The Government and the country were therefore, in the third year of the war, face to face with the impossible position that if circumstances necessitated an appeal to the country there was in existence no register of voters which could in any sense be looked upon as representative of the manhood of the nation. The elderly, the infirm, the shirker, the crank, who had remained at home evading military service, and "the conscientious objector," would remain on the old and obsolete register in full numerical strength; the young manhood of the nation who were fighting for it in the Navy, or the Air Service, or on the dreary swamps of Flanders, or the tremendous battlefields round Ypres or on the Somme, would in large proportion have forfeited their parliamentary votes in consequence of the services they were rendering to their country. It was an intolerable situation. By-elections which from time to time took place illustrated the extraordinarily non-representative character of the old register. Candidates and agents reported the existence of street after street in which only a handful of voters remained. It would have been impossible to dissolve on such a register, and even if it had been possible, Mr. Asquith had himself declared that a Parliament elected on such a register would be "lacking in moral sanction." It will be remembered that the House elected in 1910 had passed an Act limiting the duration of all future Parliaments to five years. If there had been no war the dissolution must therefore have taken place by 1915; but as a General Election, except on sheer necessity, could not be contemplated during the war, the operation of the five years' limit was more than once suspended by legislation. This, however, was only postponing the problem, and did not afford any solution of it.