Lords Sitting of 24 November 1902

RETURNS, REPORTS, ETC.
  COLONIES (GENRAL) (PARLIAMENTARY AND MUNICIPAL AND LOCAL REPRESENTATION OF TRADING COMPANIES IN THE COLONIES UNDER RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT.)
  Circular Despatch of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated 12th December, 1901, and the reply of the Commonwealth of Australia thereto.

  BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY.
  Financial Statements for 1900–19001 and 1901–1902, and Estimates for 1901–1902 and 1902–1903.
  Presented [by Command], and ordered to lie on the Table.

  FOREIGN JURISDICTION ACT, 1890.
  Two Orders in Council of the 19th November, 1902, regulating the currency of Northern and Southern Nigeria respectively.
  MERCHANT SHIPPING ACT, 1894.
  Two Orders in Council of the 19th November, 1902: (1) Making rules for preventing collisions by vessels navigating Lake Windermere; and (2) Confirming pilotage bye-laws made by the Limerick Harbour Commissioners.
  GREENWICH HOSPITAL ACTS,1865 AND 1869.
  Order in Council of the 19th November, 1902, authorizing an alteration in the scale of salaries of assistant masters, Royal Hospital School (Nautical Division), Greenwich.
  POLLING DISTRICTS (COUNTY OF SOUTHAMPTON.)
  Orders made by the County Council of the county of Southampton, altering certain polling districts in the Southern of Fareham and the New Forest Divisions of the county.

  PUBLIC RECORDS (WAR OFFICE).
  Seventh schedule, containing a list and particulars of classes of documents exiting or accruing in the office of His
  218
  Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the War Department which are not considered of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office.

  PACIFIC CABLE ACT, 1901 (ACCOUNT FOR THE PERIOD ENDED 31st MARCH, 1902).
  Account showing the money issued from the Consolidated Fund under the provisions of the Pacific Cable Act, 1901, and of the money expended and borrowed, and securities created, under the said Act to the 31st March, 1902.

  POST OFFICE (TELEGRAPHS).
  Account showing the gross amount received and expended on account of the telegraph service during the year ended 31st March, 1902, and the balance of the expenditure over the receipts, and statement additional to the above account.
  Laid before the House (pursuant to Act), and ordered to lie on the Table.

  NATIONAL EXPENDITURE.
  Leave given to the Lord Welby to attend the Select Committee of the House of Commons pursuant to Message of Thursday last, if he think fit, and his Lordship consenting thereto, a Message ordered to be sent to the Commons to acquaint them therewith.
  CONSOLIDATED FUND (APPROPRIATION) (NO. 2) BILL.
  Read 2a (according to order): Committee negatived: Then Standing Order No. XXXIX. considered (according to order) and dispensed with Bill read 3a: and passed.

  BRUSSELS SUGAR CONVENTION.
  EARL SPENCER: My Lords, I have given private notice to the noble Duke of a Question which I wish to ask him with regard to the Brussels Convention. It is, whether it is the intention of the Government to give this House an opportunity of expressing its opinion on the Sugar Bounties Convention before the same is ratified by the Crown. I do not propose tonight to state at length the reasons why I and other friends of mine are opposed to this Convention,

