At Newcastle, on Friday week, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman addressed a meeting
to protest against the action of the House of Lords. The ideal to which all Liberals adhered, was the giving of the vote to as many citizens as possible. "The more the merrier" was their motto. The Second Chamber, as long as it existed, and however constituted, ought not to have the power to spoil the work of the specially appointed Deputies of the country. After referring to the Referendum "as an outlandish invention," Mr. Camp- bell-Bannerman declared that it was not the Radicals who were departing from the old lines of the Constitution. It was the constitutional party. To discuss the question of a Second Chamber just yet was unnecessary. "To have a non-representative and irresponsible Second Chamber, and to set it up and applaud it and its action as an Assembly in which the policy of the representative Chamber can be reversed or neutralised, was not the plan of a oonstitutional statesman, but was rather the desperate shift of a belated oligarch who saw the signs of the times and the spirit of the age morally overwhelming him." That was an unusual flourish of rhetoric for Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, and shows how little the Gladstonians have made up their minds as to ending the Lords. "Please abuse plaintiff's attorney" is all the instructions the leaders seem capable of giving.
Previous page
