but more remote, tell us that they are not convinced.  What steps do they suggest that we should take in order to bring home to them the earnestness of our plea?  What steps do they suggest that the people should take in order to assert their wishes?  I hold entirely by what I said that to dispute the authority of an elected body fresh from its constituents is a deliberate incitement to the adoption of lawless and unconstitutional methods.  The assertion which the House of Lords made at the end of last year is an intolerable assertion.  I believe the country is altogether unprepared for it; and I wonder it was thought worth while to risk an institution which has lasted so many centuries, in the very skirmish line of Party warfare.

I am aware there is a special reason for the temerity of the House of Lords.  It is not a very complimentary reason to the Members or the leaders of the late Government, but it is argued that the Conservative Party cannot be worse than they are.  No matter what they do, nor how they are hated or reprobated by the country, the Conservative Party cannot possibly occupy a more humiliating and unpleasant position than they did after the last two years of the late Administration.  Consequently, having reached the low-water mark of political fortune, they think they can afford to be a little reckless, and that at the very worst they will be returned in their present numerical proportions.

That is a very natural explanation of their action; but if we for our part were to accept the assertion lately made by the House of Lords—­an assertion which is the furthest point to which aristocratic privilege has attained in modern times—­that assertion itself would become only the starting-point for a whole new series of precedents and of constitutional retrogressions; and worse than that, if by any chance, having raised this issue, we were to be defeated upon it—­if having placed this Resolution on the records of the House we were to fail to give effect to it, or were to suffer an electoral reverse as the conclusion of it—­then good-bye to the power of the House of Commons.  All that long process of advance in democratic institutions which has accompanied the growth of the power of the House of Commons, and which has also been attended by an expansion of the circles of comfort and culture among the people of this country—­all that long process which has gone steadily onward for 200 years, and which has almost exclusively occupied the politics of the nineteenth century—­will have reached its culmination.  It will have come in contact with that barrier of which we have heard so much in this debate.  The tide will have turned, and in the recoil of the waters they will gradually leave exposed again, altered no doubt by the conditions of the age, all the old assertions of aristocratic and plutocratic domination which we had fondly hoped had been engulfed for ever.