  219
  but I do contend that your Lordships' House has the same right to express an opinion on the Convention as the other House of Parliament. No doubt it may be said there is a treaty to be ratified, and that a Bill will have to be introduced which will reach this House, but I hold that your Lordships have an equal right with the other House to express its views before ratification. Otherwise your Lordships will be placed in an embarrassed and undignified position. No doubt this Convention has peculiarities about it, and the form in which the motion is being made here. At the same time, I do assert that on the general question, without pledging the House to any particular action with regard to the financial part, this House has an equal right with the other House to express its opinion.
  THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (The Duke of DEVONSHIRE): My Lords, the answer to the Question of the noble Earl is that His Majesty's Government, as at present advised, do not propose to submit a resolution in this House similar to that which has been moved to-day in the House of Commons. The procedure which has been adopted in the other House has, perhaps, no exact precedent to recommend it, but I believe that the circumstances themselves are to a great extent also unprecedented. It was considered most desirable to show to the other Powers concerned that His Majesty's Government were in earnest in their intention to adopt such measures as might be necessary in order to carry into effect the Convention to which they had agreed. The most regular form in which this could have been done would have been to pass through Parliament the necessary measure for carrying out the Convention before the date of ratification—namely, 1st February next; but, owing to pressure of business in Parliament, this course was not found possible, and, therefore, it was decided to proceed by Resolution. But as the Bill which will eventually have to be passed through Parliament will deal mainly with financial matters, it was not considered necessary or desirable to submit a similar Resolution in this House. A Bill will, in any case, be necessary,
  220
  and, as the noble Earl has stated, it will be possible for your Lordships to discuss the provisions contained in the Bill. The noble Earl, however, as I understand, desires that this House should have some opportunity of expressing their opinion upon the Convention before its ratification. For the reason I have stated, His Majesty's Government do not propose to invite this House to give such an expression of opinion. But I must point out that the Convention itself, and the correspondence relating to it, are in the hands of noble Lords, and, if they desire to raise any discussion upon it, it is perfectly competent for them to take that course.
  LORD TWEEDMOUTH: My Lords, I am afraid we cannot consider that the answer given by the noble Duke meets the necessities of the present position. It does seem to me an extraordinary thing that it should be a Ministry belonging to the Party which calls itself the Constitutional Party which thus refrains from bringing before the House of Lords for sanction an arrangement of the importance of the Brussels Convention. My noble friend the Leader of the Opposition has explained, I think very clearly, the great difficulty that this House will be in if it is invited to discuss this subject only on the Bill which is to be brought in at some future period. Then we shall be discussing the subject, so to speak, with our hands tied. The noble Duke has said that the object of bringing forward this Resolution in another place was to show to the other Powers that the Government were in earnest in their desire to see this Convention completed. It seems to me that we in this House have an equal right to be asked to express our opinion on the subject. I think the Government should, out of respect to this House, have invited your Lordships to agree to their proposal. I do not think that it is altogether consonant with the dignity of this House to ask that an important subject of this kind should be left in the hands of a private Member to initiate and to deal with. I, like my noble friend, do not intend to go into the merits of the question, but undoubtedly the Convention does raise most important points. It raises the

  221
  question whether bounties really are advantageous or whether they are not; it raises the whole question of the future position of this country in reference to its financial arrangements with regard to trade; and it raises the great constitutional question how far we are right in giving a Commission, largely composed of the representatives of foreign powers, the right to criticise, and even impose conditions on, our finance. It has been urged by the noble Duke that the matter is a financial one; but, while it is quite true that we in this House are constitutionally forbidden to amend a money Bill, we have a right to reject a money Bill, which shows, I think, that we have complete control over financial matters, at any rate to the extent of saying aye or no. I hope that the Government may yet reconsider their decision, and that from the Front Bench opposite some Motion will be moved inviting this House to agree with the proposals of His Majesty's Government.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (The Marquess of LANSDOWNE): My Lords, I do not differ at all from what has been said by the noble Lord opposite as to the great importance of the Brussels Convention. It involves many important and far-reaching principles, and no subject would probably be more worthy of discussion in your Lordship's House. I do not, however, consider that we are open to the charge of having in any sense withdrawn the matter from the cognizance of your Lordships. So far as the question of form and procedure is concerned, the noble Duke behind me has, I think, made it clear that the Resolution now before the House of Commons is not one which your Lordships' House could conveniently be expected to discuss. Then arises the question, have we in any sense cheated the House of Lords out of an opportunity of fully debating and examining this question? The Report of the Brussels Convention was laid before Parliament in the month of March of this year. There has been nothing surreptitious about it. The facts had been fully disclosed, Papers had been laid before Parliament containing a full account of the instructions given to our delegates at Brussels, and,
  222
  so far as I am aware, on no single occasion has any noble Lord on the Bench opposite indicated an active interest in the matter. The noble Earl might upon any evening during the summer have brought down the President of the Cobden Club and asked us to discuss the economical questions raised by the kind was done. Even now it is perfectly open to any one of your Lordships to raise the question of the policy adopted by His Majesty's Government in going into conference at Brussels. I do not know whether that is likely to be done or not, but to this charge, at any rate, I do not think we are open, that we have in any sense shown a want of respect to your Lordships by not inviting you to consider our policy in regard to the question.

