§ Mr. LYNCHI rise now on the point of Order to which I referred yesterday, to ask your ruling, Sir, with regard to one of your own decisions. I had proposed for the Notice Paper a number of questions, many of them referring to Greece, but after conferring with you yesterday I saw that in most of them I was in the wrong, because I had cast reflections on a friendly King—Constantine himself—so that I have nothing more to say with regard to those, except to regret that I put you to any inconvenience. But there is one question which seems to me still, in spite of what you have said, to be perfectly in order, and, with your permission, I will read it now:
To ask the Prime Minister whether his attention has been called to the popular demand that no paid office within the control of the Government, and particularly no position of exceptional responsibility and power, shall be filled by any person German by birth or whose wife is a German by birth; whether steps will be taken to meet this demand; and whether, while making this the rule in regard to minor appointments, he will take precautions to 216 exempt from its operation rich German financiers, or members of noble or Royal German families?That still seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate question, and parallel with one asked to-day by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir H. Dalziel), and I beg now to ask your ruling as to why that question was disallowed?
§ Mr. SPEAKERIt appeared to me that the point was one which the hon. Gentleman was quite entitled to raise as a matter of Debate, but I thought that the latter part of his question was, to use a phrase which has now become classic,
tendered in a spirit of mockery.That a certain number of Germans should be permitted to retain paid offices because they were rich or belonged to a Royal family, seemed to me to be a ridiculous proposition, and not one put forward at all seriously.
§ Mr. LYNCHMay I beg to submit that, while I levelled at the Government what I may call a sarcasm of fact, yet the whole point was that they had created the fact on which the sarcasm was founded.