Mr. Asquith. (For Illustration see next page.)

Progress, Volume IV, Issue 8, 1 June 1909, Page 259

Mr. Asquith. (For Illustration see next page.)

Since the death of Mr. Gladstone there has not been a Prime Minister with a reputation for force of the leadership order. Whether there is one now remains to be seen. But if the views of a few observers of more than average ability are correct, if there is a man who will shortly emerge from the ruck of amiable mediocrity with the required stamp of leadership of men it will be the present Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith. Last year men began to suspect the possibility, when he delivered his budget speech, which took the attention of men of all shades of politics and gained their appreciation in the same remarkable manner. When the naval scare burst upon the world the other day it was freely declared by men behind the scenes that it was the Prime Minister who had reduced a most unruly Cabinet to order, that, in fact, he had compelled men of the most determined hostility to the two power standard to abandon the chaos of Liberal impracticability and come to agreement about the particular matter supreme in the eyes of the nation. Since then the budget of his colleague, Mr. Lloyd George, has caught the popular attention,

and there are already those who declare that the Prime Minister engineered it to its present position. Last year the Lords flouted the Commons with the rejection of the Education Bill, the Scottish Land Valuation Bill, and the Licensing Bill, and men began to wonder what the Government would do, and passed from wonder to the contempt due to men who boast about fighting and run away. They thought it passed the wit of man to devise anything short of a dissolution of Parliament, to bring the Lords to book, and they felt that even then it would be impossible in matters like the liquor question, and education, and the valuation of land, which in the United Kingdom are not among the things with which it is possible to work up popular excitement or a unanimous and vigorous public opinion. They could not see where the Prime Minister could find a battle ground on which he could have a hope against the Lords. This opinion about the baffling of the wit of man became universal. The Budget has shown it to be as false as it was universal. The Prime Minister has chosen a battle ground on which there is no chance of defeat for the Lords, for the simple reason that it is a ground on which they dare not fight at all. The Budget does a number of things hateful to the Lords. It increases the direct taxation very greatly ; it imposes graduation ; it extends to the whole of the United Kingdom the valuation principle which the Lords would not have for Scotland; it strikes the liquor interest ten times harder than the measure thrown out so contemptuously by the ' ' Beerage ' ' ; and these things it does in a manner which absolutely paralyses the Lords. They are all in the Budget, and the Lords must choose between swallowing the whole budget or facing the anger of a nation maddened by the refusal to pass the taxation necessary for the national safety. It must be remembered in this connection, that the only alternative to the extension of the direct taxation is a tariff striking the necessaries of life : the tariff, in fact, which the Government is bound to avoid. Mr. Asquith has always declared that whatever happens the tariff can not get any extension from his party which obtained a mandate for freetrade at the general elections. Rejection of the Budget as a whole would bring the Lords face to face with a whole people determined to resist the taxation of its food stuffs. The Lords will therefore surely swallow the Budget, and the Government will be able to say that they have

wreaked a vengeance on the ' ' Beerage, ' ' imposing the popular will without any resort to means inconvenient or difficult or dangerous. Mr. Asquith, by doing the impossible, has placed himself in a position where men talk of him as the coming force in the politics of Great Britain. The man who has kept his word to the constituencies and imposed his will on colleagues and factions, and severely punished the obstructiveness of the Lords by forwarding the Liberal programme in the teeth of difficulties before which most men, even of great strength of purpose and much fertility of resource would have lain down in mortified silence is sure to make a mark for himself in the history of his country. It is quite possible that he will be known in history as the first really strong British Prime Minister after the stormy days of Pitt.