The Lords' amendments to the Parliament Bill were con- sidered
in the House of Commons on Tuesday. All the essential amendments were of course rejected, but Mr. Churchill on behalf of the Government agreed to accept a few small modi- fications. One of these will allow the Speaker to have the assistance of two other members of the House of Commons in making his decisions as to Money Bills; another excepts from the scope of the Parliament Bill any measure for prolonging the length of a Parliament beyond five years. There was considerable opposition to these small concessions, particularly to the former, from the extreme Radicals and Labour member. During the debate a speech was delivered by Lord Hugh
Cecil, in which he denounced the action of the Government in invoking the Prerogative, the consequence of which was "to make a great body of loyal subjects feel that they had been hardly treated by the Monarchy "—a suggestion as futile as it is mischievous. He went on to criticize Lord Lansdowne's policy, and declared that the idea that the peers could actually be created was " a fantastic apprehension which haunted the disordered imaginations of the Spectator and the Times." Lord Hugh Cecil falls into the common error of thinking that disagreeable facts can be got rid of by pretending that they do not exist.
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