all a Liberal
majority. The reconstruction of 1908 was notable for the rise or
promotion of the fighting, aggressive, youthful elements in the new
Liberalism--men like David Lloyd-George, Winston Churchill and Reginald
McKenna. There followed the establishment of Old-Age Pensions at an
initial expenditure of $40,000,000 a year; the prolonged and ultimately
successful struggle to increase the taxation upon landed interests,
property, and invested income by means of the much-discussed Budget of
1909; the natural resentment of the Lords, the Conservatives, and many
who were neither--as illustrated in the subsequent wiping out of the
Liberal majority in England itself; the constitutional issue which the
Liberals so cleverly forced to the front with the House of Lords as
their chief antagonists and which relegated Tariff Reform temporarily to
the background; the prolonged period in which King Edward took minute
and anxious and personal interest in the question.

There can be no doubt as to this interest or as to the natural and valid
reasons for it. A House of Lords, either abolished or existing without
power in the constitution, would leave no check upon the Commons except
the King and this might be bad for both the Commons and the Sovereign.
Over and over again in English history the people have reversed the
action or vote of the Commons but if this was ever to be done in future
it could only be through the interjection of the King's veto, and the
bringing of the Crown into the hurly-burly of party struggle. This would
be the very thing which all parties had hitherto endeavoured to prevent
and for at least seventy years had been successful in preventing. Then
came the general elections of 1909-10, with their continual query as to
what the King would do if the Liberals did win. Would he accept the
Government's policy and the proposed Commons legislation as to the Lords
and thus take an active part in the destruction of one portion of the
constitution which he was pledged to guard--through and by means of the
creation of hundreds of peers to swamp the Conservative vote in that
House? Or would he take the situation boldly in hand and insist on
another election with this question of practical abolition of the Lords
as the distinct issue before the people? It was little wonder that His
Majesty's physicians should declare after his death that the political
situation had been one of its causes! It must be remembered that in all
c