Either of these rebuffs constituted, in the eyes of the party stalwarts, an occasion for war; and those who remembered the dismal policy of "filling up the cup" in the Gladstone-Rosebery administration yearned for a short, sharp contest in which the malevolence of the House of Lords should be fettered for all time. Nevertheless, the memory of even a successful election is so little alluring that the liberal majority of those days did not wish to engage in a second: the politician of detached judgement surmised that, when the Nationalists had secured special favours for Catholics and when all parties had united to concede them to the Jews, it was invidious to refuse similar treatment to the Church of England. In rejecting the education bill, the House of Lords aroused little practical hostility, however much its action may have offended doctrinaire democrats; and so artificial was the tattered passion aroused by the Balfour education act of 1902 that, when it ceased to furnish platform capital, it was left to function unmolested and is still operative after nearly twenty years. Similarly, when the licensing bill was thrown out, the House of Lords was so far from being reprobated by any but prohibitionists and professional partisans that it even won the sympathy of the average man by preventing an intolerable interference with his personal habits and by securing to the threatened license-holder his means of living. Some such reflections, occurring even to the less detached politicians, disposed them to wait for a more certain triumph than was promised by the half-hearted support accorded to their rejected bills; an opportunity was provided by the budget of 1909; and Mr. Asquith's first general election of 1910 was fought to reaffirm the hitherto long unquestioned control of finance by the House of Commons.