OFFICE OF WORKS AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS.—Class II.

HC Deb 15 April 1915 vol 71 cc73-146

Motion made, and Question proposed,

26. "That a sum, not exceeding £92,500, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1916, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Commissioners of His Majesty's Works and Public Buildings." [NOTE.—£67,000 has been voted on account.]

Mr. WILLIAM YOUNG

I beg to move "That Item A be reduced by £100."

His Majesty's Office of Works has within the last few months been brought into considerable prominence in connection with some of their transactions, more particularly the transaction which they carried out on behalf of the War Department which is generally known as the Meyer Timber-buying Contract. I am quite willing to admit that both the House and the country have heard a great deal about this extraordinary arrangement, but that has been due not to those of us who thought it our duty in the public interest to bring the matter before the House and direct public attention to it, but to the extraordinary and misleading manner in which the whole subject from the beginning was treated by the junior Ministers who replied on behalf of the Government. To say that they misled the House would be putting forward a very small-part of the charge which could be made, and I think justly made, and I maintain has been fully established. In my opinion it is a sufficiently serious charge to make against public officials and against the administration of one of the great public Departments of the Gov- ernment. My object in rising is to move a reduction in the salary of the First Commissioner of Works, who must be held mainly responsible for what has taken place as far as His Majesty's Office of Works is concerned in connection with this contract. I do not think it is necessary to assure the House that in moving this reduction I am not actuated by any personal motive whatsoever. I feel it my duty to speak frankly and even strongly, it may be, but the object of my attack will be the departmental system rather than individual administration, and if I do touch on the work of individuals I shall refer to them in their relation to a departmental organisation which, in my opinion, can only be described as at once archaic, unbusinesslike, extravagant, and I may add disgraceful from the point of view of the conduct of our national affairs. In case that description of the Office of Works may be thought to be in any way exaggerated, I shall read one quotation from a newspaper, and it is the only extract with which I shall trouble the House. The paper is the "Sanitary Record of Municipal Engineering," which was sent to me during the former Debates on this subject, but which I did not think it necessary to use at that time. Under date of February 26th last, referring to this very contract, this paper contains an article which goes on to state: That Department (His Majesty's Office of Works), one which is notoriously the worst administered of all Government departments, as we have had occasion to point out many times before, with a faculty for blundering which is almost unsurpassable, employed a timber merchant one, Mr. Meyer. and so on. The article ends up with the following: The whole of the circumstances leading up to this unsavoury transaction, and the part played in it by the Office of Works, is one which demands further investigation. Believing that we were acting in the public interests, those of us who brought this matter before the House did our best to investigate what this newspaper describes as an "unsavoury and unbusinesslike transaction." I do not believe that in all the records of this ancient House there exists a case where so little assistance in the public interest has been rendered to hon. Members of this House by Ministers and by the Department concerned. This is our conception of a public duty, and so long as this House and the country tolerate that sort of thing, so long shall we receive the cavalier treatment which we have received from the Ministers and officials in question. Neither I nor those who are good enough to associate themselves with me in this matter acquiesce, or propose to acquiesce, in the kind of treatment to which I have referred, no matter from what part of the House it may come. It is for that reason that we shall carry this Motion to a Division unless we get an assurance, if not a guarantee, from a responsible Minister—I do not think the hon. Member for Saffron Walden can have that description applied to him—that matters of this kind are to be treated with some kind of reasonable seriousness in the future. This is necessary both in the public interests and with deference to the dignity of this House. Recently there have been revealed a good many weak spots in the executive conscience of the Government, but none has been so flagrant as the administration of the Office of Works, which affords a striking example of the enervating and pernicious effects of the weakening of Parliamentary control over the executive. I have been informed that for some years past this Vote has always been treated with a certain amount of levity, and it has been looked upon as a sort of opportunity for displaying the volatile wit of rising politicians of which we have such shining examples on the Front Bench. The hon. Member for Saffron Walden, if he is going to reply to these criticisms, will, I feel sure, in the circumstances not be offended if I request him to depart from the traditional mode of replying to the criticisms of the Department, and regard this Motion as indeed a serious attempt to bring about a reform in the administration and organisation of His Majesty's Office of Works which has been far too long delayed.

5.0 P.M.

Whatever may be the cause of the laxity of Parliamentary control over the Office of Works, as well as other Departments, I suppose that hon. Members of this House are to a considerable extent to blame. There is no doubt that the laxity of hon. Members has been followed by a corresponding laxity in the administration of the particular Department with which we are now dealing. Before the adjournment of the House it was practically admitted, after a good deal of quibbling and shuffling, that the First Commissioner of Works, who presides over this Department, has had no cognisance whatsoever of the details of one of the most important contracts ever entered into by the Department over which he is supposed to preside. Apparently those who entered into this contract did not think it worth while to consult him, and he had nothing to say until the contract was irrevocably concluded. I think it was an insult to Parliament and to this House that the Parliamentary head of this Department should have been left in the dark regarding a contract involving the expenditure of a very large sum of public money, and the result was gravely aggravated by the impatience of Ministers in their replies to questions put by hon. Members of this House regarding a contract to which we were entitled to receive proper and straightforward replies. I say, frankly, that it would have been a gross piece of negligence on the part of Lord Emmott to have left the settlement of this important contract to the permanent official of the Office of Works concerned in the matter. Mr. Baines, as we have been told by the hon. Member for Somerset (Mr. King) is a competent architect, and with his qualifications as an architect I am not at all concerned, but when it comes to the carrying out of an arrangement for vast purchases of timber on behalf of the War Office, involving very large sums of public money, one may be pardoned for saying that Mr. Baines is the very last person in the world to whom this great business should have been entrusted. It would be useless for me as a business man to pose as an architect when I am not, and it seems to me equally ludicrous and inconsistent to pretend that Mr. Baines as an architect was the proper man at the Office of Works to be entrusted with the arrangement and the settlement of a huge and complicated contract of this kind. How it comes that Mr. Baines arranged, and, above all, signed this contract, seeing that His Majesty's Office of Works, even in the absence of Lord Emmott, is provided with an official secretary who is paid quite a large salary, and an official assistant secretary, also paid a very good salary, is one of the mysteries in connection with this very extraordinary transaction which I suppose we shall never be able to solve or to fathom

The details of the Meyer timber buying contract are already fairly known to the House and to the country. From the very beginning I contended, as I contend now, that the whole transaction was carried through on most unbusinesslike lines, and that the contract with Mr. Meyer ought to have been terminated long ago. The claim made by Ministers—I see it is again made, I believe by the First Commissioner—that the arrangement has saved the nation money, is neither more nor less than futile and preposterous. The Office of Works, as I contended from the first, have been paying a remuneration to Mr. Meyer 150 per cent. in excess of that for which any other equally capable timber buyer would have been prepared to do the work for the Government, and that without any corresponding advantage whatsoever to the nation or to the Government. Besides that, this preposterous arrangement with Mr. Meyer leaves him entirely free to continue his own business as a timber merchant, and to use the arrangement and the credit of the Government as a basis for speculation in his own business just as he may think fit to manipulate and to use it. I am not concerned now with blaming Mr. Meyer at all, but he must indeed be a very different person from that which I imagine him to be if he does not profit by the extraordinary contract which he, succeeded in arranging with the Office of Works.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract (Mr. Booth), with the zeal which characterises him, has issued a report as the result of his investigations at the Office of Works, and I venture to think that report will speak for itself. It is a comprehensive, and in my opinion an able document, which does him infinite credit, more especially when one knows, as I do, the disinterested spirit in which he has carried through these investigations with very great labour and loss of time to himself. I shall, of course, leave him to deal with and to emphasise the main points in that report, but I may say that I agree with him entirely and fully in the conclusions which he has reached in regard to this extraordinary transaction. I see that the First Commissioner of Works last night issued a reply to my hon. Friend's report, and he makes what appears to me to be the childish allegation that my hon. Friend has not approached the matter with a judicial mind or in a judicial manner. I never heard a more futile protest made against an inquiry of this nature. Surely the attitude that should be taken up in approaching a matter of this kind is not necessarily judicial, but the attitude which is generally taken by a business man when he undertakes to investigate business matters. Then, again, he makes a point of the statement that by employing Mr. Meyer the State actually became a direct importer of timber. It is common knowledge over the whole of the country that Mr. Meyer—this timber buyer—has placed the whole of the orders not direct, but practically with one firm in the City of London; in other words, he has made the purchases through the usual channels, and therefore in that respect there has been no saving of money whatsoever to the country. He further makes a point of the fact that in the contract there is the drastic provision that Mr. Meyer can be dispensed with at a moment's notice. I fancy Mr. Meyer knows very well that nothing of the kind is likely to occur. Besides, in such an arrangement where Mr. Meyer is allowed to carry on his own speculative, business, he has everything to gain and nothing to lose, even if the Government chose to cancel the contract tomorrow. I leave it, however, to my hon. Friend to deal with the main points in the reply which has been made by the Noble Lord.

There are one or two other points in connection with this matter to which I should like to direct the attention of the House. Possibly we may hear some objection, it may be from the Government Front Bench or from other parts of the House, to the discussion of a question of this kind at the present time on the ground that, after all, the Meyer timber-buying contract is but a very small matter in view of the gigantic expenditure which is being made in other directions by the Government. I have never been able to take that narrow and I think fallacious view of this question. I have endeavoured from the beginning to treat this matter not as the only case of bungling or mismanagement on the part of our public service, but simply as a typical case of the lack of business methods and business organisation in the spending Departments of the Government. If you entrust the management of a great purchasing business of the most complicated nature to an architect, however capable he may be in his own profession, is it reasonable to expect that the result will be otherwise, where the expenditure of the British taxpayers' money is concerned? I consider that the principle involved in the attack we have made on this contract—personally I am quite free to admit that to begin with, at any rate, it was mainly directed against the War Office for their responsibility in the matter, a responsibility which, by the way, has been admitted by them—lies at the root of factors vitally affecting, though perhaps it is hardly recognised by the Government, the great War in which we are engaged. After all, great business transactions of this kind involving not only millions of the nation's money, but hundreds of millions, instead of being passed on to men of business capacity and business experience, remain in the hands of officials whose previous training—I do not care whether they are civil or military officials—has absolutely failed to equip them, and could not possibly have been expected to equip them, for the unprecedented conditions which the country has been called upon to face in the great struggle through which we are passing.

When the Meyer contract, as a typical case, was formerly discussed, as it was on more than one occasion in this House, not a single Cabinet Minister thought it worth while to be present to hear the Debate. Surely even the truce which has existed up to the present moment, and I am sure I do not desire to do anything to endanger its continuance, does not justify the apparent apathy of responsible Ministers of the Government towards a great question of this kind, a question deeply affecting as it does the country's most vital and important interests! Certainly much less does it justify the misstatements, and the hiding of facts which were resorted to by junior Ministers and others in connection with this whole transaction. I do not know what answer the Government propose to give now in connection with this matter of the Meyer contract, and what they have to say why this Vote should not be reduced, in accordance with the Motion I have put forward. The charges made from the beginning, strengthened as they now are by the report of my hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract are, in my opinion, unanswerable from whatever point of view one may choose to approach them, and the only honourable—the only businesslike course for the Government to take is, in my opinion, to terminate the contract forthwith. That is the course which I advocated long ago, and I believe I am correct when I say it is one supported almost unanimously by the Press of the whole country; indeed, had it not been for the stubborn, stupid and pig-headed attitude, or whatever one may choose to call it, of the Government, that businesslike and straightforward course would have been taken long ere this.

I do not know whether it is advisable to indulge in metaphors in discussing a matter of this kind, but I venture to suggest that the Augean stables of old could not possibly have been in a worse condition than the existing system of administration and organisation in His Majesty's Office of Works. It is to be regretted we have not some present-day Hercules to divert the Thames through His Majesty's Office of Works for a sufficient period of time to cleanse the place out thoroughly. There seemed to be no hope of reform from within, from the present retrograde and the backward denizens of the Office of Works, any more than there was in the case when Hercules had to undertake the work to which I have referred. We are hearing a great deal about drastic root-and-branch measures which the Government propose to take in certain directions. I sincerely hope that those measures, when they are taken, may not be misapplied. I can assure the Government of this: they would make no mistake if they began by applying the measures in the first place to the Office of Works. The charges which I bring against the Office of Works—charges which hold good altogether apart from the Meyer contract—are briefly these: Inefficiency of control by the Parliamentary needs of the Department over the permanent officials; gross inefficiency in the business methods of the Department; and, lastly, a completely inexcusable lack of courtesy towards Members of this House. I am constrained to believe, if I may refer for a moment to the subject so ably handled by my hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Mr. King), that the Office of Works is somewhat like the roof of Westminster Hall, it is suffering from a distinct species of dry rot. The Office, I understand, is spending thousands of pounds in order to try to remedy the defects in that historic structure, and it would be equally laudable if it would expend a little of its energy in trying to eradicate the evils to which I have alluded from the functions of its own executive. If it would do that, it would be greatly to the advantage of the pockets of the taxpayers of this country.

Mr. BOOTH

Perhaps the Committee will forgive me if I remind it that the Meyer contract had its origin in a desire on the part of the War Office to buy enormous quantities of timber with which to erect huts for the new Army, so as to house it for the winter. Whether they went to the Office of Works or whether the Office of Works went to them with regard to this matter is a mystery I have been unable to clear up, and the expressions of Ministers have so far only confused the Committee. We were told once that the Office of Works volunteered to get all the timber which the Office of Works required for the huts. The War Office was already, through large contractors, such as Sir John Jackson and others, erecting new huts all over the country, but it wanted more timber and more huts. The Office of Works, apparently, convinced the War Office that they were the people to buy the large amount of extra timber required. But all this time these contractors have been going on with their work quite independently of Mr. Meyer's purchases, and they are still continuing their operations. I submit that, while we have estimable Members of this House who have spent their whole lives in the timber trade willing to give their services for nothing to the Government, the Office of Works might at least have paid one of them the compliment of having a short interview with him in order to ascertain their opinions. There are Members of this House whose time is largely at the service of the Government, and who are only too willing to give it. But if you decide not to invite the assistance of a man in the timber trade who is a Member of this House, there are certainly fifty other Members with business experience, anyone of whom would gladly have set aside all personal obligations in order to place himself at the service of the State, and if one of these business men had been called in, if he had been given the correspondence which the Government had had with leaders of the timber trade and with experienced men of great reputation, and if he had been asked to serve the country in that way. I venture to assert he would have been able to buy timber quicker, of better quality, and more cheaply. If any Member of this House acquainted with buying and selling could have given the time to a study of this matter which I have devoted to it, he must have arrived at that conclusion.

We are told by Lord Emmott, in a letter to me which I received late last night, that at this time this particular Department which had taken the matter up was overworked. He says it was working night and day, including Sundays. Yet the War Office, passing over the Supply Department and the Contract Department of the Office of Works, asks the Architects' Department, which was working night and day and on Sundays, to buy timber which largely had to come from Sweden! The claim is made that the Office of Works knows something about buying timber. But that refers to the Supply Department, and my point is this: That the declared policy of the Government of calling in the heads of a trade with which they have important business operations has not in this case been followed, and consequently they have not availed themselves of the public services which Members of this House are willing to render. If they had taken either of the courses I have suggested, or if, better still, they had used the services of one or two of the more experienced business men in this House connected with the timber trade, all this trouble might have been avoided and the ratepayers would have been much better served. The Office of Works, on getting this commission from the War Office to buy an enormous amount of timber, sent out telephonic inquiries and wrote letters to its own servants in different parts of the country, asking them, by personal calls, to find out what stocks of timber there were in this country.

