SCIENTIFIC PARLIAMENTARY REFORM 371 



which it has shown during the war, and by the moderate use 

 which it has made of such powers as it is still able to exercise, 

 has, to some extent, rehabilitated itself, and this at the expense 

 of a Cabinet-ridden House of Commons. The country is not 

 likely to forget that it was the rejection by the House of Lords 

 of the Declaration of London (in virtue of its right of temporary 

 veto) which made it possible for a British Government to escape, 

 without discredit, from fetters which would have hampered 

 the Navy in the exercise of its functions and rendered an effec- 

 tive blockade of the German coasts impossible. No serious 

 politician can, at this time of day, defend the hereditary con- 

 stitution of the Upper House, but the time has, surely, come 

 for setting up such an assembly as Mr. Asquith pledged himself 

 to create, and there should be no serious opposition to entrust- 

 ing such a body, including, as it no doubt would, the best 

 elements in the present House of Lords, with all the proper 

 functions of a Revising Chamber, reserving, of course, to the 

 House of Commons exclusive control over finance. 



All these matters are of greater present importance than 

 the Franchise and Electoral Reforms of which we hear so much, 

 and of which, at this particular time, we should probably 

 have heard nothing at all had it not been for the late Coalition 

 Government's mismanagement of the simple issues involved in 

 the enfranchisement, on a War Service qualification, of soldiers, 

 sailors, and munition workers, and its strange, and to some 

 minds suspicious, reluctance to bring the ordinary Parliamentary 

 Register up to date. 



The suggestion that the enfranchisement of women munition 

 workers involved the whole question of Adult Suffrage need 

 not have been listened to, for the advocates of that particular 

 extension of the Franchise, who are by no means lacking in 

 intelligence, would undoubtedly have accepted such an instal- 

 ment, on account of their larger claim ; realising as they do 

 that with the Statutory Enfranchisement of even one woman 

 the case against Female Suffrage is given away. 



But a Government which, from first to last consistently 

 avoided the line of least resistance could not be satisfied with 

 giving the country just what it demanded. It must prove its 

 quixotic generosity by forcing upon it, in the very crisis of the 

 greatest war in history, a huge scheme of Franchise and Electoral 

 Reform and therefore, after exhausting every possibility of 



