Commons Sitting of 31 March 1908

Preamble
The House met at a quarter before Three of the Clock.

PRIVATE BILL BUSINESS.
Hull and Barnsley Railway Bill.—As amended, considered; to be read the third time.
Great Western Railway (Superannuation Scheme) Bill [Lords] (by Order).—Read a second time, and committed.
Metropolitan Police Provisional Order Bill.—"To confirm a Provisional Order
292
made by one of His Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State under The Metropolitan Police Act, 1886, and The Metropolitan Police Courts Act, 1897," presented by Mr. Herbert Samuel; supported by Mr. Secretary Gladstone; read the first time; to be referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 182.]
North Eastern Railway Bill: Humber Commercial Railway and Dock Bill.—Reported with Amendments; Reports to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
Leicester Corporation Bill.—Reported from the Police and Sanitary Committee, with Amendments; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

PRIVATE BILL BUSINESS.

  STANDING ORDERS.
  Resolutions reported from the Select Committee—

  1. "That, in the case of the Lower Thames (Grays) Dock Bill, Petition for dispensing with Standing Order 128 in the case of the Petition of 'Northfleet Paper Mills, Limited,' the Standing Order ought to be dispensed with."

  2. "That, in the case of the Ards and Bangor Railways Bill, the Standing Orders ought to be dispensed with:—That the parties be permitted to proceed with their Bill, on the condition that resolutions of the Belfast and County Down Railway Company, and of the County Council of the County of Down, and the Urban District Council of Newtownwards, approving of the Bill as introduced, and the deposit of copies of the said resolutions in accordance with the requirements of the Standing Orders, are proved before the Committee on the Bill, and that, failing such proof, Clause 19 and Clauses 83 to 90, both inclusive, be struck out of the Bill:—That the Committee on the Bill do report how far such Order has been complied with."

  3. "That, in the case of the Stratford upon-Avon, Towcester, and Midland Junction, Evesham, Redditch, and Stratford-upon-Avon Junction, and East and West Junction Railways (Amalgamation) [Lords], Petition for Bill, the Standing Orders ought to be dispensed with:—That the parties be permitted to proceed with their Bill, on the condition that a clause is inserted in the Bill to the following effect, viz.: 'That no sale shall

  293
  take place of the amalgamated undertaking without the consent of the memorialists, Charles William Bartholomew, Richard Donald Bain, and William Howard Gray, which does not provide for the payment to the said memorialists of the sum of at least £5,000 in cash in respect of the debenture stock mentioned in Section 4 of the Act of 1901 or in respect of the stock of the new company incorporated by the Bill to be exchanged therefore under the provisions of the said Bill:'—That the Committee on the Bill do report how far such Order has been complied with."

  4. "That, in the case of the Cambrian Railways [Lords], Petition for Bill, the Standing Orders ought to be dispensed with:—That the parties be permitted to proceed with their Bill."

  Resolutions agreed to.

  ARDS AND BANGOR RAILWAYS BILL.
  Report [this day] from the Select Committee on Standing Orders read.
  Bill to be read a second time.—(The Deputy-Chairman.)

  SLOUGH URBAN DISTRICT WATER BILL.
  Reported [Preamble not proved]; Report to lie upon the Table.
PETITIONS.
  ELEMENTARY EDUCATION (ENGLAND AND WALES) BILL.
  Petition from Connah's Quay and Shotton, in favour; to lie upon the Table.
  LICENSING BILL.
  Petitions against: From Bath; Bow-broom (two); Concrete; Conisboro'; Darfield (two); Exeter; Jump (three); Low Valley; Malmesbury (three); Mexborough (nine); North-West Wilts; Oxford; Rotherham; Swinton (two); and, Wombwell (eight); to lie upon the Table.

  LICENSING BILL.
  Petitions in favour: From Amble; Batley (two); Bellshill; Bideford; Bolton (two); Chesterton (three); Chevington Drift; Cleckheaton; Connah's
  294
  Quay and Shotton; Denmead; Eastney Exeter; Greenhead; Heanor and Langley; Heddon on the Wall; Hyde; Muddiford; New Hirst; North Finchley; Orkney; Oswestry; Oxford; Pengam and Fleur de Lis; Prudhoe on Tyne; Rothesay; Scarborough: Seghill; Sheffield; Southport; Staindrop; ToftHill; Warrington (two); West Acomb; Westhoughton and Lostock; White-haven (two); Winchester; Willington Colliery; and, Wombwell; to lie upon the Table.

  MORAY FIRTH (ILLEGAL TRAWLING).
  Petition from Freswick, for prevention; to lie upon the Table.
  SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS ON SUNDAY BILL.
  Petition from Felton, in favour; to lie upon the Table.
  WOMEN'S ENFRANCHISEMENT BILL.
  Petition from Kenilworth, in favour to lie upon the Table.
RETURNS, REPORTS, ETC.
  NAVAL AND MARINE PAY AND PENSIONS ACT, 1805.
  Copy presented, of Orders in Council, dated 19th March, 1908, approving Memorials of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty praying sanction to (1) certain improvements in the Pay and Position and new Regulations for the Retirement of Engineer Officers of His Majesty's Naval Service; (2) the payment of a Special Allowance of one shilling and sixpence a day to the Chief or Senior Gunner of the Torpedo School Ship at Sheerness [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.
  FOREIGN JURISDICTION ACT, 1890.
  Copy presented, of Order in Council, dated 19th March, 1908, entitled "The Northern Nigeria order in Council, 1908 "[by Act]; to lie upon the Table.

  SUPREME COURT OE JUDICATURE ACT, 1875.
  Copy presented, of Order in Council, dated 19th March, 1908, amending the Order in Council of 28th July, 1893, as amended by the Order in Council of 7th May, 1907, relating to the Circuits of

  295
  the Judges [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.

  TERRITORIAL AND RESERVE FORCES ACT, 1907.
  Copies presented, of Three Orders in Council, dated 19th March, 1908, viz.;—(1) For the transfer of the Yeomanry and Volunteers to the Territorial Force (2) Relating to the Property of the Honourable Artillery Company; (3) Applying certain Enactments relating to the Militia, Yeomanry, or Volunteers to the Territorial Force [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.
  NAVY ESTIMATES, 1907–8 (PROGRAMME OF SHIPBUILDING, REPAIRS, MAINTENANCE, ETC.).
  Copy presented, of Statement showing the propable effect on the Programme due to Re-appropriation of cash, provision, etc [by Command]; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. (No. 108.)
  CAPE OF GOOD HOPE OBSERVATORY.
  Copy presented, of Report's of the Astronomer to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty for the years 1906 and 1907 [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.
  ARMY.
  Copy presented, of General Annual Report on the British Army for the year ending 30th September 1907 [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.
  TREATY SERIES (No. 7, 1908).
  Copy presented, of Convention between the United Kingdom and France respecting Commercial relations between Erance and Barbados. Signed at London 9th January 1907. Ratifications exchanged at London, 18th March 1908 [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.
  PANAMA CANAL (BRITISH WEST INDIAN LABOUR).
  Copy presented, of Despatches from His Majesty's Minister at Panama, respecting the employment of British West Indian Labour in the Panama Canal zone [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.
  TESTAMENTARY BEQUESTS (FOREIGN COUNTRIES).
  Address for "Return showing the limitations imposed by Law upon Testamentary Bequests in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States of America."—(Mr Holt).
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS CIRCULATED WITH THE VOTES.

  Customs Port Clerks Class.
  MR. ALDEN: To ask the Secretary to the Treasury how many vacancies have occurred on the port clerks class in the Customs Department during the past eight years; how many of these vacancies have been filled by promotions from the new class of assistant clerks in the Statistical Office, and how many by men not in the service; what is the number of new class assistant clerks employed in the Statistical Office, and how many of these are eligible for promotion to port clerkships; how many vacancies at present exist on the port clerks class; and what is the total number of promotions to a superior grade made from the new class of assistant clerks in the Statistical Office during the past ten years.
  (Answered by Mr. Runciman.) The information asked for in the Question is as follows:—

  (1) Number of vacancies for port clerkships in the past eight years

  237

  (2) Number of these vacancies filled by:—

  (a) Promotions of assistant clerks (new class) in the Statistical Office

  2*

  (b) Men not in the service

  220

  (3) Number of assistant clerks (new class) in the Statistical Office

  150

  (4) Number qualified so far as regards length of service for promotion to port clerkships

  64

  (5) Number of existing vacancies for port clerkships

  15

  (6) Total number of promotions of assistant clerks (new class) in the Statistical Office during the past ten years

  2*

  Shorthand Writer's Fees.
  MR. TALBOT: To ask Mr. Attorney-General, whether, under Section 16 of The Criminal Appeal
  * In addition to this number there are two assistant clerks (new class) in the Statistical Office, who have been nominated for promotion to port clerkships subject to their passing the necessary qualifying examination

  297
  Act, 1907, shorthand notes will be taken of the speeches of counsel, the evidence of witnesses, and the summing up of the Judge or chairman; and whether any arrangements are in contemplation for the employment of expert shorthand writers for the various Courts of Assize and quarter sessions.
  (Answered by Sir William Robson.) The Judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal have made a rule dealing with the point raised in this Question as follows:—For the purpose of Section 16 of the Act proceedings at the trial shall mean the evidence and any objections taken in the course thereof, any statement made by the prisoner, the summing-up and sentence of the Judge of the Court of trial, but unless otherwise ordered by such Judge shall not include any part of the speeches of counsel or solicitor. This rule awaits the approval of the Lord Chancellor. I believe the Lord Chancellor will arrange for the appointment of expert shorthand writers.

  Indian Fever and Opium.
  MR. REES: To ask the Secretary of State for India whether, in view of the fact that the mortality from fever in India is so greatly in excess of that occasioned by other diseases, and of the fact that opium is a recognised specific, and an absolute necessity to certain races and tribes of Indians, for the treatment of this disease, he will, in arrangements that are made for reducing the cultivation of opium, safeguard the supply of sufficient quantities for use for medicinal purposes.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Morley) I have no doubt that in any further regulations which the Government of India may make for the restriction of the opium habit in India, the special circumstances of particular tribes or races, necessitating a supply of the drug for medicinal purposes, will receive due consideration.

  Indian Imperial Education Service.
  MR. HART-DAVIES: To ask the Secretary of State for India whether, in filling up vacancies in the Imperial Education Service of India, he will take into consideration the claims of Indian graduates who have dis-
  298
  tinguished themselves at British or Indian Universities
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Morley.), As I have stated before in reply to similar Questions, the conditions of the Indian Educational Service are fixed with a view to the position of officers serving away from their own country. They are therefore not appropriate in the case of natives of India, with a view to whose recruitment, on the other hand, the conditions of the Provincial Educational Service are adjusted.

  War Office Land at Cloch Point.
  MR. DUNDAS WHITE: To ask the Secretary for Scotland if he can say what is now taken as the annual value for rating the land near Cloch Point, which was purchased by the War Office for £13,050 in 1905 and resod for £10,000 in 1907; or, if it is not entered in the valuation roll as a separate subject, by what amount the annual value as stated in the valuation roll of the subject in which it is now included has been increased in consequence of its inclusion.
  (Answered by Mr. Sinclair.) The subject in question is entered in the valuation roll separately at the annual value of £20.

  Gambling in Brewery Stock.
  MR. FIELD: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether his attention has been called to the depreciation on the London Stock Exchange in the prices of brewery and other allied stocks; whether he is aware that this has affected insurance and other large public companies with money invested, likewise causing losses to investors; and whether, seeing that the gambling agencies' transactions causing this depreciation have been based on the financial aspects of the Licensing Bill, the Government proposes to take any measures to restrain such gambling and bear operations in the London and other British stock exchanges, with a view of protecting bona fide investors.
  (Answered by Mr. Asquith.) The hon. Member is probably right in his conjecture that recent market fluctuations in the class of securities to which he

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  refers have been to some extent due to speculative manipulation, but the matter does not appear to me to be one which could with advantage be dealt with by legislation.

  Irish Land Purchase Finance.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether there is any good reason for restricting the benefit conferred by Section 10 of last year's Finance Act to loan capital merely; whether the hardship which that section was intended to remedy equally exists in the case of the consolidation of share capital; and whether he will consider the propriety of extending the benefit of the section to share capital also.
  (Answered by Mr. Asquith.) The case referred to is presumably that in which loan capital is issued for the purpose, of the conversion of existing share capital. I cannot agree that in such a case any hardship arises through a charge for loan capital duty being made at 2s. 6d., not 6d. per cent. This duty is practically in substitution for the stamp duty which would be payable on a mortgage for the same purpose, which duty in the case in question would be at 2s. 6d., not 6d. per cent.

  Irish Land Purchase Insurance Fund.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland if he can state the amount of the Insurance Fund accumulated under The Local Registration of Title (Ireland) Act, 1891, Section 92; how many claims on this fund have been received and allowed; and whether it is intended to continue to levy stamp duties, which in some cases are oppressively high, to add to the fund.
  (Answered by Mr. Runciman.) I am informed that (1) the amount of Insurance Fund up to 28th March, 1908, was as follows:—

  £

  s.

  d.

  Consols

  10,789

  12

  10

  Cash

  890

  4

  2

  £11,679

  17

  0

  and that (2) one claim has been received and allowed. It is not considered desir-
  300
  able to discontinue the fees for insurance on which the safety of the system of conclusive registration depends, or to consider the question of reducing them until after further experience of the working of the system.

  Irish Land Deeds—Stamp Duties.
  MR. T. M. HEALY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that the stamp duties payable on the registration of a deed under The Local Registration of Title (Ireland) Act, 1891, are considerably higher than those charged in the old registering of deeds, with the result that for certain classes of conveyances, such as family deeds or settlements, the new procedure instead of being cheaper is considerably more expensive than the old; whether, in the case of large holdings, the registry fees in the local registry run to £3 or £4 as against the fixed fee of 10s. 6d. in the old registry of deeds; and whether he will represent to the proper authorities that a maximum fee should be fixed in the local registry somewhat approximating to the fee in the registry of deeds.
  (Answered by Mr. Runciman.) Stamp duty is regulated by the Stamp Acts, and is, therefore, necessarily the same in the registry of titles and the registry of deeds. On the other hand the fees payable in the registry of deeds are regulated by 2 and 3 Will. 4, c. 87 (Schedule B), and depend on the length of the memorial, the number of grantors, and the number of denominations affected; whereas the fees payable in the registry of titles depend on the value of the land or charge affected by Section 8 of the Local Registration of Title (Ireland) Act, 1891. No proper comparison can accordingly be made between the two sets of fees, but it may be pointed out that the minimum fee in both offices is 8s., while there is no maximum fee in either office. It is the fact that the more valuable the land the higher the fees in the registry of titles, but it should be remembered that registration in that office gives a conclusive title, which is not the case in the registry of deeds. Also in the registration of charges in the registry of titles there is not the expense of a memorial, nor is any special fee allowed to the solicitor for the registration in that office. It follows

  301
  that in most cases the actual cost to the public is less in the registry of title than in the registry of deeds. The question of the fees in the registry of titles has been for some time under consideration. When a new schedule is being prepared the question of a maximum fee will be carefully considered.

  Extra Police in County Longford.
  MR. J. P. FARRELL: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that, at the last monthly petty sessions court in Newtownforbes, county Longford, which is supposed to be the centre of agrarian discontent in county Longford, there were only three small cases for hearing, not one of which was for any agrarian offence; and will he, in these circumstances, now direct a reduction of the extra police force engaged there in protection duty.
  (Answered by Mr. Birrell.) The fact is as stated in the first part of the Question, but it is also the fact that there is a good deal of boycotting in the locality, and while this remains so the extra force cannot be reduced.

  Lisnageeragh Townlands.
  MR. J. P. FARRELL: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Estates Commissioners have yet succeeding in purchasing from the Land Judge the townlands of Lisnageeragh; if so, whether the purchase includes the turbary of lot seventeen offered for sale; and, if not, whether steps will be taken to acquire this bog for distribution amongst the purchasing tenants, who are entitled to its possession, having had all their lives the turbary rights there.
  (Answered by Mr. Birrell.) Neither the Estates Commissioners nor the officials of the Land Judge's Court are able to identify the property in question from the information given. If the hon. Member will give the name and address of the owner of the lands, and the county in which they are situate, further inquiries will be made.

  Longford Labourers Act Inquiry.
  MR. J. P. FARRELL: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland to state whether any complaint
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  has reached the Local Government Board as to the delay in furnishing the Report on the inquiry which took place under the Labourers Act in Longford on the 7th January last; and will he now call for the Report and the inspector's decision in the various cases heard on that occasion.
  (Answered by Mr. Birrell.) The Local Government Board have not received any complaint of delay. It is expected that the inspector's order, which is now in the printer's hands, will be ready in a few days, and as soon as it is signed copies will be forwarded to the council. The, scheme was a large one, embracing 265 cottages and thirty-eight additional allotments.

  The Colonies and the Race Question.
  CAPTAIN FABER: To ask the Prime Minister whether, looking at the recent trouble which arose in South Africa through the finger-print orders, and as we have no Imperial opinion about the race question, he would communicate with the self-governing Colonies as to the desirability of a Commission which should elaborate an imperial scheme to anticipate such events by a common understanding.
  (Answered by Mr. Churchill.) The Secretary of State for the Colonies has recently stated in the House of Lords his reasons for deprecating the line of action suggested, and I would therefore refer the hon. Member to that statement which was made on the 17th February.

QUESTIONS IN THE HOUSE.

  Fife Coast and the Coastguard Service.
  MAJOR ANSTRUTHER-GRAY: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether any changes are contemplated on the Fife coast with regard to stations or personnel of the Coastguard service.
  THE SECRETARY TO THE ADMIRALTY (Mr. EDMUND ROBERTSON,): No changes are contemplated at present at any stations on the Fife coast.

  Naval Promotions.
  MR. BARNES: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty what numbers have been promoted

  303
  respectively to the rank of admiral, captain, commander, lieutenant, sub-lieutenant, gunner, boatswain, carpenter, artificer, and engineer since 1st April, 1906; what proportion do such promotions bear to the numbers of officers in

  Rank.

  Number of Officers promoted.

  Total number of Officers at the present date.

  Percentage of promotions to total.

  Rear-Admiral

  34

  96 (a)

  35

  Captain

  65

  250

  26

  Commander

  101

  368

  27

  Lieutenant

  391

  1,677 (b)

  23

  Sub-Lieutenant

  396

  460

  86

  Gunners

  92

  1,181 (c)

  8

  Boatswains

  Signal Boatswains

  6

  67 (d)

  9

  Carpenters

  7

  271 (e)

  3

  Artificer Engineers

  21

  425 (f)

  5

  (a) Total number of flag officers.

  (b) Including those promoted from chief warrant rank.

  (c) Including chief gunners and chief boatswains.

  (d) Including chief signal boatswains.

  (e) Including chief carpenters.

  (f) Including chief artificer engineers.

  As regards the last part of the Question, full details of the pay of all ranks and ratings in the service will be found in the Quarterly Navy List, pages 773 to 822.

  Recruits' Uniforms.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War if he is aware that men recruited at the Oxford depot were not supplied with uniforms for several weeks after joining the colours, and therefore had to be confined to barracks; and if this is due to the reduction lately enforced in the stock of Army clothing kept at the depot.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (Mr. HALDANE,): This regiment is now being supplied with the
  each of the above cases; and what is the increased pay consequent on such improvement in rank.
  MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON: The figures are as follows:—
  new green cap. There appears to have been an abnormal demand for the small sizes, and some delay in the issue was caused thereby. It was in no way due to any reduction of stock of Army clothing. The recruits were allowed to go out of barracks in khaki uniform, so no recruit has at any time been confined to barracks for want of clothing or caps.

  Cavalry Barracks in Scotland.
  MR. MITCHELL-THOMSON: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War what progress has been made in the selection of sites for cavalry barracks in Scotland?
  MR. HALDANE: The matter is still under consideration, and no information can be furnished for some little time.
  MR. PIRIE: Can the right hon. Gentleman explain the reason of the delay in carrying out his promise?
  MR. HALDANEwas understood to say the reason was that the Government had to make the barracks fit their policy and not the policy fit the barracks.
  *MR. GULLANDasked whether the right hon. Gentleman had yet decided how to utilise the ground belonging to the War Office at Dumfries.
  MR. YOUNGERwished to know if arrangements had been made to train the Yeomanry along with the Regular Forces.
  *MR. SPEAKER: Order, order. That does not arise from the Question on the Paper.
  MAJOR ANSTRUTHER-GRAYasked the right hon. Gentleman whether he could give any indication when he could make a statement on the subject.
  MR. HALDANE: No, sir.
  MR. WATT: Will there be a Royal visit to Scotland shortly and will not cavalry be required in connection with that?
  *MR. SPEAKER: Order, order.

  Transfer of Officers.
  MR. WALTER LONG: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether his attention has been called to the fact that the compulsory Transfer of officers from one regiment to another, caused by the recent disbandment of certain units, imposes a considerable amount of hardship and expense on the officers concerned, and that such transfers generally necessitate a change of stations which are sometimes at considerable distances from each other; and whether he will consider the advisability of relieving officers from personal expense in connection with such transfers.
  MR. HALDANE: As I have already explained to the House, officers so transferred will be compensated for any necessary expense entailed in change of uniform. They will also receive the
  306
  regulation allowances for travelling expenditure.

  Maharajah of Baroda's Administration.
  MR. O'GRADY: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for India whether he is aware that in the Native State of Baroda the Maharajah has, with the help of his Ministers, separated the judicial from the executive functions, restored local self-government in the form of the the ancient village Panchayat, instituted primary education, compulsory and universal, throughout the State, and has further instituted the reform of popularly-elected members in the Legislative Council; and, if so, whether the Council of India will consider such reforms, with a view of suggesting to the Viceroy in Council their application to other Native States, and to India as a whole?
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA (Mr. MORLEY,): I am aware of the measures recently introduced in Baroda; their results will be watched with interest, and will be considered in their bearing on Indian administration generally. But I need hardly say that I cannot undertake forthwith to suggest the introduction of similar measures in the whole of British India, and I certainly cannot interfere with the discretion of the rulers of other States.

  Indian Penal Code-Press Prosecutions.
  MR. O'GRADY: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for India whether in view of the prosecution and sentence of printers and editors of papers in India generally to long terms of rigorous imprisonment and heavy amounts in fines under the Indian Penal Code for carrying on the propaganda of nationalism, and as it is impossible to carry on such propaganda without transgressing the terms of the code, he will take steps to amend the code so that constitutional reform agitation shall be exempt from its operation.
  MR. MORLEY: If my hon. friend will refer to Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, under which the prosecutions to which he refers have taken place, he will find that it includes this provision: "Comments expressing disapprobation of the measures of the Government with a view to obtain their alteration by lawful means, without exciting or

  307
  attempting to excite hatred, contempt, or disaffection do not constitute an offence under this section." I am not prepared to extend the exemption to forms of agitation such as cannot be brought within this description.
  MR. O'GRADYasked whether the right hon. Gentleman would consider the advisability of exempting from the operation of the Penal Code such acts as came within the propaganda of nationalism.
  MR. MORLEY: I cannot exempt anybody from the operation of the Penal Code.
  MR. O'GRADYasked whether it was not possible to frame some new law to deal especially with cases of this character.
  MR. MORLEY: I am asked to introduce a new law allowing anybody to agitate for a change of Government and excite or attempt to excite "hatred, contempt and disaffection." I do not think I could be responsible for a change of law of that kind.
  MR. O'GRADYasked whether they were to understand that the Government of India wished to put an end to the propaganda of nationalism in India, because it was impossible to carry it on under the terms of the Penal Code.
  MR. MORLEY: They can agitate as much as they please, but they must not break the law by deliberately exciting hatred, contempt, and disaffection.
  SIR H. COTTONasked whether his right hon. friend was not aware that a learned Chief Justice in India, when he was only Justice in the Bombay Court, defined the word "disaffection" in the section as meaning want of affection.
  MR. MORLEY: My hon. friend must be so good as to give me notice of that.

  Colonial Office Legal Appointments.
  *MR. WATT: I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he is aware that in the Regulations as to Legal Appointments of the Colonial Office
  308
  (No. 117, Third Edition, page 4) candidates are instructed that the maximum age for application is forty years, yet that candidates have been informed that they are too old, although only thirty-five years of age at the date of the reply; and, if so, will he in future see that the regulations issued correspond with the methods of the office.
  THE UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Mr. CHURCHILL,): The limit of age for candidates for legal appointments is forty years, and for administrative appointments thirty-five years; and I have no reason to suppose that the practice followed in dealing with applications is out of harmony with the regulations issued. I understand that the case to which my hon. friend refers is that of a candidate who was not considered to be sufficiently qualified for a legal appointment. He was, however, carefully considered for an administrative appointment until he had passed the age limit for those posts.
  *MR. WATT: Is it an essential qualification under the present règime that a candidate should not be a member of the Liberal Party?
  MR. CHURCHILL: I think it very undesirable to introduce principles of that kind.

  Trinidad—Fines on Railway Employees.
  MR. SUMMERBELL: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies if he can state the total amount received by the Government of Trinidad during the years 1906–7 in the shape of fines imposed on railway employees for various offences, as also the amount for each year distributed to deserving men out of such moneys in the shape of bonuses and rewards.
  MR. CHURCHILL: The Secretary of State has not received the figures for the year 1906–7, but for the year 1905–6 the fines received amounted to £26 5s. 6d., and the gratuities paid amounted to £32 7s. 11d.

  Trinidad—Legislative Council's Finance committee.
  MR. SUMMERBELL: I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for the

  309
  Colonies if he is aware that the meetings of the finance committee of the Legislative Council of Trinidad are held with closed doors, and that the taxpayers have no knowledge as to its deliberations; and, if so, can he state whether he is prepared to take action with a view to the meetings of such committee being of a more open character in the future.
  MR. CHURCHILL: The Secretary of State understands that, under the Standing Order of the Legislative Council of Trinidad, the Government of that Colony consults the Standing Committee on Finance before submitting to the Council votes entailing expenditure from public funds. My noble friend has no information as to the conditions under which the Standing Committee deliberate on the proposals made to them by the Government, but he considers that at this preliminary stage of considering expenditure it is only proper that publicity should be avoided. Full opportunity for discussion in public arises when the report of the Committee is presented to the Council.

  East Indians in Trinidad.
  MR. SUMMERBELL: I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies if he has received from the Trinidad Working Men's Association a communication to the effect that, owing to the number of East Indian and West Indian labourers unemployed in the town and country districts of the colony, and to the number of East Indians unemployed inhabiting public lodging-houses licensed by ordinance, and owing also to the predominance of crime, particularly among East Indians, the association protests against the importation of another 2,400 East Indian immigrants, as set out in the application by the Protector of Immigrants laid on the table of the Legislative Council of the Colony at its meeting of 17th February, 1908, and feels the time has arrived that any further importation of such coolies should be at once stopped; and, if so, can he state whether it is the intention of the Government to accede to such latter request.
  MR. CHURCHILL: No, Sir. No such communication has been received.

  White Labour in the Transvaal Mines.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: I beg to ask the Under-Secre-
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  tary of State for the Colonies how many of the Chinese miners who have been repatriated have been replaced in the Transvaal mines by white miners of British origin.
  MR. CHURCHILL: None, Sir, as far as I am aware. The Chinese were by law restricted to unskilled labour, and their places are being taken by Kaffirs.
  SIR GILBERT PARKER: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that a member of the Government sitting beside the right hon. Gentleman announced that if the Chinese were withdrawn 50,000 white men would find work?
  MR. CHURCHILL: I am not aware that that statement was made, but if it were made it could scarcely be more absurd than the statement of Lord Milner that for every 10,000 Chinese there would be 1,000 white men employed.

  Dinizulu.
  MR. ELLIS: I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies whether Dinizulu is still confined in prison; whether he has yet been informed of the specific charges laid against him, with full particulars of names, dates, and places respecting them; whether he has free and unrestricted access to such legal advisers as he may desire and can receive visits from friends; and whether a date has yet been fixed for his trial.
  MR. CHURCHILL: Dinizulu is still confined to prison. Perhaps the House will allow me to read the recent telegraphic correspondence on this subject generally, which will give the fullest information in the possession of the Secretary of State. On 19th March the Secretary of State telegraphed to the Governor of Natal as follows:—"I am sorry to have to recur to Jellicoe's allegations, but I am pressed for reply in detail to several points and I desire to be in a position to do full justice to your Ministers if and when they are assailed on any particular ground. (a) Have Dinizulu's advisers full access to all statements and depositions which are being used by or before the magistrate, with liberty to cross-examine witnesses upon them? (b) Are they permitted to make inspection of papers, etc., taken from Dinizulu's

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  Custody? (c) Are they or their agents permitted to go into Zululand to collect evidence for the defence, and if not, when will they be allowed to do so? (d) Can you also give me any further information as to the foundation for allegations of undue delay by the examining magistrate; of coercion under martial law to sign depositions, and of brow-beating of witnesses in Court? All these points are the subject of inquiry. I am also anxious for some information (e) as to the detention of Mankulumana and Mgwago in addition to Dinizulu. In England as you know a man cannot be detained in prison without formulating some definite sworn information against him, or a writ of habeas corpus would promptly issue. It is a matter of comment that there would seem to be no similar means of securing the liberty of the subject in Natal, and that men may be detained indefinitely in gaol without redress. Any information you can send me to rebut this position will be most welcome." On the 27th the following answer was received—"Ministers have asked me to reply to your telegram of 19th March in terms of the following Minute of acting Attorney-General. The preparatory examination in Dinuzulu's case is proceeding in ordinary course before the tribunals created by law for the purpose. Government have no control over such tribunals and are neither responsible nor can they be required to answer for the proceedings there. If any impropriety or injustice takes place a remedy can be sought in the higher Courts, but no application has hitherto been made for such relief. But in so far as Government may wish to be in a position to answer the specific questions asked by the Secretary of State for the Colonies I take them in turn. (a) Yes; Dinuzulu's advisers have full access to all statements and depositions used by or before the magistrate with liberty to cross-examine witnesses on them. Counsel for Dinuzulu is always present, sometimes two counsel. (b) The papers taken from Dinuzulu's custody, of which there is considerable quantity, are being translated for my information. Up to the present I have not considered them nor have I allowed them to be inspected by Dinuzulu's solicitors. (c) Up to the present permission has not as far as I am aware been given to Dinuzulu's solicitors to go to Zululand to collect evidence.
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  Proper opportunities will be given when the fitting time arrives. I cannot advise that permission be given yet. (d) There has been no undue delay: evidence has been brought forward as quickly as possible. Any allegations of coercion under martial law to sign depositions would be to the best of my information entirely baseless. Accusation of brow-beating in Court would be equally untrue. (e) Preparatory examinations are proceeding against Mankulamana and Mgwago on charges of treason. Certain general questions are asked regarding the necessity of definite sworn information. I need merely say that none of the prisoners have been arrested except upon sworn information and warrants granted by judicial authority. The course followed has been that prescribed by the long established law of the Colony and of Cape Colony before Natal was annexed. Some of our forms differ from those of English law, but our system is equally founded on principles of justice and fairness."
  MR. SWIFT MACNEILL: Has not the Cape Premier complained of this "damnable interference?"
  *MR. SPEAKER: Order, order. That does not arise on this Question.
  MR. LEHMANN: Are we to understand that by protracting this preliminary examination for an indefinite period no definite charge can be brought?
  MR. CHURCHILL: My hon. friend puts the case as severely as it can be put, but I am not in a position at present to rebut his interpretation of it.
  MR. ELLIS: Has the Secretary of State asked the Ministers of Natal when the trial is likely to take place?
  MR. CHURCHILL: Yes; we have asked when the distinct charges will be formulated and a definite trial begun. We are informed that the preparatory examination is now taking place, and they cannot say when that examination will be finished.