The case now made is that the Office of Works has succeeded in buying direct from Sweden. But, as a matter of fact, they only commenced to do that after they had made the telephonic inquiries and personal calls upon timber merchants to ascertain what stocks they had. That was on the 15th of October. On the 16th one of the surveyors of the Office of Works, a draughtsman, called at Mr. Meyer's office in the City, and, having interviewed first Mr. Meyer's partner and then Mr. Meyer himself, returned to the Office of Works in company with Mr. Meyer, as near as I can fix the time, at 4.30 in the afternoon. That same afternoon Mr. Baines, the architect in charge of this overworked Department, discussed with Mr. Meyer the whole situation, and this eventuated in a written proposal the same night from Mr. Meyer offering to buy all the timber that was required. Saturday intervened, and replies were coming in from various parts of the country to the promiscuous inquiries which had been made. Sunday also intervened. On Monday and Tuesday more replies came in. But on Monday the appointment was confirmed, and, therefore, the assumption that Mr. Meyer was appointed after all the replies and quotations had been carefully scrutinised by the Office of Works entirely breaks down.

The original arrangement was for a commission of 2½ per cent. on all purchases, and Mr. Meyer was to be allowed to buy and sell in his own way of business. After the first £600,000 of purchases the commission was to drop to 1½ per cent. When the question was put by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir H. Dalziel) whether, in the new agreement, there was any stipulation with regard to Mr. Meyer conducting his own business as a speculative merchant, the hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Mr. Beck) replied that that question did not arise. Probably now that the bulk of the timber has been bought it does not actually arise. In the course of the discussion, however, the hon. Member for Saffron Walden quoted figures to show that this was an excellent business arrangement and that specific profit had been made on definite purchases of timber. But those statements did not impress the House at all. Hon. Members interested in the question interrupted them and wanted to know more as to the comparisons, As a matter of fact there was no comparison between the purchases by Mr. Meyer and the market price of the day; there was nothing which could be deemed to be a just comparison.

But the hon. Member invited any hon. Member of this House to go to the Office of Works and investigate the matter for himself, and he made the remarkable statement that if any Member did so he should have every facility. I trust the Committee will keep those words in mind. I responded at once and said I would go. It is complained that, when I went, my deportment did not altogether please the First Commissioner of Works, and the First Commissioner presumes, in the letter published this morning, to give me a sort of lecture on what, I suppose, is his own idea of how a Member of this House should approach the Government Department over which he presides. He says that many important considerations were not present to my mind. I venture to think he has forgotten one or two which should have been present to his mind, seeing that he formerly adorned the Chair in Committee of this House. Since he was called away and received a call from His Majesty to serve in another House—I am sure to the general satisfaction of all the Members here—he has forgotten, what he never would have forgotten if he had remained Chairman of Ways and Means here, namely, that even the humblest Member has a perfect right to challenge the expenditure of the Crown and to investigate as he sees fit a possible or probable waste of money. Nothing is further from my mind than to usurp judicial functions. I was a critic of the contract in this House. I was asked to go to the Office of Works in order that I might be perfectly satisfied, and I was told that they would show me every detail. I therefore appeared there as an hon. Member who was challenging the contract and anxious to see what was on record. It is entirely uncalled for to say that I appeared in a sort of judicial capacity. I went to examine the facts. I assured the officials I met on my first visit that I was only too anxious to be able to go away and say that I was perfectly satisfied with the business arrangement if I was so perfectly convinced, but the more I have seen of it, the more resolutely I must denounce this transaction.

With regard to Lord Emmott's reply, I I am glad of one thing—apparently his lordship has taken the matter seriously. I therefore gladly acknowledge that even the report of a Back Bench Member of this House should be regarded by his lordship as a document worthy of a reply, and to that extent I thank his lordship for the attention paid to my report. I want, however, to say to the Committee that this is not a case of debating society arguments and point-making between Lord Emmott and myself. I am surprised at the style of document with which he has favoured us. I would have forgiven his Lordship if he had dealt more with the main question—which is whether this is a businesslike contract—than trying to make debating society points against me. I can answer them all. I do not retract one single word in the report to which I put my name. I have gone through Lord Emmott's reply, together with the particulars of the transaction, and I can convince the Committee or any impartial mind that where Lord Emmott differs from me he makes statements which are not to be reconciled with the facts. The first important point I would make against Lord Emmott is that he entirely ignores some of the strongest statements and arguments I have made. I will not go through them all, but I will tell the Committee seven of them. There were seven main points in my report which Lord Emmott entirely ignores. The Committee will judge whether they are of importance or not. The first is the assertion I made that the Office of Works reversed its policy between 15th October and 16th October. On 15th October they were sending out promiscuous inquiries by telephone. On 16th October they were fixing up an agreement with Mr. Meyer, whereby a sole purchaser is put up against the entire trade. Lord Emmott has not answered the statement of mine that the Office of Works reversed its policy in twenty-four hours.

The second point was that I said the Office of Works had passed over its own Supplies Department. Lord Emmott makes no reference to that. I attach the utmost importance to it, because if the Office of Works has been buying timber it has bought timber through the Supplies Department. One of my main charges was that the Supplies Department had been passed over for some reason or other. Lord Emmott makes no reference to that. My third point was that I said that when Mr. Meyer buys jointly on behalf of himself and of the Government out of one shipload, some considerable time often elapses before the entries of these purchases are made in such a manner as to determine who has bought the cargo. Two and three weeks often elapses before Mr. Meyer is really bound by any entry in these books irrevocably to take a certain portion of that contract, or the Government is bound to take its own portion. I make no charge; I merely report to the House. I drew Lord Emmott's attention to the point, and he makes no reference to it in his reply. My fourth point was that I said Mr. Meyer is using Government information to expand his business particularly in trying to obtain contracts for railway sleepers. I specifically put it in my report that it was on account of information Mr. Meyer has picked up from letters offering timber for sleepers that he decided to go into that branch of business, which his firm had not previously touched. I drew Lord Emmott's attention to that, but he makes no reference to it in his reply. The fifth point I submitted in my report was that I was refused information of the details of Mr. Meyer's sales to the War Office. This answer makes no reference to that. It is a very important point. Mr. Meyer sold a portion of his own stock to the Office of Works. He has also bought very largely for the Office of Works, but since the War broke out he has also sold standards of timber to the War Office. I wish to compare his sales to the War Office before he was a Government buyer with what he is doing now. I said I was entitled to know what Mr. Meyer's sales to the War Office had been, and I asked that I might examine them in order to see if he was one of those who had put up the price against the Government. I drew Lord Emmott's attention to the fact that I was refused that information, but he makes no reference to it in his voluminous reply.

The sixth point I made was that the Office of Works is in competition with the War Office now in the purchase of timber. Will any Minister on the Front Bench deny that at the present time the War Office, through Sir John Jackson and others I might name, are buying timber for these huts? This has been going on all through the winter. I drew Lord Emmott's attention to the fact that the competition is going on now and I appealed to him to stop it. He makes no reference to that in his letter to me. My seventh point is this: I said that the Government had been compelled to buy from the English agents of Swedish timber firms. I pointed out that with regard to buying direct there was a great misapprehension, and I said he had been compelled to buy Swedish timber from firms in London, to whom anybody could go. Lord Emmott pays not the slightest attention to that point and entirely omits all reference to it. I submit that for a public Minister to attempt to reply to my report and to make no reference whatever to seven substantial points of that nature, shows that there is some reason, which I cannot fathom, for keeping back information from this House.

My next point is that I did not have those facilities which were promised in the House. I made four specific complaints to show how I was handicapped. The first was that they refused me the help and support of anyone versed in the timber trade. There are some hon. Members in this Committee who know more about the timber trade than I do. I have now been studying it for the last six weeks very closely, and I have had enormous facilities placed in my way by firms engaged in the timber trade. The way they received me in opening their offices and books and giving me secrets of their trade in confidence as a Member of Parliament is in marked contrast with the treatment given to me by the Government whom I help to keep in office. First they denied me the help of an expert. I suggested an expert who was not a man in competition with Mr. Meyer. I suggested an expert arbitrator whose duty it is to receive confidences; they refused me. I then went further, and said I would accept the help of an expert even if Mr. Meyer chose him. I did not put that in my report, but when I am challenged in this way by this document I am entitled to tell the Committee that I said I would accept a timber expert to be chosen by Mr. Meyer if they would not give me one to be chosen by myself. I was refused any expert help, and I was on the point of retiring from the inquiry altogether. Business men in the Committee will sympathise with me. I went to the Office of Works to inquire and I was denied expert help. I am not connected with the timber trade in any way, and I have had no timber trade experience in all my life. I wanted expert help to explain only what all the terms were. I have books showing hundreds of marks—hundreds of marks relating to Sweden alone—and to hundreds of ports of shipment. I was in such a mass of detail that it was indispensable that someone in the trade should explain the terms of the trade and the documents placed before me, owing to the special marks and brands of the trade, in order that I might be more accurate in criticism of the Office of Works. I asked for the help of an expert and I was denied it.

The second complaint I have to make is that I wanted particulars of Mr. Meyer's sales to the War Office. I have already dealt with that point and need not refer to it again. Thirdly, I asked Mr. Meyer to furnish me with a statement of his own purchases of timber while he had been buying for the Government. Lord Emmott put in a miserable paragraph suggesting that I demanded to see the whole of Mr. Meyer's private business. I did nothing of the kind: I asked Mr. Meyer to give me a statement. I told him I would accept what he gave me as a statement of what his own purchases were on his own account while he had been buying for the Government. I wanted to compare them. I told him I should be pleased beyond all measure if I could go back to the House and say that, having compared them, I believe he had dealt fairly with his own firm as well as with the country. But I was refused these facilities, and I can give no report on that subject. It is necessary at this stage to communicate something to Lord Emmott which, perhaps, he has overlooked. If he knows of this correspondence he could not possibly have penned that paragraph. This is the paragraph:— The implication in your letter appears to be that it was necessary for your inquiries to have access to the whole of Mr. Meyer's private office and records, as distinct from the office and records of my staff at Dashwood House. Such access was unnecessary to secure the presumed object of your inquiry. But I do not feel that I should have been justified, even if I had had the power to do so, in forcing a private trader to show his private dealings to you or to any other outsider. An hon. Member of the House responds to an invitation given across the floor and a phrase of that description is used towards him. I leave matters of taste without any further comment, but I will read to the House exactly what I did want to learn at Mr. Meyer's office in the City, as some call it, or the Office of Works as Lord Emmott and myself call it. I wrote on 22nd March to Mr. Earle, the Secretary of the Office of Works:— I should like to pay one more visit to investigate the question of present purchases and deliveries by Mr. Meyer, as I understand the trade has undergone considerable change. It appears to me that if I had an interview with Mr. Barnet at your office at Dashwood House it would be the most convenient course. If you approve I would suggest next Wednesday or Saturday, in the morning. There is an application from me to visit His Majesty's Office of Works at Dashwood House. The reply I get from Mr. Earle is as follows:— As regards your request to examine present purchases and deliveries at Mr. Meyer's office, I do not feel that there will be any advantage in such a course, but if you will kindly inform me what documents you wish to examine, I will gladly instruct Mr. Burnet to bring them to your office on "Saturday morning next. Yours faithfully. That was on 24th March. I replied on the 26th:— Dear Sir,—I regret that you should have thought fit to offer an opinion with regard to my proposed visit to the Office of Works at Dashwood House. I intimated my intention out of courtesy to yourself, and so that I might not be thought to be paying a surprise visit. I feel it my duty to see the office where the records of these transactions are made and kept. I wish to inspect the books and documents I may find there relating to Government contracts, and to question the servants of the Crown who are in charge of this work. I intend to call at the office at Dashwood House at 11.30 to-morrow morning. After letters of that description saying that I want to see the Government servants, and the books and documents relating to Government business, it is unworthy of the First Commissioner of Works to represent that I wished to go there in order to see Mr. Meyer's private dealings. I cannot think that Lord Emmott has been made acquainted with that correspondence, and I publicly request him, on being made acquainted with it, to withdraw that objectionable paragraph with regard to myself.

I now come to the point of the reference I made to Ministerial statements in this House. I do not retract one single word of what I said. I claim that they stand convicted of eight mis-statements. The idea of Lord Emmott that I searched through their speeches is ludicrous. In the course of my investigations at the Office of Works I found that things were not as has been represented here, and when a statement struck me I looked back to the OFFICIAL REPORT to make quite sure, and then I pilloried it in my report in a parallel column. What are those eight statements, and how does Lord Emmott deal with them? In two cases he said the OFFICIAL REPORT misrepresented him. My memory agrees with the OFFICIAL REPORT, and not with the subsequent correction, because I drew attention to some of these points on the first day I was at the Office of Works, and I said that I should make this matter public in my report. The only copy of the OFFICIAL REPORT which has come into my hands as far as I can remember is accurate. In two cases Lord Emmott says he is not correctly reported, but in two others he practically admits it and minimises the importance of the occurrence. To (3) he gives replies which I can only say bear no relation whatever to the truth, and one (7) he entirely overlooks. I do not say that whoever drew up this document did not put it before Lord Emmott in good faith. In the first, of course, the version is correct, but I say take either version, it is an incorrect statement. Any judicial person who goes to the Office of Works will, I am sure, come to the same decision that I have come to.

With regard to the second point, I say that Mr. Meyer was not known to the Office of Works before these transactions, whereas in this House it was stated that he was known to them before. That information was given me by Mr. Baines himself. There was no question of it there, and I made a note of it, and found it did not correspond with the statement in the House. I challenge the Office of Works now. If they say they knew Mr. Meyer before these transactions, let them produce any evidence. They told me in their own building that they did not. Did they have any transactions with him before? Did he ever buy and sell for them? What was their knowledge? I challenge them to produce any direct evidence at all that they knew Mr. Meyer before. Mr. Baines assured me they did not. On the third statement, with regard to inquiries, I say the leading merchants were ignored in the inquiries they made. That is challenged by Lord Emmott. I repeat my statement, and I challenge the Office of Works to produce the men who made the inquiries of these leading firms and give the names of the firms. I attended a private meeting of the Timber Trades Federation. Without any suggestion from me the chairman, a man who had offered the services of the timber trade to the Government and merely got the acknowledgement of a letter, asked those present who had received any inquiries from the Government to make it known. He said it was their duty to make it known. Out of a large room only four men answered, and the majority of these four cases were of a casual kind; but the leading merchants, whom I could name and whom the Office of Works knows, were ignored. When I attended the Office what the official said was: "We admit there was a mistake, but we have heard about that before." To my utter amazement Lord Emmott is induced to put his name to a document in which he repeats this incorrect assertion that inquiries were made of the leading men in the trade. I ask hon. Members to inquire for themselves. I do not want to advertise the firms, but many hon. Members know them. Let them go to them, and they will get exactly the same result that I got at the Timber Trade Federation meeting. Therefore, I repeat my statement and ask Lord Emmott to produce his evidence.

