Lord Rosebery replied not only to Lord Salisbury, but to
the Duke of Argyll, who had on the previous evening made a rather severe attack upon him, with a good deal of spirit. To Lord Salisbury he said that what he meant by the legisla- tive preponderance of the House of Lords was that whatever House of Commons may be returned, and whatever the country may think, the same fixed Tory phalanx of five hundred Peers in the House of Lords will remain absolutely unaffected. That is true. And we ourselves cannot deny the mischievous effect ; for though they will in great matters bow before the will of the country, they will still in all smaller matters present the same impassable barrier to the liberalising influence of the legislation passed in the Lower House. And strongly as we condemn Lord Rosebery's apparent wish to strike the House of Lords with legislative impotence, and to turn it into a perfectly helpless advisory Assembly, we do hold that the present constitution of the
House of Lords stands in need of very grave modifications. To the substance of the Duke of Argyll's censures, Lord Rosebery did not really reply at all, though he was rather happy in indicating their too declamatory form. "He seems to have framed these great oratorical efforts on the model of those directed by Cicero against Catiline. But he forgets one material circumstance. I am not Catiline, and the noble Duke will for- give me for saying that he is not Cicero." And he quoted the remark of the late Lord Derby concerning an elaborate attack made on him by the same noble Duke, to which he had not publicly replied,—namely, that he was in much the same position as a big Lifeguardsman who was remonstrated with for allowing his wife to beat him, and who had said in reply, " It amuses her and it don't hurt I." That was judicious in Lord Rosebery, as it diverted attention from the substance to the form of the Duke of Argyll's criticism. The invective was much too strong, but the political in- dictment was very powerful, and, in our opinion, quite unanswerable.
