The Solicitor-General (Mr. Lockwood, for he has not yet been
knighted) addressed the Eighty Club on Monday on the subject of the House of Lords, and assured his Radical colleagues that there was a passionate feeling amongst the people for either reforming the House of Lords, or getting rid of the block which it places on the legislative energy of the House of Commons. In the face of the Forfarshire election, this assumption looks very paradoxical, indeed so paradoxical that the Eighty Club must have felt very much in the state of mind of the lover who remarked, "It might have been right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me downstairs P" After Lord Rosebery's appeal for a great effort to place him in a triumphant position to surmount victoriously this great obstacle, it was rather a thunderclap for one of the advanced Scotch constituencies to turn round and declare boldly to the Scotch Prime Minister that it was more than indifferent to the crusade that he had been preaching, and indeed determined to have no part or lot in the undertaking. The cup which has so long been gradually filling up against the House of Lords, was, said Mr. Lockwood, a "bumper now." Then why not dissolve at once? We understood that the Gladstonians were only waiting for that. But if the cup when it is full gives Inch excellent results as the Forfarshire election, we can well be content to have it filled till it overflows.
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