With regard to the fourth point, the hon. Member (Mr. Harold Baker) said, in column 1350:— Almost all the answers consisted of prices so excessive and exorbitant that it was necessary for the Office of Works as the custodian of the taxpayer to consider the position. At this stage Mr. Meyer appeared. That is to say, when they had got these prices in, they appeared to be so excessive that at that stage Mr. Meyer appeared. Mr. Meyer appeared instantly a man called at his office, and he went with him in a taxi-cab to the Office of Works. Therefore, his entry had nothing to do with the prices of the other firms, and the bulk of the answers came in to the Office of Works after he appeared. I got out the exact replies that came in on the Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday. If hon. Gentlemen on the Front Bench dispute it I have the authentic facts supplied by the Office. I want to ask whether it is a correct statement that Mr. Meyer appeared on the scene in consequence of exorbitant prices charged by his rivals, in view of the facts I have given. How do the Government reconcile their statement with the facts I have given? I repeat my statement, and say that the correction of Lord Emmott is entirely mistaken. In regard to (6) it was stated from the Front Bench that Mr. Meyer gave no pledge at all, and was never asked to give a pledge, not to continue his own business. I put this note: "Mr. Baines and Mr. Meyer, however, both asserted to me that the former did raise the point." Lord Emmott's reply to me is that both of us are correct. I say that cannot be. It is a matter, perhaps, not of the utmost importance, but I cannot possibly reconcile these statements. Then point number (7) Lord Emmott does not reply to. He couples a sort of reply to (7) and (8). What I said in (7) was "Mr. Beck states that Mr. Meyer's business has for the time being been brought to an end." Point 8 is "The fact, which is testified by our accountants is that the business at present being done by Mr. Meyer is 90 per cent. Government business." My reply to that is, "The accountant repudiates this assertion." Lord Emmott's reply only applies to number (8), and therefore he has not replied to (7) at all. I said in the Office that a statement had been made that the accountants had testified that it was 90 per cent. Government business and 10 per cent. private business in Mr. Meyer's purchases, and I asked the accountant if he had testified it. He said. "I did not." I said. "Can any other accountant in the Office of Works testify it?"

Mr. BECK

Perhaps it would save a good deal of time if I admit at once that the mistake is mine. Luckily the note supplied by the Office of Works to me is still in existence. I slightly misread it. The mistake is entirely mine. There is no dispute as to the figures, but the mistake as to the accountant having certified the figures is mine. The information supplied to me by the Office of Works was quite correct.

Mr. BOOTH

I am not waking any effort to rub it in against my hon. Friend or anything of that kind. I am dealing with Lord Emmott. He puts this answer, which I am assured attaches to (8). It is something supposed to be testified by an accountant, and Lord Emmott puts it as the answer to (7). If he had taken the trouble to answer me in detail he should have been a little more careful in the matter. Therefore I am bound to say in my opinion there is a serious misstatement made to the House which misled the House. I do not wish to use any harsh language, but there was some miscarriage of information or instruction between the Office of Works and this House. I feel bound to draw attention to this misstatement because I was invited to go to the Office of Works in order to test the Ministerial statements. Lord Emmott says with regard to Mr. Meyer's entry that the explanation was simple, and that it was corroborated in my inquiry. I utterly deny that. What does Lord Emmott know of what was corroborated in my inquiry? I never saw him. Why should Lord Emmott take it upon himself to make a specific statement of what happened in contradiction to me when I was there and he was not? There was no such thing corroborated in my inquiry. I was never able to get any explanation of Mr. Meyer's sudden entry upon the scene, and I do not know it now. All I know is that something is being kept back by the Government. I do not know what the explanation is. As Lord Emmott has challenged me with regard to what I have found in the inquiry, I will now say what I did not think it wise to put in my report, which Lord Emmott's statement compels me to mention, and that is that there is in the Office of Works, in close touch with Mr. Meyer's firm, a brother-in-law of his partner. I do not say that accounts for it.

Sir A. MARKHAM

Is he of German origin, too?

6.0 P.M.

Mr. BOOTH

No; I do not think so. I did not mention it in my report, because it may be perfectly innocent; but when Lord Emmott talks about what I found as corroboration of his statement, that was the only new thing I found. I make the Government a present of the extent of my inquiries on that point. It may throw some light upon the subject or it may not. Apart from that, I have no light thrown at all, any more that I can properly explain why this was put in the Architect's Department—any more than I can explain the rapid promotion of Mr. Baines or the rapid promotion of Mr. Baines' brother in this same office. On any ordinary rule of Government promotion and recognition of services and merit I am utterly unable to understand the rapid promotion of these two brothers. I should not have made any reference to that had not Lord Emmott taken it upon himself to say that my inquiries corroborate his views. As a matter of fact I have discovered a number of things which alarm me, but, having been unable to get to the bottom of them, I did not put them into my report. I mention them now in case any Member of the Government has any knowledge of these matters at the Office of Works.

I want to refer to another matter, and that is the question of contraband. Lord Emmott makes a most extraordinary statement about contraband. I do not see any representative of the Foreign Office present. His Lordship, in his letter to me, refers to the question as to whether Germany declared timber contraband of war because of Mr. Meyer's purchases on behalf of the Government. I mentioned in my report that that was asserted. I find it to be generally believed throughout the timber trade, and I mentioned it as an assertion in order to draw the Office of Works, and to see what reply they would make, because I maintain that I have got the absolute proofs on the point. I thought, however, that it was best to say that it was asserted that contraband of war had been declared by Germany, in order to see what this clever man at the Office of Works would say in reply. This is the official statement in reply:— You quote, but do not associate yourself with the assertion, that Mr. Meyer's appearance as a buyer was the direct cause of the declaration of certain timber as contraband by Germany. It is surely unnecessary for me to deal with so fantastic an assertion. The fact that it is made at all shows the tendency to absurd exaggerations of the relative importance of the Meyer arrangement. It is my duty to bring to the notice of the House a Swedish journal under date 17th November, in order to reply to his Lordship on this point. I not only searched the files of the "Timber Trades' Journal," but, as far as possible, the files of the Swedish journal in the course of my investigations. I find a remarkable article in this Swedish paper, the name of which it is difficult for me to pronounce. The name of the paper is the "Svensk Travaru Tidning," the sub-title is the "Swedish Timber Trades' Journal," the prices and advertisements are all in a foreign tongue, but this article is in English. Most of the articles and advertisements are not in English, but Scandiavian. This is what the article says:— Market report:—The consumption in England is decidedly strong. The deliveries from the London docks has been very extensive, having during the last two months surpassed the deliveries during the same months of last year by some 15/20,000 standards. It is specially pointed out in buyers' quarters that Govern- ment orders are predominating. That is doubtless correct, but the principal thing is that consumption really is good. The date of this paper is 17th November, and on 23rd November Germany declared this timber to be contraband. When you know the relations which exist between Sweden and Germany I want to ask whether it is a fantastic assertion to say that Germany had declared timber contraband because of Mr. Meyer's buying. Here one week a Swedish journal proclaims that the Government of England are large buyers, and the German Government a few days later make this timber contraband of war. Why, then, should the First Commissioner of Works say that such an assertion is fantastic?

I now come to the question of three-ply timber, which is used for the lining of huts. I have a piece here from one of the huts that I visited. I saw a number of huts lined with timber supplied by Mr. Meyer, and with timber supplied by Sir John Jackson and other contractors, and I am bound to say, although it is not germane to this Debate, that a vast amount of rotten timber is coming into this country which is certainly not fit for housing. What will be done after the War I do not know, but I do not want to be led into that subject. In regard to three-ply timber, a voluntary buyer was at work buying for the War Office. I will give his name if the House likes, but the Office of Works knows it. He is a man who has been in the timber trade all his life, and his firm is one of the best known, with probably the largest plant in the world. He was giving his services free, and his work was very satisfactory. I have seen letters from the engineers and Army officials deeply regretting that he was asked to discontinue his services for nothing, in order to make way for a new buyer at 2½ per cent.

This gentleman was buying at the same time that Mr. Meyer was buying; I said in my report for a month. Lord Emmott, or those who may have prepared his reply, seem to think they have got me on that point. It is nothing of the kind. What is Lord Emmott's statement about the three-ply timber. He tries to correct me and he says that the instructions to Mr. Meyer in regard to three-ply timber were issued on 14th November. He wants to say that between the 14th November and the 24th November, when the voluntary buyer was stopped, was ten days and not a month. Well, it may be, but it is much more serious than that. Mr. Meyer was appointed on 19th October, and this voluntary buyer was buying three-ply timber in competition with him as late as 24th November. When I said a month I thought I was understating it. Lord Emmott says instructions were given on the 14th November to Mr. Meyer in regard to three-ply timber. Now Mr. Meyer, on 31st October, bought 71,000 square feet of three-ply timber. I have an official statement supplied to me by the War Office marked "confidential." so I suppose I must not give the prices, or the terms. It gives the prices at which three-ply wood has been purchased and a list of Mr. Meyer's purchases of three-ply wood, so that I might compare it with the list supplied to me by the voluntary buyers. I said in my report that on comparing these lists and calling in a firm of chartered accountants they confirm my view that it distinctly shows superior buying on the part of the voluntary buyer. Lord Emmott makes a point that nothing was done before 14th November, whereas large purchases were made on 31st October, and another large purchase of 58,000 square feet was made on 5th November. Why his Lordship should take the trouble to correct me in regard to my dates and particulars when he makes such a big mistake himself, I cannot understand.

I want to say, quite candidly, that my inquiry was not so complete as I would have liked to make it. It was entirely the fault of the Office of Works in not fulfilling their promise that I should "see every detail." Those were not my words; they are the words that attracted me to accept the invitation. For a business man to go and be treated as I have been is not at all attractive. No Member of this House in future will ever go to a Government department without making stipulation which I thought it unnecessary to make from my own Government. Why, if I was to be shown every detail, was I treated in the way I have been? It is all very well to say that I ought to have been more judicial. I went into the matter in a bonâ fide manner, I told the officials that I would put from my mind every prejudice I had. I said, "You may not think it possible, but it is my duty to do it, and I shall try to put away every prejudice, and start afresh in my investigations." I consider it vital that the country should know what Mr. Meyer has done privately on his own account.

When it is admitted that for two or three weeks when he has made purchases of wood no one knows to whom that wood will go, I say that in a fluctuating market that is a condition of things that no business man would tolerate. Will the Government tell me that they will thoroughly inquire into this matter? Already £16,000, we are told, has been earned by Mr. Meyer in commission, and yet we are confronted with labour troubles all over the country on the part of people trying to get some advance. In my report I stated he had made £12,500 for the first five months. He is entitled to the commission when the timber is delivered, but he earns the commission when he buys it. He has bought £700,000 worth. When I was investigating there had been delivered half a million pounds' worth of timber, and the commission he was entitled to on that date was £12,500. We are now- told that he has bought more, and will become entitled to £16,000, and the purchases are still going on. I venture to say that no Government with the biggest majority of modern times would dare to continue that state of things if we had the opportunity of voting. I appeal to my right hon. Friend the Attorney-General. I want him to sympathise in some way with us in this House. We feel it to be our duty, if it can possibly be done, to register our condemnation of this contract. We are entitled to do it. If the right hon. Gentleman says that that will be interpreted as an encouragement to Germany, look at the fix we are in. We are told that this is a War of endurance, a War of resources, a War of money, and a War of munitions. If that is so, we ought to get the utmost value for our money and do our business on business lines.

It is exceedingly difficult for a private Member in this House, feeling as we do in regard to this contract, to decide whether we ought to take a vote or not. My view is that we ought to take a vote. We ought to register in some way the fact of our protest, for, although we cannot probably do much with this contract, at any rate if the Division bells ring they would reverberate through every Government office and the spending Departments would be careful. I have been inundated with letters with regard to the Office of Works and also with regard to the War Office generally. No doubt there is extravagance. The mismanagement in some directions is almost beyond belief. This is important, simply and solely because it has been drawn to the attention of the House. We used to be the party of retrenchment. Is the word ever heard nowadays? Can any of us stand on his own platform and say that his party is conspicuous at the present time for retrenchment? While we do not stint any support for the men fighting in the trenches, at any rate we have the right to ask the House, if we are business men and a nation of shopkeepers, to see that we are careful in these things. We all know so well that this contract was a loose one. My hon. Friend asked why it was made by the architect himself and was not signed by the Secretary for the Office. He did not know that there was a Contract Department and that that Department kept a tight hand upon its officers. If the Secretary had signed it or the Assistant Secretary, it could doubtless only be signed by them after it had been sanctioned by their own Contract Department which was experienced. It therefore was not signed by the usual officials. It was signed by Mr. Baines, the architect, so as to avoid having to go before the Contract Department. Neither the Contract Department nor the Supplies Department had anything to do with it.

I see the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition in his place. I think that we are entitled in this matter to ask some guidance from him. After all I have been doing perfectly sincerely and legitimately the work of the Opposition to-day. I have admitted that the criticism would perhaps come better from a supporter of the Government who could not be said to be trying to make party capital out of the matter. I have no doubt that at least some hon. Members on the opposite side feel just as keenly as we do on this matter, but they are handicapped to some extent because some unscrupulous supporters of the Government might be ready to say that any action which they took was being taken in a party spirit. But we are now criticising expenditure; it ought to be the right of the House to do so in a legitimate way, and we think that it would be the natural course for the Leader of the Opposition—I do not know whether being in a generous mood, he may not see his way to do so—to advise not only his own followers but also those on this side to support our strong opposition to the Government. It is a very exceptional situation. Probably no Liberal has ever before appealed to Unionists; but it is a serious question. I have never taken up any matter of this kind before in the House. I have had nothing to do with the Office of Works or the timber trade all my life, but I object to waste and mismanagement and the way in which the Office of Works has hitherto treated the House of Commons.

The ATTORNEY-GENERAL (Sir John Simon)

My hon. Friend has observed that the responsible head of the Office of Works is in another place, and in those circumstances, as my hon. Friend desired that somebody who shares the Cabinet responsibility of my Noble Friend should be here to listen to the criticisms made in this Debate, I have made it my business to study as best I may the papers in this matter. Of course, I do not claim to have exact and precise knowledge of this particular trade. I am quite conscious that it is a very cheap and very easy thing to say, if a Law Officer of the Crown takes part in this Debate, in the absence of anything better to say, that he has merely got up as an advocate to argue from a brief. I am quite familiar with that particular method of attack, and if that is the worst that can be said against what I have got to say I shall have no reason to complain. But since my hon. Friend asked me to share the Cabinet responsibility in this Debate, I ask the House to excuse me for intervening now. It seems to me, with all respect to those who have gone into this matter with great minuteness, that the really important considerations here are not very numerous, and that the multiplicity of detail and the indulgence in a very precise and meticulous examination of small points of controversy, have tended somewhat to obscure the larger and somewhat simpler questions which call for consideration.

There is one other thing which I may say in reference to my hon. Friend's speech. We all of us must admire the zeal which he has thrown into this inquiry. He is indeed the modern Hercules in this matter. It remains to be seen whether the Office of Works is, as my hon. Friend seems to think, the modern Augean stables. But zeal in the examination of matter of this sort, admirable as it is, ought to be accompanied, if I may say so with great respect, by just one other quality. As far as possible a man who throws himself with great zeal into the examination of a thing like this should go into it just as willing to believe that he is going to find out that things are right as that he is going to find out that things are wrong; and I am not quite certain that my hon. Friend has always remembered that. With one example I will pass over this. I was very sorry to hear my hon. Friend, when dealing with this matter, go out of his way to make an attack upon a public servant, who cannot reply in this House, in a reference which has got nothing to do with this contract, when he said that when he went to the Office of Works he found to his great astonishment that Mr. Baines, and somebody else, had been rapidly promoted inside that Department. Mr. Baines happens to be a gentleman whose reputation in his own professional occupation is established. Some of us who take an interest in public architecture in this country know how much the country owes to Mr. Baines, and it seems singularly unfortunate that, on an occasion when we are supposed to be discussing the merits or demerits of the contract with Mr. Meyer, hon. Members should indulge in references of that kind.