  Opium Trade in the Straits Settlements.
  MR. LAIDLAW: I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State

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  for the Colonies if he can say when the full Report of the Committee on the Opium Trade in the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States will be laid upon the Table.
  MR. CHURCHILL: The Secretary of State has not yet received the Report of the Commission, but the Governor of the Straits Settlements will be asked to state when it may be expected.

  The Treaty of Paris.
  MR. ASHLEY: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether any one of the Powers who signed the Treaty of Paris in 1856 has proposed that it should be modified in any way.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Sir EDWARD GREY,): There were seven Powers who were parties to the Treaty of Paris, and I can answer Questions only respecting the action of His Majesty's Government. We are not engaged in any negotiation respecting any modification of the Treaty, nor am I aware that any such is proceeding.

  British Trawlers and the Norwegian Flag.
  MR. WATT: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he is aware that the Government of Norway three years ago passed a measure prohibiting trawlers owned in Britain registering under the flag of Norway, but that that Act was not retrospective, and that it is therefore only vessels registered in Norway before that date which at present work in the Moray Firth; and whether, in view of the fact that the Norwegian Government is in no way sympathetic to the action of these trawlers, he will not oppose the carrying out of the unanimous decision of the Judges of the Court of Session.
  SIR EDWARD GREY: I am generally aware of the provisions of the Norwegian law on the subject, and can communicate them to the hon. Member if he desires it. In answer to the last part of the Question, I must refer the hon. Member to the Answer given by the Secretary for Scotland on the 26th, which stated the policy not of a Department but of the Government.

  Wimbledon and Clapham Junction Cab Drivers.
  MR. WILES: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether, having regard to the petitions sent to him signed by a number of the inhabitants, as well as the local cab drivers of the district, he will consider the advisability of opening to all cab drivers Wimbledon station and the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway side of Clapham Junction.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (Mr. GLADSTONE,): As regards Wimbledon station, the petition to which the hon. Member refers has been carefully considered, but according to the information I have so far received the retention of the privilege system there seems to be desirable in order to secure a sufficient supply of cabs for the proper accommodation of the public. As regards the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway station at Clapham Junction, I have just heard from the Company that their contract for privilege cabs expired on Wednesday last, and that from that date the station is open to all cab drivers on the conditions obtaining at London terminal stations. I am issuing a formal order to that effect.

  The Licensing Bill.
  MR. CLYNES: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he can give the number of licensed houses closed in Manchester under the operation of the Licensing Act of 1904; whether opposition was offered to such closing; what was the sum paid in compensation; what proportion of the compensation was paid to the tenants; and whether there is any record of any compensation paid to the workmen or servants who lost situations through the closing of houses.
  MR. GLADSTONE: All the available information in answer to this Question is contained in the annual volumes of Licensing Statistics. It appears from them that 139 licensed premises have been closed in Manchester under the Licensing Act, 1904, and that a total sum of £107,128 was paid in compensation, of which about 7 per cent. went to the licence-holders.
  MR. CLYNES: The right hon. Gentleman has not answered the last part of my Question. Have the Government contemplated making provision in the Licensing Bill which will ensure compensation being paid to displaced workmen?
  MR. GLADSTONE: I must refer my hon. friend to the Bill as it stands.
  MR. BOTTOMLEY: Has the right hon. Gentleman formed any estimate of the number of people who will be thrown out of employment if the Licensing Bill becomes law?
  *MR. SPEAKER: Order, order. Notice should be given of that Question, which is rather far from the Question on the Paper.

  Death from Anthrax at Bradford.
  MR. JOWETT: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been called to the death, on the 8th instant, of a man named Michael Quigley, of Bradford, from anthrax, contracted whilst handling dirty cheap foreign wool for Messrs. Campbell and Harrison, woolcombers, of Shipley; if he is aware that the wool in its dusty state was thrown down to Quigley from the room above through a trap door; and what steps he is taking to protect working people whose anxiety to earn a livelihood forces them to work under such dangerous conditions.
  MR. GLADSTONE: I have received a report on this case, from which it appears that the wool, after opening, was sent down a shoot for blending purposes in the room below, but that the whole of it had been opened over a fan in order to remove dust and dirt, and that in order still further to reduce the risk from dust, the shoot is provided with swing doors half way down which break the fall of the material. I am informed that the regulations are fully observed at the factory and that the firm are voluntarily observing additional precautions, including the provision of respirators, the opening of all material over the opening boards and the washing of all material in a disinfectant liquid. I am causing further inquiry to be made as to whether any additional measures can be taken to reduce the danger at the blending heap.
  MR. KILBRIDE: Whence was this wool imported?
  MR. GLADSTONE: I will find out.

  Hamstead Colliery Disaster.
  DR. HAZEL: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he will direct a formal investigation to be made of the fire which occurred at the Hamstead Colliery, South Staffordshire, on the 4th March, by which over twenty lives were lost, and of the causes and circumstances of the accident, including the condition of the mine at the time of the accident.
  MR. GLADSTONE: Yes, Sir. I have already made arrangements for this purpose. The investigation will be held by Professor Redmayne, of Birmingham University.
  DR. HAZEL: Can the right hon. Gentleman say when the investigation will take place?
  MR. GLADSTONE: The preliminary steps will be taken this week.

  Motor 'Bus Routes.
  SIR HENRY CRAIK: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether there is an authority which can restrict the use by motor omnibuses of narrow thoroughfares, where a maximum of danger and of vibration to neighbouring buildings is caused, instead of wider alternative routes, and whether there is any periodically recurring inspection of these vehicles, so as to detect the increased vibration caused by the inferior and rapidly deteriorating machinery used by certain companies.
  MR. GLADSTONE: The Answer to the first part of the Question is in the negative. As regards the second, every motor omnibus is inspected at least once a year when it comes up for its annual licence. Besides undergoing this annual inspection, motor omnibuses are often reported and ordered off the streets for noise and vibration. Each such order entails fresh inspection before the vehicle is permitted to use the streets again. It must be remembered, however, that

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  noise and vibration are often largely due to uneven road surfaces.
  SIR HENRY CRAIK: But have the public no security whatsoever against the cupidity of rival companies in choosing routes entirely without regard to public convenience?
  MR. GLADSTONE: No, Sir. The law does not authorise the police to regulate the traffic in that way.

  Import Duties Abroad.
  MR. J. F. MASON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he can give information as to the amount per head of population derived from import duties in the three following countries, viz., the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Germany.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. LLOYD-GEORGE,): The net revenue from import duties (after deducting drawbacks and refunds) was equivalent in the last completed financial year to the following sums per annum per head of population: United Kingdom 15s. 3d., United States of America 15s. 9d., Germany 9s. 5d.

  Railway Superannuation Funds.
  MR. HUDSON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade if he can say whether an inquiry into the question of railway superannuation and pension funds will be held; and, if so, when the Committee will be appointed and what form the inquiry will take?
  *MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: I have arranged to appoint a Departmental Committee to inquire into the constitution, rules, administration, and financial position of the Superannuation and similar Funds of Railway Companies. The composition of the Committee will be announced shortly.
  MR. HUDSON: Will the terms of reference cover other traction companies, such as tramways?
  *MR. LLOYD-GEORGE: No. I cannot say that I contemplate including tramways.

  Foreign Powers and the British Patent Laws.
  MR. HADDOCK: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether any representations have been made by Germany or any other Foreign country regarding the new British Patent Law?
  THE SECRETARY TO THE BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. KEARLEY,): Representations have been made from Germany and the United States with regard to certain provisions of the new Patents and Designs Act which affect patents worked wholly or exclusively abroad.

  Grants to Distress Committees.
  MR. CLYNES: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board/whether he has considered the opinion in the Report of the Association of Municipal Corporations that, during the continuance of the present Unemployed Act, Exchequer grants should be made to distress committees for the payment of wages to those employed under the Act on works of public utility; whether he was asked to receive a deputation to hear the views of the association, and whether he can now make any statement on his promise to bring under the notice of the Poor Law Commission the suggestion to report at once their recommendations respecting unemployment, with a view to immediate action being taken by the House to meet the demand for work.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. JOHN BURNS,): As regards the first two points in the Question the reply is in the affirmative. I have communicated to the Royal Commission the suggestion referred to in the last part of it, but I am not able to make any statement as to the course proposed to be taken by them with regard to it.
  MR. CLYNES: Did the right hon. Gentleman decline to receive a deputation from the Association of Municipal Corporations?
  MR. JOHN BURNS: Yes, I declined to receive that particular deputation, because I had received a number of

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  deputations upon points which they were anxious to discuss.
  MR. CLYNES: Has the right hon. Gentleman formed any conclusions on the opinions expressed in the report of the Association?
  MR. JOHN BURNS: Several.
  MR. CLYNES: Is the right hon. Gentleman prepared to announce them?
  MR. JOHN BURNS: At this moment, no, sir.

  Corporal Punishment in Battle Work-house.
  MR. CLYNES: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether with reference to the case of a boy in Battle workhouse who was given six strokes with a cane on the bare back by the master, he has yet received a report from the Battle guardians, together with statements in writing from the master and the medical officer of Battle workhouse; and whether, seeing that the majority of the Battle guardians disapproved of the stripping of the boy in this instance, and that the use of corporal punishment is disallowed in the case of girls in workhouses, he will prohibit in future the infliction of corporal punishment on the nude bodies of boys.
  MR. JOHN BURNS: I have received the report and statements referred to. I do not think that a cane should be used on the naked body of a boy, and I find that the guardians have instructed the master not to administer any corporal punishment on the naked flesh of any boy unless previously sanctioned by them. I do not consider it necessary to take any further action in the matter.

  Shotton Council School.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Education if he has sanctioned the building of a new council school in the parish of Shotton, Flint-shire, adjacent to a Church school in which the accommodation is 282, and the average attendance below 200, and where no lessons on the Catechism or Prayer Book are given except to children whose parents have expressed their desire
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  for it; and if he can say why no inquiry was held when a petition signed by 115 ratepayers was sent asking for an inquiry?
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (Mr. MCKENNA,): Yes, Sir; a new council school in this parish has been sanctioned. The local education authority informs me that there are 740 children of school age in the district, and that the only school available is the St. Ethelwold's Church School accommodating 282 children. Many children for whom accommodation should be provided in Shotton are understood to walk a considerable distance to other schools. In these circumstances it did not appear to the Board necessary to hold a public inquiry in order to enable them to arrive at a decision.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: What steps does the right hon. Gentleman propose to take to ascertain the views of those who object?
  MR. MCKENNA: It is not necessary to take any steps. The local authorities are satisfied that accommodation must be found for these 500 children.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: Then it is a case of hearing only one side?
  MR. MCKENNA: No, sir; but the authority must conform to the wishes of the Standing Committee.

  Southampton Catholic Secondary School.
  MR. BOLAND: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Education whether, with reference to the letter of the 19th March, addressed by the Board of Education to the manager of the Catholic Secondary School at Southampton, he is aware that for twenty-five years this school met local requirements, and that no application for assistance from the local education authority was made; whether he is aware that the Catholic day scholars are more than sixty, and not a little more than forty as stated in the Board's letter; and whether, in view of the fact that education is willingly provided in this school for children drawn from other sections of the population, and that the local education authority is in favour of the waiver of Articles 5, 23, and 24 of the Regulations,

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  he will state when this application will be granted?
  MR. MCKENNA: According to information given by the school authorities to His Majesty's Inspector on a visit to this school between the 21st and 24th of November last, there were then 60 Catholic scholars in all in attendance out of a total number of 124 scholars, but of the 60 Catholic scholars, 17 were boarders, leaving 43 Catholic day scholars, or little more than 40 as stated in the Board's letter. The argument drawn from the small number of Catholic scholars in the school has already been the subject of debate in this House, and I must beg the hon. Member to excuse me from continuing now a discussion which cannot be properly concluded in the form of an Answer to a Question.
  MR. BOLAND: Then am I to understand that because this Catholic school generously opened its doors to Protestant children it is to be deprived of the higher grant?
  MR. MCKENNA: No, sir; as I have explained, that is not the reason why.
  MR. BOLAND: I shall put a further question on this.

  Headmasters and the New Education Act.
  SIR GEORGE SCOTT ROBERTSON: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Education how will a certain admittedly able and efficient headmaster under forty, and now drawing a salary of £240 a year, be provided for if his large non-provided school is abandoned altogether under the new Act, its scholars being found places in the neighbouring schools, as would probably be the case; and will the headmaster be compensated adequately for his loss, unless and until a similar situation is found for him, or must he go forth to seek employment perhaps in a much humbler position in order to earn a living.
  MR. MCKENNA: My hon. friend's Question raises issues which can be more conveniently dealt with in debate than by means of Question and Answer.

  Necessitous Children.
  MR. HADDOCK: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government
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  Board whether he will state the number of children who were reported by the Children's Care Committees as necessitous, and the number fed, in the week ending 6th March, in London County Council schools; and whether he can also state the number of dinnerless school children in the schools of Berlin.
  MR. MCKENNA: I understood from a newspaper report that the number of schools reported by the Sub Committee on underfed children has having necessitous children during the week ended 6th March, was 461, the number of children being 46,123. The number of children fed in the 461 schools was 45,142. I have no information as to the last paragraph.

  Dog Poisoning in Sutherlandshire.
  MR. MORTON: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether any information has yet been received as to the person or persons who poisoned the crofters' dogs last year in the neighbourhood of Badininish, Skibbo, Sutherlandshire.
  THE SECRETARY FOR SCOTLAND (Mr. SINCLAIR,): I have made inquiries from the criminal authorities and no further information has been obtained.

  Scottish Local Government.
  MAJOR ANSTRUTHER-GRAY: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland whether he can give any information as to the introduction of a Bill on the lines of the Local Government (Scotland) (No. 2) Bill, which was withdrawn in July 1906, on the understanding that he would endeavour to do so as soon as time was available.
  MR. SINCLAIR: I still hope that time may be available this session for the consideration of such a measure, but am not yet able to make a definite promise.
  MAJOR ANSTRUTHER-GRAY: Can the right hon. Gentleman indicate a date when we may expect a further statement?
  MR. SINCLAIR: I am sorry I cannot.
  MAJOR ANSTRUTHER-GRAY: Not before Easter?
  MR. SINCLAIR: No, sir.

  Trawling outside Territorial Waters.
  MR. ASHLEY: I beg to ask the Secretary for Scotland if he is aware that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs has recently formally protested against the Uruguayan Government's claims to jurisdiction over River Plate waters outside the three-mile limit; and whether, in view of this fact, he has secured the support of the Foreign Office to the proposals for regulating the operations of trawlers outside territorial waters which he is formulating for submission to other Powers.
  MR. SINCLAIR: I am informed by my right hon. friend that the reply to the first part of the question is in the affirmative. Any proposals to be laid before the Powers will be made on the responsibility of the Government as a whole.

  Boy Clerks.
  MR. CLAUDE HAY: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Treasury if he will render every assistance to boy clerks in their efforts to secure suitable outside employment; and for this means will he cause an employment register containing full particulars of thoroughly trustworthy boy clerks, who are approaching the age of 20, together with the names of the firms who are willing to employ such boys, to be kept at each office in the United Kingdom where boy clerks are employed, in view of the fact that a similar plan has been instrumental in obtaining employment for large numbers of telegraph messengers in the Post Office, who are situated in a somewhat similar position to boy clerks in the Civil Service.
  THE FINANCIAL SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY (Mr. RUNCIMAN,): I fear that it would be impracticable to give effect to the hon. Member's proposal in its present form. But the Civil Service Commissioners, who keep the register of boy clerks, will be ready to answer inquiries from employers as to the qualifications of those about to be discharged.
  MR. CLAUDE HAY: Can the right hon. Gentleman say why?
  RUNCIMAN: It is the view of the Civil Service Commissioners, and I am not prepared to contest it.

  Selling by Auction without Licence.
  MR. HUNT: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Treasury why Mr. A. H. Wainwright, clothier, Knighton, was allowed to sell by auction the surplus provisions which were over from an entertainment at the Assembly Rooms at Knighton on 10th January last, seeing that he had not an auctioneer's licence; and why the Excise officer took no notice of the matter.
  MR. RUNCIMAN: The matter was not brought to the knowledge of the Excise officer until a month after its occurrence, and in view of the trivial and isolated character of the offence it was decided to overlook it.
  MR. HUNT: Does not an auctioneer have to take out a £10 licence?
  MR. RUNCIMAN: That is so.

  Potato Disease
  MR. FFRENCH: I beg to ask the Vice-President of the Department of Agriculture (Ireland) if the latest potato disease in Great Britain, known as the black scab, has made its appearance in many places; if it has made its appearance at all in Ireland; and if the Irish Board of Agriculture are taking any steps to prevent its importation.
  THE VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE FOR IRELAND (Mr. T. W. RUSSELL,): The Department have for a considerable time been on the look out for this disease, but fortunately so far no evidence of its presence in Ireland has been discovered. Fearing its importation from Great Britain with seed supplied under the Seed Loan Scheme this year, the Department sent to the Local Government Board for Ireland a printed description and illustrations of the disease with a request that the same should be furnished to the Seed Inspectors and that those officers should be asked to examine carefully imported seed for the disease. This the Local Government Board have done,

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  and no cases of the disease have so far been reported.

  Non-Residential Grazing Tenants.
  SIR WALTER NUGENT: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland if he will advise the Estates Commissioners in future not to advance money to nonresidential grazing tenants for the purchase of tracts of land held under grazing leases; and if he will further recommend them to make careful inquiry before making any advances of purchase money when there is any reason to believe that fraudulent leases have been created in order to permit transfers of land to be made, contrary to the spirit of the Land Acts and to the rules laid down by the Commissioners themselves.
  THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL FOR IRELAND (Mr. CHERRY,Exchange; for Mr. BIRRELL): My right hon. friend has asked me reply to Questions to day. The Estates Commissioners inform me that they exercise the discretion given to them by the Act of 1903 as to the amount, if any, of the advances to be made to non-residential grazing tenants holding under lease. It is the Commissioners' practice to make careful inquiries in all cases in which they have any reason to suspect that fraudulent means are being adopted in order to obtain advances.

  Royal Irish Constabulary.
  MR. MULDOON: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, whether the Royal Irish Constabulary authorities have refused to permit the members of that force in Ireland to report as to any cases of infringement coming under their notice of the provisions of closing orders under The Shop Hours Act, 1904, which have been confirmed by the Lord-Lieutenant and left upon the Table of this House; and, if so, whether the time has arrived when the members of that force, who have absolutely nothing to do in many Irish towns, might be utilised with advantage to enforce public health, sanitary, and general statutes, and local by-laws, if not as complainants at least as witnesses on behalf of the local authorities, and thus render some service for the cost the upkeep of the force imposes on the nation.
  MR. CHERRY: The facts are not correctly stated in the Question. The police are permitted to assist the local authorities to the extent of reporting any breaches of closing orders which may come under their notice, and instructions, to that effect are issued to them when, application for their assistance is made by local authorities. The police perform a number of duties under the public health and sanitary laws, including the reporting of offences; and in certain cases they take proceedings for breaches of county council by-laws. They cannot, however, undertake to perform all the duties which devolve upon the officers of local authorities in these cases.

  Cooldoney Evicted Tenants.
  MR. J. P. FARRELLI beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Estates Commissioners are taking, or intend to take, any steps to reinstate. Philip Reilly, son of the evicted tenant, in the farm from which his father was evicted at Cooldoney, county Longford; and, if not, will they now take action in the matter.
  MR. CHERRY: The reply is in the negative. The applicant is employed as a clerk in Dublin, and the Estates Commissioners do not consider him to be a suitable person to work a holding.

  Longford Grazing Farms.
  MR. J. P. FARRELL: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that a, portion of the grazing farms of Tully, Asnagh, and Ardagullion, at present held by Mr. James W. Bond, D.L., was at one time in occupation of a number of Catholic tenants who were evicted from it by Mr. Bond's grandfather; and, if so, will the Commissioners take any steps to have these tenants reinstated.
  MR. CHERRY: The Estates Commissioners have no knowledge of the face alleged in the Question. The only application for reinstatement in any of the townlands mentioned which the Estates Commissioners have received is one sent by the representative of a tenant evicted forty-three years ago. The applicant therefore is not eligible for reinstatement under section 2 of the Act of 1903.

  Mr. Davoren's Killasona Estate.
  MR. J. P. FARRELL: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that in May, 1906, Mr. Richard Davoren agreed to sell his estate at Killasona, County Longford, to his tenants and to divide his residential holding at Killasona amongst his said tenants; whether the agreements to purchase have yet been lodged with the Estates Commissioners; and, if not, will they ask the landlord or his representative for an explanation of the matter.
  MR. CHERRY: The Estates Commissioners inform me that proceedings have been instituted for the sale to them of the estate of Mr. Richard Davoren, comprising tenanted, untenanted, and demesne lands, and including the lands of Killaconna, The matter is at present in the hands of an inspector for inquiry and report.

  Knockhall Grazing Farm.
  MR. JAMES O'KELLY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Congested Districts Board have completed the purchase of a grazing farm at Knockhall, County Roscommon, from Mr. McGuire; and whether in the distribution of this land, the Congested Districts Board will have due regard to the fact that, in its immediate neighbour-hood, there are several occupiers of small uneconomic holdings, and to the feeling that a preference should be given to such occupiers of land.
  MR. CHERRY: The Congested Districts Board have agreed to purchase the property in question, which is situate in a non-congested district. In such case the Board, after providing for the wants of congested districts, may enlarge the holdings of neighbouring occupiers in non-congested districts, but under the existing law they cannot enlarge such holdings of which the rateable value exceeds £5. Until the purchase has been completed the Board cannot give any undertaking as to how they will exercise their discretion in this particular case.

  Curraghmore Farm.
  MR. DELANY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary
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  to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether Mr. Robert V. White, Stillorgan, County Dublin, has created a new tenancy in the farm of Curraghmore, for a term of thirty-one years, in favour of Mr. Peter Roe, who has held the farm under the eleven months system for some years; and whether, in view of the fact that Mr. White proposes selling his estate in Queen's County to the tenants, and that this farm of 200 acres is required for the enlargement of the small holdings in the district, be can say what course the Commissioners are going to adopt with regard to this transaction.
  I beg also to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Estates Commissioners have received a resolution passed by the Borris in-Ossory branch of the United Irish League, calling their attention to the fact that Mr. Robert V. White, Stillorgan, County Dublin, is endeavouring to dispose of his estate at Sheirk, Curraghmore, and elsewhere in Queen's County, to his tenants, whilst refusing to sell the untenanted land to the Commissioners for the purpose of enlarging the uneconomic holdings in the locality; and, if so, can he say whether the Estates Commissioners propose to approve of this sale.
  MR. CHERRY: The Estates Commissioners are not aware that a tenancy of the farm at Curraghmore has recently been created. Proceedings for the sale of Mr. White's estate are pending before the Commissioners, and the vendor has offered to sell to them portion of his untenanted lands. The Commissioners have expressed their willingness to purchase the lands at Kilpurcel and Doon but are not prepared to purchase the Curraghmore farm, as it is unsuitable for their purpose. The matter of the estate generally is under the Commissioners' consideration.

  Borris-in-Ossory Untenanted Lands.
  Mr. DELANY: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that Mr. Lyster has refused the price offered him by the Estates Commissioners for his untenanted land at Cappagh and Monea, near Borris-in-Ossory, Queen's County; and can he say whether the Commissioners propose putting the compulsory provisions of the Evicted Tenants Act

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  into operation on this estate for the purpose of reinstating William Phelan, an evicted tenant, in view of the fact that those farms have remained untenanted ever since the eviction some twenty years ago.
  MR. CHERRY: Mr. Lyster has refused the Estates Commissioners' estimated price for the untenanted land in question. The case of William Phelan is at present in the hands of an inspector, upon the receipt of whose report the Commissioners will consider what action they should take in the case.

  Irish Board of Works Loans.
  MR. FFRENCH: I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland whether he is aware that the Irish Board of Works refuse to lend money to farmers to carry out improvements where they have made their bargain with the landlord, and paying him a certain percentage on the purchase money, except on the old title; will he explain why the Board of Works refuse to advance money on the tenant's new title; and what is the objection where tenants have purchased within the zones or the bargain sanctioned by the Estates Commissioners.
  MR. RUNCIMAN: Loans to tenants purchasing, under the Act of 1903, are not refused by the Board of Works pending completion of sale, provided the tenants can produce receipts for rent showing that, in the event of the sale from any cause falling through, they would not be liable for more than twelve months rent—an arrear of a year's rent being a barrier to a tenant's loan. Purchasing tenants cannot however be treated as owners, until the fee simple of their holdings has been legally transferred to them by the issue of the Land Commission Vesting Order.

  Omagh Postmaster.
  MR. MULDOON: I beg to ask the Postmaster-General whether his attention has been called to the fact that two telegraph messengers in the employment of the Post Office were engaged in delivering religious tracts through the town of Omagh on 15th February last when they were supposed to be on duty; whether this took place with the assent and approval of the post-
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  master there, whose name was attached to the tracts distributed, and whether replies were requested to be sent to the postmaster at the post office; whether there is any previous record against this postmaster for similar proceedings; whether he is aware that this action has produced much local irritation; and whether it is in accordance with the regulations that distributions of this nature and character can be made gratuitously by officials of a public department.
  THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL (Mr. SYDNEY BUXTON,): My attention had already been called to the postmaster's action, which was improper and indiscreet; and I had taken such notice of it as seemed to me desirable.

  Education Bill.
  MR. BRIDGEMAN: I beg to ask the Prime Minister if he can say when the Second Reading of the Education Bill will be taken.
  THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER (Mr. ASQUITH,): I can make no statement at present.

  The Budget.
  MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN: Will the Chancellor of the Exchequer at any time before Easter be able to fix a date for the introduction of the Budget—to indicate when it is likely to be brought in?
  MR. ASQUITH: I will consider that.

  Imprisonment of Unemployed Leaders at Manchester.
  MR. CLYNESasked—in accordance with private notice—the Secretary of State for the Home Department if his attention had been drawn to the case of certain men, local leaders of a body of unemployed at Manchester, who had been sent to prison on the unsupported evidence of a man who confessed he had been twenty-four times in prison, and whether he would call for a report of the case and consider the advisability of reducing the sentences?
  MR. GLADSTONE: The case had not previously been brought to my notice. I am asking for a report and will communicate with the hon Member.

  SELECTION (STANDING COMMITTEES.)
  Sir WILLIAM BRAMPTON GURDONreported from the Committee of Selection; That they had discharged the following Members from Standing Committee A. Mr. Solicitor-General for Ireland and Dr. Shipman (in respect of the Housing of the Working Classes (Ireland) Bill): and had appointed in substitution (in respect of the Housing of the Working Classes (Ireland) Bill); Mr. Russell and Sir George White.
  Report to lie upon the Table.

NEW BILL.
  FIRE INQUESTS BILL.
  "To provide for the holding of Fire Inquests," presented by Sir Henry Cotton; supported by Sir William Holland, Mr. Starkey, Mr. Lehmann, Mr. Yoxall, and Mr. Richardson; to be read a second time upon Friday 1st May, and to be printed. [Bill 183.]

