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when they did and supported their efforts with the gracious manner of the grand seigneur which characterized him. Lord Curzon adorned debate with speech “so infinitely superior to that of the ordinary peer that it is quite difficult to believe that he is ever in the wrong.” The Liberals’ new Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, lent an invigorating presence and paid the House the compliment of always being wide awake when he was on the Woolsack. He was the former Sir Robert Reid, known as “Fighting Bob,” a Scot, a famous cricketer who had bowled for Oxford, a Radical strongly opposed to the Liberal Imperialists and a “fiery orator” in the Commons who now lectured the Opposition “in tones that almost made the sinner weep,” and advanced “the most contentious proposition with the most entrancing plausibility.” In the rhythm of Gibbon and the gallantry of Lord Tolloller bowing to Lord Mountararat in Iolanthe, Lord Curzon acknowledged Lord Loreburn as “courtesy personified, persuasiveness incarnate and dignity enthroned.”

On the crossbenches sulked the Liberals’ last Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, who had resigned the leadership and as an Imperialist and opponent of Home Rule had announced, when C.-B. became party leader, that “emphatically and explicitly and once and for all I cannot serve under that banner.” Acknowledged since Eton days for his brilliance, wit and charm, Rosebery, having won the Derby and married a Rothschild fortune, was too used to success to be an accommodator, and remained—in Morley’s phrase—“a dark horse in a loose box.” When he sulked he could turn “an eye like a fish” on his friends and wither them with biting sarcasm; when he charmed he encircled himself in adoration. His variability caused the public to lose trust in him and recalled to A. G. Gardiner the story of a rustic who, being asked if Wordsworth was not very fond of children, replied, “Happen he was but they wasna verra fond o’ him.”

During the years of crisis over Home Rule, Rosebery had been leader of the movement for reform of the House of Lords by some modification of the hereditary principle and had three times brought forward proposals toward that goal in the hope that self-reform would ward off attacks on the veto power. The reform movement was now revived with Lord Curzon as the leading spirit. Even Mr. Churchill, who liked to have a hand in everything, contributed his suggestion in an article for the Nation entitled “A Smooth Way With the Peers.” He proposed a system by which peers should be appointed for each session to reflect the same majority as in the House of Commons at the time, not however to exceed 250. This would exclude the “frivolous, lethargic, uninstructed or disreputable elements.” Most of the proposed reforms contemplated some system by which the peers would elect from among themselves those specially qualified by ability or services. But many preferred the simple principle which once had moved Lord Melbourne to say he liked the Garter “because there was no damn merit about it.” Balfour sympathized. He advised Lansdowne to “avoid the fatal admission that the ancient ground of hereditary qualification is insufficient to qualify for the upper House. If it is not sufficient qualification it is no qualification at all.… I think it a fact that the accident of birth is more easily defended on what some people call its naked absurdity than birth plus services.” The Government did nothing to encourage reform of the Lords because it did not want them reformed; it wanted an issue and an excuse to limit the Veto.

Faced with these exciting possibilities Lloyd George became quite impatient with his constituents’ single-minded attention to Welsh nationalism and tactlessly told them, “I will say this to my fellow countrymen. If they find the Government moving its artillery into position for making an attack on the Lords, Welshmen who worry the Government into attending to anything else until the citadel has been stormed ought to be pushed into the guardroom.” The military language was curious and the speech so much resented that its