In order, first of all, to trace the course of the actual controversy as it has been carried on in the House of Commons and in the country, it is not necessary to go further back than 1883.  In that year the Lords had rejected the Franchise Bill, and it was then that Mr. Bright, in a speech at Leeds dealing with the deadlocks between the two Houses, sketched a plan which was really the essence and origin of the principle adopted in the Parliament Act that has just become law.  The Lords had rejected many Liberal measures before then; attempts had been made to get round or overcome their opposition; but not till then was any practical method formulated for dealing with the serious and permanent obstruction to progressive legislation.  Mr. Bright himself had condemned the peers and declared that “their arrogance and class selfishness had long been at war with the highest interests of the nation,” and now he advocated a specific remedy, which he declared would be obtained by “limiting the veto which the House of Lords exercises over the proceedings of the House of Commons.”  The actual plan was that a Bill rejected by the Lords should be sent up to them again, “but when the Bill came down to the House of Commons in the second session, and the Commons would not agree to the amendments of the Lords, then the Lords should be bound to accept the Bill.”  This method of procedure, it will be seen, was more expeditious and drastic than the scheme in the Parliament Act.

Mr. Chamberlain joined vigorously in the campaign against the Peers.  Telling passages from his speeches are quoted to this day, such as when he declared that “the House of Lords had never contributed one iota to popular liberty and popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal,” but “had protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege.”

No further mention of the Bright scheme was made for some time.  Six years of Conservative rule (1886-1892) diverted the attention of Liberals as a party in opposition to other matters, and the Lords subsided, as they always have done in such periods, into an entirely innocuous, negligible, and utterly useless adjunct of the Conservative Government.

In the brief period between 1892-1895, the animus against the House of Lords was kindled afresh.  Several Liberal Bills were mutilated or lost, and the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill served to fan the flames into a dangerous blaze.  The Bright plan was recalled by Lord Morley.  “I think,” he said (at Newcastle on May 21, 1894), “there will have to be some definite attempt to carry out what Mr. Bright at the Leeds Conference of 1883 suggested, by which the power of the House of Lords—­this non-elected, this non-representative, this hereditary, this packed Tory Chamber—­by which the veto of that body shall be strictly limited.”  Mr. Gladstone, too, in his last speech in the House of Commons on the wrecking amendments which the Lords had made on the Parish Councils Bill, dwelt on the fundamental differences between the two Houses, and said that “a state of things had been created which could not continue,” and declared it to be “a controversy which once raised must go forward to an issue.”