No. If operations were ever resumed, the People’s Navy—or the Republican Navy, as it now chose to style itself—would be quickly annihilated, and it knew it. Which meant that until the Star Kingdom deigned to propose the terms of a formal treaty of peace, the new Havenite government had no choice but to continue to talk. Which, he conceded, was a most fortunate state of affairs, given the domestic threats he and his political allies faced.

The Constitution required a general election no less than once every four Manticoran years, except under certain carefully specified extraordinary circumstances… yet the last election had been over five Manticoran years ago. One of the circumstances which permitted electoral delays was the existence of a declared state of emergency, proclaimed by the Crown and confirmed by a two-thirds majority of both houses. Any state of emergency, however, had to be reconfirmed each year, both by the Crown and by the same majority in each house, or it automatically lapsed.

The other circumstance which permitted the postponement of a general election was the existence of a state of war. The Constitution didn’t require that elections be postponed in either case; it merely provided that they could be, at the discretion of the current government. Unlike High Ridge, the Duke of Cromarty’s primary base of support had been found in the Commons, and despite occasional sags in the public’s morale, it had remained essentially firm. Cromarty had timed the elections carefully, but he’d also called two of them during the course of the war, and his majority in the lower house had increased after each.

High Ridge’s primary support base, however, lay in the Lords, which meant that the last thing he wanted, for many reasons, was to call a general election. And since sustaining a state of emergency required a majority in both houses—not to mention the concurrence of the Crown, which he was most unlikely to get—only the official state of war against Haven allowed him to hold off the election which, under current conditions, would almost certainly have proved a disaster.

But that state of war was useful in other ways, as well. High Ridge had not only managed to postpone confirmation of the San Martino peers and an almost certain embarrassing electoral defeat for both the Liberals and Progressives (his own Conservative Association’s representation in the lower house was already so tiny that no conceivable popular vote could have had much impact upon it), but also to maintain the “wartime only” tax measures which had been instigated by the Cromarty Government. Those taxes were unpopular, to say the very least, but their passage was firmly associated in the public mind with Cromarty—and thus with the Centrist Party.

The Star Kingdom’s Constitution had been drafted by people determined to restrict the power of the state by restricting the power to tax, and the Founders had crafted a fiscal system in which the government’s income was intended to depend primarily on import and export duties and property and sales taxes. The Constitution specifically required that any income tax be flat-rated and limited to a maximum of eight percent of gross income except in time of emergency. To make their position crystal clear, the Founders had also specified that even in emergency conditions, any graduated income tax could be enacted only with the approval of a super-majority in both houses and automatically lapsed (unless confirmed by the same super-majority) in five T-years or at the next general election.