POSTSCRIPT.

This article was already in type when Mr Asquith, on the 14th of April, made the momentous announcement which has removed several of the problems discussed in the previous pages from the region of speculation into that of fact. The Prime Minister has publicly promised that, if the Lords decline to accept the Resolutions he has carried in the House of Commons, he will ask the King's consent to the creation of the four or five hundred peers necessary to force the policy embodied in those Resolutions through the Upper House. No secret is made of the reason for this humiliating reversal of the principles described by the same Mr Asquith on the first day of the session as those which ought to actuate a First Minister of the Crown. Mr Redmond was inexorable. He had the power, and he convinced Mr Asquith, at any rate, that he meant to use it. Against that no publicly proclaimed principles, no sense of personal dignity, no feeling, such as would have so strongly influenced Mr Gladstone, of the Minister's duty to shield the Sovereign from controversy, have been allowed to stand in the way. There seems no doubt that, if he has sacrificed political consistency, personal honour, and the old traditions of loyalty which made Ministers the devoted guardians of the august impartiality of the Crown, he has at least gained Mr Redmond. The prophets whom we mentioned above as confident that Mr Asquith would not risk the unpopularity of bringing the Throne into a party dispute, have proved wrong; and the extreme Radicals have, as usual, proved right, because they added to prophecy the more potent weapon of pressure.

The Budget, it seems certain, will now pass. And, as no one thinks it likely either that the Lords will accept the Resolutions of the Government, or that the King will feel able to accede to the demand for the creation of peers, interest will pass from the barren discussions accompanying the passage into law of a bought Budget to the dissolution which must lie in the very near future. Whether it be Mr Asquith or Mr Balfour who actually takes the Ministerial responsibility of advising it, it seems now quite inevitable. What will its result be? To begin with Ireland, nobody supposes that the Budget has gained

in popularity there since January. Mr Redmond has, no doubt, extorted a humiliatingly high price from Mr Asquith; but, weak as Mr Asquith has shown himself, he has got something too; and is it not possible that Ireland may think the acceptance of the actual and present Budget a high price to pay for the vision of a very problematic Home Rule? Is it certain that the future may not have its humiliations in store for Mr Redmond also? And if Mr O'Brien gains ground in Ireland at the expense of Mr Redmond, it will not require the gain of many English seats by the Unionists to put the continuance of the policy of the Budget in a very precarious position.

Then can the Liberal leaders hold together much longer? Politicians generally manage to go on acting with their colleagues longer than impartial onlookers expect. But whatever be Sir Edward Grey's loyalty to the Liberal party, this final and abject surrender to the Irish and the extremists is making people ask more than ever whether it is credible that he should long continue to accept a nominal responsibility for a policy which is plainly leading to an indefinite postponement of that reconstitution of the Second Chamber to which he has always been committed and on the importance of which he has publicly insisted so lately as on April 11. On that day he wrote a letter to the chairman of the Berwick Liberal Association in which he stated that he intended to ask his constituents at the next election to give their attention to the constitution of a proper Second Chamber and a definition of its powers.' Does anybody suppose, does Sir Edward Grey himself suppose, that, whatever attention he may obtain from the electors of Berwick for this problem, he will obtain much from his party in the next or any other House of Commons? And if not, how long will his position as a Liberal leader remain a possible one?

For Unionists, at any rate, the issue is clear. The Unionist party must strain every nerve to prevent the destruction of the ancient Constitution of the country. Their candidates will have great allies. There is the historical feeling that lies deep in the mind of the average Englishman and makes him disinclined to sudden breaches with the traditional past; the just indignation which

is so widely felt at Mr Asquith's indecent treatment of the Crown; the equally widespread indignation at the ignominous surrender of the Prime Minister of England to the dictation of an Irish leader who parades his indifference to the most vital interests of Great Britain; and there is the impatience and disgust of all classes of the business community at the neglect of the most urgent financial affairs of the country in order to find time for playing with revolutionary changes which, as all men of common sense will agree, should certainly never be undertaken in a hurry. All these forces will work in favour of the Unionist party at the general election. Only once or twice in their long history have the English people been ready to tread the path of revolution, and then only when the path of reform appeared closed and inaccessible. That is not the case now. It is the essence of the Union

ist policy to show the way to the reasonable reform of the Constitution and to ask the country to unite upon it. That way is open. The Lords have shown their willingness to enter upon the discussion of the reform of their House, and have accepted resolutions which lay the necessary foundation for a great change from a Chamber purely hereditary to one including many members who neither inherit their seats from their fathers nor will transmit them to their sons. The practical choice which the country will have before it at the election is that between a real but reformed Second Chamber on the one hand, and, on the other, a Second Chamber at once unreformed, impotent, and unreal. The policy of the Government is to retain whatever abuses there may be in the constitution of the Upper House in order to create prejudice against it, and prevent it from discharging any useful function. The policy of the Opposition is to remove the abuses in order that the reformed House may have the full confidence of the country and may play that secondary but important part in the working of the Constitution which all other great countries have assigned to their Second Chambers with admittedly good results. That is the issue which is to be tried. The Unionist party enter upon it with a full sense of its gravity, but also with the best hopes of a successful result. There seems no conceivable reason why anybody who voted against the Government three months ago

should vote in their favour now. But there are many and obvious reasons for the opposite change. We should be tempted to despair of the political future of England if we did not feel strong confidence that when the struggle opens there will be found among those who voted Liberal at the last election enough moderation and sanity, enough of that political good sense which has so long been the boast of Englishmen and the admiration of foreigners, to rebuke the violence and recklessness of the Liberal Cabinet, and to secure that whatever changes may be made in the laws or customs which govern the relations of the two Houses of Parliament to each other and to the Crown shall be made in the interest of the nation as a whole, not in the mere interests of a party, and, above all, in the spirit of reform, not in that of revolution.

INDEX

TO THE

TWO HUNDRED AND TWELFTH VOLUME OF THE
QUARTERLY REVIEW.

[Titles of Articles are printed in heavier type. The names of authors of
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