PARLIAMENT SINCE 1910 The General Election of 1910 was fought on the issue, already placed before the Commons in a series of Resolutions which were moved by the Prime Minister during the summer of that year, of the legislative supremacy of the Commons over the Lords. The success of the Government at the polls decided the fate of the Upper House, the more decisively as it eventually became known that the Prime Minister had on asking for a dissolution obtained a contingent pledge from the King that he would in the event of his being returned to power at the General Election be au thorized to "exercise the prerogative" in the event of the Lords rejecting the "Parliament Bill" which embodied the Govern ment proposals. In other words the House of Lords were faced with the same coercion as that which confronted them in their opposition to the Reform Bill in 1832, namely an announce ment, duly made by Lord Morley in the debate on the Bill in the Lords, that, if it were rejected, the Prime Minister would advise His Majesty to create such a number of new peers as would ensure its acceptance. Faced with this tre mendous exercise of the prerogative, the Lords gave way, and a constitutional revolution of the first magnitude was effected. The provisions of the Act may be summarized briefly as pro viding (I) that the House of Lords should have no power either to reject or amend "a money bill"; a term defined as meaning any bill which, "in the opinion of the Speaker," con tains "only" provisions dealing with "the imposition, repeal, alteration or regulation of taxation," and "the provision of pub lic money, supply, appropriation and regulation of public money"; (2) that any public bill (private bills are excluded) passed by the Commons in three successive sessions, whether with or without the intervention of a General Election, should, if rejected by the House of Lords in each successive ses sion, on its third rejection be presented to His Majesty for his assent provided that a minimum period of 2 years had elapsed since the date of the second reading in the Commons in the first session. These were the main provisions of the
Act and, as they have been controverted ever since, and as the Conservative party is at the present moment committed to some amendment of the first of them, they will call for careful examination in a moment. Other provisions of the Act can be summarily disposed of. The maximum "life" of Parliament is reduced from seven years to five, the statute thus involving a repeal of the Septennial Act. This provision, of course, may be repealed by Parliament itself as it is inherent in the principle of "Parliamentary sovereignty" that what one Parliament has done, another Parliament can undo and, during the war, when conditions made a dissolution extremely undesirable, Parliament passed one Act after another extending its own duration, with the result that the Parliament elected in December 1910 was not dissolved for eight years. These Acts, prolonging the life of Parliament beyond five years, required, and received, the consent of the Lords, for the Parliament Act itself preserves their absolute veto in the one, and only the one, case of bills to extend the life of Parliament. It also provides that nothing in the statute is to "diminish or qualify the existing rights and privileges of the House of Commons." The object of this clause is to preserve the claims of the Commons to dispute the right of the Lords to amend "a money clause" in an ordinary bill: a claim which has always been an object of dispute be tween the two Houses and which is left unsettled by the Parlia ment Act. The statute also provides, necessarily, that a bill, to take advantage of the automatic machinery of the statute when successively rejected, must be "the same bill"--a pro vision which has a constricting effect on the power of the Government to amend the Bill after the first session in which it has passed the House of Commons. No amendments can be made therein without the consent of the House of Lords itself.