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 of January, 1910, when the elections were over in the boroughs, Mr. Asquith claimed that “the great industrial centres had mainly declared for Free Trade,” and the impartial chronicler of the Annual Register stated that “the Liberals had fought on Free Trade and the constitutional issue.”  The twice-repeated decision of the country against Home Rule for Ireland was therefore in no sense reversed by the General Election of January 1910.

But from the very beginning of the agitation over the Budget and the action of the House of Lords in relation to it, in the summer of 1909, the gravity of the situation so created was fully appreciated by both political parties in Ireland itself.  Only the most languid interest was there taken in the questions which stirred the constituencies across the Channel.  Neither Nationalist nor Unionist cared anything whatever for Free Trade; neither of them shed a tear over the rejected Budget.  Indeed, Mr. Lloyd George’s new taxes were so unpopular in Ireland that Mr. Redmond was violently attacked by Mr. William O’Brien and Mr. Healy for his neglect of obvious Irish interests in supporting the Government.  Mr. Redmond, for his part, made no pretence that his support was given because he approved of the proposals for which he and his followers gave their votes in every division.  The clauses of the Finance Bill were trifles in his eyes that did not matter.  His gaze was steadily fixed on the House of Peers, which he saw before him as a huntsman views a fox with bedraggled brush, reduced to a trot a field or two ahead of the hounds.  That House was, as he described it, “the last obstacle to Home Rule,” and he was determined to do all he could to remove the obstacle.  Lord Rosebery said at Glasgow in September 1909 that he believed Ministers wanted the House of Lords to reject the Budget.  Whether they did or not, there can be no doubt that Mr. Redmond did, for he knew that, in that event, the whole strength of the Liberal Party would be directed to the task of beating down the “last obstacle,” and that then it would be possible to carry Home Rule without the British constituencies being consulted.  It was with this end in view that he took his party into the lobby in support of a Budget that was detested in Ireland, and threw the whole weight of his influence in British constituencies on to the Liberal side in the elections of January 1910.