unaware that it even existed.  We had never as a nation, or never rather within living memory, troubled ourselves about “theories of State,” or whetted our minds on the fundamentals of government.  There is nothing in our educational curriculum that corresponds with the instruction civique of the French schools, nor have we the privilege which the Americans enjoy of carrying a copy of our organic Act of Government in our pockets, of reading it through in twenty minutes, and of hearing it incessantly expounded in the class-room and the Press, debated in the national legislature, and interpreted by the highest judicial tribunal in the land.

When, therefore, we were suddenly called upon to decide the infinitely delicate problems of the place, powers, and composition of a Second Chamber in our governing system, the task proved as bewildering as it was unappetizing.  Any nation which regarded its Constitution as a vital and familiar instrument would have heavily resented so gross an infraction of it as the Lords perpetrated in rejecting the 1909 Budget.  But our own electorate, so far from punishing the party responsible for the outrage, sent them back to the House over a hundred stronger, a result impossible in a country with any vivid sense, or any sense at all, of Constitutional realities, and only possible in Great Britain because the people adjudged the importance of the various issues submitted to them by standards of their own, and placed the Constitutional problem at the bottom, or near the bottom, of the list.  In no single constituency that I have ever heard of was the House of Lords question the supreme and decisive factor at the election of January, 1910.  It deeply stirred the impartial intelligence of the country, but it failed to move the average voter even in the towns, while in the rural parts it fell unmistakably flat.

Even at the election of December, 1910, when all other issues were admittedly subordinate to the Constitutional issue, it was exceedingly difficult to determine how far the stedfastness of the electorate to the Liberal cause was due to a specific appreciation and approval of the Parliament Bill and of all it involved, and how far it was an expression of general distrust of the Unionists, of irritation with the Lords, and of sympathy with the social and fiscal policies pursued by the Coalition.  That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their proposals, may be freely granted.  It was as near an approach to an ad hoc Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system.  Party exigencies, or at any rate party tactics, it is true, hurried on the election before the country was prepared for it, before it had recovered from the somnolence induced by the Conference, and before the Opposition had time or opportunity to do more than sketch in their alternative plan.  But though the issue was incompletely presented, it was undoubtedly the paramount issue put before the electorate, and the Liberals were fairly entitled to claim that their policy in regard to it had the backing of the majority of the voters of the United Kingdom.