that the responsible statesmen by whom they are led, and by whom we think they are controlled, would not hesitate as patriotic men before they plunged the finances of the country into what would be a largely irremediable confusion.  And still more I find it difficult to believe that Party leaders, anxious no doubt for office on the most secure terms and at the shortest notice, would voluntarily run unusual risks in order to be able to fight a decisive battle upon exceptionally unfavourable ground.  In common with most of us who are here to-night, I hold that the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would be a constitutional outrage.  I do not think we are entitled at this stage to assume that such an outrage will be committed.  We cannot credit such intentions, even though we read them every day brutally and blatantly affirmed by a powerful Party Press.  We do not credit such intentions.  We are, however, bound to be fully prepared against all contingencies.  The necessary precautions must be taken.  The fighting machine must undergo all those preliminary processes necessary for a rapid and efficient mobilisation.  And the ground on which a great battle might take place, the theatre of war, must be scanned beforehand with military foresight.  And that is being done.

But those who lightly estimate the crisis which will follow the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords must be either strangely unimaginative or else they must be strangely ignorant of British history and of the British Constitution.  The control of finance by the representative Assembly is the keystone of all that constitutional fabric upon which and within which all of us here have dwelt safely and peacefully throughout our lives.  It is by the application of the power of the purse, and by the application of the power of the purse almost alone, that we have moved forward, slowly and prosaically, no doubt, during the last two hundred years, but without any violent overturn such as has rent the life and history of almost every other considerable country, from a kind of mediaeval oligarchy to a vast modern democratic State based on the suffrages of six million or seven million electors, loyal to the Crown, and clothed with all the stately forms of the venerable English monarchy.  Finance has been the keystone.  Take finance away from the House of Commons, take the complete control of financial business away from the representative Assembly, and our whole system of government, be it good, bad, or indifferent, will crumble to pieces like a house of cards.

The rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would not merely be a question of stopping a money Bill or of knocking out a few taxes obnoxious to particular classes; the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would mean the claim of the House of Lords—­that is, the claim of a non-elective and unrepresentative Chamber—­to make and to unmake Governments; and a recognition of that claim by the country would