The predatory note was struck vehemently in the passage in
which, after asserting that Mr. Wyndham had said he was going to tax the bread of the poor, Mr. Lloyd George went on:—" We mean to raise the taxes of the—now I am not gOing to tell you any secrets." Nothing, again, could have been more outrageous than his assertion that the state of Ireland afforded an object-lesson in the effect on property and upon credit of the unfettered action of the Lords. We doubt whether even Mr. Birrell, whose disastrous maladministration is chiefly responsible for that state of affairs, would endorse such a statement. It is little short of a national calamity that we have in Mr. Lloyd George a Chancellor of the Exchequer who seems unable to make a public utterance out of London without seriously affecting our national credit. As for his bold words about challenging the Lords, they irresistibly remind us of "Lewis Carrolrs " lines in the poem on "The Photographer and the Family Group," lines in which we read how the artist
"Told them that he would not stand it, Said, in language most emphatic, What he'd be before he'd stand it."
That, and no more, is what the threats of Mr. Lloyd George come to when put in plain terms. Does any one really imagine that the Peers will be frightened by such means P
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