Excerpt from The Governance of England

A re-touched portrait is seldom a satisfactory production. It is a fact I have had to keep in mind in preparing for the press this new edition of a book first published more than nine years ago. Such fidelity to the original as the sketch may have possessed when executed might be lost in the attempt to make it a register of all the changes which time has wrought upon the features of the subject. The task would be one of peculiar diculty at the present moment; for my revised edition is called for, as it happens, while the structure of our polity is undergoing a process of reconstruction still incomplete. With the ultimate form and powers of the Upper Chamber in suspense, and with the revolution in the government of Ireland impending but undecided, it would be futile to pass a definite judgment on transitory developments which must eventually assume a more definite and tangible shape. And so, while drawing some fresh illustra tions and arguments from the events of the past few years, I prefer to leave this book as, in the main, an account of the working constitution of the United Kingdom in the Opening decade of the twentieth century.

It may, however, be worth while to indicate briefly some of the changes that have occurred since the following chapters were composed. Several of these changes were anticipated; and those who did me the honour to read my pages with attention in 1904 will not perhaps have been surprised by the march of events during the years that have since elapsed. I have left the chapters on The House of Lords and The Peers as a Senate substantially as they were written, though I am conscious that their interest must now be largely antiquarian. But, since it is impossible to know what the Upper Chamber will become, it seems useful to leave on record what it was, and what, to a certain extent, and pending further modifications, it still is.

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