§ 11. "That a sum, not exceeding £11,663, he granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Offices of the House of Lords."
§ 13. "That a sum, not exceeding. £61,000, he granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses in the Department of Her Majesty's Treasury and Subordinate Departments."
§ 15. "That a sum, not exceeding £32,500, he granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for a Grant in Aid of the Mercantile Marine Fund."
§ 16. "That a sum, not exceeding £12, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come 506 in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for meeting the Deficiency of Income from Fees, etc., for the requirements of the Board of Trade, under the Bankruptcy Acts, 1883 and 1890, and 'The Companies (Winding-up) Act, 1890.'"
§ 17. "That a sum, not exceeding £35,529, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Board of Agriculture, and to defray the repayable Expenses to he incurred in matters of Inclosure and Land Improvement, and to pay certain Grants in Aid."
§ *MR. EDWARD STRACHEY (Somerset, S.)called attention to the question of weather forecasts. The Board of Agriculture decided to publish weather forecasts in various districts during the hay and corn harvests as an experiment. They first selected two counties in 1893, then in the spring of 1894 the experiment was further extended, and forecasts were given in the counties of Somerset, Carnarvon, Ayr, Cambridge, York, and Haddington. Speaking for the county, part of which he had the honour to represent, he might say that general satisfaction was expressed by the farmers and others interested in agriculture at these reports, which were exhibited every day giving the probable state of the weather for the next 24 hours. The Report of the Meteorological Council for the present year dealt with this question, and expressed regret that the Board of Agriculture had not continued these forecasts, and pointed out that a proper appreciation of the valuable information given by the forecasts could only be arrived at by a somewhat continued experience. In answer to a question, the President of the Board of Agriculture threw cold water upon the proposal that further experiments should be made this year, on the ground that these forecasts would entail a cost of £4,000 or £5,000 for the whole of Great Britain, that people did not very much care about them, and that they were not of very much practical utility. He was quite aware that it took some time to get people to take sufficient interest in these forecasts, but it was no use saying they were a failure when they had only been tried a year or two. He was quite sure the right hon. Gentleman sympathised with every endeavour to assist the farmers of the country, and he thought 507 it was worth while to continue these experiments in order fairly and honestly to test whether they were of real advantage to agriculturists or not. It should also be remembered that the Central Chamber of Agriculture had unanimously declared in favour of these weather forecasts.
§ MR. LEWIScalled attention to the working of the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Act, which had received the consent of both parties in the last Parliament. It was an Act which ought to be of the greatest value in protecting agriculturists against fraud by means of adulteration, but he regretted to say that in a great number of the counties of England and Wales it was practically a dead letter. The reasons alleged for the failure of the Act by the Board of Agriculture and by the County Councils Association were very different. The President of the Board of Agriculture rather threw the blame upon the agriculturists who were not ready to take advantage of the provisions of the Act; the County Councils Association, on the other hand, rather cast the blame on the regulations that had been issued. He was aware that the Board of Agriculture had issued thousands of pamphlets with a view of giving farmers an idea of what the provisions of the Act were and what was the best way of carrying them into force, but the net result was that the Act was not used as it ought to be. He asked whether it would not be possible, by arrangement with the Board of Trade, to make the regulations for the working of the Act more simple in character than at present. He was quite aware that it was necessary to take certain precautions, but he did not believe that it was necessary to have regulations so complicated that a large number of County Councils would not avail themselves of the benefit of the Act. He urged that the forms and schedules which were sent by the Board of Agriculture to the farmers to be filled up should, in the Welsh speaking districts of Wales, be supplied in Welsh. At present the farmers in these districts were obliged to resort to the Minister, or someone else, for an explanation of these forms. It was also most desirable, that on the maps of the Ordnance Survey the commons should be marked in some way. Then there were a number of 508 persons who desired access to the papers that were deposited at the Board of Agriculture relating to the time when the tithe commutation was settled. Those papers were not paid for by the central authority, but by the local authorities, and he thought it was very hard that, at least, representatives of the local authorities should not be allowed access to them, as was the case at present. He would venture to press for an answer on these four points.
MR. HERBERT ROBERTS (Denbighshire, W.)hoped the President of the Board of Agriculture would take into his favourable consideration the question of the schedules.