I will present to the House the matter as it strikes me. What, after all, are the two or three really large considerations which arise? First of all, the really most important thing to be considered is what was the occasion on which the Office of Works were appealed to by the War Department in order to assist them in this matter. Other matters have their importance, and I hope that I am not going to belittle their importance; but we lose all sense of perspective in this affair unless we realise that the matter which I am now going to mention is the most important matter of all. That was this: In the middle of October, when the rigour and the chill of autumn were day by day coming nearer and becoming greater, we had tens of thousands—or maybe hundreds of thousands—of soldiers who had volunteered in this time of crisis who would need, and need in the shortest possible time, satisfactory housing in huts, instead of being kept under canvas or being billeted at great public expense. The need was one that should be met, and met promptly; and I say deliberately that that was a much more important consideration than any other consideration short of actual downright fraud. It may be said, "Why did not the War Office make preparations earlier?" If I am going to reply for the Office of Works I ought not to be asked to reply for another Noble Friend of mine, who is also in the Cabinet and is also in another place.

As far as the Office of Works are concerned, they were asked on the 16th of October, with the assurance that the matter was most pressing and most urgent, whether they could lend a hand immediately in getting, without delay, very substantial quantities of timber, in order that our troops, who, to a large extent, had earlier in the autumn been under canvas, might, with the help of that timber, be rapidly housed in huts. The first thing, therefore, that the House ought to bear in mind, and the really overwhelming consideration in this case, is this, that there was the most urgent need of decisive, prompt and effective action, in order to get that done. In the next place, it was a matter of great importance that the materials should be good, and, so far as the Debate has gone, no suggestion has been made that the timber which Mr. Meyer has been instrumental in buying has not been good. [HON MEMBEES: "There was!"] My hon. Friend says, on what authority I do not know, that he finds that some timber was not satisfactory, but he does not know by whom it was purchased.

Mr. BOOTH

Some timber purchased by Mr. Meyer.

Sir J. SIMON

All I can say is that up to the present date, according to the information given to the Department and the War Office, those who have to examine this timber for public Departments find that the timber supplied through Mr. Meyer's instrumentality is, I will not say absolutely without exception, because there may be some exceptional cases, but that it is of excellent quality, and the War Office has expressed the greatest satisfaction with the quality of the timber supplied by Mr. Meyer. In those circumstances, it would have been very easy for the Department to take a different course from that which they did take. Nothing would have been easier than to have taken a course which would not have exposed them to this criticism. They might have said, "Let us have a Committee, or let us have the co-operation of suitable persons who sit in different parts of this House or who are engaged in this trade outside," or they might have publicly advertised for tenders. These would have been possible courses. But, apart from all other inconveniences, alternatives of that sort would have been open to this obvious objection, that they would have taken more time. My hon. Friend makes it a matter of complaint that the arrangements by which this timber was going to be supplied were made so rapidly. I think that that is not a matter of complaint. It is not quite accurate to say that they took four days. They took four days and four nights. But in the course of the four days and four nights an arrangement was made, and an arrangement which, as I have told the House, has resulted in providing very excellent timber. And I will go further and say that it was provided with the greatest promptitude and the greatest regularity.

It does seem to me that before you consider the question of remuneration which is involved in this bargain, it is just as well that the House of Commons, exercising its power and its duty to examine this or any other contract entered into for the public weal, should remember those very large and important considerations—that, whatever else happened, the most important thing was to see that the supplies were secured quickly in the interests of the troops, and not only is it the fact that the supplies have been secured quickly, but the supplies have been universally of good quality. I say this further: There has been talk about the public Treasury and the duty of economy. I am very glad that my hon. Friend attaches importance to these matters, but let me assume that the rate of commission is too much; let me assume that the rate per cent. commission ended in an amount which could be attacked as too large; let me assume, if you like, that it was too large, there can be no question about it, that the saving which has resulted to the Public Treasury from buying the timber that is required by this method, rather than by going around among a whole series of timber merchants, small and great, loudly announcing that the Government wanted to buy timber here and there, has been considerable. There can be no question whatever, apart from a mere matter of profit and loss, that the delay to the Government in this matter is less than it would have been under the other system. I do not claim to have any sort of expert knowledge of this trade, but I do claim that a lawyer in this House will be quite well qualified, as well qualified as any business man, in many respects to judge of questions of business policy.

After all, lawyers spend a good deal of their time in examining business matters when people think it desirable to have their assistance, and I say that if the Government is going to buy large quantities of timber it is plainly right that, as a matter of method, they should do it quickly, that they should endeavour to buy the timber wholesale and in large quantities, and that they should, if they can, organise a scheme quickly enough for themselves to see that the timber is conveyed to the different places where it will be wanted for use. The alternative, of course, is to buy here and there from different people who deal in this country. I say not a word against them, but it is perfectly obvious that the middleman's profits are bound to creep into the account, and there is no reason whatever to complain because the Government have chosen this method of buying timber in Scandinavia at convenient places near the forests, and having it brought across to the places where it is required. Instead of leaving the timber at the ports which were congested, I believe that it is now to a large extent kept afloat in barges, in proper cases, rather than incur the great expense of landing and distribution.

Arrangements were made with the railway companies here—and the railway companies are acting under very abnormal conditions—by which the timber, which is sorted, can be carried to certain places where, as it has been arranged, it can be sawn and cut up, and distributed where it is required. That is the work which the much abused Mr. Meyer has been arranging for the Government. It would not be fair to this gentleman whether he is called Mr. Jones or Mr. Meyer, to pretend that he is an ordinary buying agent sitting in an office. The buying agent might get through by telephone an order to buy, and through the other telephone he communicates with the exchange and buys accordingly. That is not what Mr. Meyer has been doing. What he has been doing is to organise the steps which I have been recounting to the House. As a matter of method I feel that I shall have the support of hon. Gentlemen in the transaction of business on a large scale, that as a mere matter of practice there is not the slightest doubt that the methods we have adopted for the purchase of timber from the places nearest the forests is infinitely better than any attempt of getting a supply from various people in this country.

Sir H. DALZIEL

Is it not a fact that Mr. Meyer bought practically the whole of his purchases in the City of London, and that there is no evidence that he bought abroad?

Sir J. SIMON

We cannot examine the details of every case. That cannot be done. Certainly it is mot true that Mr. Meyer has been engaged to work as a buying agent.

Sir H. DALZIEL

This is the first Debate that the right hon. Gentleman has attended on this subject, and I suppose he has only had a few minutes in which to make up his case. We have been told already in every Debate exactly what the right hon. Gentleman has been stating about these arrangements.

Sir J. SIMON

I am very glad to hear the statement has been made before. I should not come down here and repeat it without having ascertained that it was true.

Sir H. DALZIEL

I did not deny this at all. I do not deny that Mr. Meyer was doing all the work which we have been told, but I say that he did buy wood, not in Scandinavia, but by buying most of it from firms in the City.

Sir J. SIMON

The method which I have endeavoured to sketch is the method which was designed to be adopted, and Mr. Meyer was employed for that purpose. It is said that Mr. Meyer's contract was very hurriedly made. If by hurry it is suggested that consideration was not given as to the right way to do it, I do not think that is true. It is quite true that the matter was proceeded with very quickly. According to the circumstances, it appears to me that it was absolutely essential to make the arrangements which were necessary. It is said by my hon. Friend who criticised this arrangement that we should have been more deliberate, and might have waited longer, and taken some time to find whether other people would have offered to do the work which Mr. Meyer was prepared to do free. I am most anxious in this matter not to claim a more detailed acquaintance with these affairs than I have, but I am stating what I understand to be the result of what I have gathered by studying the papers during a substantial number of hours in the course of the last day or two.

I understand that the War Office first sent an urgent message to the Board of Works, and the Board of Works began instantly to make discreet inquiries. It was not a matter which they should have advertised in the "Times," for that would have been a perfectly idiotic thing to do. They made discreet inquiries, in some cases by telephone, in some cases byword of mouth, and as far as possible they avoided doing anything which would raise the market against them. The Board of Works found—and this is the only assertion I can make about it—that, as the result of their inquiries, whether they took the small men or whether they took the big men, the quotations they were getting, in both cases alike, represented prices which were not satisfactory at which to buy on a large scale. It is not the case that the big people were making good quotations, and that it was only the small people wanted high quotations, but that they quoted prices, so far as I can collect the information, which could not be considered satisfactory for purchasing on a large scale. Inquiries were made confidentially in a discreet way, and whether, taking the small men or the big men, the offers made were not offers which were encouraging for making large purchases.

While making those inquiries Mr. Meyer made the proposal that it would be infinitely better for the whole thing to be done in a different way and by the method I have described. The idea that he offered himself without even being known by anybody is very absurd; it is a good example of how easily a zealous critic will find something wrong when there is nothing wrong at all. My hon. Friend seemed to doubt the fact that Mr. Meyer as a contractor is on the War Office list. His name is one of the names among many other people on that list. I believe it to be true, so far as the Board of Works is concerned, that the name was a name which they had got from other sources and from other lists rather than because they had had personal dealings with him before. Is it worth while making it a grievance against the Board of Works that they made a contract with a person they did not know? I have now disposed of the charge actually made that we made a contract with a person with whom we had no previous dealings. We know that the man was an the War Office list and that he came to the War Office and told them that, instead of going all over the country, they should obtain timber by the means I have stated, and that they should really get bedrock prices, having regard to the Scandinavian market. That is how Mr. Meyer comes into this matter. I, on my part, think we ought to acknowledge the public-spirited and the generous efforts which all classes of citizens are making in every department in order to help in a common and great emergency. There obviously must be another side to this matter. Nobody can deny that when a gentleman becomes the sole agent of a Government Department in a matter of this sort he is the object of a certain amount of criticism, and the object perhaps of a certain amount of envy. These seem to me, at any rate, to be some of the large considerations.

I now come to what seems to me to be the only remaining point, which is this: Granted that the case was very urgent and that it was most important to get timber from other countries of good quality; granted that the method was a proper method of proceeding; granted that it was necessary in these circumstances to make a contract with Mr. Meyer, even though his name is Meyer; suppose that his name was Jones, or, perhaps, that is a suspicious name; suppose that his name was Smith, then there would remain the question I quite agree, and it is an important point if you put it in its fair place, was such a bargain in point of remuneration a fair bargain? I should make no complaint as long as criticism was conducted within reasonable limits on a point of that sort. It is plainly a point on which business opinion and reasonable good sense might lead different people to slightly different conclusions. I will only make these two remarks about it. Looking at it as best I can, I think, and I have always thought, that there is a good deal of objection to be taken to the very common and traditional system by which you remunerate people who are acting for you for the purpose of purchase by a percentage on the amount they spend. It is a very different thing when you are dealing with an agent acting for you for the purpose of sales. There it is your interest that the price should be high. I have always thought it a pity that the tradition should be so deeply rooted when you are employing an agent to see that as little money as possible is spent; that he should be remunerated in proportion to the amount of money which he spends for you. That is not peculiar to this case. Everybody who has had a man to bid for him at an auction and in a hundred other ways, knows how deeply rooted that tradition is. It is obviously open to the objection that unless you take very great care there is at least the temptation, and there is at least the opportunity that your agent will make out that the price you have got to pay is bigger than the price he is paying.

We should have been very much to blame if we left matters entirely at large. What was done? A thing was done, and I speak subject to the correction of business men, which I believe has been rarely done, and which very few persons in a large way of business would regard as at all normal or ordinary. As a term of the bargain we made with Mr. Meyer we said, "we must put into your office a number of our own people with skill to understand your accounts and to examine your commercial documents, and we must satisfy ourselves with respect to every single purchase which we make through you that the real truth is that you are charging us commission upon the precise sum which we, in fact, have got to pay, and that the sum which we have got to pay is the sum you arranged we shall pay, and that you shall make no other profit." That system has gone on from beginning to end. I think that an arrangement of the kind, assuming that it is carried out, is a perfectly watertight arrangement.

Mr. BOOTH

I have spoken to all those four men who were there as accountants. I asked each one of them individually if he knew anything about the timber trade before he was put there to check the accounts, and each one replied that he knew nothing.

Sir J. SIMON

Let us distinguish. I am anxious about this, or any other part of the matter, not to take too high a line, but to present the case quite reasonably and moderately. As far as the honesty and good faith of the arrangement is concerned, what I have endeavoured to describe is most certainly an arrangement likely to be effective. I quite agree that you cannot first of all choose a man on the ground that he is the person most skilled in buying for you, and then at the same time put four other people over him on the ground that they are more skilled to check him. I do not think that is easily done. There is no dispute about it that you cannot make arrangements which will prevent the conceivable possibility of more money being spent here and there than somebody else would have spent. You must make the best of an imperfect world, and a world which, on the whole, is an honest world. I repudiate with great indignation the suggestion that because this gentleman's name happens to be what it is that, therefore, he, acting at this time of crisis, is prepared to do anything within the terms of his bargain which is other than in the interests of the country he has contracted to serve. There is no reason to say so, and it is a perfectly cruel and unfounded and uncalled for thing to suggest.

Sir A. MARKHAM

Why have gentlemen well known in the timber trade who have been in the National Forces, but who are over the age of fifty, and who for patriotic reasons offered their services to the Government free to buy this timber, been persistently refused and this contract given to Mr. Meyer, who is a Hebrew and of German origin?

Sir J. SIMON

It is a natural question, I think, to put, except that I am sorry that the hon. Baronet should have used the qualifying expression.

Sir A. MARKHAM

It is true.

Sir J. SIMON

I do not know that that makes it either anything the worse or anything the better.

Sir A. MARKHAM

An Englishman should have the preference.

Sir J. SIMON

Mr. Meyer is an Englishman. I do not want to enter into controversy on this matter at all. I quite recognise the hon. Baronet's question is a fair one. My information is this: That up to the time that this contract was being negotiated with Mr. Meyer there was no single other person in the trade who had offered to do that which Mr. Meyer was being employed to do, but that there were people, or may have been people, who offered to buy timber for the Government free. I am not convinced that when you are dealing with a matter of this sort it follows necessarily that a very important piece of business is best handed over to a man on the terms that he is patriotically going to do it for nothing. I say nothing whatever against the patriotism and good faith of anybody who comes forward and offers his services free, but it is not a bad principle when you are employing a man to carry out a business transaction that you should treat him as a business man, otherwise the opportunity of complaint, if he does not do the work you desire, is extremely difficult to find, and your relations are excessively ambiguous and awkward. I must add this: It does not always happen because a man is prepared, as he presents it, to do work for you without charging remuneration, that you and he will entirely agree when you calculate, say, such things as establishment charges, to which he has been put in carrying through the bargain. I do not wish to say a word against anybody, but what I do say is this, that there was nobody who made an offer to the Board of Works for services of this sort up to the time Mr. Meyer's contract was being negotiated. There was one other offer similar to that of Mr. Meyer which was made subsequently, when the negotiations with Mr. Meyer had already made considerable progress.

