But I hope the House of Lords and those who back them will not be under any illusions about the Budget and the position of the Government.  The Government is in earnest about the Budget.  The Budget carries with it their fortunes and the fortunes of the Liberal Party.  Careful argument, reasonable amendment, amicable concession, not affecting the principles at stake—­all these we offer while the Bill is in the House of Commons.  But when all that is said and done, as the Bill leaves the House of Commons so it must stand.  It would be a great pity if Lord Curzon, the Indian pro-Consul, or the London Spectator—­it would be a great pity if those potentates were to make the great mistake of supposing that the Government would acquiesce in the excision of the land clauses of the Budget by the House of Lords.  Such a course is unthinkable.  Any Liberal Government which adopted it would be swiftly ruined.  The land proposals of the Government have not been made without long deliberation and full responsibility.  We shall not fail to carry them effectively through the House of Commons; still less shall we accept any amendment at the hands of the House of Lords.

Is it not an extraordinary thing that upon the Budget we should even be discussing at all the action of the House of Lords?  The House of Lords is an institution absolutely foreign to the spirit of the age and to the whole movement of society.  It is not perhaps surprising in a country so fond of tradition, so proud of continuity, as ourselves that a feudal assembly of titled persons, with so long a history and so many famous names, should have survived to exert an influence upon public affairs at the present time.  We see how often in England the old forms are reverently preserved after the forces by which they are sustained and the uses to which they were put and the dangers against which they were designed have passed away.  A state of gradual decline was what the average Englishman had come to associate with the House of Lords.  Little by little, we might have expected, it would have ceased to take a controversial part in practical politics.  Year by year it would have faded more completely into the past to which it belongs until, like Jack-in-the-Green or Punch-and-Judy, only a picturesque and fitfully lingering memory would have remained.

And during the last ten years of Conservative government this was actually the case.  But now we see the House of Lords flushed with the wealth of the modern age, armed with a party caucus, fortified, revived, resuscitated, asserting its claims in the harshest and in the crudest manner, claiming to veto or destroy even without discussion any legislation, however important, sent to them by any majority, however large, from any House of Commons, however newly elected.  We see these unconscionable claims exercised with a frank and undisguised regard to party interest, to class interest, and to personal interest.  We see the House of Lords using the power which they should not hold at all, which if they hold at all, they should hold in trust for all, to play a shrewd, fierce, aggressive party game of electioneering and casting their votes according to the interest of the particular political party to which, body and soul, they belong.