on the 10th of December there was a sentence in which the Prime Minister
had declared that "the Irish problem could only be solved by a policy
which, while explicitly safeguarding the supreme authority of the
Imperial Parliament, would set up self-government in Ireland in regard
to Irish affairs." The rest of the speech dealt with Tariff Reform and
with the constitutional question of the House of Lords, on which the
public mind was focused throughout the election.

In the unprecedented deluge of oratory that flooded the country in the
month preceding the elections the Prime Minister's sentence on Ireland
at the Albert Hall passed almost unnoticed in English and Scottish
constituencies, or was quickly lost sight of, like a coin in a
cornstack, under sheaves of rhetoric about the dear loaf and the
intolerable arrogance of hereditary legislators. Here and there a
Unionist candidate did his best to warn a constituency that every
Liberal vote was a vote for Home Rule. He was invariably met with an
impatient retort that he was attempting to raise a bogey to divert
attention from the iniquity of the Lords and the Tariff Reformers. Home
Rule, he was told, was dead and buried.

On the 19th of January, 1910, when the elections were over in the
boroughs, Mr. Asquith claimed that "the great industrial centres had
mainly declared for Free Trade," and the impartial chronicler of the
_Annual Register_ stated that "the Liberals had fought on Free Trade and
the constitutional issue." The twice-repeated decision of the country
against Home Rule for Ireland was therefore in no sense reversed by the
General Election of January 1910.

But from the very beginning of the agitation over the Budget and the
action of the House of Lords in relation to it, in the summer of 1909,