The extent to which this ministerial reserve was carried was shown by a question put to Mr. Asquith in his own constituency in East Fife on the 6th of December.  Scottish “hecklers” are intelligent and well informed on current politics, and no one who knows them can imagine one of them asking the Prime Minister whether he intended to introduce a Home Rule Bill if Home Rule had been proclaimed as one of the chief items in the policy of the Government.  Mr. Asquith gave an affirmative reply; but the elections were by this time half over, and in the following week Mr. Balfour laid stress on the fact that five hundred contests had been decided before any Minister had mentioned Home Rule.  Even after giving this memorable answer in East Fife Mr. Asquith, speaking at Bury St. Edmunds on the 12th of December, declared that “the sole issue at that moment was the supremacy of the people,” and he added, in deprecation of all the talk about Ireland, that “it was sought to confuse this issue by catechising Ministers on the details of the next Home Rule Bill.”

Even if this had been, as it was not, a true description of the attempts that had been made to extract a frank declaration from the Government as to their intentions in regard to this vitally important matter—­far more important to hundreds of thousands of people than any question of Tariff, or of limiting the functions of the Second Chamber —­it was surely a curious doctrine to be propounded by a statesman zealous to preserve “popular government “!  There had been two Home Rule Bills in the past, differing one from the other in not a few important respects; discussion had shown that many even of those who supported the principle of Home Rule objected strongly to this or that proposal for embodying it in legislation Language had been used by Mr. Asquith himself, as well as by some of his principal colleagues, which implied that any future Home Rule Bill would be part of a general scheme of “devolution,” or federation, or “Home Rule All Round”—­a solution of the question favoured by many who hotly opposed separate treatment for Ireland Yet here was the responsible Minister, in the middle of a General Election, complaining that the issue was being “confused” by presumptuous persons who wanted to know what sort of Home Rule, if any, he had in contemplation in the event of obtaining a majority sufficient to keep him in power.

Under such circumstances it would have been a straining of constitutional principles, and a flagrant violation of the canons of that “democratic government” of which Mr Asquith had constituted himself the champion, to pass a Home Rule Bill by means of a majority so obtained, even if the majority had been one that pointed to a sweeping turnover of public opinion to the side of the Government The elections of December 1910, in point of fact, gave no such indication.  The Government gained nothing whatever by the appeal to the country.  Liberals and Unionists came back in almost precisely the same strength as in the previous Parliament.  They balanced each other within a couple of votes in the new House of Commons, and the Ministry could not have remained twenty-four hours in office except in coalition with Labour and the Irish Nationalists.