Lord Rosebery made an amusing speech at the dinner of
the Trades House of Glasgow, held on Wednesday. He was asked to return thanks for both Houses of Parliament, and complained that Sir Archibald Orr Ewing, M.P. for Dumbar- tonshire, and a Conservative, who has "one foot firmly planted in the House of Commons," and the other foot, if journalistic rumours may be trusted, "in that more august and tranquil Assembly" to which Lord Rosebery himself has the honour to belong, had much more right to be asked to answer for the two Houses of Parliament than he himself had. The House of Commons, he said, was in danger of an attack of apoplexy, and the House of Lords of death from atrophy. The two great constitutional dangers of the House of Lords are that it claims a sort of precedence over the House of Commons,— which is a fictitious claim as things actually are,—and that Members who do not wish to enter the House of Lords are forced into it without their own consent. Both these dangers Lord Rosebery would like to remove by the reforms which he proposes. But would not his reforms substitute for what is universally recognised as a mere formal and unreal precedence in the Upper House, a claim to real equality which might have a very much more serious result P
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