Even at the election of December, 1910, when all other issues were admittedly subordinate to the Constitutional issue, it was exceedingly difficult to determine how far the stedfastness of the electorate to the Liberal cause was due to a specific appreciation and approval of the Parliament Bill and of all it involved, and how far it was an expression of general distrust of the Unionists, of irritation with the Lords, and of sympathy with the social and fiscal policies pursued by the Coalition. That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their proposals, may be freely granted. It was as near an approach to an _ad hoc_ Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system. Party exigencies, or at any rate party tactics, it is true, hurried on the election before the country was prepared for it, before it had recovered from the somnolence induced by the Conference, and before the Opposition had time or opportunity to do more than sketch in their alternative plan. But though the issue was incompletely presented, it was undoubtedly the paramount issue put before the electorate, and the Liberals were fairly entitled to claim that their policy in regard to it had the backing of the majority of the voters of the United Kingdom. Whether, however, this backing represented a reasoned view of the Constitutional points involved and of the position, prerogatives, and organization of a Second Chamber in the framework of British Government, whether it implied that our people were really interested in and had deeply pondered the relative merits of the Single and Double Chamber systems, is much more doubtful. "When he was told," said the Duke of Northumberland on August 10th, "that the people of England were very anxious to abolish the House of Lords, his reply was that they did not understand the question, and did not care two brass farthings about it." That perhaps is putting it somewhat too strongly. The country within the last two years has unquestionably felt more vividly than ever before the anomaly of an hereditary Upper Chamber embedded in democratic institutions. It has been stirred by Mr. Lloyd-George's rhetoric to a mood of vague exasperation with the House of Lords and of ridicule of the order of the Peerage. It has accepted too readily the Liberal version of the central issue as a case of Peers _versus_ People. But while it was satisfied that something ought to be done, I do not believe it realizes precisely what has been accomplished in its name or the consequences that must follow from the passing of the Parliament Bill. There are no signs that it regards the abridgment of the powers of the Upper House as a great democratic victory. There are, on the contrary, manifold signs that it has been bored and bewildered by the whole struggle, and that the extraordinary lassitude with which