IRISH UNIVERSITIES.
THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. BIRRELL,), in asking leave to introduce a Bill to make further provision with respect to University Education in Ireland said: In describing the main and salient features of a long-promised, painfully delayed, and much misunderstood measure, I think I may safely promise to be reasonably brief. I pray I may be intelligible, and if heaven comes to my aid even businesslike. At all events no accents of party will mar the dignity of my theme, and I will promise to be as dull as I can. I have only one preliminary observation to make, but I must make it in bare justice to my old friend, former colleague, and immediate predecessor in the office I hold. Mr. Bryce has been exposed to a cert in amount of acidulated criticism because, on the eve of his departure for Washington, he, being still Chief Secretary and knowing who his successor was to be, thought fit in Dublin in answer to an important northern deputation to give the outlines of the University measure which the Government then hoped in a short time to be able to introduce to the notice of the House. It
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has been suggested that Mr. Bryce was hardly justified in taking this course, that he was doing something which added quite unnecessarily to the burden of his successor. Mr. Bryce was fully justified in doing what he did. He had acquainted his colleagues with the nature and character of his proposals, and he had asked and obtained my permission to receive and address the deputation. He believed, and I believed, and for the matter of that I still believe, that it was desirable and helpful that he before leaving Dublin for good should publicly place on record what his plan was and the measure—the very large measure—of support which that plan had undoubtedly received. But the absent are always in the wrong. Mr. Bryce is now absent in Washington busily, and as I think the House will agree, nobly, occupied in removing one by one all possible causes of dispute between ourselves and the United States, and I am sure no one would wish that he should be exposed to any criticism in this House which he really does not deserve, and to which he cannot reply. Mr. Bryce left Dublin for Washington; and I left Whitehall for Dublin. When the Prime Minister, much to my dismay and amazement, for the thought of going to Ireland had never entered my mind, asked me whether I was willing to go there, I, with that frankness which the Prime Minister, exhibiting always himself, is entitled to expect from others, told him that, were it not for the hope of being able to deal with this University question, nothing could induce me to make myself responsible for a single week for the government of Ireland. I had the courage to believe that this hope of mine was not groundless; and in pursuit of it I am willing to admit I crossed to Dublin. This University question is not a sentimental question. I disclaim altogether the notion of being a man of sentiment. I am nothing of the kind. The proper provision of higher education in Ireland, cheap, popular, and good—above all good—is, in my judgment and the judgment of everyone who has given attention to the subject, a vital necessity. I thought so before I took up the office of Chief Secretary, and every hour I have been in it, every deputation I have received, every resolution I have read and torn up, all the experience I have

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gained—and it has been by no means inconsiderable—has intensified my conviction that Ireland not only needs it—to tell the truth, we all need it, this House, as much as any other assembly of men, needs it—but what Ireland eagerly needs and demands is good teaching and mental discipline. In things material, in things necessary for the defence of our island home, we all aim at being at least twice as strong at sea as any two foreign nations. I only wish we were equally bent on being half as intelligent on land. If hon. Members during their short Easter holiday would take the opportunity to visit Strasburg—a place which evokes many bitter, black memories, associated as it is, and has been for centuries past, with war and a double aggression—they would see what the people of Germany are doing for the people of Alsace; and I think they would discover that, after all, foreign Universities may do this country, during every hour of every day of the academic year, a considerable amount of injury by way of competition. Something has been done in England, Scotland, and Wales to supply this undoubted want. A great number—I think, ten—of teaching Universities have of recent years sprung up among our great and murky towns—Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and last, but by no means least, Birmingham, are now being associated in the minds of their younger citizens, not merely with docks and warehouses, not merely with shops and factories, least of all with gaols, lunatic asylums, and workhouses, but nobler structures from which are streaming forth the inspiring traditions, the ever-strengthening traditions, of University life and training. Ireland must not be left out. What is the present provision for university education in Ireland? There are two Universities in Ireland, one founded by Queen Elizabeth, and the other founded by Queen Victoria—two famous women, but separated by a long distance of time. The elder foundation is, of course, the University of Dublin, so inextricably entangled with its one College of Trinity as to become known throughout the world as Trinity College, Dublin. Everybody knows Trinity College, Dublin, her imposing sit—one of the noblest in Europe—her magnificent buildings, her famous
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library with its priceless manuscripts, her gardens, her proud memories in science, in literature, and in mathematics. Among its alumni are lawyers, doctors, parsons, mostly of the Protestant persuasion, all the world over, and I do not suppose there is in this House a man, I will not say who is happy enough, but who has not at one time or another in his life been preached to, prescribe for, or a worse and more cruel fate than that, cross-examined as to character by some member of Trinity College, Dublin. This great foundation is not only splendidly constituted, but also splendidly endowed. Her revenues from what may be fairly called public sources have been estimated at exceeding £50,000 a year. The generosity of her sons, by private bequests and otherwise, have greatly added to her wealth, and the fees of her numerous students are no more than an increment of her income. It has been calculated that her income from all sources does not fall far short of £90,000 a year. It has been sometimes said that she is the richest college or University in our Empire; but this is not the case, for Edinburgh, "mine own romantic town," as Scott called it, has an annual revenue of £117,000 a year, and her capital resources have been lately calculated at £750,000, which leaves out of account all her magnificent buildings, splendid medical school, McEwan Hall, and all things of that kind. But though Trinity College, Dublin, is not so wealthy as Edinburgh, she is still comfortably off. As Universities go, Trinity, Dublin, must be pronounced in this matter of religious tests, at all events, to be in the Van of progress. Roman Catholics were admitted to her degrees in 1793. It is, perhaps, a little remarkable that in a Roman Catholic country Roman Catholics should not have been admitted to the only University in that country until more than 200 years after its foundation; but in these matters it does not do to be too particular, and so far as the cash emoluments are concerned, everybody has been admitted to them in Trinity without any regard to creed or religious opinions since 1873; and in this respect, although the dates are rather remarkable, Trinity contrasts favourably with Oxford and Cambridge. With justice or without, Trinity College

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remains what she was from the first, a great, proud, and historical Protestant institution. She has to-day some thousand students, of whom a hundred or thereabouts are Roman Catholics. The number of Presbyterians is even less, for the indisposition of Presbyterians to come to Trinity is even more marked than that of the Roman Catholics. She gives her degrees to women, whom, however, she admits on merely passing a written examination, without regard to residence, except so far as that is necessary for the purposes of examination. Ireland's other University£the Royal University, founded in 1879, replaced Queen's, established in 1850. The Royal University is not, strictly speaking, a University at all, for she teaches nothing. She merely examines, mainly, except in the medical schools, by written questions, all who proffer themselves for that purpose, and she awards those who obtain a sufficient number of marks in these examinations a degree. She has no professors or teachers of her own; she needs none. An army of examiners serves her turn. Her buildings are never crowded with students, save for the purpose of being examined; her laboratories are empty save during the examination period; people come to the Royal University not to learn, but to answer questions. The Royal University has an annual income of £20,000 a year; but my old friend "the predominant partner" must not too readily take credit to himself for generosity in this respect towards poor Ireland, because the whole of this £20,000 comes from the Irish Church Fund. What Ireland would be, or where I should be, without this Church Fund I dare not think. It is indeed a horn filled with plenty. It took over in 1869, and I hope the House will bear this in mind, the £26,000 a year which up to that date appeared annually on our Votes for the maintenance of Maynooth. The £26,000 a year was then capitalised at fourteen years' purchase, and the sum—a very large sum—was a grant from the Irish Church Fund. That was Mr. Gladstone's bargain, and I quite agree with what was said yesterday, that that indeed was the day of grants. If this Royal University does not teach, who does prepare for the
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degrees that University confers, who does teach the students who only present themselves to its walls in order to proceed to further degrees? These young men and women are taught at one or other of four colleges, at Magee College, or private establishments, and in some cases, not many, by solitary work. The bulk of the students who avail themselves of the Royal University are educated at these private establishments or by solitary studies; the majority of them do not proceed from the colleges I have referred to. These four colleges are the three Queen's Colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway, and the Catholic University College in Dublin, so long and so honourably associated with the name of Dr. Delany, and with which the famous medical college in Cecilia Street is closely allied. It may be said to form a medical faculty and a medical college under the headship of Dr. Delany. This Royal University, mere examining body as she is, has done good work in Ireland. She has stimulated ambition by placing degrees within the reach of thousands who never could have gone to Trinity for half a dozen good reasons. The standard of examinations, particularly in her honorus subjects, has been maintained at a high standard. Those who have obtained a degree in honours at the Royal University have got something of which they may well be proud. There are those, I know, who sneer at examinations. I am not one of them. I admit I have always stood in dread of them. I think the House hates quotations, fond as I am of them myself; but in reading over again Sir William Hamilton's "Discussions I came across a famous passage from the great scholar Melancthon on the subject of examinations. I think I will not read it, but I will refer anybody to page 768 of Sir William Hamilton's book. I will read a little bit of it—
"Examination, therefore, may be called the life of studies, without which reading, and even meditation, is dead. Against prejudice and error there is no surer antidote than examination; for by this the intellect is explored, its wants detected and supplied, its faults and failings corrected. Examination likewise fosters facility of expression, counteracts perturbation, and confusion, inures to coolness and promptitude of thought. Not less useful is examination in restraining the course of youthful study within legitimate boundaries. Nothing is more

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hurtful, as nothing is more common, than vain and tumultuary reading, which inflates with the persuasion without conferring the reality of erudition. Wherefore, if examination brought no other advantage than that it counteracts the two greatest pests of education, found indeed usually combined, sloth, to wit, and arrogance, for this reason alone should examination be cherished in our Universities. Against sloth there is no goad sharper or more efficacious than examination; and as to arrogance, examination is the very school of humility and improvement."
Perhaps that is the reason why I have always shunned examination.
"By no other discipline is a soaring conceit so effectually taken down, and this is the reason why self-satisfied preterders ever fly examination, whilst those who think less of the little that they know than of the much they know not, resort to it as the most efficacious means of improvement."
What I would ask the House to bear in mind is that the Universities which Melancthon had in mind when he wrote what I have just quoted were teaching Universities, and the examinations which he so greatly, and I think so justly valued, were conducted under the guidance and control, though not, I believe, under the sole guidance and control, of the professors and teachers of the Universities themselves, and they were directed to test minutely discipline and training, and not merely verbal memory or a glib repetition, of text books. Between this examining University and the four colleges I have named at Belfast, Cork, Galway, and Dr. Delany's College in Dublin there is no avowed connection. It just so happens that if they want degrees, as most of them do, they come to the Royal University to get them, as in Ireland they have nowhere else to go to. It remains to ask how these four colleges are provided. The history of the three Queen's Colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway is a well-known history. It has been made a subject of constant research, and I would certainly advise anybody who wishes to get a clear history of these University proceedings in Ireland to study at least the first few pages of the final Report of what is called the Robertson Commission. I do not know who wrote that Report, but it is certainly a masterpiece of lucid explanation; and there you will find all you need know upon these questions. These three colleges were founded by Sir Robert Peel in 1845. In intention I
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have no doubt they were excellent, but in Cork and Galway they have entirely failed to fulfil that intention, for the simple reason that no pains whatever seem to have been taken to find out what Irishmen want. You may in Ireland sometimes succeed in sending a man to prison against his will, but never to college. But there are the colleges, very handsome buildings. The Belfast College—I do not know whether there was a scandal or not—it is said, was meant for Cork and the Cork College for Belfast. I do not know that it really matters much now. They are there, and they were paid for by Parliament. At this present moment this college at Belfast costs the Exchequer on an average of the last five years, because the amount varies a little according to the expense of repairs and the like, £13,101; Cork, £11,252; Galway, £10,586; a total of £34,939 When you have added to that certain extra payments from time to time you find that the total cost of these three colleges annually on the average of the last five years, amounts to £36,500. The number of students in these college; to-day is as follows: at Belfast, 390; a Cork, 261; and at Galway, 111—in all, 762. But it is very important to bear in mind that these figures were much larger at the date of the determination of the old Queen's University. The old Queen's University only gave its degrees to students who had attended the colleges, and, therefore, it kept out from its examination those external bodies, private establishments who no` send up the greater half of the person to be examined. Before the date or at the date of the determination of the Queen's University, Belfast, instead of having as now, only 390 students, had 508 students. Cork instead of having only 261 students had 327, and Galway instead of having only 111 students had 208. In all in these days there were 1,043 students at the three colleges whereas now there are only 762. No, there remains to be considered what I call Dr. Delany's College, the Catholic University College in Dublin, and the Medical School. What public money do they get? Well, being frankly Roman Catholic institutions with a Jesuit at the head, of course it is not to be supposed that they can have one penny of public

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money. Yet without some assistance how could they have kept going all these years even in their present half-starved and ill-conditioned state? The answer is that by arrangement outside this House they are paid some £7,000 a year out of the £20,000 allotted as the endowment of the Royal University. The Royal University gets £20,000 a year from the Irish Church Fund, and about one-half of this sum is annually absorbed in maintenance and upkeep of the University, and the very heavy cost of the examination, whilst the other half is spent on the endowment and establishment of certain fellowships. The whole history of these fellowships will be found on page 6 of Lord Robertson's Commission Report. There are about thirty-nine or forty of these fellowships, each of which is £400 a year. They are distributed amongst the colleges at Belfast, Cork and Galway and the Magee College. These fellowships are assigned and allotted to the professors at the several colleges. In the case of Belfast, Cork and Galway colleges, the professor does not get the whole £400 a year, because he has to bring into the account the salary at the colleges, but the sum is made up. Dr. Delany's College has something like fifteen or sixteen fellowships, and there is one at the Magee College, and they receive the £400 a year. Consequently, as a matter of fact, the Roman Catholic University College and the Medical School do receive out of this £20,000 endowment something a little under £7,000 as being their share, and these fellowship monies. The upshot of all this is that at the present moment the Exchequer finds the sum of £36,500 a year for the maintenance and upkeep of the three Queen's Colleges. The Royal University College gets £20,000 out of the Irish Church Fund and the Roman Catholic University College and Medical School gets £7,000 a year out of that £20,000 by way of indirect endowment. That being the provision for higher education in Ireland—assuming reform to be necessary, and all the Commissions, Reports and evidence put that, I think, beyond the possibility of doubt—there are only two ways of handling this problem. Some federation is unfortunately necessary. Cork College I hope has a great future before it. I do not believe she is at the present time strong enough
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nor are the classes sufficiently well attended to establish Cork with a University of her own. Galway, in which I feel great interest, is in a weaker position than Cork, and not perhaps so well situated for the purpose. Therefore some federation of these outlying colleges is absolutely necessary. The question is: Are you going to federate as much or as little as possible? That is where I admit the present proposals of the Government do undoubtedly come into collision with Mr. Bryce's scheme, but it is only fair to remember that Mr. Bryce's scheme has been greatly criticised since he formulated it, whilst he has not been in a position to attend here and the force of these criticisms he has not been able to appreciate. The big federal scheme which the Government have rejected was to include in one University Belfast in the north, Cork in the south, Galway (as an affiliated college it is true) in the west, and Trinity College, Dublin, with her 300 years behind her, and a new college in Dublin. All these colleges were to be the colleges of one university under one federal centre. Thus you would get a number of states, each with its own code of state rights which would be most jealously guarded and subject to the federal control of a senate, meeting, I suppose, in Dublin. When I began to go down into the depths of the problem in Ireland I found that this big federation scheme outside Trinity College altogether was very unpopular. The three Queen's Colleges, all of which I visited, and which were to be states in the new federation, were strongly opposed to the scheme. "A sprawling University," as it was rather rudely called, can never be a popular University. In these matters of Universities local patriotism, the genius loci as it is called, plays, and must play, a great part. State rights, federal rights, the rights of the colleges to govern themselves, so far as is consistent with their being members of a federal body, must give rise to much trouble and future difficulty. State rights and federal rights give rise to wars among human forces, and in Universities, although there is no bloodshed, they give rise to wars of pamphlets and bitterness, and, apart from bloodshed, the one kind of quarrel is as bad as the other. No quarrels are so fierce as those begotten

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by academical rivalry. I think that the academical difficulties which press upon me arise from the fact that the outlying colleges of Cork and Galway do require, and I think they are justly entitled to require, a large measure of autonomy. The question is how much autonomy you can give to outlying colleges consistent with their being part of a federal University. There are a great many people in Dublin no doubt who would like to see a two-college system in Dublin alone. They would have liked to see a another college in Dublin admitted into the old University side by side with Trinity College. To the sentimentalist that is a very attractive idea and to the economist I am bound to say that it at first sight seems to be perfectly common sense. But Trinity College, Dublin, declined the proposal, and if it is to be carried out it must he done by Parliamentary force, and this to me, I frankly admit, robs the scheme of all its attractiveness. The two colleges, the old and the new, would begin by hating each other. The notion that colleges love one another simply because they are in juxtaposition to one another is a total error. Indeed, college life is rather apt to stiffen into and breed dislike. Sometimes it almost amounts to acute feeling. The present Prime Minister and the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition are both Cambridge men and were at the same college. I am also a member of that University, but of another college, far more ancient than Trinity College, though not so well endowed. Yet when I asked the Prime Minister whether he had been inside Trinity Hall he was not content with a negative, but added words which seemed to me words almost of contumely. I will not ask the right hon. Gentleman opposite whether he has been in Trinity Hall, because I should be sorry to run the risk of getting the same kind of answer from him. I find with regard to the two-college scheme in Dublin that, although it may be attractive at first sight to a great many people, they all recognise that the position of Trinity puts it almost, if not entirely, out of the region of practical policy. Whether Trinity is wise or foolish is no concern of mine. Putting, therefore, the two-college scheme on one side, I also found the big federation scheme un-
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popular with all its component parts. Therefore I confess that after a time, with great reluctance, I found myself more and more driven to find the solution of this difficult problem in a direction which should be free both of this hostility and this unpopularity. Coming now to the plan of the Government itself, I have approached the question in a spirit of the most genuine humility. I have sought advice and counsel from an enormous number of persons, Protestants as well as Catholics inside Trinity and outside Trinity, laity and clergy, and I have not the least desire in any way to associate my own personality with this University question. My only anxiety was to come speedily to some creditable and safe solution; and I believe the proposals that I am now about to make, when they have been subjected to that degree of criticism which, of course, proposals involving so much detail must necessarily be, will be found to have received and to be worthy of receiving, an extraordinary amount of support throughout the length and breadth of Ireland. I now turn to our proposals, and I say at once that by the first clause in the Bill we propose that His Majesty, if he pleases to do so, by charter found two new Universities in Ireland; these two Universities to have their seats respectively in Dublin and in Belfast—two Universities, with bodies corporate, under such names respectively as His Majesty may be pleased to determine. This question of names is, of course, in a certain sense a very important one. I have no ambition to be earthly godfather to these heavenly lights, which will, I hope, continue to dominate the firmament of learning long centuries after all of us have ceased to be. Therefore, at present I leave the question of their names to be hereafter considered. I am told by my academic friends in Belfast that they lean to the name for their University of "The University of Belfast." In Dublin differences of opinion, I dare say, may arise. Some think they would like the University in Dublin to be called "St. Patrick's University." Others think "The University of Ireland" should be chosen. All these things are matters for discussion, and after all a rose under any other name will smell as sweet.

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In Belfast there will be put one college. In that respect the University of Belfast will resemble the University of Dublin, which has one college—Trinity. Belfast will have only one college, the present Queen's College; and it will not be able to have any other except, of course, by a subsequent Act of Parliament. Dublin will have three constituent colleges, and three only—Cork, Galway, and the new college, with a charter and an incorporated body in Dublin. Cork and Galway will also have to have new charters, and reconstructed governing bodies of a character I will describe in a moment. Neither Belfast nor Dublin will have any power to add to their constituent colleges, although they will have, and must have, severely restricted powers of affiliation, a word which has now become familiar in connection with the University question. The existing Royal University will be dissolved as from some appointed day, and its buildings, property, and endowments will be dealt with in a manner mentioned in the Bill. It is suggested, as a matter of finance, that the £20,000 from the Irish Church Fund shall be divided into two equal parts, and that the University in Belfast shall take £10,000 for maintenance and the new University in Dublin the other £10,000 for maintenance. In neither of these Universities will a religious test of any kind be permitted. Clause 3 of the Bill will read: "No test whatever of religious belief shall be imposed on any person as a condition of his becoming or continuing to be a professor, lecturer, fellow, scholar, exhibitioner, graduate, or student of, or of his holding any office or emolument or exercising any privileges, in, either of the two Universities or any college of those Universities. Nor shall any preference be given to or any advantage be withheld from any person on the ground of religious belief." That applies just as much to the new University in Belfast as it does to the new University in, Dublin. Nor is it proposed that the professors who accept office should enter into any long and rambling declarations as to what they will do or will not do, or will say or will not say, as they do at present under a somewhat elaborate undenominational system. There will be no test, nor any of these preliminary
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declarations as to what the professors are expected to do. It will be asked, who are the governing bodies? These two new Universities will be governed academically by their Senates, and these Senates, after a very short space of time, will ultimately be bodies elected for the most part. The Crown reserves its right of making certain nominations; but the Senates will be academically elected bodies, and anybody who has the honour of finding himself a member hereafter of either of these Senates will be so because he has received the confidence and the votes of the professors and graduates of these Universities. They will be academically elected bodies. The details of the composition of the permanent Senates will be hereafter a matter of discussion; they will be found set out in the schedule to the Bill, which the House will have a full opportunity of discussing.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I do not think the right hon. Gentleman has made it clear whether the right of the Crown to nominate will be a perpetual right. Will it lapse after a few years?
MR. BIRRELL: No, it will be a perpetual right. But the thing has to be set going in the first instance. Therefore it is proposed in the charters of these Universities that both the Senate in Belfast and the Senate in Dublin shall be nominated for a period of five years. The names will be found in the charters. It is impossible in matters of this sort to state these things in a Bill which of necessity has to be a good deal of a skeleton. But it is essential that the House should be able to have the whole thing before it in all its details, and although charters from the Crown have to be dealt with delicately, I have caused to be prepared preliminary drafts of the charters of the Universities in Dublin and Belfast, and of the new college in Dublin, and of the new charters of Cork and Galway, and I propose to lay on the Table all those charters in their preliminary drafts as Parliamentary Papers along with the Bill. So the House will be in full possession of them, I hope, in a very few days—a considerable time before the Easter holidays. Hon.

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Members who like to pay sufficient attention to the subject will be in possession of the full details of the scheme. As to the proposed size of the Senates, so far as we have got at present the Dublin Senate is composed of thirty-six members and the Belfast Senate of thirty-five. I deprecate very much any inquiry as to the religious beliefs of these gentlemen and ladies—there are two ladies on the first nominated Senates. I know it is most difficult to prevent questions arising upon that point. I may say I am informed by my theological scouts—I have no knowledge myself, I cannot be expected to have knowledge of the religious beliefs of seventy or eighty gentlemen and ladies with whom I have only been brought into contact on a purely academic subject—I am informed that on the Belfast nominated Senate there is one Roman Catholic and on the Dublin nominated Senate there are seven Protestants. Amongst them I am glad to notice the name of my hon. friend opposite the Member for the University of Cambridge, and I may be permitted to express the hope that, if all goes well, he will succeed in infusing into the new University some portion of his own passion for the Humanities, and even, it may be, some trace of his own exquisite scholarship. The permanent constitution of these two Senates will be found stated in the first schedule of the Bill. I will indicate very roughly what it is in Dublin. The Chancellor of the University, the Vice-Chancellor, the three presidents of the constituent colleges of Dublin, Cork, and Galway, the persons nominated by His Majesty, one at least of whom is to be a woman. Then the three colleges of Dublin, Cork, and Galway will elect fourteen. I have no doubt by that means the professorial body will be largely represented on the governing body. Convocation will elect five, and there are powers for the co-optation of six. I merely mention this as a scheme which, on the whole, after careful consideration, commends itself to the mind of the Government, but in no way, I need scarcely say, as being a final settlement of the composition of this permanent body. Our object is to make it an academic body, and to prevent anything like ex officio repre-
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sentation appearing upon it, in order that the University graduates and professors hereafter may have full power of representing themselves. The composition of the Belfast body is somewhat different. There is the Chancellor and they propose to have two pro-Chancellors. They are very anxious to honour Sir Donald Currie in his old age for his great generosity and the interest he takes in this subject. I only regret that Lord Kelvin has disappeared before this dear wish in his heart has been realised. Then the Crown nominates, the professors elect, the graduates elect, and the Lord Mayor for the time being, the president for the time being of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, and the chairman of the board of management of the Royal Victoria Hospital have all got places on the permanent Senate of Belfast University. Now, the governing bodies of Cork and Galway have to be considered, because a great part of the success of the new university in Dublin depends upon Cork and Galway becoming flourishing constituent centers. They are at present governed by a president and six of the professors, a close corporation. For reasons I need not give, these two colleges have never in any way tapped the resources of the parts of the country where they are situated. I do not believe there is any part of the country where there is a larger supply of eager students, men, not wealthy, but anxious to learn, and if the governing bodies are reconstructed they will largely increase their numbers. There has been no difficulty whatever in the reconstruction of these bodies. Nothing has been more gratifying to me. They have been reconstructed so that they will contain some twenty persons. All classes and creeds have combined to express their willingness to work in any scheme of this kind. Therefore we shall have no difficulty. Catholic bishops, Protestant bishops, the Catholic gentry, professional men, and persons academical are associated upon these temporary bodies. In the case of these bodies it is thought that three years will be sufficient as the period of nomination. After these three years they also will be academically elected bodies. Provision has been made in both cases for local representation.

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Local authorities, county councils, and the like have agreed to participate in the work which, I am sure, will benefit them, even if it does not always benefit the bodies with whom they are associated. Then in Dublin University I do exactly the same thing. A three years nominated governing body to be replaced at the end of that time by an academically elected governing body. The powers of the Senate are similar in all cases and are set out in the charters, and the charters are really very much in the form of copies of other charters which are in existence. They have poster to confer degrees and admit graduates and so on. There are some thirty powers which are very much the same as those which will be found in the charter of the new University of London or any other purely academic body. Questions, however, do arise as to the appointment of professors and as to what would happen on the appointment or dismissal of any professor. The Senates and governing bodies of these Universities must have the appointment of their professors. Here again difficulties arise with the outlying colleges. Some question has arisen as to how far Cork and Galway should have a right to send up three names to the Senate from which the Senate must choose, or whether the Senate should have a right to proceed outside and select somebody who is not in the list. That is a question on which there may be some difference of opinion. My own view is that as far as possible the dignity of the University should be kept up, because Universities have a tendency to disappear before active colleges. That is a matter which will be really the better for sonic discussion hereafter. Professors will be appointed and dismissed by the Senate. Then questions arise as to whether a professor dismissed should not have a right of appeal. I think he should, and accordingly the Bill provides that a professor who has been dismissed by the Senate should have a right to appeal to the visitor. The Crown reserves to itself and its successors the right of being the visitor both of this University in Belfast and of this new University in Dublin, and it will act through a Board of Visitors who will be nominated by the Crown as occasion arises, of course paying some attention to the nature of the dispute
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to be decided. Professors may be dismissed for a variety of reasons, some disciplinary reasons relating to character and the like, and sometimes it may be, but I hope very seldom, with regard to questions which have given rise to philosophical or religious discussions. The Crown reserves the right to appoint the Board of Visitors on all occasions when its authority is appealed to. Therefore I make it plain in the charter that it is to exercise these visitorial rights through the Board of Visitors who are to have regard to the nature of the dispute. There is one other matter I wish to mention, and that is the appointment of the professors of the new College of Dublin. The professors in the existing colleges of Cork and Galway go on. They hold their positions under tenure from the Crown during good behaviour and nobody wishes to interfere with them in going on and accepting professorships in the new University, and they will remain professors of the University on the old terms. When they die or retire the Senate will appoint their successors under the provisions of the charter. But the new college in Dublin is not in that position and professors will have to be appointed. I have thought this question out very carefully, and I do not think it is desirable that the nominated temporary Senate should have the appointment of the professors in the first instance of the new college, because when you come to study the composition of that new Senate and its professional character, it will be seen that a good many of its members would themselves be eligible for these posts. Therefore I have thought it desirable that these professors should be appointed by the Statutory Commissions which it is proposed to set up under this Bill of which there will be two, one for Belfast and one for Dublin. They will have to sit together for some time as it may be thought joint interests may arise, but otherwise they will be independent Commissions—Commissions of seven, four elected by the Senate and three nominated by the Crown. To these seven gentlemen I propose, in the first instance, to entrust the duty of appointing professors for the new college and, of course, of fixing their salaries. An important question arises as to the President of this new college in Dublin;

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and I need scarcely say it is a very important subject. The first man who would occur to us is Dr. Delany, whom I have already mentioned and who has for many years devoted himself with great success and with the utmost industry to the education of Catholic youths in University College. But there are objections to that course which he appreciates himself, and he has written to me to say that he feels those objections prevail—he is seventy-six years of age—but his one desire is that this scheme should be a great success and he wishes, before he dies, to see a University in Dublin. There are some objections to starting with a clergyman, and there may be in some minds objection to starting with a Jesuit. I am bound to say that any Chief Secretary who has enjoyed the acquaintance of Dr. Delany will not feel that, but it will be felt in certain quarters, and I do think that until tradition grows up it is rather desirable that the head of this new college should be a layman, in order that the tradition should not spring up that the president has to be a clergy-man. We all know how in our colleges of Oxford and Cambridge a tradition grows up and is preserved. Therefore, while I tender my thanks to Dr. Delany for his patriotism in this matter, I think it would be better that the president of this new college should be a layman—a Catholic layman and a younger man—in order that it should secure a good start under energetic and sympathetic rule. That is all I have to say on that subject. There is a very important subject with regard to all colleges of this kind and that is affiliation. The charter which the House will soon have an opportunity of reading, secures that the University may affiliate, or allow a constituent college to affiliate, an institution which in certain limited subjects is capable of giving University training. I have done my best in order that it may be made as strict as possible so that they shall not be at liberty, even if they desire it, to affiliate with those which cannot honestly be said to be doing University work. Unless you have a severely restricted right of affiliation your University may become a sort of conglomeration of secondary schools, and that is a thing to be avoided. The House may say what about Maynooth
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and Magee? Those are institutions known to us all. I have very little doubt, though they are not constituent colleges, in the charter of Bill that they will be affiliated by the Senate. With regard to Magee, that is a Presbyterian foundation, it educates both the Presbyterian clergy and the Presbyterian laymen. In its Arts schools it has always had an honourable connection with, and has sent persons every year to graduate at the Royal University, and I think it would interfere with the success of my scheme and would be unjust to the Presbyterian foundation were its rights not preserved. The same with regard to Maynooth, where, as we all know, Roman Catholic, clergy are educated. A University which ignores the clergy of the country starts at a great disadvantage. Maynooth has been very closely connected of late years with the Royal, and it has made it a condition that every person who enters its walls as a student shall have matriculated at the Royal. Its course is a long one of seven years, and the great majority of the students in the first three years take the Arts programme at the Royal and proceed to degrees. It would be a great hardship upon the Maynooth students if we prevented them from taking degrees at the University which takes the place of the Royal to which they have gone hitherto for their degrees. My own belief is that the Senate will affiliate both Magee and Maynooth. Then as to examinations. We shall take care that at the examinations conducted at Cork, Galway, or Dublin the local professors shall in every case be associated with an external teacher who will have a veto in deciding whether the person examined has shown a faculty and capacity for learning and benefiting by the teaching. That, and not the mere number of marks gained, is, I think, the way to get the greatest benefit from University teaching. The scheme will have sufficient safeguards to allow the professors who have actually taught to have an important voice in determining the questions and in judging answers. So that the degree attained at Galway should not be better or worse than that at Cork or Dublin in the estimation of learned men. It is a delicate problem, the difficulties of

