At the final sitting of the House of Lords this
day week, Lord Salisbury commented at some length on Lord Rose- bery's account of the House of Lords as having a "legis- lative preponderance over the House of Commons." Since its censure never displaces a Government, since it has no vote at all in the arrangement of any public money matters, which the House of Commons keeps completely to itself, it did not seem to him that Lord Rosebery could have chosen a worse mode of describing the relative positions of the two Houses than to talk of the legislative preponderance of the House of Lords. Nor did he understand how the rejection of the Evicted Tenants Bill, which was admitted to be quite im- practicable, could show such preponderance. Lord Salis- bury added that if, in Lord Rosebery's sense, the country should take away the legislative preponderance of the House of Lords, it would give a perfect legislative despotism to the House of Commons, which would then gain the power of passing absolutely into law any measure, how- ever arbitrary, on which the Government of the day could sweep up a minute and chance majority in the House of Commons. Lord Salisbury also added a short sum- mary of his policy, in case the country should give him a majority at the General Election, which included the usual proposals of the Unionist party.
