Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman next proceeded to defend his attitude towards
the House of Lords, and indignantly repudiated the notion that the Liberal Party proposed to abolish the Second Chamber. " We leave the Second Chamber to its truest functions unimpaired, advisory, corrective, and, if you like, dilatory, so as to gain time for full consideration. We leave it with all that. We leave it with far more, even the full powers exercised under a Conservative Government, and they seem to be perfectly satisfied with that." In spite, how- ever, of the Prime Minister's rhetoric, the plain fact remains that if you take away the power of the House of Lords over legislation, by passing laws over their heads on a 'third summons, you in fact destroy the House of Lords as a legis- lative body. At the close of the meeting, the Prime Minister, among other questions, was asked why the Liberals had'failed to support the Labour "Party's amendment to abolish the House of Lords altogether. To this Sir Henry replied that he preferred to take a quieter way which " would secure all we 'want." That seems to us perilously near an -admission of what was denied so emphatically in the main body of the speech,—namely, that the Government's proposal is in effect to abolish the House of Lords. Abolition secured by " a quieter way " is none the less abolition.
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