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which arise from this particular federation. I think, if I may say so, there is wisdom in the course I have adopted in limiting the federation as much as possible. I say frankly I would much sooner that Cork and Galway, great and important places, were strong and powerful enough to run Universities of their own—I hope that Cork may yet be. But if it is not the case, we have to adopt limits, and those who have kindly assisted me in this matter have taken the utmost precautions to secure the general standard in the University. My right hon. friend the Secretary for War, who, like myself, is a great enthusiast in this matter, reminds me that I have not called attention to one clause in the Bill. That clause provides that the moneys paid to the governing body of the University or college, as the case may be, shall be used in accordance with their statutes, but no such sum shall be applied for the provision or maintenance of any church, chapel, or any other place of religious observance, or for the provision and maintenance of any theological or religious teaching. I say nothing on that subject. I think it is an object which some do ill to leave out, but at all events, it can be provided for out of other than public money, and I think that is in accordance with the general sentiment of this country. I have only now to refer to the finance of this great undertaking. The present charge upon the Exchequer is £36,500, the present charge on the Irish Church Fund is £20,000; that is the beginning and end of the public charge, so far as it goes. We propose to divide the £20,000 a year between the two new Universities, each of which will have £10,000, and we propose to increase the lump sum of £36,500 to £80,000. That is the provision by way of new endowment, £43,500. Opinions may differ whether that is enough or not; my own belief is that it is adequate for the occasion, that it will be enough if this Bill gets through to make it plain that these two Universities will be successful. That I regard as a sine quanon. I found Ireland in a state of profound scepticism as to whether, notwithstanding all its reports of this House and the eager promises of many of its leading men, the good day would ever come when such proposals could really
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be carried. I do not think there is much use expecting the want to be supplied by private beneficence or generosity, even in a country which unfortunately is not a great and wealthy community, such as is Liverpool, where the University has already been endowed with enormous sums. That cannot be; still, much can be looked for in Ireland, but not unless and until this House by passing this Bill inaugurates proposals on a scale to make it plain that the thing will succeed. When that has been done, we may confidently expect in Ulster, Belfast, and Dublin considerable endowments, it may be from the pence of the poor or from the investments of the rich, enabling suitable chairs to be properly endowed, and all the branches of learning fully represented in these new Universities. But we have got to do our duty first, and I think the sum I have named by way of endowment is adequate. The proposal which will be found in the schedule is that Belfast will get £10,000 for its University, part of the Irish Church Fund; it will also have £18,000 by way of annual endowment, making in all £28,000 a year. The new college in Dublin, of course, has got first of all to be built, and then endowed and maintained, and the proposal is that out of the moneys which I have suggested £32,000 a year shall endow and maintain the new University in Dublin when it has once been started. Then the income of the Queen's College, Cork, will be increased to £18,000 a year, and the income of Queen's College, Galway, will be increased to £12,000 a year. I think those sums are sufficient to meet the needs of the case. Building grants, of course, become necessary. Belfast has got fine buildings, but they are inadequate for the purpose of the University, and it is proposed that a grant of £60,000 should be made to the new University of Belfast to enable it to celebrate this auspicious occasion, as I trust it may be, and provide itself with the sizings and appearances of a University worthy of the distinguished province to which it belongs. I am told that a maximum sum for the purpose of the University and college in Dublin should be £150,000. That will not be sufficient to build on any scale a residential college; I think hostels and institutions of that sort will have to be

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left to private enterprise and generosity. But it will, I hope, be sufficient first of all to complete the present University buildings, which will be utilised, many of them, for college purposes. At present, for the greater part of the year the laboratories and the like stand empty, and those can be thrown in as college property, for college purposes. The college will have to be built representing all the dignity and social life of a college; a library, gymnasium, and reading-rooms may be necessary, and, of course, lecture-rooms, and a residence, it may be, for the principal.
MR. LYTTELTON: A cricket field.
MR. BIRRELL: I hope a cricket ground, which is, no doubt, an essential. I recognise that cricket is a faculty by itself. Then, Cork and Galway will receive very considerable sums also for the purpose of their buildings. I think the financial proposals will be found sufficient. I said I would not introduce any party aspect. I put before Unionists and Nationalists alike first the obligation of government, in which all of us, whatever our opinions may be, may be proud to take a share. I believe that the objections of Belfast to a University have largely disappeared during the last five or six years. Speaking from knowledge gained chiefly from academic sources, I can only say that there is the utmost enthusiasm in Queen's College, Belfast, for this new scheme. I believe the province is quite large enough to maintain a University, and the value of her degrees, and I am only sorry that Lord Kelvin did not live to become the first Chancellor of a University which, I hope, is destined to be great. As for religion, all I can say is that these new Universities start precisely on the same grounds. They are not denominational institutions, they are not marred and disfigured by tests of any sort or kind. The most anybody can say is that we are planting one University on what, I suppose, may be called Protestant soil, although there are many Roman Catholics in Ulster, and the other on what may be called Roman Cotholic soil, although there are many Protestants in Dublin and Cork, and some even in Galway.
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These Universities, as they grow, thrive, and develop, may, I dare say, develop some differences of tone and temper and disposition, but I believe the temple of learning is wide enough for both, and that there is room enough in Ireland to provide for Catholics and Protestants, and all eager and quick to learn, not merely in the arts, but in the exacter sciences, in mathematics, and engineering. If I have the good fortune to succeed where far greater men have failed, it will only be due to the fact that I have sought counsel on all sides, and have had no personal feeling in this matter. There is no originality about this scheme—anybody who likes may claim it as his own; but if we are all united in support of it we shall have done a great work for Ireland, and future generations may rise up and thank us.
Motion made, and Question proposed, "That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make further provision with respect to University Education in Ireland."—(Mr. Birrell)
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: The right hon. Gentleman has dealt at length with a subject on which there is not only a great division in this House—that may perhaps be said of almost all subjects frequently before us—but on which there is a great division not merely between Parties. He has dealt with it in a manner and spirit which, I think, has been agreeable to everybody—to those who agree with and those who differ from him. I am one of those who agree with him, but I think I may speak even for those who do not when I say that no single word has fallen from him which can offend any susceptibilities. The right hon. Gentleman gave, as was proper, a brief preliminary historical statement leading up to his proposals. He gave us some account of the history of this question as it affects the Government of which he is a Member. I confess his explanations on that point have left me as puzzled as I was before. He told us that the late Chief Secretary had spoken with the authority of the Cabinet, not only when he announced an entirely different scheme, but when he announced that that scheme was the only one which

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Ireland could ever expect from the present Administration. I am glad to say that different counsels have prevailed, but how the Cabinet can ever have authorised so sweeping and so unfortunate a statement from one of their Members I cannot imagine, nor do I know by what process the Cabinet have been converted to what I certainly think myself the far more reasonable and rational proposals which the right hon. Gentleman has now laid before us. The right hon. Gentleman told us that the only object which induced him to leave the Education Office and take up the difficult post of Chief Secretary was the hope of being able to settle this University question. I was touched by that statement. It also somewhat surprised me. It seemed to me there was rather a violent change between bringing in a Bill which was intended to destroy the denominational atmosphere in places of education in this country, and going across the Channel for the sole purpose of establishing a great academic institution in which religious belief and a denominational atmosphere were to prevail in the future. I do not know if the right hon. Gentleman could introduce into his measure for England the same broad recognition of facts which he has shown in his treatment of this Irish question. If he could I think we should be near a settlement of a subject which is almost as difficult of final solution, and leads to almost as embittered controversies on this side of the St. George's Channel, as the question of the University has done, or is likely to do, on the other side. I pass from the history which the right hon. Gentleman gave in his statement of Irish University education since it was begun in Ireland. It has not been on the whole a successful history, though much has been done; and I am glad to think, speaking as a Conservative and as a Unionist, that everything that has been done so far has been done by the Party of which I am a member. All the Bills mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman, without exception, have been passed into law as Conservative and Unionist measures. I hope that on this occasion the right hon. Gentleman will share with us and be able to claim for his Party at least an equal meed of praise from those who desire to academic education for Ireland put in the position in which certainly it ought to
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be, and in which it is not at the present time. Of the plan itself I have very little to say. I quite agree that it is impossible for any Member of this House, who takes the trouble to examine into the existing state of higher education in Ireland, to be content to leave to an examining University the great charge of dealing with higher education for the larger part of the population. That is an intolerable situation. The right hon. Gentleman gave us a quotation from Melancthon containing a great eulogy of examinations, but, if I may venture to differ from such great authorities, I should like to express emphatically my dissent. I do not believe, as the right hon. Gentleman does, in the system of competitive examinations under which, I believe, the best interests of academic learning are now oppressed and smothered; nor do I personally believe that Melancthon would have supported this system of examinations. I have not looked into the question of German University education in the 16th century, but I rather suspect that what Molanethon referred to were the sort of controversies which are allowed to go on in this House between gentlemen on opposite sides, on which perhaps a more impartial and more learned jury had to pronounce, but which were actually very much in the nature of debates and not at all in the nature of these competitive examinations which have been invented for the perplexity of students and are not, in my opinion, in the best interests of academic training. However that may be, we all agree, whether we believe with the right hon. Gentleman and Melancthon or not as to examinations, or whether we believe in vain and tumultuary reading, which is my position—we are all of one mind in thinking that the teaching University is the only real way of carrying out the higher training of those who have entered into adult life and are just about to deal with the business of their profession or the business of promoting learning and research. Holding that view, I do not believe that, speaking broadly, a better plan could be devised—I am talking only of its main outline—than that which has been propounded to us by the Government. The scheme of Mr. Bryce included Trinity College, Dublin, within its purview. That would have been resented as an intolerable wrong by Trinity College itself and

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would, I believe, have roused antagonism in every University body throughout England and Scotland. The Government have been certainly well advised in leaving that great institution which has done, is doing, and will do in the future so much for Ireland, to carry out the traditions which it has created, and which from day to day is proving itself worthy to administer the funds which in the past, and certainly in the present, are being used in the very best interests of the higher education of the country. Trinity College is safe, and is not touched by this Bill; I think that alone shows the great superiority of the measure which the right hon. Gentleman has I proposed over the abortive suggestions that were made two years ago. The only point of doubt I should have about the scheme of the right hon. Gentleman, so far as I have been able to gather its import from the statements he has made, is as to whether he is right in altogether excluding the Crown from all appointments to the professorships. As I understand his plan, the country has to provide practically all the funds of the two institutions, and yet the whole of the appointments is to be left to the Senatus. I believe that would be perfectly right with regard to the majority of the appointments. But I have had some experience in this matter of selecting professors, and I am inclined to think the responsibility of the Crown in the matter is very often advantageously exercised. It is only by appointments through the Crown that you can be sure of not being unduly influenced by academic surroundings. The Senatus is almost certain to select the best men for the University if the charge is confined to members of the University, and I do not think there would be any partiality, while I am sure they would be judges of merit. But it is not certain always that the Senatus would be willing and anxious to go outside the limits of its own members. The Scottish Universities do constantly appoint professors who are not of the alumni of the Universities at which they are asked to lecture. My hon. friend the Member for the University of Cambridge, to whom the right hon. Gentleman made an eloquent, and I think, most deserved reference, has himself, I think, taught in at least two Universities besides the one which had the honour of giving him his education. Nevertheless, I am not quite
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sure—I put it rather tentatively—whether the right hon. Gentleman is wise, in the interests of academic learning, to hand over the whole of the University patronage to the Senatus of the institutions which he is about to create. That is not an opinion which is very commonly shared in the House. It may be an idiosyncrasy of my own; at all events I do not wish unduly to press it. That is the only criticism which I have to pass this evening on the scheme. I am not quite sure whether I quite understand the relation of the two new universities with Maynooth. It is most desirable, I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, that the clergy of any country should come into some kind of contact with their fellows, and should have an education in matters outside the relatively narrow range of theological subjects. But I do not gather that those who are ultimately to go through a theological course at Maynooth are to be in any sense resident, or to have the advantage, as I think, of admixture with laymen of their own age in the period of their going through their arts course. That may perhaps be inconsistent with the views of those who have to regulate such matters in Ireland. If so I regret it. I personally believe that the clergy of all denominations, without exception, would be batter calculated to carry out their great work in later life if some part of their academic career at all events were passed in that general atmosphere of fellowship with their equals in age and allies in studies—an admixture which, so far as laymen are concerned, all who had been at Universities will admit is perhaps the most valuable gift the Universities can give to those who are educated within their walls—far better and more important than all the examinations of which the right hon. Gentleman or Melancthon has dreamt of. But, after all, when we touch this question of the education of the clergy in the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant who deals with it touches upon matters on which be is little qualified to assert the opinion of those who differ from him in matters of religion. I do not desire to press unduly that point. Literally, I have no other commentary, I will not say of a hostile or even of a critical character, to pass upon the plan. It seems to me an absolutely sincere effort to solve a great difficulty. I do not

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believe that any of his predecessors in office could have proposed so good a plan with a chance of its being accepted—by which I mean that I think the opinion, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, in Ireland has greatly modified, matured, and developed since this question first came to the front about twenty years ago, and I do not believe that any of the right hon. Gentleman's predecessors in that period would have had the smallest chance of receiving the adhesion of, perhaps, Gentlemen below the gangway, but certainly of many in Ireland whom they represent, bad they produced this scheme in other Parliaments. I am glad to think that at all events the opinion of the Roman Catholic majority of Ireland is modified in the direction of what I call a sound academic tradition, and I hope and think there has been some corresponding movement on the part of Protestants also. It is well known that do not wholly agree with some of my best friends from Ireland behind me; they do not take the same view as I do on this question. However that may be, it must be plain to everyone acquainted with the matter that the general scheme which the right hon. Gentleman has turned out provides for Ireland academic institutions in the best sense of the word, institutions which ought to have and which I think will have the power of gradually building up a tradition of sound learning, unpolluted and unperverted by religious prejudice or bigotry on either side, having for their object the advancement of sound learning and the education of the rising youth of the country. If this Bill does, as I hope it will, become part of the law of the land we shall be able to look to Ireland as one can now look to Scotland and England as a country in which we have not allowed the highest, best, and most important of all national interests—education in its most important aspect, namely, higher education—to lag behind the example which has been set us by other nations on both sides of the Atlantic—an example which we have too long lagged behind, but which we now seem in a fair way to imitate, I hope to better, by giving our own special touch to this particular aspect of education and making it not merely as complete as any which the German, French, or American citizen now enjoys, but even yet more admirably fitted, more closely suited to the special
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needs and special character of our own country.
MR. DILLON: I am sure I am only giving expression to what is felt in every section of the House when I congratulate the Chief Secretary for Ireland on his courage in tackling this great problem at all. He has embarked upon this most dangerous voyage under peculiarly favourable auspices and, speaking for myself—and I know I am speaking the sentiments of my colleagues also—I tender my thanks to the Leader of the Opposition for the cordial and graceful speech which he has just delivered, in which he has given that consistent support which he has always given to what I agree with him in describing is, after freedom, the highest of all Irish interests. And there are two other names which I think ought to be mentioned by way of thanks, because it is a rare pleasure to an Irish Nationalist, either in this House or out of it, to be able to thank his political opponents. I desire to express my own personal deep gratification, and that of my colleagues, to the hon. Member for the University of Cambridge, who has accepted a seat upon the Senate of this new University, and who is willing to offer us in the great task before us his valuable services in keeping up the standard of education. And I think it would be ungracious on our part not to add a word of thanks to the Provost of Trinity College, who has assisted the right hon. Gentleman; he has set a high example of fair play and courage in this matter, and has promised his steady support to this Bill. The right hon. Gentleman will need all the support he can get, and yet I must say that after the proceedings that have taken place I am full of hope. The right hon. Gentleman required courage to embark upon this voyage. The Leader of the Opposition spoke of the history of Irish education as not a very successful one. I think he might have used stronger and more emphatic language, and said that it had been disastrous. The whole of that path has been strewn with wrecks. Sir Robert Peel in 1843 started the Queen's Colleges; then came the attempts of Lord Derby and Disraeli in 1866 and 1868; then Mr. Gladstone in 1873, with his great measure which brought his

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Government to destruction; then pledges of Lord St. Aldwyn in 1885; then the pledge of the present Leader of the Opposition in 1889 and his famous Manchester letter in 1897; then the Robertson Commission in 1900 and its Report in 1903; and then the Bryce Commission of 1906. Yet throughout the whole of that period of sixty years, nothing substantial has been done to remedy the grievances of Ireland in this matter of University education. I have made a careful study of these things, and I believe the failure was mainly due to the fact that the problem has always been approached upon wrong lines. It is entirely unnecessary for any man to argue as to the desperate necessity for some remedy being applied and applied promptly. But there is this one most significant and striking fact which I think might impress anyone who is disposed to throw obstacles in the way of the right hon. Gentleman, viz., that throughout these sixty years there has not been one single British Member who has taken part in the government of Ireland, but has been converted at an early stage to the conviction of the crying necessity for a remedy being applied to the grievance in the matter of Catholic education. I will only make one quotation from Mr. Gladstone. In 1873, when introducing his measure, he said—
"There are those who maintain that upon the whole, considering who Roman Catholics are, considering how little property they possess, how little it is possible for them to enter upon the higher culture, their state so far as University education is concerned is not very bad at the present. I hold on the contrary that it is miserably bad. I go further and I would almost say it is scandalously bad."
That was thirty-five years ago, and since that time nothing has been done. The only measure passed since then on the question of Irish University education has been that which resulted in the foundation of the Royal University, and the foundation of the Royal University was, I might say, a double-edged sword. I would be the last to deny that the Royal University did something for higher education in Ireland. It stimulated the ambition of some scholars, and afforded some of our poor people on opportunity of studying abroad which they would not otherwise have had, and in that way it did great good. But it was very much a case of supplying un-
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wholesome food to a hungry man, for the food was unwholesome. The Robertson Commission, commenting, on the action of the Royal University, used these remarkable words. The Report of the Commission, although it produced no result, was one of the greatest collections of opinion on this subject and on the whole question, and I entirely agree with the Light hon. Gentleman that whoever drafted the Report was certainly a master of the art of exposition. What did it say?—
"But while those who have administered the Royal University system have done their utmost to make it work well, and successfully, and smoothly, the system itself suffers from incurable defects. A false conception of learning was held up before the eyes of the students of Ireland, and apart from internal defects of organisation the Royal university has brought about one result which was doubtless unforeseen by its founders. It has seriously impaired the value of the University education which was in existence previous to this foundation. On this side its influence has been one of positive destruction."
That is absolutely true. While the Royal University has in some respects opened the paths of learning to some of our poor Catholic countrymen, it has also degraded in another respect the whole standard of University learning in Ireland, and has done as much harm as—some think even more than—it has done good. It is also true to say that from the day the Queen's Colleges were admitted to be a failure, for the last half-century, Ireland, which of all countries in Europe, owing to the peculiarities of its circumstances and its great lack of what I might call the raw material, requires more than any country to cultivate the intellect of its people, has been absolutely neglected by the Government in the matter of University education. The natural question that must arise is, after all the misrepresentation to which this whole question has been subjected for years,—Is this a scheme which the Catholics of Ireland will accept? In considering this great scheme, I wish at the outset to draw a distinction between principle and detail. It is an all-important distinction. The real question for us to consider at this stage is,—Has the right hon. Gentleman succeeded in drafting a scheme which will at the same time have an easy passage so far as the vested interests in Ireland are concerned, and meet the needs and satisfy the demands of the Catholics

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of Ireland? Therefore I put aside all details so far as this stage of the Bill is concerned, only saying one sentence as regards finance. That, of course, is a very important detail. I am bound to say it appears to me that the provision for the Dublin College is less than moderate in view of the great competition which it has to face in Trinity College. I earnestly press on the right hon. Gentleman that the grant which he mentioned is entirely insufficient. The providing of some residential college in Dublin as a nucleus for academic life in that city is a matter of vital importance, and it is all the more vitally important because, as hon. Members opposite know, Trinity College has a munificent establishment and noble buildings, which I for one do not in the slightest degree grudge so long as Trinity College will help us to get fair play and equal treatment. The Robertson Commission specifically says—
"if you decide to do this the new college in Dublin should be on the scale regarded by a University college of the first class, and which is intended to draw students from all parts of Ireland. If you are not going to endow it handsomely and in proportion to Trinity College you had better not do this thing at all."
I now come to the principle of this Bill, I say, first of all, that anybody who studies the debate on the Bill of 1883 will find that the scheme now presented to the House is free from all the great objections taken to Mr. Gladstone's scheme in that discussion which ended in the defeat of the Government. It was alleged in the first place that it was grossly unfair to the Catholics to leave them a single college without a penny endowment to compete against three richly endowed non-Catholic colleges; secondly, that it substituted for the healthy rivalry of more than one, a single University partaking in some degree of an examining board; thirdly, that this sole educational University was subject to restrictions of a most degrading character which would have made it a laughing stock of all the learning of Europe; fourthly, that Mr. Gladstone's scheme proposed to interfere with powerful institutions in Ireland against the will of those interested in them; and fifthly, that the University was to be subject to the headship of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, making it more or less of a political institution. I do not know of
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any subject upon which opinion is more unanimous and strong in Ireland than on the question of "hands off" this matter as far as the Crown is concerned. One of the main causes of the prosperity of Trinity College has been the fact that the Castle and the Government have no power of interference whatever. What are the characteristics of the new University which the Chief Secretary proposes to set up in the City of Dublin? It is to be free and self-governing. I do not in the least degree quarrel with the provision the right hon. Gentleman announced in regard to the nomination by the Crown for a limited number of years, because in the ultimate form the University is to be absolutely free and self-governing. There is to be absolute freedom of teaching. We have been continually subjected to cruel calumny in this House by the accusation that we were seeking to establish in Ireland an institution in which there would be no freedom of teaching, and we have been told over and over again in this House and publicly and privately in the library and the smoking-rooms of this House that the difficulty some hon. Members experienced upon this question was that they could not give one penny of public money to encourage the foundation of higher learning where the teaching would be under the control of bishops and priests. I claim that the teaching in the proposed University will be as free as in any University in Europe. Modern history and modern philosophy will not be excluded subjects as under Mr. Gladstone's scheme of 1883. There will be no exclusions, and I entirely agree that it is a maimed University that excludes theology. We shall have a great faculty of theology in connection with our University, but we shall pay for it out of our own pockets, and we willingly accept the clause which prevents our spending one farthing upon religious teaching. There will be no excluded subjects. There is to be no attempt in this University scheme to interfere with the vested interests of any other great institutions, and, while it is not proposed to allocate a shilling of public money to any denominational purpose, the principle at least is recognised that something should be done and some step taken towards establishing an equality between all sections of the population in Ireland in the matter of

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endowment. The first question which the House is entitled to ask and which calls for an answer is, will a University founded on the principles set forth in the statement of the Chief Secretary be accepted by the Catholics of Ireland? I have no hesitation in saying "Yes" to that question. It will be accepted by the Catholics. There has in the past been a great deal of misconception and misrepresentation in discussing this question. Two things have always been assumed in the debates, public and private, that have taken place on University education for Ireland. First of all, it has been held that the demand put forward on behalf of Irish Catholics for University education in Ireland was purely a clerical demand; and, secondly, that in the matter of University education nothing would satisfy the Irish Catholics except a University strictly confined to Catholics and absolutely controlled by the prelates of their Church. To both these assumptions I give a most absolute and unqualified denial. This demand is not only not a clerical demand, but it is a demand passionately made by all thoughtful men in Ireland and even by many who do not share our faith. I challenge all hon. Members in this House, and particularly Nonconformist friends, to examine critically the scheme now put forward and point, if they can, to any one particular in which it is more clerical or less free than either Trinity College or the late Queen's University. On what ground can opposition be raised? Can such a proposal be objected to in a country where three-fourths of the population are Catholic, where the Protestants have already taken possession of Trinity College, and where there is a great flourishing Presbyterian institution in the North? The really important matter is that the thing will be free and there will be no tests and it will truthfully represent the feelings and beliefs of the students. I invite all who take an interest in this matter to scrutinise this Bill and view the institution from this point of view. We have been so continually taunted and misrepresented in this matter that I may be pardoned for dwelling upon it. I challenge anyone to point to one particular in which this proposed University and the charter are more clerical or less free than any other institution for higher education in this country or in Ireland.
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I will go further. Are hon. Members who have offered us over and over again Trinity College in full settlement of our demand aware that for 100 years no Protestant layman was allowed to be Provost? Are they aware that since the Queen's College, Belfast, was founded no layman has been Provost? Yet our college is to be started under the presidency of a layman. When I talk about freedom I am one of those who have deeply and firmly believed that true religion has no fear of the pursuit of truth, and furthermore I have believed that that religion which is afraid of the untrammelled and free pursuit of truth is doomed. This University is to be perfectly free, and the professors are not to be called upon to sign any undertaking. There is really a lot of unconscious hypocrisy in this House and in the country. I myself was a teacher in the old Catholic University which is going to be incorporated in this, and I was never asked to sign anything. But there is a discipline set up and maintained by this House in the Queen's University, which has been held up as a free institution and as a sample of free teaching. What have the professors of that college to do? The moment a man is appointed a professor of Queen's College he has to sign this—
"I, A. B., do hereby promise that in lecturing and examining and in the performance of all other duties connected with my Chair, I will carefully abstain from teaching or advancing any doctrine, or making any statement derogatory to the truths of revealed religion or injurious or disrespectful to the religious convictions of any portion of my class or audience."
Who is to be judge? And that is your Government system of free teaching! The professors have to go beyond that, because they have to say—
"I, moreover, promise to the President and Council that I will not introduce or discuss in my place or capacity as professor any subject of controversy, political or religious, tending to produce contention or excitement."
That is freedom. We will not degrade the professors in our Universities by requiring them to enter into any such matter. We trust the truth of our religion. Speaking as an Irish Catholic I am quite content to go even far beyond that in my desire to protect the freedom of our professors, and to give to those who may be dismissed an

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appeal to the Crown. It is manifest that a professor must be subject to dismissal. He may be guilty of scandalous conduct, and therefore there must be power to dismiss a professor. That power will reside in the Senate, but in order to remove all feeling of doubt I will be quite willing to agree that, as against any arbitrary exercise of that power, the professor should have an appeal as set forth in the Act to a Board of Visitors appointed by the Crown. It will satisfy the Catholics of Ireland, and by reasonable endowment and fair and generous treatment such as is recommended by the Robertson Commission, I venture to think that the right hon. Gentleman may, although his time in Ireland has been rather a stormy one, feel that he has done a great work. The right hon. Gentleman said that if he could succeed it would be an ample recompense to him for having crossed the Irish Sea. I understand that that passage is not a pleasant operation, but I ask him to be of good courage. If he succeeds in doing for Ireland in this matter what Mr. Gladstone failed to do thirty-five years ago, then his name will be honourably associated with the country. I listened with sympathy to the speech of the Leader of the Opposition, because, in this matter we share one view. While the greatest interest a country has is education, by far the greatest education interest of a country is higher education. Many say that all depends on primary education. That is a false idea. The foundation of all education is higher education; the real foundation and beginning, whether it be in history or philosophy, is the higher education of the people, and that is the reason why all education in Ireland to-day is in such an unsatisfactory state. As regards the great mass of the people, they have been left without any facility for securing higher education. They are passionately devoted to it, and I assure the House that in dealing with this matter you are not dealing with the interests of the rich but with the interests of the poor If you throw open to them the door to the higher culture, they will avail themselves of it to the infinite and incalculable benefit of the nation.
MR. MOOREsaid that the speech of the Chief Secretary in introducing the Bill could scarcely have been better conceived, and certainly the measure could not have been brought forward with less offence to those who differed from the principles which it contained. In making the remarks which he should feel called upon to make he might run counter to the feelings of hon. Members below the gangway, and while he would not shrink from doing so he would try to give as little offence as the hon. Member for East Mayo had given to Unionist Members from Ulster. The Leader of the Opposition had said that the scheme sketched by the Chief Secretary was, so far as he could see, the best of all possible schemes for dealing with the problem of University education in Ireland. He concurred in that once it was admitted—and it appeared to be admitted from the speech of the hon. Member for East Mayo and from the other speeches to which they had listened—that they were going to settle the question of higher education in Ireland on grounds of denominational endowment. It was because he and his colleagues were returned from a part of the country in which feeling was very strongly against denominational endowment of any religion that they felt it their duty, now that it was made clear that the scheme involved the endowment of denominational education as a solution of the University question, to say that in accordance with their pledges to their constituents they would oppose it at every step. Every objection he took to the endowment and establishment of a denominational University from which his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen would derive advantage applied with equal force to the proposed endowment of a Presbyterian University in Belfast, because in common fair play and justice they could not assent to that while objecting to Roman Catholics receiving an endowment. He wished to draw the attention of the House to the somewhat extraordinary history of the last twelve months which had led to the introduction of this Bill, because he wished to prove then in bringing forward this Bill the Chief Secretary had acquiesced in the demand

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put forward by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He did not question their right or their conscientiousness. It was the Roman Catholic Bishops who occasioned the impasse and killed the usefulness of the Queen's Colleges. The Roman Catholic Bishops were the guardians of the faith and morals of their own flocks, and it was their action which had caused the difficulty for which the Chief Secretary was now proposing a, solution. If the proposals were accepted by hon. Members below the gangway it was because they were satisfactory to the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The Roman Catholic hierarchy had put forward their demand before Commission after Commission, and there was very little doubt as to where the real kernel of the matter lay. They were going to have set up in Dublin denominational education which pleased the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The Protestant leaders in Belfast had never made any request for a denominational college in that city, and the gift which had been thrown at their heads was absolutely gratuitous. It was to balance the University in Dublin which was granted to comply with the Roman Catholic demand. The question of the endowment of a Presbyterian University had been brought up in the General Assembly in Belfast. That was a democratic assembly consisting of ministers and laity, and he defied anyone to say that, outside of the professional interest, the Presbyterian Church had ever put forward a claim for the endowment of a University in Belfast, and yet they were to have there a denominational University of a soft to which it was appropriate to affiliate Magee College in the city of Londonderry. It was transparent that that was a mere makeweight to give the semblance of equality and to enable the Government to satisfy the demand of the Roman Catholic bishops. He wished to call attention to the circumstances which had preceded the introduction of this Bill. There was the scheme of Mr. Bryce introduced to the public with what was really an ultimatum. The right hon. Gentleman said—
"I can hold out no hope that any other will be proposed by the present Government. It represents our convictions."
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The Chief Secretary entertained those convictions, for in April last he was asked if Mr. Bryce's scheme still held the field, and he replied that there was not a word of truth in the statement that the Government had abandoned the proposed legislation on the University question. In July he said that Mr. Bryce's scheme had achieved the satisfactory result of bringing about greater agreement and consensus of opinion in Ireland than any other scheme that had yet been produced. The present Bill was denominational from start to finish. From the moment of its inception the scheme had been brought about with the acquiescence of the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland. Ireland, in spite of the pacific rule of the Chief Secretary, was in a very disturbed state last autumn. The right hon. Gentleman minimised the outrage in the House of Commons, although he admitted it in the country. At Southampton he spoke of the legislative benefits he had in store for Ireland (he alluded, of course, to University education), and he said publicly, and practically gave notice, that if that system of outrage were permitted to continue it would be impossible to induce the House of Commons to grant any of those legislative benefits. Almost immediately afterwards the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam denounced cattle-driving as immoral and ordered it to cease; and in some dioceses in the West the same course was taken. This University Bill was part of the price, and the right hon. Gentleman was bringing it in to fulfil the promise of legislative benefits to various people for putting down cattle-driving. [An HON. MEMBER on the MINISTERIAL Benches: What about the Leader of the Opposition?] It was true that the Leader of the Opposition had always supported a Roman Catholic University and favoured this Bill, but the right hon. Gentleman had said that his opinions on it were personal, and that other Members could vote according to their own convictions. That was what he was going to do. The arrangement between the Roman Catholic bishops and the action of the Chief Secretary in introducing the Bill were very significant facts. The probable cause was that Trinity College had been left out of the Bill.

