benefit the landowning classes at least, was entirely to the mind of the great landowners in the Upper Chamber. Hence, up to the close of the Conservative administration, the Conservative House of Commons was in reality the only active figure on the political stage, the Lords remaining tranquilly in the background, as if asleep. Was not the other House their friend, their champion? In that security they let their champion go to the polls.

To their horror, he returned an entirely changed being. The new House of Commons in an enormous majority was of the hated Liberal complexion; and besides an old grudge against the Lords, it had a number of missions to perform on behalf of people who were not lords at all. Hence it had hardly stepped into the place of government, before the hitherto somnolent Upper House began to stir uneasily, and all attentive on-lookers could see that instead of one active figure on the stage, namely the House of Commons, there would henceforward be two, namely the Commons and the Lords; and further, that the two would eventually come into collision. But nobody at that time anticipated such a deadly struggle as that which has since arisen.

It began in sulky fashion. Amongst other things, the Liberal House of Commons was pledged to remedy those abuses in educational administration, which compelled nonconformists to support schools controlled by the Church of England. The measure promoted for that end brought the Lords to the front at once, led by the Bishops. They would permit no such tampering with established privileges; they rejected the bill with indignation, and thus the first blow was struck. The Commons took it, too, replying merely with a protest asserting their own supremacy. In fact, however, their supremacy was endangered from that hour. The other House had felt its own power: it stood now, in a defensive attitude, it is true, yet not un

willing to strike again, but as it were daring the other House to come on. And by and by the Commons came on. Their attack, this time, was directed against the abuses of the Liquor Trade, which, under cover of the Licensing Laws, had become a monopoly and was not much better than a "Trust." But this was to touch the House of Lords in a sensitive part indeed. Many of its members were large shareholders in the monopoly, and almost all of them recognized a powerful friend in the threatened "Trade." Accordingly, urged on this time by the fury not of Bishops but of Brewers, the House of Lords struck a second time. Insolently, too. It was not as a result of formal public debate that the peers rejected the Licensing Bill; the agreement to throw it out was come to at an informal meeting at the private residence of Lord Lansdowne, as though that were a suitable place from which to carry on the government of England; and the formal debate at Westminster merely ratified the decision arrived at in his lordship's mansion.

Thus once more the Lords had shattered to the ground the product of months of arduous labor by the Commons. And now the meaning of the situation was clear. It amounted in effect to this: that the Lords challenged the right of the Commons to propose any legislation disagreeable to the Conservative Party. There might be a Liberal House of Commons, and a Liberal Cabinet, but there were to be no Liberal measures passed. So well was this recognized that it was openly admitted by Mr. Balfour, the Conservative leader. Whether his party were in office or out of office, he explained, they would still govern. So great a confidence had he in the House of Lords.

It must be owned that they had earned it all. Mark the change well. Beginning with a sulky resistance to the supremacy of the Commons, the Lords were now claiming supremacy for their own House. They, and not the elected representatives of the English people, were to rule; they, who might never be removed, but were established in power by hereditary right, like a committee of irresponsible sovereigns. They were out, it appeared, for the conquest of England. They intended to capture the Government and make it their tool.

The fight went more swiftly after this. Having got their hands

in, the Lords struck out recklessly. True, they allowed the Old Age Pensions Act to pass; but they yielded with a very bad grace, and were but the more eager to put their veto on every other Liberal measure of importance. They resorted to other modes of embarrassment too. Against the six or seven millions of additional revenue required for pensioning the aged poor they had protested in the name of economy; but they did their utmost to force the Government into a far greater expenditure than that upon new battleships, in utter disregard of economy. So, week after week, the contest went on, the Lords asserting themselves with increasing arrogance, while there seemed nothing for the Commons to do but to submit.

There remained finance, however. For two hundred and fifty years it had been accepted as the root principle of the Constitution that the control of finance rested with the Commons alone. A King had died on the scaffold for refusing to accept that doctrine; all subsequent authorities had preached it; not three years earlier the Conservative leader himself had affirmed it again with unmistakable clearness; and it had become a common-place, taught to the little children in English schools. In money matters not the Lords, not the King himself, had any right to interfere, but the proposals sent up to them from the Commons must be ratified by them without alteration. For two and a half centuries this privilege of the House of Commons had not been challenged. It was the famous "power of the purse," which, in part, had made the House of Commons, and through it the English People, supreme even over King and Lords. And this hitherto irresistible weapon the Commons still held. It was, indeed, all but their last resource against the encroachments of the Upper House.

