There is, however, one reason which would justify a Government, circumstanced and supported as we are, in abandoning prematurely the trust confided to us by the country. When a Government is impotent, when it is destitute of ideas and devoid of the power to give effect to them, when it is brought to a complete arrest upon the vital and essential lines of its policy, then I entirely agree that the sooner it divests itself of responsibilities which it cannot discharge, the better for the country it governs and the Party it represents. No one who looks back over the three busy years of legislation which have just been completed can find any grounds for such a view of our position; and although we have sustained checks and vexations from circumstances beyond our control which have prevented us settling, as we otherwise would have done, the problems of licensing and of education, no lover of progress who compares the Statute-book as it stands to-day with its state in 1905, need feel that he has laboured in vain. No one can say that we have been powerless in the past. The trade unionist as he surveys the progress of his organisation, the miner as the cage brings him to the surface of the ground, the aged pensioner when he visits the post office with his cheque-book, the Irish Catholic whose son sees the ranges of a University career thrown open, the child who is protected in his home and in the street, the peasant who desires to acquire a share of the soil he tills, the youthful offender in the prison, the citizen as he takes his seat on the county bench, the servant who is injured in domestic service, all give the lie to that--all can bear witness to the workings of a tireless social and humanitarian activity, which, directed by knowledge and backed by power, tends steadily to make our country a better place for the many, without at the same time making it a bad place for the few. But, if we have been powerful in the past, shall we then be powerless in the future? Let the year that has now opened make its answer to that. We shall see before many months are passed whether his Majesty's Government, and the House of Commons, by which it is supported, do not still possess effective means to carry out their policy, not only upon those important political issues in which we have been for the time being thwarted, but also in that still wider and, in my opinion, more important field of social organisation into which, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, we shall now proceed to advance.