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In the Bill and the Charter it would be found that Trinity College was not mentioned. The Provost of Trinity College was an old friend of his, for he was his tutor at college; and no doubt he considered that so long as Trinity College was untouched, denominational education might be set up in Dublin. It was a regrettable thing that the force and weight of Trinity College should be used to assist what he believed to be a retrograde measure. He believed that Trinity College was short-sighted, because it was in Ireland the national University and held out inducements to men of all religious creeds. If the Bill passed, undoubtedly Presbyterian students in Ireland would go to the Presbyterian University in Belfast, and Roman Catholic students in the same way would go to the new college in Dublin. Thus Trinity College from being the national University would be degraded to a mere sectarian University. Although the students who would attend it would be fellow-members of his own Church, he maintained that it would have been to their interest to have thrown in their lot with those who objected to sectarian education rather than have submitted to a Bill the effect of which would be to turn Trinity College into a mere Church of Ireland secular training college. He regretted it, but the Chief Secretary was able to boast of the help of some of the senior fellows of Trinity College; and he had paid the price for it. The whole inducement of Mr. Bryce's Bill was that Nationalists and the Radical section of the Presbyterians would get a chance of destroying Trinity College.
MR. DILLON: So far as I am personally concerned, I have always been in favour of this scheme and opposed to the other.
MR. MOOREsaid he had a very keen recollection of a speech of over an hour's length delivered in the House, by the hon. Member for East Mayo, in which he used language of malevolence, or, if that was not a Parliamentary phrase, of bitter and extreme denunciation towards Trinity College. Trinity College was denounced as the narrow, bigoted, political fortress of ascendency, and no words to be found
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in the hon. Member's unlimited vocabulary were too bad to describe his hatred of Trinity College. Therefore, that lament over, Mr. Bryce's Bill could not have fallen on deaf ears in the Roman Catholic party, and in a section of the Radical Presbyterians in the North of Ireland. That was the genesis of the present Bill. The Chief Secretary had an interview with Cardinal Logne, at which his University proposals were discussed. Far be it from him to suggest that it was not perfectly right for the right hon. Gentleman to see Cardinal Logne, but it was perfectly evident from the date of that visit that his proposals had the sanction of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. What had happened since? Hon. Members below the gangway had submitted to having their national aspirations deadened. They were met with unsatisfactory speeches from the Front Treasury Bench. The Chief Secretary uttered his non possumus and hon. Gentlemen below the gangway, knowing that the Roman Catholic bishops were waiting for this Bill, said nothing. [An HON. MEMBER on the OPPOSITION Benches: Muzzled] Yes; after the debate in the House they were muzzled; but while the muzzle did not prevent them from barking, it did prevent them from biting. If it had not been for the University Bill on which the Roman Catholic bishops had set their hearts, there would have been eighty-two Ishmaelites out that day on a tomahawking expedition. He did not know whether the Ishmaelites had tomahawks or not; but he might be allowed to substitute the mediaeval equivalent. It was undoubted that the Roman Catholic bishops had wade that demand, and the present effort of the right hon. Gentleman was to meet it. Although that had been studiously omitted from the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the previous day, nor had any hint of this proposal been given yet it was suggested that this solution of the University problem was satisfactory to the Roman Catholic bishops, while it was said at the same time that it was not a denominational system. The two things were an impossibility. He would remind the right hon. Gentleman and the Liberal Party that they had boasted again and again

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in this Parliament that they were the largest Nonconformist majority in the House of Commons since the days of Cromwell. They boasted that they were the true Protestant party; but he would like to furnish them with a quotation from Mr. Gladstone, in a letter to the late Queen in 1873, on his Irish University Bill—
"It is not in the power or will of Her Majesty's advisers to purchase Irish support by subserviency to the Irish Bishops."
That was the Gladstonian position in 1873; it was entirely different from the policy of the Radical front bench in 1908. As to the definite proposals in the Bill, the House would recollect—it had been borne in upon them by the Estimates—that there was this year an increase on the Irish expenditure already, without any question of education, of £85,000. They were told that there was no money forthcoming for land purchase in Ireland. They were told on another occasion that the land question was the biggest in Ireland. They had been told that the Treasury for Irish purposes was depleted, that there were no financial means to stop the mouths of the Irish Members. But it was now proposed to increase the financial expenditure on Ireland by £43,000 a year. Before the House agreed to burden the already overburdened Estimates, they ought to see what sort of body it was going to pay for, and what were its principles. If on examination it was found that it was denominationalism, pure and simple, which was going to be established, they ought to reject the proposals of the Bill. The hon. Member for East Mayo took great satisfaction in looking forward to the time when the Universities in the near future would be free. He understood perfectly what the hon. Member meant by free. He meant free from outside, free from the control of the Government. At present the professors in the Queen's College were appointed by the Government, and the hon. Member looked forward to the time when those colleges would appoint and dismiss, subject to the right of appeal, their own professorial staff and conduct their own arrangements. The moment they made a college or a University free from outside control, and free from a government which cared nothing for any party, they would enable
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them to hang round the neck of their students the fetters of denominationalism. Opposed as he was to the endowment of any denominationalism, he would look forward with regret to a college in Belfast in which all the professors and students were Presbyterians, and where everything was to be done under a Presbyterian colour, and he would look forward with regret to the time when there would be no power of interference with them to prevent their system becoming denominational. The same remark applied with equal force to the new University in Dublin. He did not know what the safeguards would be. The safeguards to which the hon. Member for East Mayo looked forward were that there would be a majority of the laity on the governing body and no tests, and the Chief Secretary laid great stress on the terms of the Bill which provided that there should be no tests, but everybody knew that they might have a University as denominational as they chose to make it without any test at all. If he had the power to make a governing body to-morrow he could take twenty-eight clergymen of the hon. Gentleman's Church, his own Church, or the Presbyterian Church, and the result would be to make as denominational a college or University as any man could wish for, and not a word about it in the charter. But the security was supposed to be afforded by a lay majority. He did not know whether that position was ever dealt with or summed up better than by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Montrose in a debate in the year 1898. The right hon. Gentleman said—
"The Bishops as I understand, agree that there is to be a preponderance of laymen on the governing body, but they are to be of the Roman Catholic faith."
That would be the governing body under the Chief Secretary's proposals. It was not suggested that there was to be allowed a Protestant majority in the new college at Dublin, or a Presbyterian majority in the new University at Belfast.
MR. BIRRELLsaid he controlled the body for the first five years.
MR. MOOREsaid that during the first five years students would come in under

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the auspices of the first people, and it was during the first five years that the people come in who were to elect their successors. Was there any doubt what the result would be in a University established on those lines? The Secretary of India went on to say—
"I confess I am not satisfied that this preponderance of laymen over ecclesiastics would be a very solid guarantee, because in more churches than the Roman Catholic there is a species of persons known as the clerically-minded layman,' so I am not satisfied that a provision for the preponderance of laymen would be any adequate guarantee."
He thought the right hon. Gentleman was perfectly right, and from start to finish he had never heard from the Chief Secretary, or the hon. Member for East Mayo, anything which would prevent these colleges becoming denominational in every sense of the word.
MR. DILLONinquired whether it would not be perfectly fair to the Secretary for India if the hon. Gentleman would go on and read that he said he would accept this proposal as a guarantee because it was a self-governing body?
MR. MOOREsaid he had not seen that, but if the hon. Member said it was so he would accept his statement. The Chief Secretary was setting up a college or University for Roman Catholics, and he had taken advantage of a play upon words to say that it was not a Roman Catholic University. If it was a Roman Catholic University, as soon as that appeared to hon. Gentlemen opposite their pledges would compel them to vote against it. Here was a college, of which the governing body and the students were all Roman Catholics, and they had power to elect. Was there any doubt that it would become a Roman Catholic University? That question was never dealt with better than by a distinguished jurist who had been quoted with approval by the Chief Secretary and complimented by the hon. Member for East Mayo. That was Lord Robertson, who said—
"Our Report makes it clear that a college for Roman Catholics or a University for Roman Catholics must be a Roman Catholic institution, with limitations of thought corresponding to the requirements of the authoritative exponents of that creed."
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In this House the very first time the President of the Board of Trade differed from hon. Members below the gangway was on the University question, and he tore to shreds the pretence that a University for Roman Catholics was not a Roman Catholic University. He said that he thought it was possible to overcome certain difficulties in the way of education in Ireland without setting up a Catholic University. There ought not to be any difficulty at all in setting up a University into which the poor boy could enter, and in which the Roman Catholic creed could be put on an equality with every other creed, but the right hon Gentleman said there must be something more than that behind the demands of Irish Members, and that the real object must be to set up a University, Catholic in tone, Catholic in atmosphere, in a word, a Catholic University. The President of the Board of Trade could not make any distinction between that and a Roman Catholic University, and said that the Nonconformists would oppose the constitution of such an institution, no matter from what side of the House it came. Those were the opinions of the President of the Board of Trade in 1898 and it would be a matter of interest to the House before the Bill reached its final stage to see if the right hon. Gentleman was now prepared, as the Chief Secretary was, to distinguish between a University for Roman Catholics and a Roman Catholic University. He had described the Bill as produced in reply to the demands of the Roman Catholic Bishops, and he would very briefly summarise to the House what those demands were. In 1864 Pope Pius the Ninth issued to the World his "Syllabus, of Errors," and he started in the first place with, as the primary error, education not subject to clerical control. Again and again, moreover, the Roman Catholic Church had denounced mixed education grants. In 1871 the Bishops passed a series of Resolutions, one of which ran—
"In union with the Holy See and the Bishops; of the Catholic world, we again renew our oft-repeated condemnation of mixed education as intrinsically and grievously dangerous to faith and morals, and tending to perpetuate dissensions, insubordination, and disaffection in this country."

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From that date to this there had never been any question on the part of the Roman Catholic bishops about mixed education. In another document under their hand they repudiated again the error condemned by Pope Pius IX., and said that education must to some extent be under clerical supervision or control. They had always set their faces against mixed education even in regard to the technical instruction given under the Department of Agriculture. There had in those cases been protests against young people of different churches being allowed to meet at certain training colleges. He was not complaining of that, they had a right to enforce it if they did not like it, but if they did, let it not be said that it was not denominational education. It seemed to him that that was the whole subject with which the Bill was dealing, viz., the setting up of denominational education in Ireland. He and his friends considered that such a proposal was retrograde. Trinity College, Dublin, had been struggling to, and had thrown off its whole tendency to be denominational. On the Continent they could see the same thing taking place in Spain, and in Bavaria. The whole tendency of any University now was to shake off the shackles of any Church. As would be seen from the correspondence in The Times, the struggle was going on. If one of the professors taught Modernism, where there was a representative of the Pope in the country to which the University belonged, his dismissal was called for. As soon as ever a man raised his voice against the Papal Encyclical and in favour of Modernism, there was a conflict as to the right of free teaching. The same consideration did not arise so often in the Presbyterian Church, but there would be at any rate a source of friction. It was a retrograde step; the Government were going to set up under a teaching University in Dublin the same shackles which, in this country, we were endeavouring to get rid of year after year. They in Ireland objected very much to this process of segregation. They thought, it was an infinite pity that the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic bishops kept their people away from the Protestants as if they were heretics and there was some contagion about them. It was
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an unfortunate thing and did not make for better feeling in Ireland. In Belfast they had a beautiful hospital to which everybody might go, but the Roman Catholics insisted upon having a hospital for themselves, and when that sort of thing was carried to the length of having separate graveyards it was no part of the duty of the British Government to endow separate universities for separate creeds. He and his friends were accustomed to be reproached with bigotry, and they were treated as if they were discussing the penal laws, which were not now in force, and objecting to their repeal. They had no objections to the Roman Catholics opening a University if they wanted one, but why should Protestants be taxed to set up a Catholic University, when this country said that all religions should be equal before the law? All the temporal possessions of the Irish Church had been taken from her, and from the moment they were taken, it was said that in Ireland there was to be absolute equality between all the religions. This proposal to endow the Presbyterian Church which had not asked for it with a University in Belfast, and the Roman Catholic Church which had asked for it over and over again with its own University in Dublin, was an absolutely retrograde policy. He would give one more quotation from a man who was a strong Presbyterian and had been president of this Presbyterian body and a strong supporter of Mr. Bryce's Bill. That gentleman said—
"In conclusion he hoped they would treat the new scheme of three universities that were bound to be sectarian less or more with the most uncompromising hostility. They should resist to the uttermost the notion of dividing the youth of the country in their best and most generous days of life into three hostile camps, since they were already divided enough. There was no squaring of the Presbyterian Church. There was no 'deal' The Presbyterian forms of procedure did not admit of such a thin. They were a free and open court. Their resolutions were in favour of the establishment of one University, with constituent colleges on an unsectarian basis."
On the face of it, it became more and more evident that the real object of this Bill was not to establish equality between religious denominations in Ireland but to meet the demand of the

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Roman Catholic bishops. Ulster Members were frequently told that they were narrow-minded and met all these proposals with a direct negative. He believed there had been a great change of opinion in Ireland, and that it was not in the direction wished by hon. Gentlemen below the gangway. The people were beginning to ask themselves why, when there was a splendid University in Dublin, to whom everybody might go, and Queen's Colleges at Belfast and Cork, the privilege of going to these places was not permitted, as a matter of Church policy, by the Roman Catholic bishops. It was a hard thing to say, and he spoke in all sincerity when he said that he did not like to say hard things, but he believed that if the House put its foot down and said that denominational endowment in Ireland was a retrograde policy, and that they would have no part or share in it, the Roman Catholic bishops would recognise the inevitable and no longer withold from their people the education which was waiting for them these, as it was at Oxford and Cambridge.
*MR. BUTCHERsaid that the speech of the Chief Secretary in introducing this Bill was a model of lucid exposition; but to his mind it was much more, and he desired to join with the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition in congratulating the Chief Secretary on having, as he believed, found a solution of this question which would commend itself to the enlightened judgment of almost everybody, both in this country and in Ireland. No one would suspect him of any undue friendliness to the Chief Secretary on the side of Irish administration and policy, but his feeling on this question was above all political interests. He believed the right hon. Gentleman had found a way out of a difficulty which had perplexed successive Chief Secretaries. He himself perhaps knew as much as any Member of the House of the complexity of the problem. He had sat on two Commissions and had listened to evidence which had filled four or five volumes of Blue-books, and he ventured to say that the Chief Secretary had brought to bear on a baffling difficulty a candour and impartiality and statesman
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ship which would make his tenure of office memorable. Few persons would dispute that the equity of the Roman Catholic demand had been proved. No less than five Chief Secretaries since 1886 had admitted it. Since 1901 two Royal Commissions, on which sat men representatives of all our Universities and all the curches in the Kingdom had declared with hardly a dissentient voice that the Roman Catholic demand was a just demand and ought to be met. Nor could the urgency of the demand be denied. It was no exaggeration to say that University education was worse off in Ireland to-day than it was thirty years ago. At that time a criminal blunder was made in the dissolution of the Queen's University and the substitution for it of the Royal University, which, whatever its merits, was educationally indefensible. During the last five years opinion in Ireland had been gradually maturing towards a solution of this kind, and he believed they had now arrived well-nigh at unanimity regarding the main lines of a University scheme. There were some who still said, Why should not Roman Catholics go to Trinity College? He was content with the answer that experience proved that they would not go there. He agreed with what Mr. Gladstone said in 1873, that it was not our business to inquire whether the Roman Catholics were right or wrong; the question for us was—supposing they were wrong in their view, was it right for us to exclude them from University training and culture? Personally, he ejected the idea that any man should be excluded from the privileges of higher education for conscience sake.
There were two cardinal conditions without which no scheme of University education for Roman Catholics could be successful. The first was that the plan proposed should meet with the approval of those in whose interests it was proposed. It was not enough to say: "Ask and ye shall receive,"—the direct opposite of that which was asked for. The long list of misunderstandings and failures—as in 1868, 1873, 1878—stood before them as a warning. The gift was all but given and then withdrawn or given in a form which nobody desired. The first condition, therefore, was that the solution proposed must satisfy

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national sentiment. The second condition was that it must on the academic side satisfy instructed academic opinion. It was not worth the time and labour of the House, or worthy of its dignity, to set up institutions which had no promise of an intellectual future, no hope of promoting education or advancing learning. The reason he was able to support the Bill was that he believed the institutions which it proposed to found would foster all the elements of intellectual life in Ireland, that they might in time become great seats of learning, and even rival that one noble University which Ireland now possessed.
Coming to the Bill itself and the proposals which had been sketched out, he would first refer to Belfast. He had listened with astonishment to the description just given of the Belfast University as a Presbyterian University, a body in its essence denominational. It might as well be suggested that the Universities of Scotland were denominational because the majority of the students were Presbyterians. As to Edinburgh University he had lived there a good many years, but it had never occurred to him that the place was denominational. It was true there was a sort of negative test—he forgot the exact words—which came upon him by surprise when he was called upon to sign it. Its effect was that he would not in his teaching do anything to upset the Westminster Confession of Faith. As Plato, Arstotle, and Sophocles, did not know the Westminster Confession of Faith, he felt that without seriously embarrassing his conscience he might sign that test. But there was to be no kind of test in the University of Belfast. He welcomed the fact that the College was now prepared to accept University responsibilities. It had prospered under adverse conditions; it had survived the crippling blow dealt it in the destruction of the Queen's University. In recent years it had received liberal benefactions. He felt confident that civic generosity would be still further elicited when it had gained University status; that the new institution would be an intellectual stimulus to the whole district around; and that, as in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham the citizens were proud of their City University, so in a very few
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years to come Belfast would rejoice over its University as much as over its shipbuilding. Next he turned to the federal University with its seat at Dublin, the other constituent colleges being Corkand Galway. Other federal Universities had been proposed at different times. The federal University of Mr. Bryce was to include five colleges, one of which was to be Trinity College. Now a federal University was a delicate bit of mechanism, and the fatal objection to the Bryce scheme was that every point of contact would have been one of friction, for it brought unwilling yoke fellows into partnership with the probability of early disruption. Another previous scheme of federal University was that contemplated by the Robertson Commission. In that there were to be four constituent colleges, including Belfast. The scheme now before them embracing only three constituent colleges had this advantage over all the others, that it was more homogeneous; there was in it no distinct cleavage in academic policy Or religious principles. Of course, it would have a Catholic atmosphere; otherwise it would not satisfy those for whom it was intended. But let the broad fact be noted, that there were to be no tests either for students or professors; no student was to be debarred from competing for his religious belief; and there was to be no endowment out of public funds of any theological chair. That met many people's objections; but there was a further point. Consider the constitution of the governing body. There was a time when the Bishops insisted on controlling a Catholic University by their representatives as the governing body. In 1897 they modified that claim, and they said they would accept a majority of laymen. In 1902, in evidence before the Robertson Commission they demanded two ex officio representatives on the Catholic College in Dublin. To-day, if he understood aright, they had entirely withdrawn their claim for ex officio representation, for the governing body, he understood, was to be as free from tests as were the students. That was not all. The academic freedom of the governing body rested not merely or chiefly upon the absence of tests, but upon another

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question—how were the vacancies in that body to be filled up? He was glad to hear from the Chief Secretary that as regards its permanent constitution the majority would consist of academically elected members. Out of thirty-five members seventeen were to be representatives of the constituent colleges, and five were to represent the graduates. The atmosphere, therefore, would be determined mainly by the character of the teachers and the graduates—the right way of determining the atmosphere. They would give the colour and tone to University policy; there was to be no external power exercising controlling authority.
He had said that a federal University was a delicate mechanism; and there were two main conditions of harmonious work; which he desired to emphasise. One was that the representation of the constituent colleges on the governing body should be a fair one, in particular that a just balance should be maintained between the claims of Dublin and Cork. The college in Dublin would, of course, be the metropolitan college of the University, and it ought to be national and not provincial, large, well-endowed, and on a scale sufficient to strike the imagination. In the words of the Robertson Commission—
"Unless what is done is done on an adequate and impressive scale, it need not be done at all. It is necessary that in the dignity of the buildings, the emoluments of he teachers and the equipment of the establishment, the institution should command respect and inspire enthusiasm."
But subject to this condition, he would urge on the House that the claim of Cork for a place of due importance in the University system should be fully considered. The other condition of success was this—the Chief Secretary had alluded to it as one of the problems of the case—that there must be the largest measure of college autonomy that was consistent with the maintenance of a high academic standard. The detailed suggestions for effecting that end, contained in the Report of the Robertson Commission were, he thought, compatible with what had been said by the Chief Secretary that afternoon. He would mention two points. One concerned the appointment of professors in the constituent colleges. Each college must have, he did not say
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a final voice, but an effective voice in the selection of its own professors. Secondly, the colleges should be free, subject to the approval of the University Senate, to lay down their own courses of study and to carry on their own examinations. It was right as proposed by the Chief Secretary, that there should be an outside examiner, who had a power of veto. But one of the weaknesses of most federal Universities was that the teaching body was more or less dissociated from the examining body; and the corrective now suggested was that the teachers should themselves be ex officio examiners, their results being revised by an external and impartial authority. He noted in passing with great satisfaction the proposal that the governing bodies of the Queen's Colleges at Cork and Galway should be so remodelled as to bring into closer contact with the districts from which they drew their students.
He now passed to the only two features of the scheme which caused him some misgiving. Both were connected with the question of affiliation. The first was that the Senate of the University was empowered to affiliate various colleges or other institutions. Now there were in Ireland a number of colleges, secondary schools, and diocesan seminaries which imagined themselves to be up to an academic standard, partly because they had sent up successful students to the examinations of the Royal University. Steady pressure would be brought to bear on the Senate to affiliate such institutions. If the Senate acted laxly and yielded, they would have all the evils of the Royal University over again. Young men cramming in their schools and seminaries, never studying in an academic centre, never coming under the liberalising influence of meeting fellow-students in a larger atmosphere, would merely carry on the present educational tradition. That would be the ruin of the scheme. The only answer under the Bill as it stood would be that there was no danger of the Senate doing anything so foolish. But one knew what ecclesiastical pressure was in Ireland in educational matters, and he regretted that such a responsibility should be laid on the Senate. Rather let the Bill itself specify the institutions to be

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affiliated. The affiliation question, however, became much more serious in dealing with the two theological seminaries, Magee and Maynooth Colleges. It offended against all academical principles to allow residence at a theological seminary to count as residence at a University for the purposes of an Arts degree. He knew of no instance in which that was permitted in any other country. Maynooth was a great and organised institution, one of the most powerful in Ireland, and the affiliated college would in this case be more powerful than the college to which it was affiliated. In time it might dominate the whole University system. Dr. O'Dwyer, the Bishop of Limerick, gave evidence on this question before the Robertson Commission. He laid stress on the necessity of having an educated clergy, and on the gain that would result if clergy and laity became friends at college and attended the same lectures. He held out the hope that some 200 students, candidates for the priesthood, would come from Maynooth every year to study at the Catholic College in Dublin. But this idea was disclaimed by other witnesses who spoke for the hierarchy and in the end the prospect held out was merely that a handful of Honour Students and a few priests after passing through Maynooth might come up to Dublin to attend advanced courses in certain subjects. The suggestion might, however, still be made with all deference to the Roman Catholic prelates that Maynooth would withdraw the claim of being affiliated for Arts purposes to the Dublin 'College, and allow the ecclesiastical students to take their Arts course in Dublin in a residential hostel, under proper supervision, moral and religious. Having thus graduated in Arts they would pursue their theological studies at Maynooth. The whole affiliation question was one of grave importance and was likely to prove the chief flaw in the Bill.
But apart from this objection there was in some minds a fear that the new University would augment the power of the priesthood. For himself, he had no desire to increase priestly Tower either in this country or in Ireland; but he would put it to the
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House, was it likely that the giving of higher education to Roman Catholics would aggravate the evil of priestly influence, if evil it was? He had so much belief in the value of learning, that he was confident that the more young men learned the less likely were they to come under any influence, priestly or otherwise, which would shut their minds upon intellectual truth. The safeguard lay not only in the reading of books and in attendance on lectures, but still more in such discussion and criticism as led to the enlargement and emancipation of the mind. The University question was not, as some thought, a bishop's question, but a layman's question. Nor was it the layman only of the upper class whom it concerned. Nothing had interested him more in recent years than to find that wherever he went, even in remote parts of Ireland, he came upon farmers, who might be supposed never to have heard of a University, who discussed the University question. Farmers, tradesmen, members of county councils,—many of them had power, they knew it; they had not knowledge—they were beginning to know that too; but they desired it for their sons. They had heard, moreover, of the younger and democratic Universities that had sprung up in England. They had discovered that there was a new alliance between industrial and University life, and that science was being applied to every department of social and economic activity. Their ambitions were stirred; they desired to share in that intellectual movement. Cork, prosperous and thriving, with a population remarkable for its energy and independence of mind already aspired to be a University city. The interest the question aroused had been shown by a thing unique in Ireland, namely, the magnificent offer made by the hon. Member for Cork to give his whole fortune to that College if it were put on a new basis either as a well-endowed University College or as a separate University. Cork desired to have its own University, but was content for the present with a College united to the University by a federal bond under conditions which ensured the needful freedom and elasticity. He appealed to the House no longer to allow the greatest of Irish treasures to go to waste

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—the intellectual wealth and the love of learning long dormant or suppressed. Again and again high hopes had been formed, only to be dashed to the ground. This time, he thought, those hopes were destined to be fulfilled. Hon. Members would remember the words of the Great Charter: "To no man will we deny or delay justice." In this matter justice had been delayed, but justice would no longer be denied. He felt specially grateful to his political opponents for the magnanimous kindness by which they had thought him worthy of proposing his name for the first Senate. He would do all in his power to help to make the scheme a success. He thought the Bill now before them gave promise of a just settlement and he trusted it would have a speedy and prosperous passage through the House.
*MR. MASSIEsaid that whatever might be his personal attitude towards this Bill in regard to its details and probable working his attitude would never be the same as that which had been adopted by the hon. Member for North Armagh. He echoed the words of the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition that this measure was a sincere attempt to solve a very complex problem. To a great extent he appreciated the difficulties which the Chief Secretary for Ireland had had to face in the course of his very necessary and important task, and if anyone could conciliate opposition it was the right hon. Gentleman. If the Chief Secretary could not command success in this matter he at least deserved it. Complete success was indeed a thing incredible. He fully recognised the success with which the right hon. Gentleman had been able to cope with many difficulties, and he was very glad to notice in connection with the Bill how the episcopate had modified its demands. The University was to be a real one, it was to be an abode of learning from which no Irishman or any other man was to be debarred by his religious views from being a student or a professor, or in due time a member of the governing body. He did not call that a denominational atmosphere, on paper at any rate. When the crutches which at first would be used to set the University on its legs
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were removed, he understood that this. University was to be self-governing, democratically governed by graduates without any serious interference by a co-optative or nominated element, whether spiritual or temporal. What then was further needed to bring up a University in the way it should go? Nothing, except one thing, and that was that they should make sure that this paper constitution would be a reality. If the Irish people were determined to have it so then it would be so. If the University was to be a genuine on, then its professors must be free to teach that which was in them. There must be no dismissal of a professor of biology because he believed in evolution and told his class so. There must be no dismissal of a professor of philosophy because he did not bow the knee to St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the pride of Oxford and Cambridge, of Paris, of Jena, Tübingen and Berlin, of Harvard and of Yale that their professors were free men, and every University founded in modern times must be on those lines, or the modern spirit would be found like one walking about in waste places seeking rest and finding none. If this University was developed in the manner described in the Bill it would be in the end a home of academic freedom and companionship of men of different faiths, and that. University would be the pride of Ireland. He regretted that the hope of those patriots of the Young Ireland Party of two generations ago was, now fading away. They looked for one great National University in which all the sons of Ireland could associate freely together, and in their impressionable years learn how to differ without hostility, and how to soften the asperities of Catholic and Protestant, of Nationalist and Orangeman. The legislators who founded the Queen's Colleges desired to look upon a home of harmony, equality and brotherhood, but they had hoped in vain. This Bill in that respect seemed to him to be a signal of despair. There was not going to be one great national University but three Universities, one practically Protestant, another practically Presbyterian, and a third practically Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholics, with their bishops, would have it so, the Presbyterians, or rather a section of the

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Presbyterians—and he was not certain that he could not more truly say an individual section—were content that it should be so—[Cries of "No"]—and Trinity College, Dublin, had secured that it should be so. Their opposition had been transformed to agreement and even to support. That was the price they paid for "hands off Trinity" If that was the case it would be so to the regret of those whom he ventured to call true Unionists, who desired a University, even as Young Ireland had desired one, where men of all faiths freely mingled together. He was not sure that Trinity College, Dublin, would not live to repent it, because it was now standing aloof from the great stream of national life, and its lot might yet be that of the pool which was proud to stand still while the great river rushed by. Even statesmen might yet repent this action and look back and wish that those who had so rashly divided the educational life of Ireland were not met with more firmness, more patience and more strict justice, instead of being allowed rather too easily to get their way. He still had one hope and to that he clung. His hope rested in the people of Ireland themselves. He looked forward to the time when the Irish people would take their educational salvation into their own hands and brush aside all injurious interference, whether spiritual or temporal, and take care that those who had to shape the destinies of the University which this Bill proposed, should make that institution a University worth of the name, national, broad, comprehensive and free.
MR. WILLIAM O'BRIENsaid that they were mindful of the difficulties of this great question. He desired at once to join his colleagues in wishing god-speed to the Bill. It was a happy augury to find the Leader of the Opposition and the Member for Cambridge University concurring with a Liberal Minister in putting their shoulders to the wheel for the settlement of this seemingly inextricable problem. Without some such spirit of magnaminity and of mutal compromise between Irishmen and between Englishmen as well, some of them recognised that it was not possible to solve this question nor indeed any other great Irish question. None of
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them on those benches would be grudging in their acknowledgment of the spirit of generosity which they Leader of the Opposition and the hon. Member for Cambridge University had shown, and which alone made it possible for the right hon. Gentleman to introduce this Bill, and not only introduce it, but pass it before the end of the session. The Bill was really a Bill for the emancipation of the people of Ireland from intellectual penal laws almost as humiliating and as destructive of any higher life in the country as the more brutal penal laws in other matters. As to the speech of the hon. Member for North Armagh, he had not left them in any doubt that they were still threatened with opposition of a somewhat forlorn character, and opposition on which he was afraid any argument of generosity, or indeed any other argument would be thrown away. But when they had men of the intellectual calibre and of the standing in public life of the Leader of the Opposition and the Member for Cambridge University, generously acknowledging that under the existing state of the law Ireland was crippled and sterilised in the matter of higher education, and throwing themselves into the breach to enable even a. Liberal Minister to provide a remedy, he did not think the Chief Secretary need be greatly daunted by an opposition which still, he was sorry to say, was of the kind of the old ascendancy, but which was not perhaps nowadays particularly distinguished for brilliancy or daring. He hoped the hon. Member for North Armagh would not take it as a personal offence if he suggested that, whatever other feeling they might inspire among a dwindling band of their fellow countrymen in Ireland, the last feeling they were likely to inspire was that the Nationalists had any dread of them. They and their ascendency were things of the past. The Government had obeyed for good or ill the warning "hands off Trinity" and, he thought, he and his friends had some right to retort upon these gentlemen, "hands of Ireland." He hoped that hon. Members on the Liberal side of the House, who might think it necessary to oppose the Bill, would think a great many times before they said or did anything to complicate differences. He

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hoped he might respectfully appeal to them to let Irishmen settle this question among themselves, and to remember that this Bill involved no wrong and no disability upon any human being of any class or party in Ireland. It simply enabled three-fourths of the population of Ireland to enjoy the blessings of higher education from which, under existing circumstances, they were debarred. They did not for an instant pretend to infringe the religious liberties of any other persons. They simply asked to be allowed to enjoy those liberties themselves in the only way in which they could conscientiously do so. He would ask hon. Members representing English constituencies to remember that there were matters on which they must agree to differ, and on which they must be prepared to allow that Catholics were perhaps the best judges of what it was permissible for them to do in the domain of conscience, and to trust the Catholic young laymen of Ireland to take care of the intellectual liberties of their Protestant fellow-countrymen if they should ever be attacked. So much for the sympathy with which they regarded the right hon. Gentleman's entrance on the path which he had chosen. He had been met with a great many intimidatory remarks by the hon. Member for North Armagh. He did not for a moment pretend that this was an ideal settlement. Was there ever an ideal settlement, or was there ever likely to be an ideal settlement as the result of their human struggles? Although those who represented Cork had to speak with certain amount of reserve, they all recognised, in the words of the Leader of the Opposition, that this was a sincere and courageous effort capable of yielding incalculable blessing to the future higher education of Ireland, and certainly it would be no fault of theirs if this great measure of intellectual emancipation was lost to the youth of Ireland. He was startled at the ingenuity of the hon. and learned Member for North Armagh in discovering a grievance in the new Belfast University. He only wished that they had been made to suffer from the same grievance in Cork, for certainly their patience had been tested in a somewhat severe way. Up to recently Belfast had not shown any opposition of the kind which the hon.
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and learned Gentleman had expressed. The proposal was a handsome piece of good fortune for Belfast, but the hon. Member condoled with the unfortunate people of the North of Ireland that the gift had been almost pressed upon them. It was one of the little ironies in the government of Ireland that Belfast should get a University it did not seek, while the University which Cork most earnestly asked had been refused. He did not complain, and the people did not complain. They recognised that it was no fault of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. They did not grudge the people of Belfast what they regarded as a very valuable charter, and they did not grudge the very substantial increase which had been made to their endowments, although Belfast was, from its wealth, better able to supplement State endowments than other parts of the country. Still less did they grudge or demur in the slightest degree, except as to its smallness, the provision made for the new University in Dublin and the University College with which it would be so closely identified. They recognised in the fullest manner that Dublin was the centre and reservoir to which the youth from the southern provinces would naturally go, and that it was entitled to such endowment and equipment as would enable her worthily to fulfil the function of building up what was required in the way of higher education for three-quarters of the young men in Ireland. Although in Cork they would be undoubtedly heavily handicapped in the race, they hoped they would be able to start under conditions which would give promise of success. For the people of the poorer classes in Munster, with whom he and his friends were principally concerned, a residence in Dublin, or higher teaching in Dublin, was out of the question, but it was not a bad sign of the intellectual alertness of the people of the South that they had declared themselves ready to tax themselves out of their own pockets in order to have a University of their own. They were ready to make a start at this great disadvantage provided they were not forced to start under conditions which would place Cork in the position of being completely overshadowed by the more wealthy institutions of the North.

