I press these points in order to justify me in making this statement, that the House of Lords, as it at present exists and acts, is not a national institution, but a Party dodge, an apparatus and instrument at the disposal of one political faction; and it is used in the most unscrupulous manner to injure and humiliate the opposite faction.  When Conservative Members go about the country defending a Second Chamber, let them remember that this is the kind of Second Chamber they have to defend, and when they defend the veto let them remember that it is a veto used, not for national purposes, but for the grossest purposes of unscrupulous political partisanship.

I have dealt with the issues between Houses, and I come to that between Parties.  Great changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly.  Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one institution which under pretentious forms is only the husk of reality, and another which under a humble name is in fact the operative pivot of the social system.  Constitutional writers have much to say about the estates of the realm, and a great deal to say about their relation to each other, and to the Sovereign.  All that is found to be treated upon at length.  But they say very little about the Party system.  And, after all, the Party system is the dominant fact in our experience.  Nothing is more striking in the last twenty-five years than the growth and expansion of Party organisation, and the way in which millions of people and their votes have been woven into its scope.

There are two great characteristics about the Party institutions of this country:  the equipoise between them, and their almost incredible durability.  We have only to look at the general elections of 1900 and 1906.  I do not suppose any circumstances could be more depressing for a political Party than the circumstances in which the Liberal Party fought the election in 1900, except the circumstances in which the Conservative Party fought the election of 1906.  At those two elections, what was the salient fact?  The great mass of the voters of each political Party stood firm by the standard of their Party, and although there was an immense movement of public opinion, that movement was actually effected by the actual transference of a comparatively small number of votes.

When Parties are thus evenly balanced, to place such a weapon as the House of Lords in the hands of one of the Parties is to doom the other to destruction.  I do not speak only from the Party point of view, although it explains the earnestness with which we approach this question.  It is a matter of life and death to Liberalism and Radicalism.  It is a question of our life or the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords.  But look at it from a national point of view.  Think of its injury to the smooth working of a Liberal Government.  At the present time a Liberal Government, however powerful, cannot look far ahead, cannot impart design into its operations, because it knows that if at any moment its vigour falls below a certain point another body, over which it has no control, is ready to strike it a blow to its most serious injury.