I have only one other thing to say and that is as to the question of the rate of commission of 2½ per cent. As I said just now, if the criticism which has taken place had been a criticism addressed to that point, and kept within reasonable bounds as being addressed to that point, there may have been differences of opinion, but, at any rate, there would be no reason to complain because a great amount of zeal has been expended in examining into this matter. My understanding of the matter is this: First of all we have the authority, and I can hardly imagine a higher authority on this subject, of my hon. Friend the Member for Partick (Sir B. Balfour), whom everybody knows to be one of the partners in a great enterprise. We have his testimony, given in a previous Debate, that in his experience, which I need scarcely say is infinitely greater than mine in this matter and is probably greater than that of a good many critics, that as a mere matter of rate this was not unreasonable. I am not affirming this, because it is obviously a point on which my personal judgment would be worth nothing whatever; and the only thing I ask of other persons whose personal judgment in this matter is not worth very much more, is that they should not claim greater authority. But what I say about it is this: I should have thought that assuming that you are dealing with a contract of fair dimensions, such a percentage was certainly not necessarily exorbitant and excessive; but when you are getting into a very big contract, it is perfectly true that some sort of adjustment or sliding scale is better adopted. I am quite willing to agree that debate in this House called attention to this matter, and it is the proper object of debate in this House that attention should be called to these matters. As the House knows, an arrangement was made that from a point which had then practically been reached, the remuneration should be reduced to 1½ per cent. It is right to remember that this is not 2½ per cent. paid on a price which simply represents the services of the buyer's agent. It does, in fact, represent a great deal of organisation and work over and above that work, in respect of which our own outlay is comparatively small, and work which does involve, as the Office of Works have ascertained, constantly involved the employment of a very substantial staff on the part of this gentleman. I have seen within the last hour or two some balance-sheets of this firm, and it is perfectly obvious, looking at them, that the firm is a firm which in the past has done very substantial business. It is also perfectly evident, while, of course, it is a great advantage and a matter of pride and kudos that they should be known as being entrusted to do this work for the Government, and my hon. Friend has taken very good care that that should be known—

Mr. BOOTH

He has taken good care.

7.0 P.M.

Sir J. SIMON

The prospect of Mr. Meyer buying for the Government without the seller knowing that the Government is buying I am afraid cannot have existed very long. Still, while that is so, I should assert with a good deal of confidence on the material I have seen, that the contract was in the circumstances not an unreasonable one. If this gentleman had not borne the name he bears, and if we had not had introduced into these Debates an almost infinite variety of controversy and discussion on all sorts of subsidiary points, I think it would not have taken us so long to judge quite fairly what are the real merits of this matter. There is another point, which also is a business point. It is said that we did very wrong in not insisting that Mr. Meyer while he was acting for the Government should act for nobody else at all. I do not complain of anybody's urging that point of view. This is what I complain of: I complain that they obstinately shut their eyes to some considerations which work the other way. For example, it is perfectly obvious that unless Mr. Meyer still remained, at any rate in name, a person who was buying in respect of his own business, any prospect of his making purchases without the market rising, because he was the Government buyer, became impossible. The hon. Baronet the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) knows very well what is the effect of a person who is known to be the Government broker going into the market and buying.

Sir F. BANBURY (indistinctly heard)

The fact that he is Mr. Meyer does not disclose to anybody that he is buying only for the Government.

Sir J. SIMON

It does not in itself, but it tends to be known obviously if he has no business of his own.

Sir F. BANBURY

Is it not a well-known fact in the City and elsewhere that an agent does not do business for himself while he is doing business for his principal?

Sir J. SIMON

It is certainly a principle of law and of good sense that an agent is not to make a secret profit out of his principal by pretending that he is buying for his principal when he is really selling to his principal.

Sir F. BANBURY

He must not be agent and principal at the same time.

Sir J. SIMON

That is true enough, but there are many cases in which a man may be employed as an agent to buy, and still at the same time be carrying on quite honestly and properly a business of his own. It happens constantly. I quite agree that it is a thing which ought as a general rule to be scanned with a good deal of suspicion, and to be subject to a very careful check. But there was, as I understand, one rather substantial reason why it should be done in this case. In the first place, in order to get some timber very promptly it was thought desirable to take over some portion of Mr. Meyer's stock, applying exactly the same rule as has been applied in the case of the purchases he was afterwards going to make—that is to say, examining with the greatest care the invoices and other commercial documents in order to guard against the possibility of his selling it at a higher price than the price given. In the second place, I am told that the arrangement has actually been found to the advantage of the public authorities, at any rate in some cases, because in the circumstances it is possible for the timber which the Government want to be bought through Mr. Meyer even in circumstances where it is only possible to buy at that price along with other purchases. In fact, it has happened in this case. By that means the Government have been able to take over, at exactly the same price as the price which has been paid for the whole of a cargo, the portion that they want, which they could only do because, as a matter of fact, Mr. Meyer was buying the balance of the cargo. An arrangement of that sort is one which very naturally invites scrutiny, but it does not, or ought not, to invite indiscriminate abuse. It ought to invite scrutiny, and of that I make no complaint. In the end it all comes down to this: So far as the Government are concerned, the most important thing they could do was to buy good timber quickly. So far as Mr. Meyer was concerned, the one and overwhelmingly important thing is, is he an honest man? If he is not an honest man, if he is a disreputable person, I have no doubt he will do the Government just as much as anybody else would, and that all the checks that ingenuity can devise cannot prevent him. I regret that a Debate, which ought to be conducted simply on the lines of discussing the propriety of the bargain, so easily slides into an attack, none the less obvious because it is in point of form concealed, against Mr. Meyer's origin.

Mr. BOOTH

If my right hon. Friend applies that to me, I deny it.

Sir A. MARKHAM

That applies solely to me—to nobody else.

Sir J. SIMON

The hon. Baronet apparently has a monopoly—the sole contract for providing that particular commodity. I regret that we could not keep this discussion within lines which are perfectly reasonable and right. It does not appear to me to be in the least desirable that I, or any other Minister, should stand hero and assert through thick and thin that every conceivable item and detail in every contract that was ever made by this immaculate Government is not only perfectly right and proper, but incapable of being improved. But I do say about this contract that, having had a good deal of examination given to it, it comes out of that examination by no means the miserable, stupid arrangement which I was given to understand when this Debate opened—the "futile and preposterous arrangement," according to the hon. Member for Perth, or the "stubborn, pigheaded conduct of my Noble Friend," according to somebody else. We shall not improve the matter by adopting a tone of that sort. The great thing is, first of all, to be sure that the Department has been honestly trying to discharge its duties. The next is to be sure that the Department is not afraid in a time of emergency to take a bold, rapid decision. It is so very easy for officials to do something much milder and less open to possible misunderstanding. The third, thing it is necessary to be sure about when, a contract of this kind is made is that it should be surrounded with conditions which will secure that the contract is carried through honestly and in a businesslike way. Looking at the thing as a, whole, I invite the House to say that that is their view of the matter, and if it is regarded in that spirit I, on behalf of my Noble Friend and colleague, will have no reason to complain because the matter has been raised in the House of Commons.

Mr. BONAR LAW

The hon. Gentleman opposite invited me, not, I think, as he put it, to meet him, but to follow him in the attack which has been made. I am afraid I shall not satisfy hon. Members opposite who have made speeches against this contract. I am afraid I cannot do it, because I have not quite the enthusiasm, as to the "stupidity," "pig-headness," and other qualities of the hon. Gentlemen whom I see opposite. The right hon. Gentleman the Attorney-General made one remark which struck me as being perfectly true. He said that if contracts of this kind were discussed in the House of Commons in normal times, no Government could exist. The first comment I make upon that is that if these were normal times I am not at all sure that the right hon. Gentleman would have made his speech. The difficulty I have in taking up the matter so strongly is twofold. In the first place, I have thought and learned a great deal about contracts, and if this were the one of which we had the most to complain, I think the House of Commons would have great reason for congratulation. If I am not prepared to become indignant over this matter, the House must not suppose for a moment that we on these benches are watching with indifference everything that is happening, or that, when we think the proper time has come, we shall not make use of the information which we possess in regard to these matters. For reasons which I think are adequate we have refrained from criticism of this kind in regard to much bigger matters, and I intend to adopt the same attitude tonight. That is one reason. The other is that, although as a rule I do not object to see political opponents punished even for something approaching a virtue when I think they have been guilty of other things for which they have not been punished, but for which they deserve punishment, as a matter of fact—I have said this before in the House—I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman that this is the right method in which to do this thing. I agree also that, if Government Departments are too much frightened when they depart from the ordinary custom, we run a risk that they will spend far more money and get things done in a worse way simply to avoid the responsibility which they are afraid to take. I do not approve of that.

I would like to repeat what I have said on other occasions when the question of contracts has been raised. In my belief this kind of work can only be done by individuals who are trusted. Fourteen years ago, after the Boer War, I wrote to the newspapers a letter in which I expressed the same view—that the way to do this kind of business is not by Committees. I am glad that the Government are bestirring themselves in some other matters which are more important. But I do not believe in Committees very much. All business must be done by autocrats more or less. It cannot be done properly in any other way. What I strongly recommended then, and what if I had had the power I would have done when this war broke out, is this. I would have chosen the best business men I could get, and put one in the War Office, and another in the Admiralty, and would have said, "You be responsible for everything that is bought and sold in these Departments." That I believe is the right way to do it. Strange to say, I find, if the statement in the "Times" to-day is correct, that that is exactly what the German Government have done. They have appointed Herr Ballin to do all the buying and selling for both Government departments. I believe that that is the right way. Therefore, so far as employing a single man is concerned, I think the Government were perfectly right. I go further. The right hon. Gentleman dwelt more, I think, than was necessary, because I listened to the other Debates, which he has not done, at least I listened to one of them, on the name of Mr. Meyer. I can assure him that the last thing that I have ever allowed to influence me is prejudice against a Jew. I think at this time perhaps more than at anytime in our history we have no reason whatever to make any complaint on that score. As I understand it, although the name is of German origin, Mr. Meyer's family has been practically English for two or three generations. I think we might drop altogether that part of the case, and look upon the thing on its merits. I said when I spoke on this subject before that nothing that had been brought before me had convinced me that Mr. Meyer was not dealing honestly with the Government, and perhaps on the whole to the advantage of the Government. Nothing that has been put before us to-day has changed my view. Indeed I do not see how Mr. Meyer could have acted otherwise than honestly with this Government.

I am reminded in this connection of an American proverb which perhaps may be familiar to some Members of the House. It says that it is considered that one of the worst of imaginable crimes is taking the candy from the children. He has dealt with the Department responsible in a way that showed that he could take any advantage of it that be chose. That is what it amounts to. I do not say that, this has not been a good transaction; but I do wish to point out to the House—and this is both important and fair—that the terms of the bargain made with Mr. Meyer were terms which ought not to have been made even by a Government Department, and would never have been made by any business man. That is my opinion. I say that on two grounds. First of all, there is the question of the commission of 2½ per cent. We have heard to-day what it amounted to in a round sum. No one who is not acquainted with the trade is in a position to say offhand that the commission is too big or too small. I have been told by those who are connected with the trade, and in whom I have confidence, that there is not a firm in London which would not have jumped at the chance of doing this business at a much lower commission. I believe that to be true. The right hon. Gentleman used the same kind of arguments which were set up by the hon. Member about what had to be done for this commission. Obviously, if the wood is bought in Sweden, more work is probably done than if it is bought in London. In judging whether or not a commission is utterly unreasonable, I should like to know how much of the timber was bought and imported from Sweden and how much from merchants here in London. I think that is very relevant to the arguments used by the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman points to the other work which was done. It is all clerical work. It is said that Mr. Meyer's work is not like that of a buying agent who simply sends a telephone message. But look at the difference in the commission! Does the right hon. Gentleman ever deal on the Stock Exchange?

Sir J. SIMON

indicated dissent. [HON. MEMBERS: "No." (Laughter.)]

Mr. BONAR LAW

How then does he invest his money?

Sir J. SIMON

I lend it to the Government.

Mr. BONAR LAW

Lucky Government! The stockbroker's commission is an eighth per cent. This is 2½. I say, therefore, that any business man making that arrangement with Mr. Meyer would have fixed a sum limiting the profit which was going to be made, and would have made sure at the outset that only a reasonable amount of money was going to be made. Clearly, here is something indefensible. As I understood it, the previous statement did not put it on that ground. I come to my second point, which I regard as much more serious than does the right hon. Gentleman. It is certainly wrong, if it can be avoided, that a man who is buying on commission on such a gigantic scale should be allowed to trade for himself. It is certainly quite obvious that it must be wrong. The hon. Member for Pontefract said—and this seems to me to show the impossibility of such a position—that the actual buying of the cargoes, or whatever it is, took place, and for two or three weeks they did not know whether it was going to the Government or to the merchants. Let any business man think what a power that gives a man of making money! If the prices go down, the stock goes to the Government. If the prices go up, you take it and make money. That is an impossible position, and one which ought not to be allowed. In the same way, in the matter of dealing for yourself, it is said that the percentage is not a large one. It was stated in one of the Debates that Mr. Meyer did not deal in the same kind of timber. It really makes no difference. If a man is dealing in a commodity which has many branches, and he knows that he has a big order to place which will raise one kind of wood, he knows also that every kind of wood will rise in response, and the power you give a man by making such an arrangement is practically this: So long as he knows that he has hundreds of thousands to buy for the Government he can go on buying for himself in absolute security if he is going to make a profit. Therefore, you are really giving him a power, by the arrangement, to make any speculative profit he pleases out of the Government contract, in addition to his commission. I read the whole of the report of the hon. Member opposite. I think he has one good ground for complaint.

He was invited by the Government to go and examine into the matter. If I had been invited, and had thought it worth while to accept the invitation, the very first thing I would have gone into—if it had not seemed to me vital to the whole matter—would have been to find out what private business was being done by Mr. Meyer: if he was using his Government orders to make private profit for himself. It is a farce to invite an examination and leave that side of the matter out of consideration. I am quite sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree with me in thinking that a restriction of some kind ought to have been put on at the outset. I would not go so far as to say that under no circumstances, in a case like this, should Mr. Meyer have been allowed to do any private business, but I think it would have been much better to have done so. If I had been in the position of the First Commissioner of Works, and had come to the conclusion that Mr. Meyer was the best man I could get—and let me say, in passing, with regard to that I shall not make any complaint because the Government did not employ someone who was willing to do the work for nothing—but I do say this, if I had been in the position of the First Commissioner of Works—I rather think he was not consulted at all about it—the very first thing I would have done would have been to have gone to some man in the trade whom I trusted. If I did not know anyone I would have got an introduction to someone. I would have found out from him how the matter stood. If I came to the conclusion that in spite of having his own business he was the man who would do best for the Government, I would still have given him the order. In that case at the same time that I was making arrangements for the accountants—for that is all the elaborate machinery that the right hon. Gentleman referred to comes to—make an arrangement to prevent dishonesty by the man pretending that he had bought what he had not bought, at the same time that I did as I have said, and made that arrangement, I would have said: "I quite trust you, but you are in a false position; you must show me, or someone whom I will send, all your books and satisfy me and satisfy the House of Commons."

Sir J. SIMON

I know nothing about that; but I would like to make clear that as a matter of fact the Office of Works has in the case of this transaction and throughout had access to Mr. Meyer's private books. That point, in fact, has been secured. I know my hon. Friend behind me complains that he did not get similar access. I do not know how that may be, but I would point out to the right hon. Gentleman quite definitely that as a matter of fact the Office of Works have been able to examine Mr. Meyer's private transactions from the time this transaction began.

Mr. BONAR LAW

I am dealing with the transaction as originally made. If I am not mistaken it was stated in this House by the representative of the Board of Works that at the time no request was ever made to Mr. Meyer that he should be interfered with in any way with his private transactions. Whatever is done now, at the very beginning the Government went into this transaction in a way no business man would have done. I am inclined to think that we are perhaps making too much out of this matter. I certainly am convinced that in the buying of timber a single agent is the right way. I am not at all satisfied that Mr. Meyer is not as good a man as you could have got. I do not know. I am satisfied that it would be a wise thing for the House of Commons to frighten the Departments from doing something a little unusual in emergencies, and that therefore we ought not to be too hard on them, even if they do not make the best possible arrangements. That is all I desire to say on the subject. I hope that this discussion will have one useful result: that at the beginning of transactions a little more care will be taken to see that they are made in a businesslike way that will stand examination. That is not true in this case. This really was not done in a businesslike way. However true it may be—and I cannot judge—it is no use saying you have bought cheaper than in any other way—you could not prove it. It is simply that you say that you had confidence in the man. Even though that is true, I do think ordinary business methods should be adopted, and that you should take care that yon are not putting a man in a position where he can be accused of using the orders he gets from the Government as a means of speculating privately to make money for himself.