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While they heartily accepted this provisional arrangement they hoped that by-and-by, when Cork would have won its spurs, and hid shown its metal, such a charter of autonomy as they now started with would be enlarged by the nature process of affiliation by which constituent colleges in the north of England had evolved into Universities. He wished to say that, without fuller consideration of the right hon. Gentleman's proposals, he did not like to come to any final decision on the subject So far as he could judge, the proposals of the Chief Secretary to give them a fair start very much depended upon the first Senate, but there was no concealing from the How and from themselves their apprehension that Cork would be left at a very grievous disadvantage in that respect. The Member for Cambridge University had said that the Cork Medical School—the Cork College—was on a level with the Dublin School of Medicine, and that it would be to a great extent crowded out by Dublin under the present proposal He was glad to hear the Chief Secretary say that on all these questions his mind was open, and that there would be plenty of opportunity, hereafter, for discussing them in a friendly way. As to matters of income and the local governing powers that were proposed to be conferred upon Cork College, he wished to say a word. He quite shared the protest of the hon. Member for East Mayo as to the monetary provision for the Dublin University, but he must candidly admit that as to the other provisions allocated to the Cork College it did not seem to him a serious grievance even against the English Treasury. As to the local governing powers that were proposed to be conferred upon them he hoped that they might work out practically in a system that would make the efficiency of the Cork students tested by their own professors instead of by strange professors which sometimes put students to a very serious disadvantage, although, to use a phrase employed in the fiscal controversy, they would have the advantage of a preferential tariff. Without that much of autonomy, it would be better to put Cork out of pain at once. On this subject he asso-
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ciated himself wholly with the view of the Member for Cambridge University and on the part of the people of the South of Ireland he thanked him most cordially for his most powerful support. He accepted his position that in the first place they ought to have the right of shaping their own course of studies in those special matters, such as the higher agricultural education, brewing, chemistry, schools of journalism, music, and teaching generally of the higher stamp, in which they could find careers suitable for their own young people. They must also have what the hon. Member for Cambridge University called an effective voice in the appointment of their own professors, and they must have it made clear that their own student would be examined at their own University centre by their own professors, subject, of course, to the appointment of an external examiner for the purpose of maintaining the standard of efficiency so long as there was an interchange of external examiners all round. If they only got, as he was satisfied the Chief Secretary intended they should get a fair initial start upon this basis they would not be afraid to face the music and to take their chance. They had sufficient confidence in the capacity and enthusiasm for learning of their young people, and he had sufficient confidence in the man who was at the head of the institution in Cork. They were quite willing to take their chance with the future. With this very modest measure of justice for their side they were most ready to join in obtaining the fullest possible measure of endowing scientific equipment, and of teaching power for Catholics and Protestants in Galway or Cork, or in Dublin or Belfast. They would enter into competition with, them without the smallest tinge of professional or sectarian jealousy. On the contrary, the more highly Ireland was educated, the better it would be for toleration and liberality of mind al round, for all religions and for higher education. He begged to congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the speech he had made, and he hoped he would not think it presumptuous if he ventured to press upon him, having regard to the reception the Bill had, even with the many

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English Bills in the way, he should take a firm stand to secure immediate facilities for the passage of the Bill into law in the present session.
MR. WYNDHAM: As one who has long wished to see some practical solution of this question of University education for Ireland, I wish to congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the bold use he has made of a fair opportunity. I am persuaded that those who see the difficulties of this question, and they are great, will not get a return for the money justly devoted for those other reforms in Ireland unless Ireland has a proper system of education. All the credit and cash which have been devoted to land purchase and the establishment of new departments, to the many other projects which have been contemplated in the past or which may be undertaken in the future, will fail of their effect unless Ireland has an effective educational system, and University education is by far the most important part of it. It is not the roof to complete an edifice, but the foundation and source from which all fructification follows. On these grounds and claims I welcome this Bill. But I welcome it also as a Unionist, because that will enable enable us to urge, as we have urged over and over again in the past, that this Parliament is willing to undertake any services for Ireland which any Parliament sitting in Dublin would be willing to do. I welcome this Bill because it will prevent that strong disparity between the existing opportunities for higher education in this country and those in Ireland—a disparity which must always be a source of deep concern to Unionists. I welcome this Bill because it is a conservative measure, and preserves existing institutions. I welcome it because it is an Imperialist measure (and I wish to see Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom and of the Empire) and because it will enable Ireland to take her place side by side with Great Britain in competition with other countries in science, art, invention, and commerce. Of course there are difficulties, but to those who think them formidable, I would point out that at this moment we devote a great deal of money in respect to primary education in Ireland which
396
has a distinctly denominational character. There is the College of Maynooth with absolutely denominational teaching and clerical government. Those who fear the domination of the priesthood should be glad that there are to be other institutions in Ireland which have a denominational atmosphere and not a clerical control. It may be said that Trinity College and the old Queen's Colleges are open. So they are, but many Irishmen either will not, cannot, or at any rate do not send their sons to these institutions; and it is clear that some institutions must be opened to which they can send their sons. On these historical grounds of a political character and on modern grounds of a practical character I welcome this Bill. We know that Irishmen lost much of their property in the soil of Ireland by political views and that by fiscal views their commerce was destroyed, although the Party which which I am connected hope at some time to remedy the latter as it has done the first. I believe, however, that neither land purchase nor fiscal reform will avail unless an opportunity is afforded for the restoration of a University education to the youth of Ireland On all these grounds I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the attempt that he has made to secure that.
MR. CHARLES CRAIGsaid that before the vote was taken he wished to put before the House the views which he and his colleagues from Ulster held on this question. He must admit, however, that that might seem a work of supererogation because those views had been placed before the House by his friends in a manner which he could not for a moment hope to attain. He was convinced that the House would agree that the view they had always taken had been put forward in the most admirable and moderate way by those sitting on that side of the House. The solution of this question rested primarily with the followers of the right hon. Gentleman and chiefly with the Nonconformists opposite. He desired to ask those Nonconformists whether they considered that if this Bill passed, the higher education proposed to be set up by it would not be higher education of a sectarian character. The right hon.

397
Gentleman had carefully avoided that question, but it was the crux of the whole matter. Was the higher education to be afforded by the Chief Secretary for Ireland to be denominational or not? If there could have been any doubts while the right hon. Gentleman was speaking those doubts were set aside when they heard the speeches of hon. Gentlemen below the gangway, because they made no secret of the fact that this was an attempt to satisfy the Roman Catholic portion of the population of Ireland on the question of Irish education. They had admitted frankly that it was a University for Roman Catholics. If that was so, and he did not think the Chief Secretary would deny that that was the whole object of the Bill, he would like to know from hon. Members on the other side of the House, especially from the Nonconformists, how, in the face of their opposition to denominational education in this country in the past, they could bring themselves to vote for this Bill. He asked hon. Members on all sides of the House to believe that they opposed this Bill from perfectly pure motives and with absolute sincerity. They believed that in setting up a University to which Roman Catholics alone could go, the Government were perpetuating or tending to perpetuate a system under which they would separate the different religious bodies in Ireland into separate watertight compartments, and everybody admitted that that was not a policy likely to conduce to the welfare of Ireland. He had not heard any argument put forward in favour of this Bill, but only the extenuation that the Roman Catholics of Ireland had made up their minds that they could not use any existing University, and that being so it was the duty of the State to provide them with a University of which they could make use. If the mere holding out, on the part of the Roman Catholics, for a University of their own was to be a good reason for granting it he asked why did not they grant this University forty years ago. They had held out for fifty years, and he saw no change in the facts to-day as compared with fifty years ago. If it was wrong to give this education then it was wrong to give it to-day. In this country the Roman Catholic was perfectly free to go to any University he
398
liked: why should it be wrong for him to do so in Ireland? He could not see why a totally different and a reactionary principle should be applied to Ireland than was applied to every other country in the world. They all knew the history of Roman Catholic Universities in other countries. Every one that had existed had sooner or later been suppressed and put down by Roman Catholics themselves. But now they were asked in the twentieth century to establish in Ireland a state of affairs which, having been founded in other countries two centuries ago, had been given up fifty or sixty years ago. Nobody, he thought, could deny that this proposal of the right hon. Gentleman was a retrograde and harmful step. Some reference had been made to the action of the Presbyterians in Belfast in accepting the offer or bribe of £60,000 or £70,000 in order to convert the Queen's College of that city into a University, but he would like the House to understand that the general body of Presbyterians in the North of Ireland were not in favour of that movement, not because Belfast was not large enough to support a University of its own, but on the grounds he had indicated. The Queen's College there was already partly stereotyped as a Presbyterian institution, but under the proposals of the right hon. Gentleman it would become absolutely stereotyped.
MR. BIRRELL: Why?
MR. CHARLES CRAIGreplied that its whole staff would be Presbyterian from the head downwards. It would become stereotyped for precisely the same reason that the University they proposed to set up in Dublin would be a Roman Catholic University. The right hon. Gentleman had talked about the great enthusiasm which prevailed, but there was none except in the immediate entourage of the Queen's College itself. The other inhabitants did not want it, because they recognised that in creating a University and making it a sectarian place of education they would deprive themselves to a large extent of the argument they had always used against denominational education all over the country. His colleagues and he intended, although he understood it was

399
a somewhat unusual course, to divide against the introduction of the Bill for the purpose of entering at the very earliest opportunity their most emphatic protest against setting up an institution in Ireland which they firmly believed was retrograde and could not possibly act beneficially towards Ireland as a whole.
SIR E. CARSON: I only desire to say almost a single word on this question, but as I spoke in favour of a somewhat similar proposal fifteen years ago and have done so almost every year since, I do not desire that the present occasion should pass without saying that I am still in favour of the view I have so often expressed. I am indeed glad that the opportunity has been found by the Chief Secretary to bring forward these proposals which I think have had such a good send-off today. I have always supported these proposals, because I believe they are the only possible proposals for Ireland. It is all very well to talk about an ideal system of all creeds mixing in one University. That system has been tried at Queen's College and Trinity College, Dublin, founded as a great Protestant institution. Tests have been abolished
in Trinity College and everything has been done to try to get Roman Catholics to come into the college and share its benefits. That system has been pursued for fifty years, and my hon. friend has asked why now should we give what was refused fifty years ago. Why should we not go on for another fifty years? Meanwhile are the youth of Ireland for that reason to be deprived of a University education? That is not statesmanship. The facts as they exist have to be faced and the situation relieved. So far as I am concerned, I have no fear of my Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen, but I prefer them educated and highly educated to uneducated. By devolution of responsibility within the last few years, moreover, we have created responsibilities and offices which have to be filled by educated Irishmen. I join in the thanks expressed by my right hon. friend the Leader of the Opposition to the Chief Secretary for having taken advantage of the opportunity and for having brought forward this Bill.
Question put.
The House divided:—Ayes, 307; Noes, 24. (Division List No. 61.)

AYES.

Abraham, William (Cork, N.E.)

Brace, William

Curran, Peter Francis

Abraham, William (Rhondda)

Bramsdon, T. A.

Davies, David (Montgomery Co.

Adkins, W. Ryland D.

Branch, James

Davies, Ellis William (Eifion)

Ambrose, Robert

Bryce, J. Annan

Davies, Timothy (Fulham)

Armitage, R.

Bull, Sir William James

Delany, William

Astbury, John Meir

Burns, Rt. Hon. John

Devlin, Joseph

Baker, Sir John (Portsmouth)

Burt, Rt. Hon. Thomas

Dickinson, W.H. (St. Pancras, N.

Baker, Joseph A. (Finsbury, N.)

Butcher, Samuel Henry

Dillon, John

Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (City Lond.)

Byles, William Pollard

Donelan, Captain A.

Balfour, Robert (Lanark.)

Cameron, Robert

Duckworth, James

Baring, Godfrey (Isle of Wight)

Carr-Gomm, H. W.

Duffy, William J.

Barker, John

Carson, Rt. Hon. Sir Edw. H.

Duncan, C. (Barrow-in-Furn's

Barlow, Sir John E. (Somerset)

Cawley, Sir Frederick

Duncan, J. H. (York, Otley)

Barlow, Percy (Bedford)

Chance, Frederick William

Edwards, Sir Francis (Radnor)

Barnard, E. B.

Cherry, Rt. Hon. R. R.

Erskine, David C.

Barnes, G. N.

Clancy, John Joseph

Esmonde, Sir Thomas

Barry. E. (Cork, S.)

Cleland, J. W.

Esslemont, George Birnie

Barry, Redmond J. (Tyrone, N.

Clough, William

Everett, R. Lacey

Beale, W. P.

Cobbold, Felix Thornley

Faber, G. H. (Boston)

Beck, A. Cecil

Collins, Stephen (Lambeth)

Farrell, James Patrick

Bell, Richard

Collins, Sir Wm. J. (S. Pancras, W

Fell, Arthur

Belloc, Hilaire Joseph Peter R.

Condon, Thomas Joseph

Fenwick, Charles

Benn, W. (T'w'r Hamlets, S. Geo.

Cotton, Sir H. J. S.

Ferens, T. R.

Bennett, E. N.

Cox, Harold

Ffrench, Peter

Bethell, Sir J. H (Essex, Romfr'd

Crean, Eugene

Fiennes, Hon. Eustace

Birrell, Rt. Hon. Augustine

Crooks, William

Findlay, Alexander

Black. Arthur W.

Crosfield, A. H.

Flavin, Michael Joseph

Boland, John

Crossley, William J.

Fletcher, J. S.

Bowerman, C. W.

Cullinan, J.

Flynn, James Christopher

Fuller, John Michael F.

Lupton, Arnold

Redmond, John E. (Waterford)

Fullerton, Hugh

Macdonald, J. R. (Leicester)

Redmond, William (Clare)

Gilhooly, James

Macdonald, J. M. (Falkirk B'ghs

Rees, J. D.

Gill, A. H.

Maclean, Donald

Rendall, Athelstan

Glover, Thomas

Macnamara, Dr. Thomas J.

Richards, Thomas (W. Monm'th

Gooch, George Peabody (Bath)

MacNeill, John Gordon Swift

Richards, T. F. (Wolverh'mpt'n

Greenwood, G. (Peterborough)

MacVeagh, Jeremiah (Down, S.

Richardson, A.

Griffith, Ellis J.

Mac Veigh, Charles (Donegal, E.)

Ridsdale, E. A.

Guinness, Walter Edward

M'Callum, John M.

Roberts, Charles H. (Lincoln)

Gulland, John W.

M'Kean, John

Roberts G. H. (Norwich)

Gurdon, Rt Hn Sir W. Brampton

M'Killop, W.

Robertson, Sir G Scott (Bradf'rd

Gwynn, Stephen Lucius

M'Laren, Sir C. B. (Leicester)

Robertson, J. M. (Tyneside)

Haldane, Rt. Hon. Richard B.

M'Micking, Major G.

Robinson, S.

Hall, Frederick

Maddison, Frederick

Roche, Augustine (Cork)

Halpin, J.

Magnus, Sir Philip

Roche, John (Galway, East)

Hardy, George A. (Suffolk)

Mallet, Charles E.

Roe, Sir Thomas

Harmsworth, Cecil B. (Worc'r)

Manfield, Harry (Northants)

Rogers, F. E. Newman

Harrison-Broadley, H. B.

Marks, G. Croydon (Launceston)

Rowlands, J.

Harvey, W.E. (Derbyshire, N.E)

Marnham, F. J.

Runciman, Walter

Haslam, James (Derbyshire)

Massie, J.

Russell, T. W.

Haslam, Lewis (Monmouth)

Meagher, Michael

Samuel, Herbert L. (Cleveland)

Haworth, Arthur A.

Meehan, Francis E. (Leitrim, N.

Schwann, Sir C.E. (Manchester)

Hayden, John Patrick

Meehan, Patrick A. (Queen's Co.

Seddon, J.

Hazleton, Richard

Micklem, Nathaniel

Shackleton, David James

Healy, Timothy Michael

Mond, A.

Sheehan, Daniel Daniel

Helmsley, Viscount

Montagu. E. S.

Sheehy, David

Hemmerde, Edward George

Mooney, J. J.

Shipman, Dr. John G.

Henderson, Arthur (Durham)

Morpeth, Viscount

Silcock, Thomas Ball

Henderson, J. M. (Aberdeen, W.

Morse, L. L

Smeaton, Donald Mackenzie

Henry, Charles S.

Morton, Alpheus Cleophas

Smyth, Thomas F. (Leitrim, S.)

Herbert, T. Arnold (Wycombe)

Muldoon, John

Snowden, P.

Higham, John Sharp

Muntz, Sir Philip A.

Soares, Ernest J.

Hodge, John

Murnaghan, George

Stanely, Hn. A. Lyulph (Chesh.)

Hogan, Michael

Murphy, John (Kerry, East)

Stewart, Halley (Greenock

Holland, Sir William Henry

Murphy, N. J. (Kilkenny, S.)

Straus, B. S. (Mile End)

Holt, Richard Durning

Nannetti, Joseph P

Strauss, E. A. (Abingdon)

Hope, W. Bateman (Somerset, N

Napier, T. B.

Stuart, James (Sunderland)

Horniman, Emslie John

Newnes, F. (Notts, Bassetlaw)

Summerbell, T.

Horridge, Thomas Gardner

Newnes, Sir George (Swansea)

Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester)

Hudson, Walter

Nolan, Joseph

Taylor, John W. (Durham)

Hunt, Rowland

Nugent, Sir Walter Richard

Taylor, Theodore C. (Radcliffe)

Hyde, Clarendon

Nussey, Thomas Willans

Thomas, Sir A. (Glamorgan, E.)

Illingworth, Percy H.

O'Brien, Kendal (Tipperary Mid

Thomas, David Alfred (Merthyr

Jardine, Sir J.

O'Brien, Patrick (Kilkenny)

Tillett, Louis John

Johnson, John (Gateshead)

O'Brien, William (Cork)

Tomkinson, James

Johnson, W. (Nuneaton)

O'Connor, John (Kildare, N.)

Torrance, Sir A. M.

Jones, Sir D. Brynmor (Swansea

O'Connor, T. P. (Liverpool)

Toulmin, George

Jones, Leif (Appleby)

O'Doherty, Philip

Trevelyan, Charles Philips

Jordan, Jeremiah

O'Donnell, John (Mayo, S.)

Tuke, Sir John Batty

Jowett, F. W.

O'Donnell, T. (Kerry, W.)

Verney, F. W.

Joyce, Michael

O'Dowd, John

Wadsworth, J.

Kekewich, Sir George

O'Grady, J.

Waldron, Laurence Ambrose

Kelley, George D.

O'Kelly, Conor (Mayo, N.)

Walsh, Stephen

Kennaway, Rt. Hn. Sir John H.

O'Kelly, James (Roscommon, N.

Walters, John Tudor

Kennedy, Vincent Paul

O'Malley, William

Ward, W. Dudley (Southampton

Kettle, Thomas Michael

O'Shaughnessy. P. J.

Wardle, George J.

Kilbride, Denis

O'Shee, James John

Waring, Walter

King, Alfred John (Knutsford)

Parker, James (Halifax)

Wason, John Cathcart (Orkney)

Laidlaw, Robert

Partington, Oswald

Waterlow, D. S.

Lambert, George

Pearce, William (Limehouse)

Watt, Henry A.

Lamont, Norman

Pearson, W.H.M. (Suffolk, Eye)

White, Sir George (Norfolk)

Lane-Fox, G. R.

Philipps, Col. Ivor (S'thampton

White, J. D. (Dumbartonshire)

Lardner, James Carrige Rushe

Phillips, John (Longford, S.)

White, Luke (York, E. R.)

Law, Hugh A. (Donegal, W.)

Pollard, Dr.

White, Patrick (Meath, North)

Layland-Barratt, Francis

Power, Patrick Joseph

Whitley, John Henry (Halifax)

Leese, Sir Joseph F. (Accrington

Price, C. E. (Edinb'gh, Central)

Wiles, Thomas

Lehmann, R. C.

Priestley, W.E.B. (Bradford, E.)

Wilkie, Alexander

Lever, A. Levy (Essex, Harwich

Raphael, Herbert H.

Williams, J. (Glamorgan)

Levy, Sir Maurice

Rea, Russell (Gloucester)

Wills, Arthur Walters

Lewis, John Herbert

Rea, Walter Russell (Scarboro'

Wilson, Henry J. (York, W. R.)

Lough, Thomas

Reddy, M.

Wilson, J. H. (Middlesbrough)

Lundon, W.

402

403

Wilson, J. W. (Worcestersh. N.)

Winfrey, R.

TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Mr.

Wilson, P. W. (St. Pancras, S.)

Wood, T. M'Kinnon

Whiteley and Mr. J. A.

Wilson, W. T. (Westhoughton)

Wyndham, Rt. Hon. George

Pease.

NOES.

Banbury, Sir Frederick George

Craig, Captain James (Down, E.

O'Neill, Hon. Robert Torrens

Banner, John S. Harmood-

Fetherstonhaugh, Godfrey

Sandys, Lieut.-Col. Thos. Myles

Barrie, H. T. (Londonderry, N.)

Gordon, J.

Sloan, Thomas Henry

Bignold, Sir Arthur

Hamilton, Marquess of

Thomson, W. Mitchell-(Lanark)

Clark, George Smith

Hazel, Dr. A. E.

Walker, Col. W. H. (Lancashire)

Cochrane. Hon. Thos. H. A. E.

Houston, Robert Paterson

Wolff, Gustav Wilhelm

Corbett, T. L. (Down, North)

MacCaw, William J. MacGeagh

Cory, Sir Clifford John

M'Arthur, Charles

TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr.

Craig, Charles Curtis (Antrim, S

M'Calmont, Colonel James

Moore and Mr. Lonsdale.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Birrell, Mr. Secretary Haldane, and Mr. Attorney-General for Ireland.

IRISH UNIVERSITIES BILL.
"To make further provision with respect to University Education in Ireland," presented accordingly, and read the first time; to be read a second time upon Monday next, and to be printed.[BILL 184.]

THE FISCAL QUESTION.
MR. MOND, in moving "That, in the opinion of this House, any attempt to broaden the basis of taxation by placing small import duties on a large number of articles is opposed to all principles of sound finance, wasteful and uneconomical as regards collection, disturbing and harmful to industry and commerce, would tend to raise the price of all the taxed articles to consumers, and, in practice, would lead to the imposition of high tariffs of the same character as those in force in protected countries," expressed his thanks to the hon. Member for Hereford who, by his courtesy in withdrawing the Resolution which stood in his name on the Paper, had given him the opportunity of raising what he thought was not an unimportant phase of the fiscal question. If asked why he put the Resolution on the Paper, he would say that he did so because of his sympathy with the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition who some time ago went down to Birmingham and issued a new edition of the fiscal programme. Although that edition was accepted as evidence that at last the protectionists had been successful in casting the noose of protection round the unprotected neck
404
of the right hon. Gentleman, he had observed that in speeches in the country at bye-elections and to constituents no reference was ever made to the programme promulgated by the right hon. Gentleman in Birmingham. As the right hon. Gentleman had been somewhat shy of further elucidating his programme on public plaftorms this occasion had been taken to give him an opportunity which it was hoped he would seize. The four principles laid down at Birmingham covered a great deal of ground, and he had endeavoured in his Resolution to confine himself to the first two propositions and then to establish what was the true basis of taxation for revenue. A small duty on manufactured imports was a most foolish, costly, and futile expedient, to which no Chancellor of the Exchequer should ever resort. It was contrary to the great work of Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, and to those great Budgets which had been the admiration of financiers all the world over, which were based, not on abstract principles, but on concrete results and facts. Undoubtedly there was a certain number of difficulties to encounter in attacking this question in a theoretical manner. Some of those difficulties were in the mere vagueness of the words used, and he would have to make a certain number of assumptions in dealing with the subject at all. Let him deal with the question of what was meant by "broadening the basis of taxation." There was an impression in the minds of many people, and certainly he would not have expected to have found it in the mind of the Leader of the Opposition, that taxation was paid by articles; but every economist knew that taxes were paid by the people, and the number

405
of articles the taxes were spread over in no way affected the question of the amount of taxes which an individual finally had to pay. An eminent economist, Mr. A. C. Pigou, in an article some time ago, said that certain politicians appeared to suppose that taxes were paid by articles and that taxing a new article would open up a new source of revenue. Taxes were not paid by articles but by the people, and whether they made the taxpayer pay an amount in income-tax, or an amount on twenty articles, he still paid the same amount of taxes. By this so-called broadening of the basis of taxation did they suppose that they in the least relieved the individual from taxation? He asserted with confidence that the principle was financially unsound. It was unsound as was all indirect taxation. He would not assert that it was unpopular, or that it was not convenient, and he would not go as far as Bismarck did in 1879, when, in a famous speech, he said that indirect taxation was a good form of taxation because nobody knew what they had to pay, and, therefore, nobody felt the taxes, whilst direct taxation was very unpopular because everybody knew what they paid. Indirect taxation was not seen clearly, and, therefore, the burden was not felt: if they admitted that, they also admitted the argument in favour of direct taxation. To say that the taxes spread over a number of articles became more and more difficult to trace was to argue, not from the point of view of financiers, but from the point of view of company promoters. The fact that they could not trace the incidence of taxation did not make the taxation any less, but merely made it more difficult for the individual taxpayer to see how much money was taken out of his pocket. Sound finance meant that the taxpayer ought to know how much his taxes amounted to, and then he would begin to feel the burden of taxation and take an interest in economy of administration; until he did that he was not really taking that due part in the government of the country and in sound finance which undoubtedly every taxpayer ought to take. He would go further and say that not only was the finance
406
of our taxation unsound, but it was entirely illusory. And here he came to some of the difficulties to which he hoped that they would have answers that night. The Leader of the Opposition, in a speech at Birmingham, spoke of small duties. Perhaps he would inform them what he meant by small duties. Was 2½per cent. a small duty, or 5 per cent., or 10 per cent.? How many duties were to be levied, were they to be ad valorem or specific duties, and were the duties to be raised equally on every article, or were they to be variable duties? Until they had answers to some of those points it was, of course, difficult to make the calculations which were necessary in order to get the financial results from them. He would like to point out in this connection the curious fact that in the countries where there was a protective system the amount of revenue derived as a result was extremely small. In the United States of America for the year 1904–5 it was only 28 per cent. of the total revenue from the customs taxation on manufactured goods; in Germany less than 20 per cent. of the total customs revenue came from manufactured goods. From raw material in Germany came 5·8 per cent., and from the tax on food 74·2 Per cent total amount of revenue collected in 1904–5 from manufactures was some £6,000,000, and if they took from that the £800,000 in rebates and drawbacks to the German manufacturers, the net yield from customs duties on manufactured articles was £5,200,000. That was not a very large revenue to be derived from the enormous machinery which was put in operation. But were we to have a larger revenue from the machinery to be put in operation in this country? He would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he had gone into the matter arithmetically, though it might appear rather a prosaic method of looking at the subject. Firstly, they wanted to know whether or not the manufactures imported from the Colonies were to be subject to this duty? He could scarcely think that hon. Gentlemen opposite were going to bind the Colonies closer to our hearts by putting a 10 per cent. duty on their manufactured products. In 1906 the total schedule—and