§ *THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE (Mr. WALTER LONG,) Liverpool, West Derbythought that the importance of the weather reports to agriculturists had been exaggerated. They had practically received no representations on the subject since the experiment had been discontinued. He did not throw cold water on the idea, but he had to recollect that he should have to apply to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for £5,000 or £6,000, and then he had to consider whether this money could not be better employed than in circulating these forecasts. His own experience was that agriculturists cared very little about them. There were many other ways by which they could get the information without any difficulty at all. Besides, any individual or local authority could get the forecasts from the Meteorological Department on a small payment during the harvest. He was not prepared to hold out any hope that he should be able to apply to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. With regard to the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Act, he explained that, as the analysis might be the subject of criminal proceedings, he did not see his way to simplifying the procedure in taking the samples. As to the complaint from Welsh-speaking districts as to the forms for the agricultural returns not being printed in the Welsh language, this was the first time that the complaint had been made to him, but he should give it his personal attention. ["Hear, hear!"] He saw no reason why the difficulty should not be removed. As to the question of the inspection of documents relating to the tithe-rent charge apportionments, he 509 had not received any specific complaints, but he should inquire as to whether there were any obstacles in the way of this inspection of documents which could properly be made public. He explained the difficulties in the way of carrying out the suggestion as to the showing of common lands as such on the Ordnance Maps.
§
Resolution agreed to.
18. "That a sum, not exceeding £28,869, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Charily Commission for England and Wales, including the Endowed Schools Department.
§ *SIR FRANCIS POWELL (Wigan)said it was stated in the newspapers that Mr. Richmond had left the office and removed to an important position in connection with the Inland Revenue. It was of great importance that they should have the benefit of the experience of this valuable official.
§ *THE SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY (Mr. R. W. HANBURY,) Prestonsaid that by arrangement this Vote would be postponed.
19. "That a sum, not exceeding £14,918, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Public Record Office.
§ MR. WILLIAM JONES (Carnarvon,) Arfonsaid that he wished to call attention to the Public Record Office with regard to Wales. There were in that office a multitudinous array of documents relating to the Principality—its history, its laws, its social life, and its customs. It was highly desirable that the Government should appoint a man competent for the work of arranging and classifying them in order to bring them to light. At the present moment, Wales and learning suffered a grievous loss because they lay all but unused. While Welshmen had in their country a splendid system of education, sad to relate, they had as yet no text-book on the history of their people, written in accord with the scientific and historic method, fit to place in the hands of students at their schools and colleges. The University of 510 London had opened its doors for the admission of scholars to the M.A. degree, in part, for their proficiency in Celtic studies. Anyone who chose might read up books on the literature of Wales and its language, but none could possibly give fair play to its history. Wales stood in need of books written by scholars, with a sound knowledge of the Welsh language, who could satisfy the country with the results of a critical examination of facts bearing upon Wales at every epoch of its history. ["Hear, hear!"] It was true there were several books having pretentions of telling the country's story. It was but fair to say that, with one or two exceptions, their writers knew next to nothing of what they wrote; they were ignorant of the Welsh language, and lacked sympathy with the life of the nation. Some of them supplied great hunks of fancy mixed with homoeopathic doses of facts. [Laughter.] They treated place names—ancient and modern—with such carelessness as to utterly spoil their sense and beauty. [Laughter.] It was hopeless to expect a good text-book of history without first of all securing a competent man in the Public Record Office who should catalogue and calendar Welsh documents. The request for such a one was both moderate and reasonable. ["Hear, hear!"] If one were forthcoming to classify and index these records, and to make a précis of the most important of them, it would prove an unspeakable boon to the students of research, and not only to Welsh students, but to all who were cognisant of the extreme value of possessing a minute and an accurate knowledge of a nation's history, extending from the primitive times to its periods of civilisation. ["Hear, hear!"] This was not a Party question. ["Hear, hear!"] It commended itself to every intelligent mind, and he was glad to have the sympathy of every part of the House with him on the subject. ["Hear, hear!"] It was not a subject of interest to Welshmen alone, as was clearly shown by the evidence of so eminent an authority as Mr. Seebohm. Whilst engaged in writing his excellent book on "The Tribal System in Wales," Mr. Seebohm had to examine numerous Celtic manuscripts at the Record Office. He had been compelled to confess that he had to rest content with gleanings, 511 that the harvest was beyond his reach, as he was unfurnished with the necessary knowledge to gather it in. He could not attempt to exhaust the rich materials which lay there for the writing of Welsh history, nor could their contents, he said, be rightly appreciated except by competent Celtic scholars. ["Hear, hear!"] He had to thank the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary to the Treasury for the courtesy he had shown Welsh Members when they approached him privately on this matter. He ventured to make an earnest appeal to the right hon. Gentleman to prevail upon the Government to see the reasonableness of this request, and to grant it, for the sake of doing justice to the Welsh nation as well as for promoting the growth of an important branch of culture. He trusted the appeal would not be in vain. [Cheers.]
