Decisive action from the Government was now urgently necessary. The session had not so far been marked by any fresh conflicts between the two Houses, but the shadow of the Lords lay heavily upon everything which the Government tried to do. A short Education Bill, a poor substitute for the lost measure of the previous session, had been introduced, but it so disappointed the Government’s friends, without propitiating their enemies, that it had been withdrawn after a few weeks. An attempt to legislate for Ireland failed equally dismally, and for much the same reasons. A ‘Home Rule’ Chief Secretary, serving under a ‘Home Rule’ Prime Minister, was forced by circumstance to introduce a petty little devolution bill.1 It was attacked by Arthur Balfour and rejected by an Irish National Convention. It made enemies, but no friends, and, like the second Education Bill, had ignominiously to be withdrawn. The Licensing Bill, which had been announced in the Speech from the Throne as the chief business of the session, had not even been introduced. It was clear to the Cabinet that any measure which would command the support of the Liberal Party would be heavily assailed in the Lords, that the Government could hardly sustain a second major legislative defeat within eighteen months without dissolution, and that the cause of temperance reform, dear though it was to Liberal hearts, was not the most popular of election issues.
At Whitsuntide, therefore, the outlook for the Government was not bright. There was a general desire to avoid an autumn session, and if this was to be met,1 the Prime Minister was left with only ten weeks in which to achieve something to show for a year’s work. The bye-elections, at that stage, had indicated no substantial falling-off in support for the Government—only Brigg had changed hands to the union ists—but it was feared that this would not continue if more achievement could not be shown.
There were four land bills to be brought forward—an Evicted Tenants Bill for Ireland, a Small Holdings Bill for England, and a Small Landowners and a Land Values Bill for Scotland; but it was doubtful whether there was sufficient time to get all these through the Commons, and, even if this were achieved, four Liberal measures, although not of the first importance, on their lordships’ favourite subject, could hardly be regarded as a certain harvest for the Government.2 What was required, and required urgently, was some indication of how the Liberal leaders proposed to deal with the Lords.
Campbell-Bannerman had first to secure agreement in the Cabinet to his proposals as opposed to the plan of the Cabinet committee. In this task he succeeded, although not without difficulty. Asquith, at this stage, was a seeker after solutions less drastic than that of the suspensory veto. This is clear from his speech in the House delivered a few weeks later. It was not only his explicit statement: ‘personally I have been a slow and, to some degree, even a reluctant convert to the necessity of this particular method of dealing with the problem’;o nor his confession that he had ‘coquetted with the referendum’; but the whole tenor of his speech which indicated that his natural approach to the question differed widely from the robust radicalism of the Prime Minister.
Against this opposition Campbell-Bannerman did well to carry the day at all, and doubly well to be ready by June 24 to lay his plan before Parliament. He proceeded by the innocuous, but then usual, method of a Government resolution in the House of Commons. By a vote of 432 to 147 the Lower House resolved ‘that, in order to give effect to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives, it is necessary that the power of the other House should be so restricted by law as to secure that within the limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons must prevail’. An amendment to abolish the House of Lords, moved by Arthur Henderson, had previously been rejected by 315 to 100, the Irish and a few radicals voting with the Labour Party. The resolution as carried was given more specific meaning by the speech of the Prime Minister, which also contained a notable attack on Balfour’s disloyalty to the House to which he belonged and to the tradition of moderate statesmanship which he should have inherited from his predecessors. ‘I cannot conceive of Sir Robert Peel or Mr. Disraeli,’ Campbell-Bannerman said, ‘treating the House of Commons as the rt. hon. gentleman has treated it. Nor do I think there is any instance in which, as leaders of the Opposition, they committed what I can only call the treachery of openly calling in the other House to override this House. These great states men were House of Commons men. I venture to say that if Bills were mutilated and rejected elsewhere when Sir Robert Peel sat upon that bench, it was not done at his instance’.p