Then take the death duties.  One would suppose from what one hears in London and from the outcry that is raised, that the whole of the death duties were collected from the peers and from the county families.  Again I say, look at the facts.  The Inland Revenue report for last year shows that L313,000,000 of property passing on death became subject to death duties, and of that sum L228,000,000 was personalty and not real estate, leaving only L85,000,000 real estate, and of that L85,000,000 only L22,000,000 was agricultural land.  These death duties are represented as being levied entirely upon a small class of landed gentry and nobility, but, as a matter of fact, there is collected from that class in respect of agricultural land only seven per cent. of the whole amount of money which the Exchequer derives from death duties.[19]

I decline, however, to judge the question of the House of Lords simply and solely by any action they may resolve to take upon the Budget.  We must look back upon the past.  We remember the ill-usage and the humiliation which the great majority that was returned by the nation to support Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1906 has sustained in the last three years at the hands of the House of Lords.  That Assembly must be judged by their conduct as a whole.  Lord Lansdowne has explained, to the amusement of the nation, that he claimed no right on behalf of the House of Lords to “mince” the Budget.  All, he tells us, he has asked for, so far as he is concerned, is the right to “wince” when swallowing it.  Well, that is a much more modest claim.  It is for the Conservative Party to judge whether it is a very heroic claim for one of their leaders to make.  If they are satisfied with the wincing Marquis, we have no reason to protest.  We should greatly regret to cause Lord Lansdowne and his friends any pain.  We have no wish whatever to grudge them any relief which they may obtain by wincing or even by squirming.  We accord them the fullest liberty in that respect.

After all, the House of Lords has made others wince in its time.  Even in the present Parliament they have performed some notable exploits.  When the House of Lords rejected the Bill to prevent one man casting his vote two or three times over in the same election, every one in this country who desired to see a full and true representation of the people in Parliament might well have winced.  When the House of Lords rejected or mutilated beyond repair the Land Valuation Bills for England and for Scotland, every land reformer in the country might have winced.  When the House of Lords destroyed Mr. Birrell’s Education Bill of 1906, every man who cared for religious equality and educational peace might have winced.  When they contemptuously flung out, without even discussing it or examining it, the Licensing Bill, upon which so many hopes were centred and upon which so many months of labour had been spent, they sent a message of despair to every temperance reformer, to every social and philanthropic worker, to every church, to every chapel, to every little Sunday school throughout the land.  If it should now prove to be their turn, if the measure they have meted out to others should be meted out to them again, however much we might regret their sorrows, we could not but observe the workings of poetic justice.