§ MR. HERBERT LEWISsupported the case which had been put forward by his hon. Friend. In the Public Record Office there was an immense mass of documents relating to Wales which were entirely unindexed, and in this respect Wales had been a little hardly treated. This was by reason of the fact that there was no one in the office with the requisite technical and expert knowledge to deal with these manuscripts.
§ MR. PRYCE-JONES (Montgomery Boroughs)desired to co-operate with his hon. Friends in the laudable object they had in view, and stated that in this matter Welshmen of all shades of politics were unanimous.
§ *MR. HANBURYsaid the desire of the Welsh Members on both sides for adequate treatment of the valuable historical records relating to Wales, of course, had the sympathy of the House. It was necessary, in the first place, however, to understand the facts exactly. In speaking of Welsh records it must not be assumed that these were records written exclusively in Welsh. No doubt there were a great number of Welsh manuscripts in the Welsh tongue, but these were generally private manuscripts, dealt with not by the Record Office, but by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. He frankly admitted that exactly the same treatment ought to be accorded to the Welsh as to the English records. There were two 512 questions involved—one the question of calendaring, and the other that of transcribing. As to the former, manuscripts dealing with only one locality were practically arranged under the heads of the particular county or counties, and that applied to English and Welsh counties alike. So far as the general interest of the documents was concerned, nearly all of them were calendared geographically, and, therefore, the Welsh documents were fairly accessible to Welsh scholars. With regard to those which referred to more than one locality it was quite impossible to have a separate list, because they referred to England and Wales generally, but where a paragraph referred to Wales or a Welsh county, attention was drawn to the fact in a side note. So far as calendaring was concerned, the arrangement was satisfactory. With regard to the question of transcribing local manuscripts, the work of calendaring had been so great that practically no English or Welsh manuscripts were being transcribed at all at present. As to manuscripts of general interest, the officers of the Record Office said, and he thought with justice, that it was not so much their duty to transcribe these manuscripts as to calendar them briefly so as to enable them to be worked up by Welsh and English scholars. Welsh work did not suffer in any way from the fact of there not being a Welshman at the Record Office with expert knowledge of old Welsh. At the same time, while it would be impossible to make an immediate addition to the staff for this purpose, he recognised that the case was one which ought to be borne in mind. When the first vacancy arose the question might be considered whether it would not be well to put a Welshman into the office. He was very anxious to meet the wishes of Welsh Members, though a great deal had been done in the direction indicated.
Resolution agreed to.
20. "That a sum, not exceeding £13,800, be granted to Her Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March 1897, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of Her Majesty's Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues, and of the Office of Land Revenue Records and Inrolments.