Mr. LOUGH

I should like first to make it clear that I am not able to agree with what has been said by the hon. Member behind me. Nor should I like to advocate that all the methods adopted by the contracting parties at the War Office are good. On the contrary, so far as I know something of these methods, I shall at the proper time have some criticism to offer in regard to them. The reason I am unable to agree with my hon. Friends who criticise this contract is that it seems to me to mark a revolution in ordinary War Office methods. They have done with regard to this contract what I have never known them do before. They admitted that they did not know exactly how to deal with these great matters, and I think, on the whole, they took the very wisest way of dealing with them, and made a most excellent contract. I have often had to congratulate the Leader of the Opposition recently on the extremely fair attitude he has adopted towards the Government, and to a certain extent I can do so also this evening, but yet, towards the end of his speech, he did criticise the contract a little severely, and I do not think all those criticisms were perfectly just.

I will take one point mentioned throughout the Debate, and on which the right hon. Gentleman laid a great deal of emphasis. That point was that if a trader took a contract of this kind he must abandon his own business. If the Committee will look at it for a moment, it will be seen that that makes it impossible to make an arrangement of the kind the right hon. Gentleman generally approves. What was the reason that some house engaged in the timber trade might be valuable for the Government if they made a reasonable bargain? The reason was that they are familiar with the market; that they have constant access to the market, and that they are able to handle stuff in large quantities. If you deprive a house of that standing on the market generally, and make it the mere tool or official of the War Office, then you fall back on the alternative, to which my hon. Friends have been driven, of appointing a single individual to do all the transaction. I do not think that at all satisfactory, and therefore I cannot agree with the criticism the right hon. Gentleman offered in that respect.

I am very glad we have had a legitimate occasion to discuss this matter. This is a legitimate occasion to discuss it on the Estimates, and I believe a very great injustice has been done to the Government by the two or three irregular discussions which have already taken place in this House. It is a matter to which the House next week should have regard in considering the subject of discussions on the adjournment of the House hereafter. Without general knowledge that the subject was going to be raised on 18th February the contract was criticised, and then again on the 4th March. This is the third or fourth long Debate through an imperfect statement of facts, as I venture to think, on the part of my hon. Friend who introduced it, because I have taken all my facts from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy, the hon. Member for East Perthshire, and then the very useful report presented by the hon. Member for Pontefract. Therefore I have followed my usual method of getting all my facts from my opponents in the particular argument, and, having read all they have said about it, I have come to the conclusion that a most unfair impression was produced, not only in this House but outside, by the way in which the matter has been discussed up to the present time.

Just before I come to close quarters with the contract, which is an exceedingly simple contract, and I am surprised that the simplicity of it does not appeal much more strongly to my hon. Friends, I wish first to deal with the report of my hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract. First, I congratulate him on the extraordinary interest he has displayed. My hon. Friend the Member for East Perthshire spoke of Hercules. Whenever I speak of Hercules in the House of Commons I always think of my hon. Friend. If I summed up all the passions he does to assist me in the discussion of a small business matter I think I would bring myself to a premature grave. The hon. Member's report is most valuable in one respect which has not been mentioned yet, and, indeed, I do not think the contract has been completely dealt with on the side of defending it, with great respect to the Attorney-General. What was the charge we heard? It was that a certain gentleman was making £60,000 a year by this contract, and was thus receiving as much in three months as three Prime Ministers would receive in a whole year, or was receiving an annual remuneration of twelve Prime Ministers. A statement was made in the original speech of the hon. Member for East Perthshire, and then up came my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy, who crossed the t's and dotted the i's, and said, "£60,000 a year for timber contracting!"

Sir H. DALZIEL

At the rate of.

Mr. LOUGH

Articles appeared in the newspapers headed: "£60,000 a year," and great animus was got up against the Government, and indeed against the House of Commons, because of this vast extravagance—all based on this perfectly illusory figure. What does my hon. Friend say when he looks at it? Five months have passed up to 31st March, and the total quantity bought—I believe it is now the quantity delivered—was £500,000 worth, and the commission £12,500. Now £12,500 in five months would make only £30,000 a year, and so we cut it down to half at once.

Mr. BOOTH

Is not that enough?

Mr. LOUGH

I am on the point that the statement was made. The £60,000 has vanished, and we have got down to £30,000 It has to be still further attenuated. This £30,000, as the £60,000, was based on the supposition that the purchases were to go on at the same rate over the whole year. That was the mistake my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy fell into. It was as if I went to Christie's to buy a picture for the National Gallery, and the price was a thousand pounds, and I employed an agent who charged £50, or 5 per cent., the usual commission, for buying it. It might be said, "You earned £50 in five minutes, or £2,000,000 a year," and if anyone went about and said I had been wasting the country's money by employing a man at that rate, he would be making a false representation, unintentional no doubt, but still of a serious character, when the thing is a matter of commission. The very essence of commission is that it will not be repeated. Undoubtedly in this contract it will not be repeated. The expenditure will not go on at such a rate for the huts in the summer. I hear now the gross expenditure has gone up at the end of the seventh month to £700,000. Let us suppose it goes to one million by the end of the year, then the commission under the contract would be £20,000. See how the thing diminishes.

Mr. BOOTH

If my right hon. Friend wants to be accurate in his wonderful mathematical structure, I would remind him that it has not gone to seven months.

Mr. LOUGH

It will be seven at the end of this month. I am suggesting in the summer months the expenditure will not be so great, and that the commission for the year will be £20,000. We were told that this money was put in one man's pocket. The discussion this afternoon showed that that is an entire misstatement. The business expenses must be two, or perhaps, say, 1 per cent.

Mr. BOOTH

No.

Mr. LOUGH

I have been in business in London for many years.

Mr. BOOTH

Not in this.

Mr. LOUGH

My hon. Friend thinks because he can get a room cheap in Pontefract he need pay no more rent in the City of London. Rent alone is a huge item.

Mr. BOOTH

Fourth floor.

Mr. LOUGH

With lifts nowadays, the higher yon go the more you pay. All business expenses have to be deducted. I should say it would be reasonable to suppose you might provide half for expenses.

Mr. BOOTH

No.

Mr. LOUGH

Take any deduction you like. Some deduction must be made for expenses. There is a firm here and there fire partners, and the sum has to be divided, so that the whole statement that the amount going into an individual pocket is £60,000 a year disappears, as I believe all criticism of the contract will disappear at the close of this Debate. I think that there are only three questions to be asked, looking at the contract closely. The first is: Was the man with whom the contract was made a satisfactory man and an honest man? The right hon. Gentleman came back to that point and admitted that it was a question of confidence and honesty. You cannot deal with a man in a large way on any other basis, and there is one security you can take, and it is taken here, and that is to tell him that if he cheats the contract is broken off. We never go to law in the large business in which I am engaged: we simply leave off business relations. The Government has taken other precautions, and has given the strongest incentive to this man who, I have heard, is a very capable man, to behave well, by saying that "the continuation of the contract depends on the way you treat us."

I looked through all the criticisms, especially that of my right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for East Perthshire and the report of the hon. Member for Pontefract for one thing—an attack on the firm or individual. It did not appear. None of my hon. Friends who criticised the contract found any fault with the firm, but one, Mr. Meyer, is supposed to be a Jew, or of Jewish origin. I do not think the name would lead up to that conclusion. I know a very respectable family of that name in the north of Ireland, neither Jews nor Germans, but very respectable people, like most of the inhabitants of that region. As a matter of fact, Mr. Meyer has a Welsh partner, and so things are all right. For anything we have heard from the contract, it was a capable, good business firm with whom the arrangement was made. I come to the point as to whether the rate of commission was too high. I think the rate of commission was most reasonable. In my particular firm we pay 2½ per cent. buying commission. Large quantities of produce are bought abroad. We have paid it for years and years. The question as to whether this is too much is constantly discussed. We think we are better served by paying a fair rate of commission.

There is another point with regard to commission, that I really think if it had been properly considered by my hon. Friends would have led them to take a different view. No doubt, in the case of timber and produce generally in London, it is sold at a much lower rate of commission in the public auction. But this is quite a different thing. There the sales take place as the importer wishes, by cargoes or large quantities; and if you buy it as the importer wishes you can do it at a small rate of commission. But the Government could not do that; they wanted windows, and doors, and floors— all particular articles of their own, which require a technical knowledge to purchase.

If that contract were honestly done for a commission of 2½ per cent. it was done very cheaply. Supposing a contract extends to £1,000,000 and the trader's profit has been only £20,000, I ask was there any other war when a vast purchase of that kind was handled as carefully as that. I think the contract is a watertight bargain and I pay no attention to the fact that Lord Emmott knew nothing about it, and perhaps it is all the better. A man who made this contract made a good bargain. It is said that if the firm went on trading on its own account, somebody should have seen that they treat the Government fairly. I understand that an accountant was sent to this firm from the first day of the contract into Mr. Meyer's office.

Mr. BOOTH

No.

Mr. LOUGH

I understand that that is so.

Mr. BOOTH

But he does not check.

Mr. LOUGH

He checks the accounts; therefore I think that the Government took every reasonable precaution in that way. A great deal has been said about the Government not having taken some steps to limit the profit on the vast purchases they are making, but this is about the first case in point, and here the profits have been limited after £1,000,000 to 2 per cent. Therefore, instead of the Government being treated with reasonableness and fairness throughout these Debates, they have been stabbed in the back by their own followers as if they had committed some crime.

Mr. BOOTH

Why "stabbed in the back"?

Mr. LOUGH

Because you sit behind them. I think my hon. Friend will agree that I have treated their arguments with great respect, especially that one about twelve Prime Ministers' salaries and other scale arguments. I believe in this scheme of the contract, and I think vast sums of money were saved, probably £150,000 or £200,000 because the price of timber has increased tremendously during this period, and by acting quickly I believe the Government saved a great deal of money. What was the alternative that the hon. Member for Pontefract put forward? He asked why the Government did not go to the best men in the trade. I think one foolish thing the War Office did was the sending out of enquiries to 500 men in the trade.

Mr. BOOTH

No.

Mr. LOUGH

Those figures were given, and I think a more foolish step could not have been taken, and when the matter was sent to the Office of Works those enquiries were stopped.

Mr. BOOTH

The Office of Works sent out the enquiries.

The CHAIRMAN

I must ask the hon. Member for Pontefract to learn to listen as well as speak.

Mr. LOUGH

All that was spreading enquiries about, and it would doubtless have resulted in a rise in prices. The basis of the contract was a modest remuneration for doing work quietly and effectively, and from that point of view I have great pleasure in saying that this contract seems to present a favourable contrast with many of the contracts that have been criticised in the past. I think it would be very unfair of my hon. Friend to press the Government to a Division, and if they do, I shall be obliged to vote against this proposal.

Sir H. DALZIEL

I ask hon. Members to believe that when I came down to the House I had no intention of taking part in this Debate, having said on previous occasions all I wished to say. I state quite candidly that I am getting a little bit tired of the whole question. After the speech of the Attorney-General this afternoon, however, I feel that in justice to the position I took up in former debates, and in justice to my hon. Friends who have been associated with me in this matter, I cannot allow the Debate to end without saying a few words. On former occasions we have had to complain, shall I say, of the absence of "stars" in dealing with this question. We have had three Under-Secretaries. [An HON. MEMBER: "Satellites."] No, I do not suggest that they were satellites, and in this matter I especially sympathise with the hon. Member for Saffron Walden, because, after all, he is not associated with the Office of Works except so far as he answers questions in this House. I think it is rather regrettable that the head of the Department, Lord Emmott, is not in this House to answer these questions, because no Minister engaged in other Departments can possibly be as well informed as a Minister would be who was identified with this particular Department. Tonight we have no complaint as regards the "heavy guns" who have been brought forward to answer our remarks. We have had a distinguished man of the Government brought down to reply to the points brought forward, and we have had a distinguished ex-Member of the Government who has come down in order to enforce the arguments which the Attorney-General has put forward. As the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Islington (Mr. Lough) himself told us, until he rose the case had not been adequately represented on behalf of the Government. If the right hon. Gentleman spoke on behalf of the Government I can sympathise with them in the state they are in after he sat down. Let me tell the Attorney-General that I do not think he has treated the House of Commons fairly, and I think there was in his speech a tone of resentment and contempt unworthy of the right hon. Gentleman and the House of Commons.

The Attorney-General has come into this Debate to-night for the first time, although, as he said himself, it has been discussed on four previous occasions, I will tell the Attorney-General why I think he was unfair to the House. It was unfair of him to say in the first place, and he has no grounds for having said it, that this Debate was inspired because Mr. Meyer was a Jew. That statement has not got a word of foundation, and it has never been mentioned before in this House except in a single interruption by an hon. Member. Is it fair for a Member of the Government to come down to this House to try to get sympathy for his arguments by statements of that character? I challenge the right hon. Member to find a word of foundation for his statement that we attacked Mr. Meyer because he was a Jew, and such an assertion is unworthy of the Government and of the right hon. Gentleman. Another appeal was made by the Attorney-General because at the time they were cold days for the soldiers. Does the right hon. Gentleman imply that we are not sympathetic with the soldiers and as patriotic as he is, although we give our time here for comparatively nothing while the right hon. Gentleman is receiving remuneration on the same basis as Mr. Meyer. The right hon. Gentleman had no right to say that I knew everything in regard to this matter, and that is only another indication of the type of mind prevailing among the Members of the Government. If we say a word it is said that we are shaking confidence in the Government. The Government treated us with contempt, and contempt was running through the speech of the Attorney-General. The right hon. Gentleman said another thing which was not quite true: he stated that there had been no voluntary offers until Mr. Meyer was employed.

Sir J. SIMON

Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to intervene. He has just stated that I have said something which is not true. I shall content myself by saying that he has failed accurately to represent what I stated.

Sir H. DALZIEL

I will withdraw the word "untrue" if it offends the sensitive mind of the Attorney-General, and I say it is not in accordance with the facts. I understood the right hon. Gentleman to say that up to the time of the appointment of Mr. Meyer no voluntary offers had been made by Britishers or by any large timber-buying firm.

Sir J. SIMON

The right hon. Gentleman is not quite accurate. I did not use the word "Britishers" because I was not endeavouring to draw comparisons between Mr. Meyer and other people. I said that up to the time that negotiations were proceeding with Mr. Meyer, no other person had offered to do what Mr. Meyer was going to be employed to do, but subsequently one offer of a similar sort was made. I believe that to be quite accurate, but even if I am mistaken about that, I am still endeavouring to tell the truth.

Sir H. DALZIEL

The Attorney-General need not be so sensitive.

Sir J. SIMON

I am very sensitive about the truth.

Sir H. DALZIEL

I have not denied that the right hon. Gentleman has stated what he believes to be absolutely true. What I do say is that the statement he made is not in accordance with the facts of the case. I say that a gentleman was employed by the War Office doing the same work of Mr. Meyer before Mr. Meyer was appointed, and that he received the thanks of the War Office for what he did. This gentleman was doing the work and going on buying after Mr. Meyer was appointed, and he was competing with Mr. Meyer in the same market. I say, therefore, that there was a volun- tary offer to do this work, and the man who made it received the thanks of the War Office for doing it. Therefore, I say that I do not think we deserve the kind of taunts which the Attorney-General made with regard to our action in raising this matter. Then the Attorney-General talked of the throwing in of the brother-in-law of this man. I heard for the first time to-day that Mr. Meyer had a brother-in-law in the Office of Works, and, under these circumstances, is it fair to taunt us with always throwing in this brother-in-law when he has never been introduced into the Debates before?

