THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1910. THE ASQUITH PLAN OF CAMPAIGN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9993, 14 March 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1910. THE ASQUITH PLAN OF CAMPAIGN.

» By making separate issues of general reform of the Lords and limitation of the veto of that House on ordinary legislation, the Imperial Government has temporarily ended the crisis. The Government, it appears, will first ask the House of Commons to devote itself until the 24th of this month to finance. "Finance" means the Budget, but the Budget is seemingly to be withheld from the Lords until the Commons have carried resolutions "excluding the House of Lords from the domain of finance," and limiting its veto upon legislation to the lifetime of a single Parliament. These resolutions are apparently to be sent to the House of Lords as soon as they are passed, the Budget being kept back meanwhile. The Lords in ail probability will not pass them; what then? Mr Asquith may intend to ask for royal authority to legalise the Budget, on the ground that, a House of Commons newly authorised by the ; people has re-passed it and declared '. by popular mandate—as it has dant < more than once— in favour of its own < financial predominance, in other 3

words, constitutional reform long understood, now explicitly expressed. Or he might go to the country again, with the Budget still unlegalized and re-adjustment of the Houses still a foremost issue. A third alternative would be to ask tha King for guarantees in connection with the general question of reform of the Lords, including those "other reforms" which are foreshadowed. Whether His Majesty would give them is a nice question, but one of pure conjecture, and therefore scarcely arguable now. Meanwhile interest naturally converges on the present proposals. Exclusion of the Lords from the sphere of finance is intelligible, and is, in fact, what the House of Commons declared in Pitt's time and in Gladstone's, the approved theory being that tax and supply are not legislation but the gift and grant of the Commons, and that the concurrence of peers and crown to a tax "is only necessary to clothe it with the form cf a law," as Pitt put it. Limitation of the veto power, how-

ever, is a more modern idea, outsprung fr<jm bitter realisation that the House of Lords is characteristically and stubbornly a Tory House, fast wedded to the Tory party. Nearly three years ago the late Sir Henry Carnpbell-Bannerman, then Pnme ; Minister, moved a resolution (which was carried by a majority of over 280) providing for the procedure of legislation to be so altered that "within the limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons shall prevail." From Mr LloydGeorge's reference to ensuring predominance of the Commons' will "within the lifetime of a Parliament" it seems probable that that is what the Asquith Government is now proposing, and it is significantly favourable to that conclusion that Mr Asquith, like his predecessor, has suggested shortening the life of Parliament to live years, or even four, to prevent "the ascendency even for a brief span of years of a body which has ceased to represent tha nation.'" But the essence of the Government

proposals seems to lie in pressing upon the Lords, before proceeding finally with the.Budget, the exclusion from finance and limitation of the Veto. That brings the question of reform uf the Lords—using the phrase in its broad sense -into the forefront, where it belongs, and hangs everything upon the answer to it.