§ MR. LEWIScalled attention to the desirability of afforesting the Welsh hills. He knew there were certain common rights which would have to he extinguished before it would be possible for the Commissioners to attempt anything in the way of reafforestation, but he had been waiting in vain for them to take some practical steps in that direction. He believed it would be necessary to have legislation to reafforest the Welsh hills, and if that was the case, no Departmental Bill had so far been introduced. He had suggested that the difficulty might be met by means of purchase, and he thought that Wales had a right to some reinvestment of the proceeds of sales of Crown property in Wales itself. The policy of the Woods and Forests Department was described in the Report of the last Select Committee. Since 1851 £151,547 had been obtained from the sale of Crown lauds in Wales. On the other hand, the Crown had done nothing in Wales in the way of investment, except to pay off a permanent charge amounting to £40,000 on its estates, and to buy property to the value of £1,900. In England, on the other hand, the Commissioners had invested a great deal more than they had sold. They had sold land to the value of £2,492,000, while they had purchased to the extent of £3,172,000, or £670,000 more than their sales. In Wales, on the other hand, their purchases were less than their sales by £111,000. In these circmstances, Wales had a fair claim to say that, if it was necessary to purchase any property for the purpose of the work of reafforestation, the Crown had plenty of money in its hands, and that it could well be invested in work of this description. Private landowners had done a great deal of work in this respect lately, and it was a work which added not only to the beauty but to the wealth of the country. The Crown, however, could afford to do work of this kind better than private individuals, because private individuals could not afford to wait for the return of investments. If the Crown were to undertake the work of reafforesting a large portion of its property in Wales, it would find that the investment was of a remunerative character. This country did infinitely less than foreign countries in the 514 work of reafforesting. We needed a great deal more timber than foreign countries. We paid £18,000,000 a year for the timber we imported from foreign countries, and in that sum he did not include wood pulp used for newspapers, or mahoganies, but only ordinary timber. The timber supplies were by no means inexhaustible, and some of them showed signs of very rapid diminution. Sweden was actually importing logs from America, and this fact showed the beginning of the end. If the Crown, therefore, were to undertake in Wales the work of reafforesting they would really be rendering a national benefit to the country. They would give not only a large amount of work, but that work would be given at the time when men were most out of employment. Owing to the policy pursued in the past Wales had lost the most valuable portion of the Crown lands. The vast wealth of the great mineral basin of South Wales had entirely passed away from the Crown, and the best slate quarries in North Wales had passed away in the same way. It had been said, he thought by the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor, that whenever a sale of Crown lands took place the local authorities would be consulted as to the desirableness of the sale taking place. He asked the right hon. Gentleman to say that wherever it was practicable, any property of the Crown which might be either sold or let should be put up to public auction. The Draperstown railway case showed how public property was sometimes sold, though he did not hint that any of the proceedings of the Woods and Forests Department were to be compared with that incident. But for the protection and the information of the public he thought that wherever it could be done this class of property should be put up for sale at public auction on ordinary commercial principles. In the past landlords had been appointed as stewards of Crown property to collect rents for themselves. He asked that this policy should not be adopted in. future.
MR. HERBERT ROBERTSpointed out that a Commissioner had been able to recommend the planting of plantations in certain districts in Denbighshire, and the result had been favourable. He should like to know whether the right 515 hon. Gentleman could give any information as to what had taken place in Denbighshire, and whether a further experiment would be recommended in Denbighshire and other counties in North Wales.
*MR. HANBTTRYagreed that it was desirable to deal with Crown property in the manner indicated, and it had been his object in all sales of Crown lands to see that they were effected by public and open competition. In all cases where publicity was an advantage, publicity as a rule ought to be adopted. With reference to landlords who had been appointed stewards in the past, 1RS said, as a matter of fact there were only two landlords who had been appointed, and he was informed that they were not receiving rents; they were simply stewards of manors holding certain manorial Courts.
§ MR. LEWISasked whether the right hon. Gentleman was aware that in their case there were very considerable arrears of rent due.
§ *MR. HANBURYthought that this was not so in the case of the two landlords he had mentioned. These gentlemen did not receive rents; they merely held certain manorial Courts in respect of enfranchisement and the copyhold. The receivers of rents were professional gentlemen. He thought that there was some misconception as to the power of the Crown in the matter of afforestation. The Crown held only a small amount of absolutely freehold land. On one part of it, he was told, considerable plantation had already taken place. But the bulk of the property of the Crown in Wales was subject to commoners' rights, and therefore plantation could not take place, without the commoners' consent, and it had been found very difficult to obtain it. By voluntary arrangement, therefore, it was next to impossible to start planting on Crown property, where there were sheep runs or which was subject to other common rights. The hon. Member, he understood, was in favour of giving the Crown special statutory powers; but they must remember that a sheep run was a very important part of a farmer's interest. It would be very hard to confiscate the right in order that afforestation might be undertaken. Even if compensation were given, hardship must be caused, as the farms would depreciate in value con- 516 siderably if the sheep runs were closed. It was recognised at the Office of Woods and Forests that reafforestation would be very advantageous to Wales, but, as he had pointed out, the difficulties in the way could not be easily overcome. He would inquire whether in some cases the existing common rights could not be purchased by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, but he knew that in most cases these sheep runs were so closely connected with the farms that if they were closed to the tenants the farms would lose much of their value.
Resolution agreed to.