nation, and that they must be allowed to coerce the House of Commons, as in the days when they nominated a majority of its members. To have adopted either of these courses would have been fatal to the authority, perhaps even to the existence, of the Upper House. Thus the excuse of the Royal Prerogative, which removed the subject of contention between the two Houses, was really the means of saving the Lords from a disastrous conflict with the People. The Peers, however, carried a vote of censure on the Government, who ignored it, and then their Lordships passed the Army Regulation Bill without any alteration, nay even without dividing against the clauses transferring the patronage of the Militia from Lords-Lieutenant of Counties to the Crown. The Session of 1871 was also made memorable by the struggle over the Ballot Bill, in the course of which nearly all the devices of factious obstruction were exhausted. The Ballot had become since 1832 the shibboleth of Radicalism.[7] Resistance to it had been accepted as the first duty of a Conservative. The arguments for the Ballot were (1), that by allowing men to vote in secret they were free from intimidation, and (2), that when votes were given in secret men were not likely to buy them, for they had no longer any means of knowing whether value was ever given for their money. On the other hand, the Tories argued (1), that to vote in secret was cowardly and unmanly; (2), that it was unconstitutional; and (3), that it weakened the sense of responsibility in the voter who had no longer the pressure of public opinion on him.[8] But though these arguments were elaborated at enormous length, they were felt by the average elector to be wiredrawn and academic. To him the practical object of any system of election was to get the voter to give effect to his own real opinion, and not the opinion of somebody else, in choosing a member. There could be nothing constitutional, or moral, or distinctively “English,” in a man who desired to be represented by A voting for B, either because his landlord or his employer or some of his neighbours intimidated or bribed him into doing so. Nor could his sense of duty be strengthened under a system which enabled him to cast the responsibility for a false vote on those who had coerced or bribed him into giving it. No doubt the prospect of getting rid of violent scenes and of the demonstrations of turbulent mobs round the polling-booths where men voted in public, induced many independent politicians, who were not insensible to the weight of some of the Conservative arguments, to accept the Ballot. Strictly speaking, when the question was lifted out of the mire of mere party controversy it came to this--whether Englishmen, in giving their votes, preferred the protection of secrecy, to the protection of a strong law punishing those who attempted to interfere with their independence. To set the law in motion against a rich man in England