MR ASQUITH'S SPEECH.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 323, 24 February 1910, Page 5

MR ASQUITH'S SPEECH.

The portion of the Prime Albert Jlall speech which is so much, quoted is reported by The Times as follows: REBUFFS AND HUMILIATIONS. • 1 tell you quite plainly, and I tell my fellow-countrymen outside, iTiat neither I nor any other Liberal tUinisLer supported by a majority o£ the House ol Commons ale going u> -uDmit aga'n to the reuulfs ana the humiliations ol the last lour /ears, (i.oud cheers, again and again renewed.) We shall not assume oil ice. and wc shall not hold office, unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows to be necessary for the legislative utility and honor of the party of progress. (Cheer*), \ou will be told, and vou have been told it already, that the issue lies between government by two Chambers and government Dy a single chamber. It is not the ease. I my»cif, and I believe a large majority of the Liberal Party, are in favor of what is eailed the bi-cameral system. 1 see nothing inconsistent with democratic principle or practice in a second Chamber as such. On the contrary, I see much practical advantage that might result from the existence, wide by side with the House of Commons, of a body, not, indeed, of co-ordinate authority—(cheers) —but suitable" in its numbers and by its' composition to exercise impartially in regard to our ordinary legislation the ■powers of revision, amendment, fuller deliberation, and, subject to proper safeguards, of delay. (Cheers.) Those are both useful and dignified functions, xes, but we have got to deal with a pressing and an immediate necessity. (Cheers.) It may well be that a process) of evolution or substitution may in course of time give us a body better fitted than the House ol Lords for the judicial exercise of the functions which are really appropriate to a second Chamber in a democratie State. But. as a great man onee said, "Things are what they are," and we have t 0 face them as they are. (Cheers.) A STATUTE WANTED.

Our present condition gives us all the drawbacks, with few, if any, of the advantages', of a second Ciiamber. For what is our actual second Chamber? (Laughter.) It ia a body wiiicii has no pretensions or qualifications io be the organ or the interpreter of tiie popular will. (Cheers.) It is a body on which one party in tlie State is in possession of a permanent and overwhelming majority. It is a body which, as experience has shown, is in temper and action nakedly partisan. It is a body winch does not attempt to exercise any kind of efiective control over the legislation of the other House when its own party is m a majority there. II i s a body which, when the conditions are reversed however clear and emphatic the verdict of the country has been, sets itself to mutilate and to destroy democratic legislation, and even in these latter uavs it lays a usurping hand on democratic linance. "(Hear, hear.) That Ts a plain, literal, unvarnished picture of what every one knows to be the fact (Cheers.) We ar* going to ask tie country to give us authority to apply an effective remedy to these intolerable conditions. (Cheers.) Here, again, what is to be done will have to be done by Act of Parliament; the time for unwritten convention has. unhappily, gone by. We are not, as 1 have said, proposing the abolition of the House of Lords' or setting up a single Chamber, but we are going to ask the electors that tlie House of Lords shall be eonfined to the proper functions of a second Chamber which 1 enumerated a few minuter ago. Xhe absolute veto it at present possesses must go. (Loud cheers.) The power that it claims from time to time of, in effect, compelling us to choose between a dissolution and, as far as our main objects are concerned, legislative s'tenlity-that power must go also. (Loud cheers.) xiie Pbopi'e in future when they elect a new House of Commons must be able to feel what they cannot feel now. that they are sending to Westminster men who will have the power not merely of proposing and debating .but of makin® laws. (Cheers.) The will of the people as deliberately expressed by their elected representatives' must, within the limits of the lifetime of a single Parliament, be made effective.

SHORTER PARLIAMENTS. Finally, these changes in the relations between the two Houses—of course, I do not at this moment commit myself or commit you to precise details of' machinery or method-these changes must be accompanied and supplemented by a shortening in duration of the life of the House of Commons itself. No one desires certainly no Liberal dcsires-to make possible the ascendency, even for a brief span of years, of a body which has ceased to represent the nation. Shorten the life of a Parliament to live years—(cheers)—l should not myself be afraid of making it four— and you will Jiave reduced that possible risk to van-ishing-point.