407
our schedules were very imperfect in this matter—of manufactured and semi-manufactured goods imported into this country was £136,000,000. Did they propose to put a 10 per cent. duty on all those products? Of the £136,000,000 something like £20,000,000 was on lead, copper, zinc, etc., and nobody he should think would call these manufactured products. They had been desiring for a long time a definition of raw material and manufactured products. When were they going to have that definition? Were broken stones and iron manufactured products? The distinction between raw material and manufactured products was a fictitious one; it did not exist in fact. It was one which did not exist in any tariff in the world. The American, German, and French tariffs taxed raw material, and Members might find in their constituencies some who would want to treat as manufactured products goods which had been considered raw material, and they would find that granite for tombstones would have to be shifted to meet the wishes of some of their constituents. If he took the Board of Trade classification, imperfect as it was and including as it did manufactured goods like cotton seed oil and cotton seed cake, he could not arrive at more than £100,000,000, and not more than £50,000,000 fully manufactured goods. He would give them the benefit of the larger figures, and with a 5 per cent. duty, which he called a small duty, they would have a revenue of £5,000,000. But what was that revenue going to cost to collect? That was a point which never seemed to have been gone into with sufficient care by those who had investigated the matter on the other side. Our present cost of customs collection was over £1,000,000, and we had an exceedingly simple tariff and exceedingly few ports of entry. The cost of revenue collection in Germany was something like £3,000,000, and there it was obviously a simple thing. The number of their harbours and waterways was small. We had £1,000,000 paid now on a small number of articles. He had been through the Civil Service Estimates, and he thought it was no exaggeration to say that under such a schedule the additional cost would be something
408
between £3,000,000 and £4,000,000 a year, or even £5,000,000. Supposing he took the least figure, the amount for which they were going to harass and wrong every importer, cancel the whole of our commercial treaties, and cause disturbances and dissatisfaction to the trade and commerce of the country, was only £2,000,000. Perhaps 10 per cent. was a small duty; they would with a 10 per cent. duty have a total revenue of £4,000,000. Surely nobody would say that it would be worth while, not for any protective idea, not for the purpose of providing more employment, not to exclude the pettifogging foreigner, and not for the purpose of binding the Colonies together, but for a revenue only of £5,000,000, to upset our whole fiscal structure. The right hon. Gentleman opposite would upset and worry every importer and merchant in the City of London in order to raise £4,000,000.
MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN: I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but he appeals directly to me. £4,000,000 is roughly the amount raised by the coal-duty. What was the cost of collection?
MR. MONDsaid he had no access to official figures, but the right hon. Gentleman was proposing to put a duty on about 1,000 articles. Had he ever read the German schedule of sixty pages of manufactured articles? The difficulty was that all the articles would have to be inspected infinitely more carefully than now. However the line was drawn between manufactured and unmanufactured articles, the former would have to be inspected in a manner in which they were not to-day. The export of coal took place in a concentrated area and the duty was very easy to collect. There were 196 ports registered, at each of which there would have to be some kind of preventive officer. Were they going to make it practically impossible to import manufactured goods except at the few ports where the necessary arrangements now existed, or were they going to establish Custom House officers at those 196 ports fully equipped? The right hon. Gentleman had never told them how he was going to deal with the

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enormous transit trade passing through England, amounting to £94,000,000 a year. That was a business question to which they must have a business answer. Were they going to have a series of free ports about the coast, and if so which towns and ports were to be favoured? If they did not have free ports, were they going to throw this £94,000,000 of transhipment business into the free ports of Hamburg and Bremen? Anyone who knew anything about this business knew how delicate it was, how small difficulties in loading, port dues, and matters of that kind would drive traders from one port to another—from one centre to another. How were they going to deal with the £94,000,000 of transhipment trade? It was a very big figure and it was a very big business, and they ought to have the scheme before them before they were asked to plunge wildly into reversing the fiscal system which had stood them in good stead for two generations. Bonded warehouses formed a large part of the expenses of duties in foreign countries. Were they going to establish bonded warehouses, and if so had the cost been estimated? Were they going to pay for them out of the revenue? If so, what was collected would very soon go in bricks and mortar. Were hon. Gentlemen going to follow their usual practice and borrow money for a free trade Government to pay back? Even then it would cost a lot of money. Were they going to allow drawbacks as the German and American manufacturers did? If so, could anybody inform them how much further the revenue would be diminished by the amount of duty repaid? Did the right hon. Gentleman think even £5,000,000 was a reasonable revenue for which to upset the whole fiscal structure of the country? There was one point it seemed to him which was misapprehended, and that was the enormous worry and disturbance to trade and commerce. Whether the article was dutiable or non-dutiable they would give an amount of trouble, extra clerical labour and work and anxiety to every trader in the country. He could give an example in his own experience. He was interested in some mines in Canada, and they were importing from a well-known firm in America a large amount
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of mining machinery which was duty free Some of the machinery for nearly a fortnight remained on the railway siding to wait for an inspector to come and pass it as duty free. In the meantime the hands, the erectors and contractors, were all standing at the mine incapable of proceeding with their work while this red tape was being gone through. That was one example out of hundreds. A friend of his took a quilt to Germany. When it got there, the Custom House officer said it was dutiable as silk. It was not silk, and his friend had a long argument. Finally he got it through. He did not say that if they could turn this country into an earthly paradise, if more men could be employed at high wages, and if there could be no longer any distress or trouble, it was not worth while to go to a great deal of inconvenience to bring that about. But if they told him it was worth while for £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 a year to give an immense amount of trouble to traders and importers, if every lady who came back from Paris had her luggage turned out and all her things examined in the way they were at New York—if they thought that was going to be a popular policy they were widely mistaken. It was foolish. It was unworthy of any great mind. He was interested in the erection of engineering plant in Germany and Italy. They had tariffs in those countries and the wretched people who were buying this plant, which they could get made in England much better than in their own country, had to have a larger capital to carry on their industry. The amount of trouble that the calculations gave to the seller and the purchaser was simply incredible. They found the same trouble in the United States. A great part of the time of the merchants in New York was taken up, not in business, but in disputes with the Custom Houses as to which schedule their products should come under. If the Customs people were right, the importer sometimes made not a profit but a loss. That was a great waste of energy and time, and the extra clerical work and labour entailed represented increased cost to the consumer. These people were not going to keep an extra staff and increase their general charges in that manner out of their

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own pockets. Was it worth while for four or five millions a year to incur all this expense and trouble and create all this dissatisfaction? There was one further point of considerable importance, and that was the question of the future. The last part of his proposition was that they might establish a tariff for revenue purposes only. They might be as innocent as new born lambs, their souls might be as white as the driven snow, but if they once introduced this subtle element of a tax on the article which was manufactured untaxed in this country they had begun to walk down that decline on which nothing had or could or would ever arrest a nation. Germany, America, Canada, and France all bore eloquent testimony to the truth of his proposition. Germany, after a period of happy free trade from 1870 to 1880, called for a revision of her tariff and requested Bismarck for the purpose of financing the Empire to undertake a revenue tariff. They were supposed to be small duties. Germany had a tariff in 1879, another in 1885, another in 1887, another in 1890, another shortly afterwards, and they had had another since. The tariff produced for revenue purposes only had mounted and mounted and mounted till it had become a protective tariff. What had happened? The last tariff the German Parliament passed was forced by the agrarian party under the threat that they would refuse to vote the money necessary for the Navy; they were as patriotic as protectionists always were; they demanded a high duty on corn and the starvation of the people or there would be no Navy. With the sword held to their breasts the German Government were compelled to pass the last tariff. The United States had a long record in the matter. They began with a tariff in 1790, which was a revenue tariff. In 1816 they tried a little protection. In 1824 they started a little more. In 1833 they had a compromise tariff. In 1842 they raised their tariff again. In 1846 they put the tariff down again. In 1851 they put it down again. In 1861 they put it up again. In 1862 they had another tariff. In 1864 they raised it again. In 1870, 1882, 1890, 1894, and 1897 they had Tariff Acts. What an occupation for a great Parliament and a
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great country! What a happy prospect to hold out to them to spend their time in bolstering up decayed and ruined industries. They would find very curious phenomena if they went into the thing a little. When trade was bad it was always the fault of the tariff. It was either too high or too low. When the tariff was low and depression came along they screwed it up. When there was a high tariff and trade depression they put it down. What a splendid regulating system! The result was always uncertain, producing something entirely different from what was expected. In every country a tariff had always been the starting point, but protection had been the end, and it had gained and gained. Interests were set up which no statesman had ever been strong enough to resist, as had been shown in Canada, where the tariff was retarding the progress of the country. Naturally they would be raising up interests which they could not throw off. If they induced people in this country to establish industries under a revenue tariff, they would be establishing another lot of vested interests, and, as in the United States, they would perhaps have to find sources of expenditure in order to keep up the tariff. If there was to be a tariff, let it be a high one; then it would do something. The right hon. Member for West Birmingham never talked about small tariffs, never said he wanted little innocent revenue tariffs; he wanted to exclude the hated foreign product, which was taking the bread out of the mouths of English workmen. A revenue tariff would not do that; then why not tell the workmen so? It was because the Party opposite wished to allay the fears of their more timid supporters. Yet the free trade Unionists, the sacrificial lamb of the Party, were always being led to the slaughter by the confederates, and the arch-priest of the Party told them it would not hurt much. Let them cut its throat! Let them know what the issue was which every tariff reform speaker and lecturer was putting before the country. It had taken a long time to drive the Leader of the Opposition so far, but let him now plunge a little further. The tariff reformers could not persuade this country that the great work was fruitless which Gladstone and

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Peel did in striking off thousands of duties that were found to produce no revenue and which it did not pay to put on. Let them forsake the flimsy ground of the new Birmingham eirenicon and take their stand by the old Birmingham policy; then the trade of the country would know where it was. He submitted his Resolution with confidence to the House, and he submitted it with equal confidence to any body of expert traders and to the consumers of this country. He begged to move.
*MR. RUSSELL REAsaid he rose to second the Resolution which had been so ably moved by his hon. friend. He would not occupy very many minutes, because he felt that on an occasion like that the time at their disposal was so limited that it was not justifiable for him to occupy long. Tariff reformers professed that they did not want to return to the old full-blooded protection of the early years of the 19th century. But they forgot that in the middle of that century there was a great tariff experiment on their own lines. It was a scientific tariff of the modern kind and contained colonial preference, and it was the failure of that tariff that completed the full conversion of Peel and Gladstone to free trade. A Committee of the House of Commons which sat in 1840 and was presided over by Joseph Hume recommended a scientific tariff, which was adopted by Sir Robert Peel in 1842. The principles of that tariff were the reduction of duties on raw material, which in no case were to exceed 5 per cent., of duties on partially manufactured articles to a point not to exceed 12 per cent., of duties on manufactured articles to a point not to exceed 20 per cent., and it also contained the principle of preferential reductions of the duties on colonial products. That was the tariff advocated to-day by tariff reformers. It proved a failure, and it was its failure that converted Peel and Gladstone to free trade. In the course of his study of the economic history of that period he was very anxious to purchase a copy of the Report of the Hume Commission, but failed until he came across a second-hand copy, which he found had been in the possession of
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the late Sir Stafford Northcote, and had voluminous notes upon it in that statesman's own handwriting. Those notes showed that the late Sir Stafford Northcote had no belief in small duties, and one calculation he made was to the effect that in the two years following the tariff of 1842 the produce of the tariff on 17 articles was £21,417,000, whilst the total revenue was £22,710,000, so that 95 per cent. of the whole revenue of the country was collected from 17 articles which were subject to tariff. That illustrated what he had said that there were only 46 articles in the tariff which yielded revenue worth collecting while 822 articles produced nothing. They knew what the state of the country was in what were known as the "hungry forties." The whole system of small tare; had been changed since then. The only people who paid taxes on imported goods were the taxpayers who lived in the country where the taxes were imposed. What he would like to know was whether tariff reformers and the Party opposite advocated the institution of a general tariff or not. "General tariff" was a term which had a very definite meaning in diplomacy and finance. It meant a tariff in which taxation was the rule, and freedom from taxation by the construction of a "free list" the exception. It meant a tariff that could be expanded into a penal tariff or reduced into a preferential tariff. He thought they had a right to ask the advocates of tariff reform whether they desired a general tariff in this country. Hon. Gentlemen opposite had spoken with two voices, and it was very hard to reconcile them. Speaking in the Albert Hall on 8th July, 1905, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham, dealing with the subject of small taxes and a general tariff, said—
"Retaliation is an excellent text; so is Mesopotamia.… It is no use for a man to go down into the country and to propose to be an advocate of preference for the colonies, and at the same time to boast that he is unwilling to pay the price. We want the big revolver when we meet the men who are armed at all points. [Cheers, and "Well-loaded, sir."] I agree with the interruption. That is the whole point of my argument. What is the use of a revolver which is not loaded? We will load our revolver with a general tariff.… The revolver is not given to us as a toy—it is meant for use, that its charge—this general tariff of which I speak—may be turned

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at a moment into a penal tariff. What is the good, for us, in our case at any rate, for us who are not politicians, to conceal what we mean?"
The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition, speaking in the Merchant Taylors' Hall on 12th February, 1906, said—
"When I am told by another section of my friends that a small duty on corn is an absolute necessity and you can do nothing without it, I say why lay that down as a proposition? Are you sure it is a necessity? Are you sure that when the question has practically to be dealt with it will be dealt with by machinery? In the same way with a general tariff, do you mean that it is impossible to carry out what is called retaliation unless a general tariff is part of that scheme? I refuse, for my part, to make that limitation as I have refused to make the other limitation."
In view of these statements, they had a right to ask what was the policy of the Party opposite. It they came into power, did they mean to impose a general tariff? He did not think the Leader of the Opposition could complain if the country universally interpreted his vote to-night, it he voted against the Resolution, as a vote for a general tariff.
Motion made, and Question proposed, "That, in the opinion of this House, any attempt to broaden the basis of taxation by placing small import duties on a large number of articles is opposed to all principles of sound finance, wasteful and uneconomical as regards collection, disturbing and harmful to industry and commerce, would tend to raise the price of all taxed articles to consumers, and, in practice, would lead to the imposition of high tariffs of the same character as those in force in protected countries."—(Mr. Mond.)
*MR. HILLSsaid the mover of the Resolution had covered a very wide field. He could not pretend to soar to the heights which the hon. Member had reached. The hon. Member had stated that those on his side of the House had great minds, while their opponents had small minds. He was quite content to look at this question from the point of view of the national interest and to see how far it affected the country at this particular time. He agreed that persons were taxed,
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not things; but that only half stated the case. The object of extending taxation over a large number of articles was to tax the person according to his ability to pay. He would give a concrete case. He supposed that the hon. Member for Chester smoked cigars sometimes or he might have a motor car. If these things were taxed, he was taxed according to his means and substance, or, in other words, according to his expenditure. But if all the revenue of the country were raised by indirect taxation, it would be a far less fair means of making the individual pay according to his ability to pay, than a tariff would be. [MINISTERIAL cries of "No."] The second point was this. At present they taxed a large number of articles. The things taxed, however, were the very last that would be taxed, if they taxed people according to ability to pay. Take sugar, the sugar tax was practically a poll tax. It was said that if we had a general tariff the sum obtained would be so small and the cost of collection so great that in the end we should be no better off. The proposal of a revenue duty on manufactures was not a blind 10 per cent. all round. It was a 10 per cent. net revenue. If the hon. Member asked on what standard it was proposed to fix the amount of the duty, he would refer him to every scientific tariff the world had ever known. Did the hon. Member not know that in the German tariff, for example, the gradation of taxes depended on the labour involved in the production of the article? According as an article was produced by the employment of much or little labour, so the tax was increased or lessened. Instead of the 5 per cent. or 10 per cent. on manufactures being a blind duty all round, it was a 5 or 10 per cent. net revenue. After all, the amount taken at customs was only one part of the revenue produced by taxation. He held that the effect of any taxation of this sort was to a certain extent protective; but in so far as it was protective it must have some effect on the industries of this country. All the internal taxes were in some sort taxes on production. The income tax was certainly, correctly speaking,

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was a tax on production. If production was simulated the taxable capacity of the country was stimulated, and therefore there was a large increase in the standard or staple taxes. When the mover of the Resolution got up and reduced his sum to four or five millions, he ought to look further a field to see whether there were not certain things which he had not considered. Ever, at the Custom House the returns would be much greater than he made out, and if there were added the increase of the taxable capacity of the country, it would be found a very great deal. He was entirely at one with the mover of the Resolution as to the difficulties of any proposed new system. In his own opinion the present system of taxation had gone mad on simplicity. [Ironical MINISTERIAL laughter.] Yes, gone mad on simplicity, and for this reason; that they had gone entirely for ease of collection. All they had thought of was what the Chancellor of the Exchequer could get in most easily in the way of taxation. They had gone in for Mr. Gladstone's principle of a few taxes on articles of general consumption. He maintained at once that that was the worst standard that could be had. It simply meant that the poor paid an excessive amount of that taxation. It seemed simple to collect, but from the point of view of the poor taxpayer it was demonstrably wrong. Although the scheduled manufactured articles in the German tariff occupied 70 pages, and although it looked a very formidable list yet it presesd much less hardly upon the German taxpayer than the sugar duty did here. To say that it would be difficult to introduce a new system was a pure confession of weakness. If the thing was right, it ought to be their duty to do it. For seven years a Committee of experts had sat on the German tariff, the whole trade of Germany for the last twenty years had been examined, and 2,000 witnesses had given evidence. The result of that labour might or might not be accepted by hon. Gentlemen opposite, but it was absurd to say that it was wasted time. All the free trade party seemed to think that it was not the business of the country to consider what industries were carried on in the country.

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They seemed to think that the interest of the individual was always the same as the interest of the State. They knew that the manufacturer looked quite rightly to get his profit, and yet they seemed to think that by doing so he must conserve the interests of the State. But he maintained that the State had a great interest in the industries of the country apart from the interest of the individual producer. It had a perfect right to say that certain industries were good for, or were necessary for, the community. All the arguments about the selfish nature of protection were rather small; it was not as if they argued for tariff protection only for the sake of the producer of manufactured articles. He might be entirely wrong, but did they suppose that people like those who had gone into this movement of tariff reform were mainly concerned for the themselves and that they took all this time and trouble for the mere protection of their own interest? Surely not. The State was directly interested in the amount of production turned out by the manufacturing industries; but according to free trade doctrine that did not matter to the State. He contended that the interest of the individual was at nearly all points in conflict with the interests of the State, and that it was the duty of the State to interfere and regulate production, and it could only do that by means of taxes. Gentlemen on the other side of the House talked about giant industries held down by the unseen bonds of thousands of taxes. He disagreed with that entirely. The only way in which the State could interfere with and help industry was by means of taxes. [MINISTERIAL cries of "Oh, oh!"] What other ways were there? If they gave up that means they surrendered all control over the industries of the country, and that was a counsel of despair. It meant saying that they simply meant to let people do what they liked, and that those who represented the whole community were to do nothing at all. He took his stand on quite different grounds. He held that by taxes they could raise revenue and also do a great deal for the productive power of the country. The mover of the Resolution had told the House a great deal about the evils which existed in

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protective countries, about the people eating horse-flesh and black bread and all that sort of thing. He suspected that the hon. Gentleman was not quite serious in that part of his argument. He would ask the hon. Gentleman to look for a minute and see how the protective system really worked in Germany. The hon. Gentleman spoke of Germany in the happy days of free trade. Happy days of free trade—when Germans were leaving the country at the rate of 200,000 a year! When they came to look at any industrial system they must look at it from the point of view of what it had done. Hon. Members opposite defended their system, but any system broke down which did not employ the people of the country, and surely they who advocated a change had something to say for themselves. What was happening now in Germany? She was absorbing into her industrial life double the number of people we were. They ought not to speak of unemployed and of the percentages of people who were out of work. They ought to look at those who were employed rather than at those who were not. They never said how many people this country absorbed into its system year by year; and on that ground all the figures quoted by hon. Gentlemen opposite were beside the question. The President of the Board of Trade had told them a few days ago about the amount of unemployment in the United States. The answer to that was, that in the last ten years the United States had absorbed 15,000,000 people, for whom they had, more or less, found work. Of course, it might be said that the United States was a new and undeveloped country, and not a fair test to take; but let them look at Germany, where they had absorbed 4,000,000 people, and their system had suited their country so much better than our system that they had added double the number to their population that we did. It might be said that emigration was a remedy for unemployment. It was not a remedy; it might have been so in the old days when we sent men across the seas as consumers who bought our goods. But now we sent producers who competed with us. The more people we could absorb into our system the better for us. We were only
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on the threshold of a new day, when the number of people would be increased to an incredibly greater extent than now, and when they would find employment through the enormous extension of machinery and of our productive power. If an industry was started, population and capital flowed in, and if we started industries here, people would not leave us, and this drain which we had every year would not take place. The hon. Member who moved the Resolution talked about protectionist interests. He quite admitted that all fiscal systems must help somebody—certain interests were suited by certain systems. Free trade suited certain interests. But what they had to look at was not the interests of this body of men or of that industry, but the interests of the country as a whole. Did the Party opposite mean to defend their system as perfect? Did they mean to go on year after year, with all these people out of employment, and suggest no remedy at all? Everything they suggested was merely a palliative, and when they on that side tried to find a remedy, hon. Gentlemen opposite said they were selfish, simple-minded, and stupid protectionists. But they did not answer the question that was before them now. Their speeches might be made anywhere; they were perfectly out of place there. It was the existing condition of things they had to meet, and the Party opposite made no sort of attempt to meet them. If they did not, he could assure them that they on that side of the House would get their chance.
*MR. HAROLD COXsaid he had listened with so much pleasure to the speech which they had just heard that he would try and answer a few of the points which the hon. Member made. He began by using what appeared to be a very fair argument, that there was theoretically a case for a multitude of duties, because by that means they would spread the burden of taxation over a multitude of people, and would make people pay according to their means. He thought, however, the hon. Member overlooked the fact that they were by no means more sure where the burden was going to fall than they were at present. He had also overlooked the much

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more serious consideration, that if they were going to get a large revenue that way they must tax the things that the mass of the people used. They could not get a large revenue by taxing the things which the wealthy people used, though by doing so they might get a little but not much. He quite agreed with what the hon. Member said about the sugar and tea taxes. He was opposed to those taxes, but he would point out that if the hon. Member wanted scientifically to make taxes rest on those people who could best bear the burden, then the only scientific tax was the income-tax. He, personally, was in favour of extending the income-tax downwards so that every man should pay an income-tax, however small it might be, and make some direct contribution to the great club to which they all belonged, and so that he might know the amount of the contribution he was making. The reason they did not extend the income-tax downwards was the trouble of collection, but he believed the tremendous moral and political value they would gain would fully justify the extra cost involved in the extra trouble of collecting. The hon. Gentleman had also told them that the German scientific tariff was based on the theory of putting extra duties on those things that contained a larger amount of labour. On that theory he presumed the hon. Gentleman would put a larger duty on cloth than he would on yarn. Would that be an ad ralorem duty?
*MR. HILLSsaid not necessarily. It was not always the same thing. The labour value of each product would have to be found and the labour value taken into consideration in the tax.
*MR. HAROLD COX: But how? By weight or by value? With staple articles of manufacture, ultimately the 'question came down to one of money value.
*MR. HILLS: Not money value, labour value.
*MR. HAROLD COXsaid the point he wished to make was that the amount of labour on £100 of yarn was the same as on £100 of cloth. If the hon. Member
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doubted that he would ask him the old question of their childhood—Which was the heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead.
MR. CARLILEsaid in transferring yarn into woollen cloth they added to the amount of labour.
*MR. HAROLD COXthought with all respect he had already got as far as that. His point was that £100 of yarn contained a greater weight of yarn than would be made up into £100 of cloth. If they took £100 worth of each they would find the same labour in the lump. It must be so.
*MR. HILLS: In £100 worth of yarn there is a certain amount of wool and a certain amount of labour. In £100 worth of cloth there was a smaller amount of wool and a larger amount of labour.
*MR. HAROLD COXsaid that the wool represented labour. The hon. Member for Durham was suffering from a difficulty which all tariff reformers had felt—the difficulty of discriminating between raw material and manufactured articles. He challenged anyone to say whether leather was a raw material or a manufactured article. Let them take the case of oil, which was raw material in the manufacture of linoleum, but oil was also a manufactured article. A Scottish manufacturer of lineolum had told him that he was so troubled by the French tariff that he thought of transferring his factory to France. He had gone so far as to select a site, when it occurred to him to ask at what price he could get his raw materials in France. He then discovered that the French duties were so heavy that it paid better to continue the manufacture in Scotland. The hon. Member said that he was in favour of the principle of regulating the industries of the country for the good of the country. But it was impossible to give an advantage to particular industries by means of a tariff, unless that tariff enabled the manufacturer to obtain higher prices than he could without a tariff. By encouraging some industries we must consequently depress others.
*MR. HILLS: The thing that interests the producer is not the price, but the profit. A larger sale means a larger profit; and, therefore, an extended market may give a larger profit without raising the price.
*MR. HAROLD COXsaid that any producer could get a larger sale by selling more cheaply. What the producer wanted was a price above what he would get if there were no duty, and that must be paid by the rest of the community, and thus fall on other industries. It should be asked what industries hon. Members proposed to benefit and what they proposed to injure. No hon. Member opposite had said what industries they proposed to benefit, although when they went into particular districts of the country they advocated a protective tax for the benefit of the industries of those districts, as, for example, cement and hops. But as a national policy they had not declared that for the national interest such and such industries should be extended. It was impossible for them to do this, because, while the agricultural industries would be benefited by taxing agricultural imports, the manufacturing industries would be injured by the same duties. Hon. Members could not benefit all the industries of the country at the same time, and they had never said what was the industry from the national point of view they wished to benefit. Reference had been made to the growth of daffodils in the Scilly Isles. But why was it an objectionable industry to grow daffodils? They gave a great deal of pleasure to humanity, and if we could produce daffodils here at a greater advantage than we could produce corn, why should we not produce them? What national advantage was there in producing corn when we could produce daffodils more profitably? If the object of hon. Members was to increase the amount of labour on the land it was better to grow things like fruit and daffodils than corn, because corn growing was a machine industry, meaning that fewer people would be employed on the land. Did the hon. Member realise that the effect of his plan was not to encourage people to improve their methods of production, but to discourage them in taking pains? He would give a practical illustration of this. A
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maker of damask table cloths for the market in the United States had an offer of particularly fine linen yarn from Belgium. He wrote to the Irish spinners by whom he was usually supplied stating that he had this Belgium offer at a lower price. The Irishmen protested against the conduct of the foreigner, but some of them went to Belgium and discovered that the success of the Belgians was due to a new machine made in England. They erected this machine in their own works, and now they supplied the yarn at a lower price than that at which the Belgians could supply it. The hon. Member in his test of employment omitted the case of Lancashire, which lived on an export industry. The whole of Lancashire was dependent upon an industry which imported its raw material from the ends of the earth, and sent out manufactured goods to the ends of the earth. What duty could hon. Members put on which would benefit the industry of Lancashire? There was not a single duty which could possibly bring any advantage to the Lancashire industry, representing, as it did, one-fourth of our total exports. On the other hand, there was scarcely a duty which could be put on which would not injure that industry. The effect of all these schemes of fiscal reform was to subsidise particular industries at the expense, of the whole community. Free trade, also, might be looked upon from a selfish point of view, but there was this great difference, that the free-trader was the man who sought to get his materials cheap, and in making that request he was putting himself at one with the whole of his fellow-beings. The protectionist was always wanting to sell something dear, and in doing so he was setting himself against the whole of the rest of the community. In the one case the selfishness was social; in the other, anti-social. The difference between the protectionist and free-trader was that the free-trader sought something which would benefit himself and all his fellow men, the protectionist sought something which would benefit himself against his fellow-men. He ventured to suggest that those Gentlemen below the gangway who advocated socialism, and those above the gangway who advocated tariff reform, were advocating the same principle. Both were appealing to the

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State to subsidise somebody; both were trusting to what they could wheedle out of Parliament instead of trusting to their own energies and efforts. Those above the gangway wished to tax the food of those who sat below, and those below the gangway wished to tax the dividends and rents of those above. This difference of opinion naturally gave rise to some little ill-feeling. But give them time. The irresistible laws of logic and the exigencies of political campaigning would bring both groups into one camp, whence they would march forth shoulder to shoulder to plunder honest men.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: It is, I suppose, an inevitable law of these debates, in whatever narrow limits they appear to be fixed, to wander at large over the whole vast area of the fiscal controversy. I am not going to intervene in that part of the hon. Gentleman's dialogue which he had with my hon. friend the Member for Durham. It was highly instructive and entertaining. It had more resemblance to the modes of discussion of the sixteenth century than it had to the ordinary debates of this House, but I am not sure that it has any relevancy to the Motion we are now discussing. The Motion is strictly defined. It relates strictly to the question of whether we should or should not broaden the basis of taxation and increase the number of articles from the taxation of which the revenue of this country is obtained. Amusing as was the hon. Gentleman's speech, especially in its latter portion, in which he drew a parallel between the Party sitting below the gangway and those sitting on these benches, and spoke of us both as assaulting the citadel of which the hon. Gentleman himself has become almost the only defender, I do not see that there is any sign of any cooperation with him either in this or any other question. But the hon. Member did not profess to touch the subject of the Resolution, and if I turn from his speech and go back to the speeches of the mover and seconder, which did more or less touch on the issue before us, I suppose I have to regard the Motion they were defending as the lineal but rather degenerate successor of those private Members' Motions with which
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we were so familiar in the last Parliament, and from which hon. Gentlemen opposite derived so much gratification. That gratification, I suppose, is diminishing. I do not fancy they look forward to those Tuesday and Wednesday evenings devoted to fiscal reform with the same exhilarating sentiments of hope and expectation which formerly animated them. A good many causes may be suggested for that change of view, some of them purely electoral, to which I will not further refer—some of them purely electoral, others relating to the real economic basis of this controversy on which I think they are beginning to discover there is a good deal to be said which their economic philosophy has so far not dreamed of. There are a certain number of them, no doubt, who still with perfect self-contentment continue to repeat the old fallacies long ago given up by every competent economist. [MINISTERIAL Cries of "Name."] There is the hon. Gentleman who seconded the Motion, the Member for Gloucester. He announced as an axiom that the whole duty on all imported goods was necessarily and inevitably and always paid by the importing country.
*MR. RUSSELL REA: My opinions on that point have been published, and I did not express my view in that absolute manner.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: The hon. Gentleman said the people of the country which put on the indirect taxation were the people who paid it.
*MR. RUSSELL REA: There are other cases in which, of course, the incidence of the tax is divided.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I think if the hon. Gentleman looks at the report of his speech to-morrow he will see that he made the proposition in a far more unqualified form. Of course, I accept his statement. He does not go the length of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who lays it down as an economic proposition that not only do the taxpayers, of the country which puts on the tax pay all, but they probably pay more. If either the Chancellor of the Exchequer

