"THE WRITING ON THE WALL."
[To THE EDT/OR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Sta,—The writing looms larger and larger. Totes are being lost to the Government by thousands, and where, in cases of immense previous majorities, seats are not lost to them majorities tumble like a pack of cards, and all the King's present Ministers and all the Ministers' men cannot pick them up again. In the latter period of Mr. Balfour's last reign the same thing occurred, and although the results after the exit were terrible the present Prime Minister has learnt no lesson therefrom. This shutting of the eye to facts is not necessarily due to vanity or ambition, but may be from a desire to reward faithfulness; but, whatever the cause, the postponement increases the disease, and the last state will be worse than the first.
And why ? Well, the country is perfectly sick of new Acts of Parliament. We have been so surfeited with them the past six years that business men know not where they are. It has been worry, worry to every individual. If I have felt any comfort the past few years it was, when this year's Budget came out, to know we were as we were in that matter. But the great shock to the nation has been the Parliament Act, which vetoes the action of the Second Chamber; and when a new Government come into power the very first thing to be done, however long it may take and whatever the cost, is the formation of a Second Chamber, sound, strong, independent, intelligent, com- posed of Lords, Commoners, knights, statesmen, laymen, and such like—some hereditary, mostly elective. The terrible political fraud we are suffering from is that the present Government have declared, nearly one and all, that they distinctly believe in the wisdom of having a Second Chamber ; that they mean to create one; but their inaction shows their gross insincerity. They mean to do it only when they have passed their own pet measures, which they think will gain them further strength, yet which measures they know, as plain as light from darkness, that an enlightened Second Chamber would not pass ; hence the expression I would like to use for this falsity I dare not give pen to. To imagine for one moment that the Home Rule Bill, which practically puts out of this nation two millions of intensely loyal subjects and makes them subject to government by religionists they detest, or that the post and telegraphic services should be split up, is not possible if the nation were appealed to at large outside ex- traneous subjects ; but the "Second Chamber question" is rankling in the breasts of hundreds of thousands of electors, as will become most conspicuous whenever Mr. Asquith has the honour and morality to ask their opinion.—I am, Sir, dm, Boar.
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