And so there came the "Budget " of 1909. The amazing events that followed its introduction are too recent, and have attracted too much attention, to need recapitulating here. Old Age Pensions and the increase in the navy together necessitated a vast increase in the revenue; and everyone knows how, to meet the increase, the Budget proposed amongst other expedients to raise the existing taxes on the Liquor Trade, and to impose new taxes on land values. Nor is anyone likely to forget the shriek of fear and indignation which went up all over England from those who saw their privileges thus

menaced by this terrible House of Commons with its terrible weapon. The owners of half England threatened their aged dependants with dismissal if the Budget should become law; Dukes made themselves ridiculous by withdrawing their guinea subscriptions from cricket clubs and hospitals; Brewers raised the price of beer by five times the amount of the proposed increase in the tax, and shouted that they were being ruined. The issue was further confused, and the excitement of the country ten-fold heightened, by the ravings of the tariff Reformers, whose panacea for increasing the revenue would evidently become unnecessary if these other proposals should come into force. To the accompaniment of never-ending clamor the drama proceeded to its climax. The Lords, hardly condescending to debate the subject, so arrogant had they grown, dared what none had dared before. They struck the all-powerful weapon from the hands of the Commons; they laid claim to a right of veto over the finance of England; they rejected the Budget.

Then, of course, the fat was in the fire. As the Lords had taken their amazing step under the pretense of " referring the Budget to the people," it was almost impossible for the representatives of the people to decline the challenge and continue in office. Accordingly Parliament was dissolved, and once more the country was plunged into the embroilment of a general election. Coming, as it did, just when trade was beginning to revive again and the unemployed to find work, the disturbance was regrettable enough; yet that was nothing compared to the gravity of the remoter consequences involved in the seeming success of the Lords. They had, in fact, nearly overthrown the British Constitution. For after all, who were they to decide when there should be an appeal to the People-a general clection? To assume the right to do that was to usurp perhaps the most essential part of the prerogative of the Crown; for as it carries with it the power of destroying the government of the day, so whoever possesses the right becomes master of the government. And such was the position into which the Lords were rapidly hoisting themselves. Should they secure it permanently, the King would become a nonentity, no government would be able to stand against them, the Commons would degenerate into a mere advisory committee, and the Lords would have England at their feet.

Of course they protested that nothing of the sort was intended; that their act would never be repeated, save in great emergency. But none could guarantee that that would be so. What they had done once they might do again; it was open to them to find an emergency whenever they disliked the House of Commons, or disapproved of a proposed tax. Besides, though it was expedient for them to play the innocent during the elections at least, many of them were too indiscreet, or too arrogant, or both, to veil their pretensions. The "great proconsuls of the empire," as they were flatteringly styled, the men, that is to say, who had ruled over the subjectraces of India and Egypt and South Africa and forgotten what liberty meant, were especially conspicuous in this direction. While the more prudent leaders, like Mr. Balfour, merely repudiated or . explained away their former admissions that the Commons should be supreme, these others boldly maintained the absolute right of the Lords to exercise the decisive function whenever and wherever they might choose. They were not to stop at the mere veto, even of finance measures; they might alter, or initiate, if they pleased. In short, the taxes and the laws of England were to be imposed on the English People not by the People themselves but by an irresponsible oligarchy of hereditary nobles.

It would have been supposed that at the General Election the People would make short work of all these pretensions, returning a House of Commons overwhelmingly strong to deal with the Lords. That they failed to do so is, indeed, the most ominous circumstance in the whole affair. The result of the elections was, however, disconcerting to both parties. The Lords had counted on annihilating the majority against them; the others, on preserving it unimpaired; and neither side was right. When the total returns were obtained they certainly showed a substantial majority against the Lords, but it was nothing to that in the previous House; and, moreover, it was a composite one, made up principally of the Labor Party and the Irish Home Rulers. Ireland, of course, was opposed to the Lords. In the larger island, Scotland, Wales, and most of the industrial sections of England had voted solidly against them, but on the other hand the agricultural and "respectable" classes in England, with the brewers and the friends of sport, had voted in their favor,