Sir J. SIMON

I did not say it had.

Sir H. DALZIEL

The right hon. Gentleman charged us with having thrown in this argument, and having used it as a stock argument.

Sir J. SIMON

The right hon. Gentleman is again quite mistaken. I did not say the matter had ever been referred to before. I did not say anything which gave that impression.

Sir H. DALZIEL

Then I do not see what the right hon. Gentleman's object was in referring to it. My hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract simply mentioned it as a fact, and if the right hon. Gentleman refers to the OFFICIAL REPORT he will see that it will give the impression that we introduced this argument to sway public opinion.

Sir J. SIMON

What was it introduced for?

Mr. BOOTH

Lord Emmott in his letter to me said that an inquiry had been made on this point as to why Mr. Meyer was introduced, and it had corroborated the explanation he gave. I gave that a flat denial, and I stated that the only thing which I had found out from my inquiry was that Mr. Meyer had a brother-in-law at the Office of Works. That was the only new fact that I had brought to light.

Sir J. SIMON

My question was why was it introduced?

Mr. BOOTH

Because it was a fact that I discovered. I was invited to find out why Mr. Meyer had been introduced, and that statement was the only new piece of information I was able to obtain. The Government gave no explanation, and they say that their view was corroborated by my inquiry. The only new point I discovered was what I told the House, and I challenge the right hon. Gentleman to deny it.

8.0 P.M.

Sir H. DALZIEL

If it is true, I certainly see no objection to my hon. Friend telling the House the fact. He goes to make an inquiry, and it is the only important fact which emerges, I think, as the result of his inquiry.

Mr. BECK

Hear, hear.

Sir H. DALZIEL

I am glad that I interpret the views of the Office of Works in this matter. They so successfully checked my hon. Friend when he wanted information that they cheer at the result of his efforts. That is the manner in which they gave us the invitation to go there some time ago. The Attorney-General made a great deal of the fact that he does not believe in voluntary labour. I am inclined to agree with him. I think it is quite right that in ordinary circumstances the man who offers to do something without reward will probably be rewarded in some other way. It reminds me of an Irishman to whom the employer, when he was about to be engaged, said, "We have said nothing about wages; what sort of wages do you require?" "Oh, say nothing about that," replied the man, "there are plenty of little things lying about here which would never be missed." As far as I am concerned, I would rather pay a man a reasonable salary and expect good work in return. The Attorney-General will admit, however, that is not the principle of the Government. They have just called in a gentleman, Mr. Booth—I do not know whether he is the man of push and go for whom they are looking—and they are not paying him any salary. He is working for nothing, and he is going to do great and important work. Therefore, the principle does not apply all round; but the Attorney-General quite lightly uses the argument when it suits his purpose.

The Attorney-General, again, said, with a wave of contempt and scorn which characterised his speech, "They come forward, pretended business men, and raise this matter." That is his own phrase. Who did he mean by that? He meant, I suppose, my hon. Friend (Mr. W. Young) who, I think, deserves lasting credit for having drawn attention to the matter. He has certainly saved a large sum of money, because the contract has already been revised. My hon. Friend has been in business for thirty years. He is a successful business man who has made his fortune and who is able to come to the House of Commons. It was not worthy of the Attorney-General to make that attack upon my hon. Friend. Another complaint I make of the Attorney-General is that he devoted a considerable portion of his speech to attacking the suggestion that Mr. Meyer was dishonourable. Who ever made that suggestion at any period of the Debate? No man. There has never been from beginning to end of this Debate, one suggestion that Mr. Meyer was not acting honestly in this matter. It would have been a gross piece of impertinence for any hon. Member to have done it, because I venture to think he could not have done it outside without rendering himself liable to an action for libel. The thing has never been suggested. We have said from the commencement that this was a bad contract. We say it was loosely drawn and that it ought to have been approved by the Office of Works and by responsible officials. Lord Emmott. I am informed, and it has never been denied, never knew of this contract and never knew that this unlimited power was being given to this man to go out and pledge the credit of the State, until he saw it in the newspaper.

Why was it that the architect was the only man brought into consultation in this matter? Why were not the secretary and the responsible officials consulted? It was all done in a hurry. The Attorney-General tells us that they were four nights and tour days and that it was not done in a hurry. Why, for all practical purposes it was settled the day Mr. Meyer took the taxi to the Office of Works. That very night he put into writing what they had agreed that day. So far as he is concerned, it was settled at that time. They did not wait the result of the inquiries which were being made. They had sent so many telegrams all over the country. The hon. Member for Saffron Walden some time ago told me that they made 500 inquiries of different firms. Subsequently, it was reduced to 200. The result was that nearly all the leading firms of the country were ignored. I say that is a reasonable point of complaint. The contract was practically made that afternoon. They did not wait for the result of their inquires, and they did not make their inquiries of the larger firms.

I do not know whether anyone, whether even the Attorney-General, would defend the form of the contract. It is a contract which never asked Mr. Meyer to give up any of his private business. It allowed him to pay 5 or 10 per cent. to brokers, pledging the credit of the State, without any check. It did not compel him to go abroad in order to buy, and, as a matter of fact, Mr. Meyer has utilised firms in the City, and paid them, I have no doubt, a commission, in order to buy the timber required. There was no limit to expenses, and nothing at all in the letter of the contract which would show that any business attention was given to it at all. "Then," said the Attorney-General, "look at the business character of it. We induced him to accept four of our representatives in his office in order to check what he was doing." The Attorney-General must be quite aware that was Mr. Meyer's own suggestion made in the letter which was written the first time they met. He said, "You can send a few clerks to see what I am doing and to satisfy yourselves." All this talk about business ability in getting these four clerks in comes down to this, that it was the suggestion of Mr. Meyer himself.

The Attorney-General referred to the statement of my hon. Friend the Member for Partick (Sir R. Balfour), whom I see he has been consulting, and the advantage of whose great business experience we shall probably have shortly, that he paid a commission of 2½ per cent. to someone to sell. It is quite a different thing to pay a man 2½ per cent. to sell timber and to find his customers and to pay his expenses, from paying him 2½ per cent. to buy timber, because in the latter case he has people running after him and in the former case he has to run after his customers. There is absolutely no comparison at all between the two cases. But, even if my hon. Friend had stated that he thought it was a fair commission, it would be no satisfaction at all, because the whole trade recognises that 2½ per cent. is too high a commission to pay for this. You cannot defend it. You must take the timber trade as a whole—timber is only a sideline with the hon. Member—and buying at 2½ per cent. is regarded as altogether too high. Then the Attorney-General said that it was done in a hurry. Yes, but why was it done in a hurry? It was in October, and we were recruiting all over the country. Had the Government so little foresight as not to recognise that these huts were required until within a day or two, or a week or two, of them being necessary? Why did they not look a month or two ahead, instead of rushing into this matter? Ordinary business foresight would surely have taught them that it was necessary.

Then, almost as great a scandal as the other, we have even up to this moment other contractors competing with Mr. Meyer, and, of course, raising the price against the Government. I do not know whether anyone can regard that as a business principle. I certainly cannot see how it can be defended at all. I say that, so far as this case is concerned, there is no doubt whatever that the Government's action has been condemned by the House of Commons. It cannot be defended from the point of view of the Government as a business proposition or as a matter which has been to the advantage of the country. They have had the opportunity of revising the contract; they have not inserted any new conditions; they have only reduced the amount of the commission in consequence of the action of my hon. Friend. They have, I will not say deliberately, but they certainly have themselves been responsible for this matter being raised on the many occasions on which it has been raised. On the last occasion I said that we had been denied information and misled in regard to the matter. Anyone who reads the letter of my hon. Friend will see what justification there was for that statement. Eight different statements have been made in regard to this matter, and we have only been able to drag out the information with the greatest difficulty. I say, therefore, that the Government in my opinion have not treated the House of Commons properly. The Government stand condemned in regard to this whole business from beginning to end.

If Lord Emmott had any decency I think he would hand in his resignation at once. He neglected his public duty in allowing this to go through without his knowledge. It shows that there is no organisation whatever in the Department or the thing would be impossible. That the architect, one single individual, should be allowed to pledge the credit of the State for millions of pounds and give such extravagant remuneration is entirely wrong. The Office of Works took this matter over because they wanted to handle it, and the first thing they did was to take in Mr. Meyer and say, "You do it for us." The War Office could have done that. The War Office would not have made the same mistake of ignoring thirty or forty of the largest firms throughout the country who have been willing to give their services in the matter. Mr. Meyer was a dealer in timber of an altogether different character from that which he is buying now, and all the men dealing in this particular thing were ignored. This was not Mr. Meyer's line at all; he was dealing in a different kind of thing.

I say that from beginning to end the Government have come very badly out of this matter, and for my part, if my hon. Friend goes to a Division, I shall, without the slightest hesitation—I care not what the result may be—vote with him. The only result that could accrue—I do not believe that it would happen—would be that Lord Emmott would resign his position. I do not think that would be a great weakening of the Government—quite the contrary—but that would be all the result that could follow. I tell the Government that in asking the working man to give up an extra farthing an hour they would have some difficulty in explaining a contract which, as I rightly said, is on the basis of £60,000 a year. That is the basis of the first three months, and who knows how long it is going to last? There is no control over the expenditure which Mr. Meyer can incur. The contract makes it to Mr. Meyer's interest that the War should go on. The longer it goes on the more he makes, and the more recruits the more money for Mr. Meyer. That is a contract which cannot be defended, and in my opinion the country will resent the action of the Government in this matter, and will at the first opportunity reckon with those who support them in regard to it.

Sir R. BALFOUR

My right hon. Friend (Sir H. Dalziel) has referred to a statement I made on a previous occasion. It is quite true I stated that I considered it a reasonable thing to pay 2½ per cent., and that I mentioned that was the rate of commission my firm had paid for selling timber for many years past. My right hon. Friend establishes the point that this was a commission for buying, and should be less than the commission for selling. I venture to say that is an entirely misleading statement. It depends entirely upon the condition of the markets. If the markets are active, obviously it is easier to sell than to buy. In this case the Government were dealing with conditions which were decidedly of the active character. It was well known the supply of timber in the country was small. It never is very large, for the simple reason that it is a bulky article involving a good deal of expense in handling, and, naturally, people do not hold in stock more than they expect to require for tolerably early consumption. Under these circumstances the Government were placed in a difficult position. They had to obtain large supplies, and it was their duty to do this by making such arrangements as would disturb the market as little as possible.

The right, hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition referred to that particular point in his speech to-night, and I must say that, in all the circumstances, the arrangements the Government made appear to have been of a businesslike character. It may be, if they had known in advance that the expenses would have been as great as it has proved to be, they might have made a more economical arrangement than the commission of 2½ per cent. But the circumstances were very difficult. I do not suppose they could tell how much timber would be required at that time. They were, too, under considerable pressure in point of time, and we know that in these conditions Government Departments have to pay much higher than under ordinary conditions. But they appear to have made the very best bargain they could, and, under the circumstances, I hold that the attack which has been made upon them is entirely unjustifiable. The hon. Baronet the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) said that no agent would act on a commission basis and at the same time as a principal. Of course, the hon. Baronet knows well the conditions that obtain in the London Stock Exchange. I venture to think it is quite a common thing for commission agents or for brokers to buy on commission and at the same time to buy for their own account. That is done in the City of London every day in the week. It is done, in fact, in every business town in the United Kingdom. It may be, if you argue the question out strictly on a legal basis, there may be some objection to it, but if you are dealing with honest people—and in this case we are dealing with honest people—there can be no objection to it. It may be argued again that under the circumstances it should have been proposed to Mr. Meyer to abandon his own business. I can conceive under certain circumstances people being so self-sacrificing as to sur- render their own business for the sake of undertaking certain work from patriotic motives. But surely there was no necessity for calling upon Mr. Meyer to sacrifice his business in this case! Reference has been made to the fact that certain Members of this House would have given their services for nothing. I do not think that that refers to the actual business of buying and selling. It was rather that they were prepared to give the Department the benefit of their experience and advice. I cannot imagine business people undertaking to buy or sell for Government account without being paid a reasonable commission and under the customary conditions. I should not dream of doing it myself. I cannot imagine any business people undertaking to do it, and I cannot imagine their being asked to do it.

Mr. BOOTH

They offered to do it.

Sir R. BALFOUR

They offered to give certain advice, but not, I think, to do the buying and selling. Still that has nothing to do with the question which we have to consider. The fact remains that Mr. Meyer was employed to do the work. The commission he received was not unreasonable, although, if it had been known in advance that the transaction would be so large, there might have been good grounds for expecting him to be satisfied with a smaller commission. But it is easy to be wise after the event. We are passing through very serious times, and instead of devoting ourselves to criticisms of Government Departments we ought rather to lend a helping hand, and assist them in carrying out the heavy duties falling upon them. I have heard criticisms to-night of the officials of the Office of Works. I am not acquainted with any of them, but I do know a good many officials of other Government Departments, and I venture to say that from a business point of view, or from any point of view, they are men who are quite well able to cope with any business on behalf of the community. A good deal of feeling has been created by these Debates, and charges of a personal character have been made which might well have been left out. For my own part I can only say I shall vote with the greatest possible satisfaction in support of the Government in this matter.

Sir G. YOUNGER

I have heard a good many of these Debates, and I have listened to a considerable proportion of to-night's discussion. I hope that this is the last we are going to hear of the Meyer matter. We have heard a great deal too much about it in the past. Many extraneous matters have been dragged into the Debate which had been very much better left out. The points at issue are really very short. The main questions are whether the commission paid to Mr. Meyer for the work he has done for the Government is too high, and whether or not a single buyer ought to have been appointed. I agree with the Leader of the Opposition in thinking that voluntary work, in a matter of this kind, ought not under any circumstances to be accepted. The voluntary offer of men of business on advisory committees it is, no doubt, desirable to accept in matters of this kind, and I think the War Office or any other Department would have been very well-advised if, at the outset of the War, they had accepted advice of that kind and made the best possible use of it. But when you come to deal with enormous purchases of wood or any other article required by the Government, and used for that purpose an outsider like Mr. Meyer, you ought to pay properly and honestly for the work, and not accept offers, which we understand were received and refused, of men in the timber trade to do this work for nothing. The only question arising, therefore, if one accepts that view, is whether or not the commission was extravagant. It is, as the last speaker said, very easy to be wise after the event. I do not think the War Office had the slightest idea, at the time they requested the Office of Works to take this matter in hand, that these transactions would be so large as they have turned out to be. Neither had the Office of Works. The one mistake the Office of Works made was not to have a sliding scale of commission. If they had had that at the beginning of this contract, or if, seeing that it was going to be such a very large one, they had stopped the payment to Mr. Meyer of a commission of 2½ per cent. a little earlier than they did, there would have been no fault to find with them. That is really the gravamen of the offence they have committed, and it is really the only offence. It is not surprising that in the hurry and in the difficulties in which they were placed, that that offence was committed.

