[To THZ EDITOR OF THE " SPECTITOR."1 SIR,—The Spectator deserves
the gratitude of all believers in popular rights on a priori grounds for its advocacy of a Referendum on the Budget. Practically, however, apart from the further Constitutional difficulty caused by your proposal, there are difficulties in Obtaining an adequate poll on an impersonal issue, and an inadequate poll obviously discounts the value of the result. Such difficulties, are familiar to all students of Swiss politics, and have been met in some cantons, though not in the Confederation as a whole, by the institution of compulsory voting. But I need not trouble you with details here.
But what a farce it is to profess to be consulting the opinion of the country on the Budget by submitting it to the electorate at a General Election ! Locally, of course, each party will raise side-issues,—the state of the Navy, the rights of denomi- national schools, Home-rule, the Ellis Barker land-purchase scheme for England, the liberality or otherwise of candidates towards football clubs, Mr. Churchill's abusive language, Mr. Ure's "frigid and calculated "—let us say conclusions, and the possibilities, or impossibilities, of Tariff Reform. And behind all these is the Constitutional issue of the right of the House of Lords to interfere with finance. Then, again, con- stituencies need to be "weighed as well as counted,"—perhaps even more than individual votes. Is Romford, with its forty- six thousand voters, to count equally with Newry, which has perhaps two thousand ? Or is a large Scottish or English manufacturing constituency with a large Trade-Unionist element to count for no more than one in the East End of London, with a considerable admixture of alien, or virtually
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