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or the hon. Gentleman who seconded the Motion were to give any such answer at an examination in political economy in any of our Universities, he would undoubtedly be plucked. I was rather astonished to hear the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down, who has given a great deal of study to these questions and is as competent as any man in the House to deal with them, say that because Germany was twice as large in area as this country it was twice as easy to employ its population.
MR. HAROLD COX: I only said there was obviously room for more expansion of the population.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I think, if the hon. Gentleman reflects on the proposition, he will see that the power of any country to support a population depends hardly to any extent upon the area; it depends on the resources of the country. I mean on its capital and its power of organising industrially. These are elements which enable a country to support population, and to bring in a mere question of square miles as a solution of that problem is a method of dealing with economic problems which is not, I think, quite worthy of the knowledge and dexterity of the hon. Member for Preston. All the Gentlemen on that side of the House have, I think, so far followed their previous examples on similar occasions as to occupy most of their speeches in earnestly pressing us for details of any plan for carrying out fiscal reform. There was a period when that kind of appeal had a certain plausibility. I always thought it very irrational. I always took the view that it was only the Government that actually had to prepare the Budget and conduct the policy of the country which could be expected to deal with the details of the measures they put forward. I am aware that when they were in Opposition hon. Gentlemen took another view. They have become far tamer now that they are in office. If they will allow me to say so, they take a far more rational view of the situation. We wanted very much to know last night what they were going to lay before the Country upon another question—a question not less important than fiscal
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reform. Two Ministers spoke. They involved themselves in a cloud of words. Friends and foes left the House absolutely ignorant as to what the view of His Majesty's Government is in regard to Home Rule. I am not going to dwell upon that theme. At all events, it saves us in the future from that preposterous method which hon. Gentlemen have indulged in for four years, and which even after last night they have not yet got out of the habit of employing, of insisting that one Parliament should pronounce upon what the next Parliament is going to do. Hon. Gentlemen opposite choose to keep their own counsel as to what they are going to do when the next Parliament returns them, but it is very inconsistent with their own appeals and requests on previous occasions. The mover of the Motion, both in his speech and in the words of the proposition which he has laid before the House, says that any small duty upon imported goods, whatever it may be in the beginning, will lead inevitably to a policy of protection. All through my Parliamentary life I have belonged to a. Party which has watched with anxiety the beginning of things which, though very good, may develop into something which we think would be bad. I suppose that is the Conservative attitude of mind, and it may be pardonable in a Conservative politician. We have always been denounced by hon. Gentlemen opposite for that attitude. They have always said: "Treat the thing on its merits. Do not consider what is going to become of it when it is passed into law. Leave that to future Parliaments and to public opinion. Do what is right and best at the moment, and leave posterity to prevent any irrational, harmful developments of the good system which you establish." Let the hon. Gentlemen who moved and seconded the Motion follow that principle. Let them not disturb their dreams by the idea of a strange and extraordinary system of taxation in this country, which nobody, So far as I know, has ever recommended, and certainly does not follow rationally or logically from the broadening of the basis of taxation which I have consistently recommended both before and after the fiscal controversy arose. It is quite true the hon. Member who moved

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the Motion conjured up all sorts of terrors as to what would happen to our commerce if a small general duty were imposed upon foreign manufactured goods. He said trade would leave your ports—[MINISTERIAL cries of "So it would "]—and would go to the free ports of Bremen and Hamburg. I thought Bremen and Hamburg were situate in Germany, and that, in the opinion of the hon. Gentleman. Germany was the ideal of a country which had adopted protection.
MR. J. M. ROBERTSON: Hamburg is a free port,
MR. BALFOUR: Then a free port can exist in a country which is protected.
MR. MOND: I was asking which ports were you going to make free ports.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: That is not what the hon. Gentleman said in his speech. He slid in his speech that the result of adopting a small duty would be that our commerce would go to the ports of a country that had a big duty. The hon. Gentleman spent the greater part of his speech in dealing with the enormous cost of collection inevitable, as he supposed, to the imposition of small duties on manufactured goods. I am amazed at that view. In the first place, the hon. Gentleman is wrong in supposing that a duty which is in itself simple necessarily carries with it simplicity of treatment in the Customs House of the country. I suppose no duty could be more simple to impose than the sugar duty. Has the hon. Gentleman consulted the Blue-book issued by the Commissioners of Customs upon the sugar duty? He repeated from a very old Blue-book of 1840 the arguments against a complex tariff based upon the assumption that if you have a complex tariff very small duties are raised. If the hon. Member will look at page 68 of the Blue-book he will find that, as
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a result of our putting on the sugar duty, we have to examine and differentiate between an enormous number of separately imported articles. From one of these articles I observe that the net amount collected in the year was £4, from another article £79, from a third £24, from another £35, from another £90, and from another £1. Therefore it is clear that the simpler system of duties which now prevails in this country may be simple so far as the legislation in this House is concerned, but it is not simple so far as the tables show us in its working at the Customs House. But I believe that the apparent complication is in reality a very small argument against the sugar duty. The sugar duty may be good or bad, but the enormous number of articles which have to be enumerated as taxable under the sugar duty are taxed without any difficulty, and I believe that the drawbacks claimed by manufacturers when they export are repaid without any difficult and friction and without that enormous cost which the hon. Gentleman appeared to think was the inevitable result of such fiscal arrangements. I am told for example that Huntley and Palmer's, whose biscuits require a small amount of sugar for their manufacture, can therefore claim a drawback when they export their biscuits. At first sight we might expect there would be no transaction more complicated than giving back to the exporter the exact amount of drawback on the fractional amount of sugar contained on each biscuit in one of their boxes. But it can be done, and is done, without the smallest difficulty. It involves no expense and no trouble, and carries with it no fraud. I heard some gentleman express dissent. I do not believe what I have stated will be contradicted by anyone who has access to the officials of the Board of Customs, and it is a great illusion to suppose that a system which looked complicated on paper was necessarily under modern organisation a

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difficult system to carry out in practice. The mover of this Resolution talked about the enormous cost necessarily involved in the raising of taxation under a new system. Has he compared the cost of raising taxation in this country, with the cost in foreign countries? Is it so clear that the simpler system of this country carries with it necessarily and inevitably that cheapness of collection by which the hon. Member set so great a store? From his point of view there can be no worse system of taxation than that which now prevails in the United States. I am told if you take the whole taxation internal and external of that country, they raise their enormous revenue with a smaller percentage of cost to the taxpayer than we do here in this country under our system. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is aware of that. If the hon. Member was aware of that fact he might have taken the House into his confidence.
MR. MOND: I did state that the total cost of the Customs collection in the United States was 1 per cent. On the total imports, and if I took that basis the cost of collection on our imports would be £5,500,000. In America there is no income-tax and the internal revenue is absolutely irrelevant.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: The thing is not irrelevant at all. I believe it is true that the cost of collecting the Customs in America is slightly in excess of the cost of collecting the Customs in England—not a great deal, but fractionally in excess. But the total cost of collecting is less than in Great Britain, they do collect their enormous revenue for less cost than we do. I believe that is the fact, and at
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any rate nobody contradicts me. I turn to other matters. One would really suppose from the speeches of the mover and seconder of the Motion, and they are the only Gentlemen who have spoken to the question on that side of the House, that it is a preposterous, antiquated, and absurd method of raising national revenue to put a small tax on a large number of articles. Well, there are two large communities over whose policy this country has absolute control, India and Egypt, and both India and Egypt, as far as I know, raise their revenue by small duties upon imports. The hon. Gentleman talked as if it was an accepted axiom of every sound economist that you ought to pile your taxation on one or two articles, neglectful of all the collateral effects which that process may have, and that it is obviously and plainly on the face of it sound finance. It is not sound finance, it is not the finance we adopt in dealing with other countries, it is not the system which any other country has adopted. It is not the system of finance which theorists accept and it is not the system which practical men accept. When the hon. Gentleman talks as if it were axiomatic, there is a kind of insular arrogance about that, which is the more extraordinary when you reflect that the insular Government whose domestic policy he recommends, when they have to deal with Egypt and India, do not recommend the policy which he regards as clearly the only one which any reasonable man would for a moment think of adopting. Therefore, I think we may dismiss from our minds the pessimistic arguments which the hon. Gentlemen opposite have employed when they are looking forward to the time, I daresay not very distant, when there will be a great extension of the basis of

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taxation in this country. But there was one aspect of the question, in my opinion a more important aspect, on which nobody so far has touched at all, and that is the source from which you are going to get your revenue in the future if the needs of this country increase. I am astounded when hon. Gentlemen opposite talk of Mr. Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel and their predecessors as supporters of their view. What is their view? It is that the only scientific system of taxation which any rational man would adopt is the system of direct taxation—they would like to substitute the income-tax for indirect taxes. And the men who recommend that policy appeal to Mr. Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel as their masters in finance. They must know, even those who have taken the least trouble to acquaint themselves with the history of this topic, that the income-tax was adopted both by Sir Robert Peel and by Mr. Gladstone as a temporary expedient for reconstituting and remodelling the system of import duties in the country. They would have regarded with horror and indignation the hon. Members for Cheshire, Preston, and Gloucester. The hon. Member for Gloucester gave us a most amazing version of Peel's great Budget of 1842. I have always understood that that Budget was regarded as one of the greatest triumphs of a great financier. That is not the view of the hon. Member for Gloucester. The hon. Member says it was the failure of that Budget which converted Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone to free trade.
MR. J. M. ROBERTSON: It was the failure of the tariff of 1842.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: My point is that it has always been claimed by those who,
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from the point of view of hon. Gentlemen opposite, have surveyed with approving eyes the fiscal policy of this country for the past hundred years that the Budgets of 1842 and 1843 were great Budgets. Now we are told it was the failure of the Budgets that made Peel and Gladstone free traders. But that is by way of parenthesis. The argument with which I am concerned is that the great masters of finance in this country have never held the view which has been put forward to-night in all its nakedness by the mover of the Amendment and the hon. Member for Preston and, I think, the hon. Member for Gloucester. They would like to substitute direct taxation for indirect taxation over the whole area of national finance. Who contradicts that? The mover of the Resolution and the hon. Member for Preston would like to see direct instead of indirect taxation. That they say, is the only sound and scientific system of taxation. I say that that doctrine would have horrified Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, and it is a matter of common notoriety that not only did Mr. Gladstone object to the income-tax being made a permanent part of the fiscal system of the country but he appealed to the electorate in 1875—unsuccessfully indeed—to return him to power because the one positive plank of constructive policy in his programme was the abolition of the income-tax. Now, I understand, the Party who profess to have inherited Mr. Gladstone's system of finance regard the income-tax, not as an expedient for putting indirect taxation on a sound basis, but as a permanent and necessary part of the finances of the country; which, indeed, I am afraid we must regard it in view of the present state of national expenditure, as the only proper means by which revenue is to be raised. They

435
support that view by saying that it is the bounden duty of every Chancellor of the Exchequer to make the taxpayer feel the full weight of the burden he is imposing upon him. That is not a theory which has been invented to-night for the first time. I have always thought it the most absurd financial theory ever advanced by responsible persons. At all events, if I were Chancellor of the Exchequer, I should like to impose taxation in such a way that nobody would ever know they were paying any at all. If I were fortunate enough to attain that consummation I believe I should be the most popular Chancellor of the Exchequer that this country has ever produced. [An HON. MEMBER: What would you tax?] When you talk of the burden of taxation on individuals you ought to mean what the individuals suffer in paying taxation. If I could prevent individuals feeling it at all I should feel that I had taken away the whole of the burden, because it is what we feel in this matter, and any other doctrine to me seems purely speculative and devised for the purpose of compelling unwilling colleagues to give up expenditure which they may think necessary in their several departments. Let the House consider what the financial position of the country is, so far as we can guess it before the Chancellor of the Exchequer's statement. We have got 1s. on the income-tax, a very heavy duty on sugar, which hon. Gentlemen opposite are pledged to reduce, enormous taxation on tobacco and on tea, and you have got expenditure which is obviously going to rise and rise enormously in the next few years. If you count up your commitments in regard to the Army, Navy, and various branches of the civil service, quite irrespective of old-age pensions, a financial
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prospect is before you which might make any Chancellor of the Exchequer uncomfortable. You have beyond all that pledged yourselves to some beginning of old-age pensions which is admittedly only a beginning, and which, therefore, is going to carry with it new commitments of great extent falling not on this Budget but on future Budgets. It is impossible to meet these claims out of existing sources of taxation unless you raise the taxes either upon your imports, your income, or your death duties. It would be perfect madness to raise the taxes on any of those things. You would be seriously crippling industry; you would be inflicting a great injury on every class of the community, and I believe you will be driven whether you like it or not to widen the basis of your taxation. What is the use of the hon. Gentleman coming down to the House and getting his friends to vote in a great majority that they will not increase the burden of taxation when it is perfectly manifest to everybody that you will either increase your income-tax to a point which destroys it as an instrument to meet a case of public emergency, which promotes evasion, which will leave a feeling of hardship in the class specially affected, and will have all the ill effects of which every financier to whom you appeal laid the greatest stress in their Budgets, or increase the sugar duty, or the tea duty, or the death duties, which is a way of diminishing the capital assets of the country? It is madness to look to these sources for any considerable increase in your revenue, and if you do not look to those sources, the only sources you can look to are that increase of Customs duties which I advocate on financial grounds, and financial grounds alone, but which I frankly admit I should

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welcome, and doubly welcome, if they offered me, or any Government with which I am connected, a chance of making those arrangements with our Colonies to which I personally look forward as a great source of strength to the Empire. Putting that consideration altogether aside, as perhaps we ought to put it aside on a night when finance, and finance alone, is occupying our attention—quite apart from that, such arrangements will most unquestionably and on free trade grounds increase the manufacturing powers of this country, its market beyond the seas outside these narrow shores to a degree great now, yearly increasing, and of which no man can see the end. Sir, it is in the power of hon. Gentlemen opposite, if they retain the confidence of the country, to prevent any of these collateral consequences of broadening the basis of taxation; but I believe it is neither in their power nor in the power of any Government of this country, in view of the enormous financial responsibilities we have already begun, which are daily growing, whatever their view may be of our relations with the Colonies, to adhere to that system, fitted, indeed, and well fitted to our needs two or three generations ago, at a time when we considered the income-tax as a temporary incident of our fiscal system, but utterly unfitted to a period when more and more is daily being claimed by the community of the Government at its head, and when more and more is daily asked from this House to carry on those great social reforms to which every party is committed, which every party desires to carry through, but which nobody with the smallest knowledge of the practicabilities open to us can imagine can be carried
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through on the financial basis on which we are now working.
THE FINANCIAL SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY (Mr. RUNCIMAN,): I do not complain for one moment of the fact that I have only six minutes in which to address the House on so large a subject, for it is seldom that we have the pleasure of hearing the right hon. Gentleman make a speech so momentous, so full of commitments, as we have heard to-night. I gather that the right hon. Gentleman has committed himself to a general tariff.
MR. A. J. BALFOUR: I certainly have committed myself to a very wide increase in the basis of taxation, but that is all. [MINISTERIAL cries of "Oh."]
MR. RUNCIMAN: The right hon. Gentleman then has committed himself to a very wide increase in the basis of taxation. That, however, is another way of transposing or paraphrasing the phrase "a general tariff." He has committed himself also to the principle of taxation which is based upon colonial preference. I think I might add that not one single Member of the Party opposite, so far as I can gather, views this plunge with any disapproval, and the right hon. Gentleman does not contradict what I say. ["Oh, oh."] I am sure no one knows better than the right hon. Gentleman himself to what he has committed himself. He has committed himself, through Colonial preference, to food taxes; and when the right hon. Gentleman commits himself to Colonial preference, which involves food taxes, and when he says he wishes to widen the basis of taxation, he means

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he wishes to have taxes on more articles of food, and not on less. I notice that the right hon. Gentleman, in the course of his speech, made some reference to the fact that he had in times past watched with anxiety the introduction of the thin end of the wedge. Well, on this question he watched with similar anxiety the introduction of the thin end of the wedge, but he has himself now gone as far as any front bencher whom I see opposite, and I need hardly say that we on this side of the House view that final step of his with the utmost satisfaction. We know now exactly where we are. [Cries of "Peckham."] Well, I turn in the few moments left to me to one or two considerations dealing with the Exchequer, for let the House remember that this Motion really is an Exchequer Motion. It deals with the principles of sound finance. In the very forefront of the Resolution is the statement that any departure from our free-trade finance would be unsound. I venture to say that if the right hon. Gentleman ever introduces a tariff, if he ever extends the basis of taxation, which he is now pledged to do, he will find, first of all, that his tariff becomes unproductive, secondly, that it becomes costly to the Exchequer, and, thirdly, that it becomes immensely costly to the consumer; and—what is more than that—he will find that he has tied his hands, and that in future he will not be free to frame any tariff that he thinks fit. If we only had a tax for one year it would immediately create a vested interest. If we had it for five
years or ten years you would find that the whole machinery of a great industry was used in every election all over the country—in every constituency, in every town, and in every village—in order to bolster up that particular trade or industry. I will ask the House to compare what has happened in England with what has happened in Germany. During the last two years, while we have been in power, we have adhered strictly to free trade. ["Oh, oh."] Our free-trade finance has proved sufficient for all the needs of our time, and when the right hon. Gentleman asks how are we going to deal with the future, I can assure him that so far as our projects for the future are concerned, we will finance them without any departure from free trade. In Germany during that very period they have seen their revenue from indirect taxation go down, and they have ended in the last year with a deficit of £6,000,000, they have absolutely suspended the redemption of debt, and they have had to follow the example of our predecessors in office, and to pay a pretty good deal of current expenditure out of loan money. If we compare that with the experience of the United Kingdom during the last two years, I think we have reason to say that free-trade finance has stood the strain which has been placed upon it, and that we have no reason whatever for departing from our principles.
Question put.
The House divided:—Ayes, 280; Noes. 91. (Division List No. 62.)

AYES.

Abraham, William (Cork, N.E.)

Alden, Percy

Armitage, R.

Abraham, William (Rhondda)

Allen, A. Acland (Christchurch)

Astbury, John Meir

Adkins, W. Ryland D.

Allen, Charles P. (Stroud)

Baker, Sir John (Portsmouth)

Baker, Joseph A. (Finsbury, E.

Flavin, Michael Joseph

Mac Veagh, Jeremiah (Down, S.

Balfour, Robert (Lanark)

Fuller, John Michael F.

MacVeigh, Charles (Donegal, E.)

Baring, Godfrey (Isle of Wight)

Fullerton, Hugh

M'Callum, John M.

Barker, John

Gibb, James (Harrow)

M'Crae, George.

Barlow, Percy (Bedford)

Gill, A. H.

M'Killop, W.

Barnard, E. B.

Gladstone, Rt. Hn Herbert John

M'Laren, Sir C. B. (Leicester)

Barnes, G. N.

Glen-Coats, Sir T. (Renfrew, W.)

M'Micking, Major G.

Barry, Redmond J. (Tyrone, N.)

Glover, Thomas

Maddison, Frederick

Beale, W. P.

Gooch, George Peabody (Bath)

Mallet, Charles E.

Beauchamp, E.

Greenwood, G. (Peterborough)

Manfield, Harry (Northants)

Beck, A. Cecil

Grey, Rt. Hon. Sir Edward

Marks, G. Croydon (Launceston)

Bell, Richard

Griffith, Ellis J.

Marnham, F. J.

Benn, Sir J. Williams (Devonp'rt

Gilliland, John W.

Mason, A. E. W. (Coventry)

Benn, W. (T'w'r Hamlets, S. Geo.

Gurdon, Rt Hon Sir W. Brampton

Massie, J.

Bennett, E. N.

Haldane, Rt. Hon. Richard B.

Menzies, Walter

Black, Arthur W.

Hall, Frederick

Micklem, Nathaniel

Boulton, A. C. F.

Harcourt, Rt. Hon. Lewis

Mond, A.

Bowerman, C. W.

Hardy, George A. (Suffolk)

Money, L. G. Chiozza

Brace, William

Harmsworth, Cecil B. (Worc'r)

Montagu, E. S.

Bramsdon, T. A.

Harmsworth, R. L (caithn'ss-sh

Mooney, J. J.

Branch, James

Harvey, W. E. (Derbyshire, N. E.

Morgan, G. Hay (Cornwall)

Bright, J. A.

Haslam, James (Derbyshire)

Morrell, Philip

Brocklehurst, W. B.

Haslam, Lewis (Monmouth)

Morse, L. L.

Bryce, J. Annan

Haworth, Arthur A.

Morton, Alpheus Cleophas

Buckmaster, Stanley O.

Hazel, Dr. A. E.

Muldoon, John

Burt, Rt. Hon. Thomas

Healy, Timothy Michael

Murnaghan, George

Byles, William Pollard

Hedges, A. Paget

Murphy, John (Kerry, East)

Cameron, Robert

Hemmerde, Edward George

Myer, Horatio

Carr-Gomm, H. W.

Henderson, Arthur (Durham)

Nannetti, Joseph P.

Causton, Rt Hn. Richard Knight

Henderson, J. M. (Aberdeen, W.)

Napier, T. B.

Cawley, Sir Frederick

Henry, Charles S.

Newnes, F. (Notts, Bassetlaw)

Chance, Frederick William

Higham, John Sharp

Newnes, Sir George (Swansea)

Channing, Sir Francis Allston

Hodge, John

Nolan, Joseph

Cherry, Rt. Hon. R. R.

Hogan, Michael

Norman, Sir Henry

Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston S.

Holland, Sir William Henry

Norton, Capt. Cecil William

Cleland, J. W.

Holt, Richard Durning

Nussey, Thomas Willans

Clough, William

Hope, W. Bateman (Somerset, N

O'Connor, T. P. (Liverpool)

Clynes, J. R.

Horniman, Emslie John

O'Grady, J.

Cobbold, Felix Thornley

Hudson, Walter

Parker, James (Halifax)

Collins, Stephen (Lambeth)

Hutton, Alfred Eddison

Partington, Oswald

Collins, Sir Wm. J. (S. Pancras, W

Hyde, Clarendon

Pearson. W.H.M. (Suffolk, Eye

Corbett, C H (Sussex, E. Grinst'd

Illingworth, Percy H.

Pease, J. A. (Saffron Walden)

Cory, Sir Clifford John

Isaacs, Rufus Daniel

Phillips, John (Longford, S.)

Cotton, Sir H. J. S.

Johnson, John (Gateshead)

Pollard, Dr.

Cowan, W. H.

Johnson, W. (Nuneaton)

Price, C. E. (Edinb'gh, Central)

Cox, Harold

Jones, Leif (Appleby)

Priestley, W.E.B. (Bradford, E.)

Cremer, Sir William Randal

Jowett, F. W.

Radford, G. H.

Crooks, William

Joyce, Michael

Raphael, Herbert H.

Crosfield, A. H.

Kekewich, Sir George

Rea, Russell (Gloucester)

Crossley, William J.

Kelley, George D.

Rea, Walter Russell (Scarboro'

Dalziel, James Henry

Kilbride, Denis

Rees, J. D.

Davies, Ellis William (Eifion)

King, Alfred John (Knutsford)

Rendall, Athelstan

Davies, Timothy (Fulham)

Laidlaw, Robert

Richards, Thomas (W. Monm'th

Davies, W. Howell (Bristol, S.)

Lamb, Edmund G. (Leominster

Richards, T.F. (Wolverh'mpt'n

Dickinson, W.H. (St. Pancras, N

Lambert, George

Richardson, A.

Dillon, John

Lamont, Norman

Ridsdale, E. A.

Duckworth, James

Layland-Barratt, Francis

Roberts, Charles H. (Lincoln)

Duffy, William J.

Leese, Sir Joseph F. (Accrington

Roberts, G. H. (Norwich)

Duncan, C. (Barrow-in-Furness

Lehmann, R. C.

Roberts, John H. (Denbighs.)

Duncan, J. H. (York, Otley)

Lever, A. Levy (Essex, Harwich

Robertson, Sir G. Scott (Bradf'rd

Dunne, Major E. Martin (Walsall

Lever, W. H. (Cheshire, Wirral)

Robertson, J. M. (Tyneside)

Edwards, Clement (Denbigh)

Levy, Sir Maurice

Robinson, S.

Edwards, Sir Francis (Radnor)

Lloyd-George, Rt. Hon. David

Roche, John (Galway, East)

Elibank, Master of

Lough, Thomas

Roe, Sir Thomas

Essex, R. W.

Lupton, Arnold

Rogers, F. E. Newman

Esslemont, George Birnie

Lyell, Charles Henry

Rowlands, J.

Everett, R. Lacey

Macdonald, J. R. (Leicester)

Runciman, Walter

Fenwick, Charles

Macdonald, J. M. (Falkirk B'ghs

Russell, T. W.

Ferens, T. R.

Mackarness, Frederic C.

Samuel, Herbert L. (Cleveland)

Ffrench, Peter

Maclean, Donald

Samuel, S. M. (Whitechapel)

Fiennes, Hon. Eustace

Macnamara, Dr. Thomas J.

Schwann, Sir C E. (Manchester)

Findlay, Alexander

MacNeill, John Gordon Swift

Scott, A.H. (Ashton under Lyne

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443

Sears, J. E.

Tennant, H. J. (Berwickshire)

White, Sir George (Norfolk)

Seaverns, J. H.

Thomas, Sir A. (Glamorgan, E.

White J. D. (Dumbartonshire)

Seddon, J.

Thomas, David Alfred (Merthyr)

White, Luke (York, E. R.)

Seely, Colonel

Thomasson, Franklin

Whitley, John Henry (Halifax)

Shackleton, David James

Tomkinson, James

Wiles, Thomas

Shaw, Rt. Hon. T. (Hawick B.)

Toulmin, George

Wilkie, Alexander

Shipman, Dr. John G.

Trevelyan, Charles Philips

Williams, Llewelyn (Carmarth'n

Silcock, Thomas Ball

Verney, F. W.

Wills, Arthur Walters

Simon, John Allsebrook

Villiers, Ernest Amherst

Wison, J. H. (Middlesbrough)

Smyth, Thomas F. (Leitrim, S.)

Wadsworth, J.

Wilson, J.W. (Worcestersh. N.)

Soares, Ernest J.

Waldron, Laurence Ambrose

Wilson, P. W. (St. Pancras, S.)

Spicer, Sir Albert

Walsh, Stephen

Wilson, W. T. (Westhoughton

Stanley, Hn. A. Lyulph (Chesh.)

Walters, John Tudor

Winfrey, R.

Stewart-Smith, D. (Kendal)

Ward, W. Dudley (Southampt'n

Wood, T. M'Kinnon

Straus, B. S. (Mile End)

Wardle, George J.

Yoxall, James Henry

Strauss. E. A. (Abingdon)

Waring, Walter

Stuart, James (Sunderland)

Wason, Rt. Hn. E (Clackmannan

TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Mr.

Summerbell, T.

Waterlow, D. S.

Whiteley and Mr. Herbert

Taylor, John W. (Durham)

Watt, Henry A.

Lewis.

Taylor, Theodore C. (Radcliffe)

Wedgwood, Josiah C.

NOES.

Anson, Sir William Reynell

Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers-

Mason, James F. (Windsor)

Anstruther-Gray, Major

Du Cros, Arthur Philip

Meysey-Thompson. E. C.

Arkwright, John Stanhope

Faber, George Denison (York)

Moore, William

Aubrey-Fletcher, Rt. Hn. Sir H.

Faber, Capt. W. V. (Hants, W.

Morpeth, Viscount

Balcarres, Lord

Fardell, Sir T. George

Muntz, Sir Philip A.

Baldwin, Stanley

Fell, Arthur

Nicholson. Wm. G. (Petersfield)

Balfour, Rt Hn. A. J. (CityLond.)

Fetherstonhaugh, Godfrey

Nield, Herbert.

Banbury, Sir Frederick George

Fletcher, J. S.

Parkes, Ebenezer

Banner, John S. Harmood-

Gretton, John

Pease, Herbert Pike (Darlington

Baring, Capt. Hn. G (Winchester

Guinness, Walter Edward

Percy, Earl

Barrie, H. T. (Londonderry, N.)

Haddock, George B.

Randles, Sir John Scurrah

Bignold, Sir Arthur

Hamilton, Marquess of

Rawlinson, John Frederick Peel

Bridgeman, W. Clive

Hardy, Laurence (Kent, Ashf'rd

Remnant, James Farquharson

Burdett-Coutts, W.

Harris, Frederick Leverton

Roberts, S. (Sheffield, Ecclesall)

Butcher, Samuel Henry

Harrison-Broadley, H. B.

Ronaldshay, Earl of

Campbell, Rt. Hon. J. H. M.

Hay, Hon. Claude George

Rutherford. W. W. (Liverpool)

Carlile, E. Hildred

Helmsley, Viscount

Salter, Arthur Clavell

Cave, George

Hill, Sir Clement

Sassoon, Sir Edward Albert

Cecil, Evelyn (Aston Manor)

Hills, J. W.

Sheffield, Sir Berkeley George D.

Cecil, Lord John P. Joicey-

Houston, Robert Paterson

Starkey, John R.

Chamberlain, Rt Hn. J.A (Wore.

Hunt, Rowland

Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester)

Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry

Kennaway, Rt. Hn. Sir John H.

Thomson, W. Mitchell- (Lanark)

Clark, George Smith

Keswick, William

Walker, Col. W.H. (Lancashire)

Clive, Percy Archer

Lane-Fox, G. R.

Warde, Col. C. E. (Kent, Mid)

Coates, E. Feetham (Lewisham)

Law, Andrew Bonar (Dulwich)

Willoughby de Eresby, Lord

Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E.

Lee, Arthur H. (Hants, Fareham

Winterton, Earl

Collings, Rt. Hn. J. (Birmingh'm

Lonsdale, John Brownlee

Wyndham, Rt. Hon. George

Corbett, T. L. (Down, North)

Lowe, Sir Francis William

Courthope, G. Loyd

Lyttelton, Rt. Hon. Alfred

TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Sir

Craig, Charles Curtis (Antrim, S.

MacCaw, William J. MacGeagh

Alexander Acland-Hood and

Craik, Sir Henry

M'Arthur, Charles

Mr. Forster.

Doughty, Sir George

M'Calmont, Colonel James

Resolved, That, in the opinion of this House, any attempt to broaden the basis of taxation by placing small import duties on a large number of articles is opposed to all principles of sound finance, wasteful and uneconomical as regards collection, disturbing and harmful to industry and commerce, would tend to
444
raise the price of all the taxed articles to consumers, and, in practice, would lead to the imposition of high tariffs of the same character as those in force in protected countries.
Adjourned at a Quarter after Eleven o'clock.