I rose not so much to say that, although I am glad to have had the opportunity of saying it, as to tell the House what a man, upon whom I can confidently rely, told me about Mr. Meyer and the way he has carried out this contract. I do not know Mr. Meyer or anything about him. My informant is at the head of an enormous contracting business and was asked at the outset of this difficulty, some time in August or September, if he would place at the disposal of the War Office his staff of architects, engineers, workmen and others to help them out of the difficulty in which they were placed with regard to the building of these huts. He is a Parliamentary candidate and has peculiar notions, I think, of the position which a Parliamentary candidate occupies, because he thought it would be very much against his chances at the next election if he were known to be a Government contractor. He therefore said he could not make any contract with the Government, but he put his people at their disposal and said that he would accept what is called in the shipbuilding trade time and line for the work and nothing more. The point is this. He said to me: "I have never seen Mr. Meyer, I have had no connection with him personally of any sort or kind, but I have supervised this work myself and can say that no man could have sent a better quality of timber for the work and no man could have given more prompt delivery. Although his commission appears to be a large one it has to cover the whole trouble and cost, which were not inconsiderable, of buying these batches of timber all over the country, and having the railway facilities at his disposal which the Government had he did it very promptly, and I will pay him the great tribute that he did it in a time of great difficulty and stress and that we were never delayed a moment in the erection of these huts." I am very glad to be able to say that, and to give that testimony to the way in which Mr. Meyer has done the work in the opinion of a most competent judge. I shall be happy to give the name to the right hon. Gentleman (Sir H. Dalziel) in confidence, if he wants it. I hope we have heard the last of this matter. It is not pleasant to have these personal matters brought up again and again in this House. I dare say the hon. Gentleman who represents the Office of Works himself will admit that if at the outset of this contract there had been a sliding scale of commission no one could have had any objection to what the Office of Works did.

Sir A. MARKHAM

The hon. Baronet for the Partick Division (Sir R. Balfour) in his defence of the Government stated that Mr. Meyer and any person buying for the Government was entitled to the customary commission, and that he would not dream of doing business unless he also received a customary commission. We are living in war time, and certain of us who have reached the age when we are not fit for military service are anxious to do what we can for our country, while others who are younger are fighting abroad. It is within my own knowledge that some of the largest timber merchants in this country—men in the National Reserve who are too old for fighting—went to the Office of Works and offered to place at their disposal their staff for no payment whatever, wishing to make their contribution toward this National War. I suppose we shall be told that we ought not to accept the offer. The hon. Baronet said he would not dream of doing any business unless he received the customary commission. That is not the line I take, and it is not the line the country expects us to take on an occasion of this kind. The hon. Baronet the Member for Ayr Burghs (Sir George Younger), who has just left the Chamber, in defending this contract, has said that the timber bought by Mr. Meyer has been of good quality. I do not think he could have been serious in making that statement. Mr. Meyer had the Government purse behind him and all the facilities of the railway executive, and it would have been gross carelessness and negligence if the best quality had not been obtained. It has been said that the huts are of good quality. I live, and have lived for many years, within two miles of a large military camp. Hundreds of these huts were erected months ago and not one has yet been occupied, for the wood has warped to such an extent that they are not fit to be occupied by the soldiers. The hon. Baronet says they have been erected expeditiously, and the Attorney-General told us that the War Office was satisfied with the timber. I beg to differ. I know that a great quantity of the timber delivered in Shorncliffe camp for the erection of huts has been of the most shoddy description, for I have examined it myself. The huts were so bad and so badly put up that we are going to hear a great deal later on in this House of the scandal of the huts. The huts were occupied for a few days, but the men had to be turned out of them and billeted in the villages in the district.

The Office of Works have themselves to thank for all the discussions on this subject. The House and the country owes a deep debt of gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract (Mr. Booth) for what he has done in this matter. It is a very thankless task for any Member of this House to undertake public duties, and especially to come between a public Department and the House itself. The hon. Member has devoted days of work to this subject. He must have done so from what he has told us, and I know; it from my own knowledge. He is chairman of the Wounded Allies' Committee and is dealing with innumerable questions affecting that organisation without any salary or any customary commission, and he is devoting an enormous amount of time to it. He has been badly treated by Lord Emmott and the Office of Works. It was the duty of the Office of Works to have afforded every facility to an hon. Member who went to them—who conscientiously desired to ascertain the truth in order to lay it before the House. I believe my hon. Friend only desired to obtain the facts. What good was it for him to give up his valuable time to the public service if he was not allowed to see even the books of Mr. Meyer, which were open to the Government—the books showing the purchases Mr. Meyer made on his own account since he had this contract? It was treating my hon. Friend with contempt for Lord Emmott in his letter to the Press to describe him as an "outsider." Who is the outsider? Is that term applicable to Members of this House who vote the money or to the men sitting in the other House, who represent no one but themselves? Members of that House are responsible to no one but themselves. If the term "outsider" is applied by them to a Member of the House of Commons who is doing his duty, it is an insult to this House. I am sure my hon. Friend has the sympathy of everyone on this side of the House in regard to the language Lord Emmott has used. If Lord Emmott were in this House to answer for himself, he would hear some very strong language for applying this term to a Member whose only object was that the public should get to the bottom of the matter. I have finished with the Noble Lord who sits in another place and is responsible to himself and to no one else.

There has never been, so far as I know, any criticism by any of us who have taken objection to this contract except on one ground. We do not say that the arrangement made of allowing one man to buy all the timber was not the best arrangement. I think it was. I think the purchasing of this timber ought to have been in the hands of one man. It was not desirable to have firms competing against each other. But that is not what you had in this case. The competitive buying did not stop. It went on until 24th November. There was an overlapping of a month. We will not say anything about that. It was negligence. What I object to, and I am not afraid to say what I am going to say, which no one else has said, is that when this contract came out the firms of the country were not asked in the usual way by inquiries sent out in writing. What is the good of sending out inquiries by telephone? There are hundreds of different kinds of timber and different sizes. Why were not all the firms of the country, in the first place, circularised, giving the dimensions and qualities, and the telephone left alone? Fancy any business man buying timber to the value of thousands of pounds over the telephone! The hon. Member (Mr. Houston) would be the last man to deal with business on those lines. He would ridicule any such position. Agreed, therefore, that one man was the best to buy the timber, what follows?

Why did not the Office of Works see the leading members of the trade, and ask them on what terms they were prepared to buy? There were many old-established firms not of Hebrew-German origin, but purely British firms, with much larger business experience than Mr. Meyer, who were never even asked, and I resent the Attorney-General making this charge against my hon. Friend Mr. Booth. Why was the brother-in-law brought in? The name of this firm is Montague Meyer and Williams. The active members are Messrs. Meyer and Williams, and Mr. Williams' brother-in-law, Mr. James, is in the Office of Works. You say that is immaterial. I say it is very material. I ask the hon. Member (Mr. Houston) whether he would not have special regard to the fact that he was giving an order to one man only who happened to have a brother-in-law in the Department. Every time I have dealt with Jews they have had the better of me, and that has made me all the more careful. I am not making any attack on Jews, except to say that for many years they were not allowed in the House, but they are a race who are credited with great business knowledge and always getting the best of a bargain. They took the first Jew who came along, and paid him a commission of 2½ per cent. when the market commission is 1 per cent. Why should you go and pay this gentleman, without asking anyone else, more than double the commission that prevails in the ordinary market? The whole thing is indefensible. What we complained about was that Mr. Meyer was carrying on business for himself at the same time and being paid a commission altogether out of proportion to what other men would have asked who would have done the work just as well as he has done. With regard to carrying on business at the same time, it is really like flying kites. Mr. Meyer has an option. He buys timber, and can declare the option if the dealings are not marked down in the book from day to day as my hon. Friend says.

Mr. BECK

That is a mistake. The Office of Works had an entire option.

Sir A. MARKHAM

Do they have it as soon as the timber is purchased?

Mr. BECK

At any moment, yes.

Sir A. MARKHAM

That is not my question. On the day the timber is purchased is the Office of Works notified that the timber has been bought on account of the Office of Works only? I do not want to be told that at a later date Mr. Meyer notifies them. Of course he does. If a man buys or sells for me on commission, he has to notify me by the same post that the bargain has taken place.

Mr. BECK

I understand that is so.

Mr. BOOTH

No, it is not so.

Mr. BECK

I am informed that the Office of Works has an immediate option as to whether they will take, what they will take, and how much they will take, and the timber is laid up until they have made up their minds. They keep an absolute check on the whole transaction.

Mr. BOOTH

That is not the case at all. The thing is laid up until Mr. Meyer makes up his mind. I stated in my report to Lord Emmott that two and sometimes three weeks elapsed before the thing is definitely recorded. That information was given me by Mr. Meyer himself in the presence of Mr. Barnet and of another Civil servant, and the only one who decides, after he has bought a shipload, which is for the Government and which is for himself is Mr. Meyer.

Sir A. MARKHAM

I ask the hon. Member (Mr. Houston), who is a very keen business man, is not the whole thing perfectly ludicrous? I am sure he thinks so. You are going to give a man three weeks or a fortnight's option. If the market goes against him he declares, and if on the other hand the market goes down he keeps it. That an arrangement so ridiculous should be brought before the House of Commons and defended with such strong language by the Attorney-General is to my mind perfectly amazing. Here is an arrangement under which a timber merchant is allowed to carry on his business equally with that of the Government, and he can declare when he likes what part he will take for his own business. He is not satisfied with the business he had before the War broke out, and opens a new business through the troubles of the War. He turns his business to a trade of which I know something, namely, the sleeper trade. That is a very big business of Mr. Meyer. I am told by one of my constituents, one of the largest timber merchants in the United Kingdom, having large businesses in the country and in London, that he offered to put his own services at the disposal of the Government at a nominal consideration. Of course, that goes by the wall. It does not accord with the view of the hon. Member for Partick Division of Glasgow, who holds the view that he ought to have the customary commission. We have to face the fact that the whole of this transaction is unbusinesslike, and yet the Government come down to defend an arrangement which they ought to have put a stop to long since, when the matter was brought before the attention of the House. If they had done so this House would have been saved this controversy and this discussion, which must be very painful to Mr. Meyer. I do not think anyone says that Mr. Meyer wanted to swindle the Government. What we say is that. Mr. Meyer has been extremely cute, Cleveland far-seeing, and that he played ducks and drakes with these Government officials, and that he has had everything he is entitled to have legally from them. I do not propose that he has taken anything to which he is not legally entitled. He has had his full pound of flesh. I am sure he has done well for the Government, but that is not the point we are discussing. The points we are discussing, at any rate so far as I am concerned, are, first, that the commission Mr. Meyer is receiving is utterly unreasonable, and, secondly, that he is allowed to carry on his own trade at the same time that he is buying for the Government. That surely is utterly monstrous and unjustifiable, and if the House of Commons proposes to allow such things, then I say good-bye to all common sense in connection with commercial undertakings.

Mr. A. C. MORTON

I am sure the taxpayers will welcome this discussion and criticism, and they will certainly not consider it a laughing matter, as it has been attempted to be made some time to-night. An hon. Member spoke about customary commissions. I have had a long experience, and I say that a good many of these customary commissions are very doubtful commissions, and a considerable number are being condemned by the judges as being improper. The hon. Member for Ayr Burghs (Sir G. Younger) said he hoped we had heard the last of this trouble. I am sorry to say that I think that is practically impossible. Everyone you meet outside, especially in the City of London, no matter what his politics are, condemns this transaction, and they wonder what others are going on. I do not desire to say a single word against Mr. Meyer. He has made a good bargain for himself, and we are not condemning his conduct at all. What we are condemning is that the Government, as soon as they found this matter out, did not say there must be an alteration of the system and of the arrangements of the Office of Works, so that all these matters could be looked after in a businesslike way. I am sorry that the Prime Minister has not attended this Debate, because he is the only man who really can carry out a reform such as is necessary in connection with the Office of Works. The system at present is about as bad as it can be. There seems to be no control, and in this case Lord Emmott appears, in regard to the contract, to have been away altogether and to have left the whole thing to chance.

We should have been very glad to have seen the Prime Minister here to-night, or some other Cabinet Minister, except a lawyer. But the Attorney-General has been selected as the spokesman. He commenced by saying, that probably he would be accused of holding a brief. I do not know whether it was a brief he had, but it certainly was a repetition of the same case which has been put forward in former Debates. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman would like to have a brief in this matter, but I am sure that no respectable attorney would take this at all. He would say, "You had beter settle it out of Court and have done with it." The Attorney-General seemed to whitewash the Office of Works and to be making it look a little better than it is. I have been in business in London for many years, and have had a good deal to do with building and building materials, but I never heard of anyone buying timber in the way the Government have bought it in this case. The more Mr. Meyer gives for timber, the more commission he gets. What is done by large contractors and others in the case of buying is that they buy through a salaried officer who is not allowed to act for any other party. That is the only way to conduct business, and it is the way in which the system ought to be carried out here.

I trust that the Prime Minister will take in hand a reform of the administration of the Office of Works. The Office of Works is not represented in this House. We are told that the hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Mr. Beck) represents the Office of Works. I have no complaint against the hon. Gentleman, but he is only here to answer questions. He has nothing to do with the administration in connection with the Office of Works. They do not ask him for his opinion or his consent in any way whatever. That is bad system. The Office of Works is a big spending Department, and undoubtedly someone connected with the administration of it should have a seat in this House. The Prime Minister should insist upon this Department being conducted in a good business style, so that everybody is protected. These contracts should come not only before the chief secretary, who might finally sign them, but they should go to a solicitor, and be considered in all their details. The Attorney-General knows that, but he did not tell us so. I do not want to make any personal complaint against either Mr. Meyer or those Members of the Government who find themselves in this position that they cannot make a reply, because they have got nothing to do with the administration of these affairs. That is where the difficulty comes in. I hope that much good will arise out of this Debate as far as these Departments are concerned. The more we can do to stop this unnecessary and wasteful expenditure the better. The poor taxpayer will be badly hit in this country over the War, and he certainly ought not to be called upon by bad and weak administration to pay more than a fair market price and in a businesslike way for all these goods. I do not think that there is much good in my hon. Friend going to a Division, because, on account of the truce which has been made between us, we shall not know from a Division what is the feeling of the House. I can assure my hon. Friends that they will have the British public with them outside in criticism at opportune moments of such transactions as these, but I cannot promise to support them if they go to a Division, bearing in mind the truce that has been made between all parties to do nothing to disturb the position of the Government, because, if the Division be taken, this will be made a Government question. All we want to secure is that they will bear in mind, in future, in all these offices, that it is their duty to protect the taxpayer in this country from abuse of all sorts. I am certain from a long experience in this House that good always comes from criticism and consideration of expenditure, and I have no doubt that a great deal of good will come out of this discussion which we have had to-day.

Mr. YOUNG

Perhaps the House will allow me to make one or two remarks. I agree with what was said by the Leader of the Opposition that certainly in other circumstances no Government could have come to the House of Commons with a contract of this kind. I know, from information which has been given to me, that a vast majority of the House is with us in the course which we have taken in bringing this question before the House. Still, out of deference to the truce and to the fact that we do not wish to have our actions here misunderstood, as they might be in other quarters, and worst of all abroad, I shall not press this Motion. I hope that the First Commissioner of Works will read the Debates carefully, and if he does so, and if he knows all the facts, then, if he has any real sense of propriety, he will seriously consider the point whether it would not be the right thing for him at once to tender his resignation.

The DEPUTY - CHAIRMAN (Mr. Maclean)

Is it your pleasure that the Amendment be withdrawn?

HON. MEMBERS

No.

Amendment put, and negatived.

Original Question put, and agreed to.

Resolutions to be reported upon Tuesday next; Committee to sit again upon Tuesday next.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER, pursuant to the Order of the House of the 3rd February, proposed the Question, "That this House do now adjourn."

Question put, and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at Two minutes after Nine o'clock till Tuesday next, 20th April, pursuant to the Resolution of the House of this day.