Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition sought to make the situation more embarrassing for the Government. The Speaker is not empowered to issue his warrant for a new election during the Recess in the room of any Member who since the Prorogation has accepted any office whereby he has vacated his seat, unless on receipt of a certificate from two Members and a notification from the Member himself of the fact of such acceptance of office. What happened in this particular case is thus described by John Morley in his _Life of Gladstone_: “The unslumbering instinct of Party had quickly got upon a scent, and two keen-nosed sleuth-hounds of the Opposition, four or five weeks after Mr. Gladstone had taken the seals of the Exchequer, sent to the Speaker a certificate in the usual form, stating a vacancy at Greenwich, and requesting him to issue a writ for a new election. The Speaker reminded them, in reply, that the issue of writs during the recess in cases of acceptance of office required notification to him from the Member accepting, and he had received no such notification.” In the midst of the controversy Parliament was dissolved, and with it the difficulty. Governments have tried to repeal the statute of Queen Anne. Arthur Balfour, who thought the law not only antiquated, but inimical to good government, once, when Prime Minister, brought in a Bill to abolish it. “I remember in my early days,” said he, in the session of 1905, “the Party to which I belong—it was in 1880—derived infinite enjoyment from the satisfaction of turning the late Sir William Harcourt out of his seat at Oxford on his taking office as Home Secretary. He found a seat after considerable inconvenience to Mr. Gladstone’s Government; and in my opinion, although it gave us great satisfaction as a good practical joke, it was a severe condemnation of the system on which we now carry on business, and which no practical assembly in the world but our own would tolerate for an instant.” Balfour failed, however, to get the House of Commons to agree to his Bill. I have heard several debates on the subject. The chief argument of the Treasury Bench for the repeal of the Act was that by reason of it no Prime Minister has ever been able to exercise a really free choice in the selection of his colleagues in the Administration; for often he has had to put a square man into a round hole, because the round man that would fit the round hole admirably held an unsafe seat, and therefore might not be re-elected. But the view of the back benches always has been that the Act supports the control of the House over the Government, and gives to the constituency the opportunity of expressing its opinion as to the action of its representative in accepting office under the Crown. This view has always prevailed. During the Great War the principle was twice suspended by emergency Acts. Members who accepted office in the two Coalition Governments of the War—one under Asquith in May