WHAT WILL THE LORDS DO P [To TEE EDITOR OF
TIN " Seirwroz."J SIE,—What will the Lords do ? is once more the cry, as it was when the first Reform Bill was going up to the House of Lords. It is the cry here, too, though in a less anxious strain, for Canada is still under the supreme power of the British Parliament. As I have said before, it seems to me hardly possible that the Lords should be constitutionally debarred from voting on a Tax Bill now that they pay taxes,
whatever may have been the ease when they contributed, not in taxes, but in the military service of their fiefs. However, it is surely important to remark that the Budget measure is not merely financial, but plainly political in a Socialistic or semi-Socialistic line. The House of Lords is a second Chamber, the only second Chamber that the nation at present has and it surely is not to be desired that a measure of great political moment should be passed by the vote of a single Chamber without possibility of amendment. I am not saying whether the measure is right or wrong, but only that it appears to me unquestionably to be not only financial but political. The nation, at all events, seems to want a little
time to thiuk.—I am, Sir, &a., GOLDWIN SMITH. Toronto.
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