After the long silence of the Treasury Bench which fol-
lowed Mr. Asquith's speech, Mr. Courtney, who opened the debate of Monday, succeeded in rousing Ministers to some audible reply. Mr. Courtney declared that no great political object could be gained in this country without sticking to it in what Mr. Lowell had called a pigheaded way. Now, though Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Morley were capable of this effectual pigheadedness, the rest of the Ministers are not, and the Irish Home-rule Bill of 1893 was not a measure at all adapted for the display of this kind of tenacity. The recourse to such a measure as a campaign against the House of Lords in order to get up steam for carrying Home-rule was utterly inde- fensible. If they wanted to get rid of the obstruction of the House of Lords, they should plainly state their plan, develop it fully, and then go to the country upon it. But to flourish their hostility before the eyes of the House, and then plunge into Disestablishment, Local Veto, or the question of the London municipality, without either declaring or discussing their avowed policy on this great constitutional question, was intolerable. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, who replied to Mr. Courtney, taunted him with having formerly ex- pressed an opinion of the House of Lords, much more like that of the Government. He described the amendment as one of pure cant, which he found defined in a dictionary as " an empty, solemn appeal implying what is not felt." Mr. Goschen, who continued thethe debate, dwelt with great force on the mi..7 ble to a number of journals in Paris ; and the Public of substituting a provincial policy like the Newcastle l'et Prosecutor stated that he had still "another cartload " of gramme for the policy which used to result from the delibera- tions of a responsible Cabinet. And Sir Charles Dilke delivered a strong attack on Lord Rosebery, whose incon- sistent statements about the House of Lords had taken all the life out of the agitation against the Lords (a hard saying, considering that there was never any life in it), and he urged the Government to make declarations on the House of Lords which would dissipate the confusion caused by Lord Rosebery.
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