  AGRICULTURE AND TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION (IRELAND) (NO. 2) BILL.
  Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
  THE EARL OF DENBIGH: My Lords, this is a very short Bill, which was introduces at the request of the Royal Dublin Society and passed through the other House without opposition. The object of the Bill is to transfer the administration of a sum of £5,000—being part of the sums paid in respect of the Probate Duty Grant to the Local Taxation (Ireland) Account—expended annually for the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle in Ireland, from the Royal Dublin Society to the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland. This will prevent a considerable amount of overlapping which now takes place in the distribution of two grants of public money for the same purpose by two different Departments.
  Bill read 2a (according to order), and committed to a Committee of the Whole House on Thursday the 4th of December next.

  ERRORS OF SEXTANTS.
  LORD ELLENBOROUGH: My Lords, I raise to call the attention of the House to the means that are generally adopted for ascertaining the errors of sextants both in the Royal Navy and in the Mercantile Marine; and to ask the First

  223
  Lord of the Admiralty if there is any probability of his causing a table of angular star distances to be published for the purpose of facilitating the necessary calculations as described in an article which appeared in the September number of the Nautical Magazine of 1901. This matter may appear somewhat technical, but there are several Members of your Lordships' House who have had sea experience, and others who are in the habit of assisting in the navigation of their own yachts, and they, at any rate, will have no difficulty in understanding the subject. It is almost needless to remark that the supposed position of a ship at sea, when out of sight of land and out of soundings, depends entirely upon observation taken by a sextant, whose error ought to be correctly known. The calculations for ascertaining some of these components are very simple, while others are very complicated. The index error can easily be found. It is the centring error that baffles the mariner. So much so, that Captain Lecky, the well-known writer on navigation, has declared that—
  "To test the centring errors is practically beyond the power of the navigator."
  It is customary, in consequence, to send sextants to be corrected for centring and other errors to Kew Observatory, where special apparatus has been erected for that purpose. But it is a far cry from China to Kew, and if a sextant gets out of order on a far distant station, or meets with an accident, an occurrence which is not uncommon, the ship herself is very likely to meet with another accident on her way home, for she has to be brought back by a faulty sextant and thereby runs considerable risks.
  It have, however, been fortunate enough to hit upon a method for finding the total error of a sextant which is simplicity itself, and which I published in the Nautical Magazine for September, 1901. By taking the angular distance between two stars, when they are in a line, or nearly in a line with the Zenith—that is, in other words, on the same great circle of altitude—and then applying the corrections due to refraction, a true observed distance is obtained. The difference between this and the calculated distance is the total error for that particular angle. If the real or calculated angle is already known, the
  224
  error can in this manner be found in less than a couple of minutes. I am desirous of seeing a table of these calculated distances published in the Nautical Almanack. I am aware that all the executive officer of the Royal Navy, and many of those belonging to first-class lines of mail steamers, are capable of making this calculation for themselves. These is, however, no reason why their time should be wasted in calculating and recalculating the fixed distance of fixed stars when they have other duties to attend to. These calculations would be much better done once for all by a single computer on dry land. As, however, some stars have an appreciable movement, this work would require revision about once in five years. But by far the larger portion of the tonnage of Great Britain is in the charge of men who have not much knowledge of nautical astronomy, and who have possibly never made a logarithmic computation to seconds of are in the course of their existence. The sextants they use are often cheap and secondhand. But though their sextants are cheap, the lives of these men are of value, and so also are the lives of the men under their command; and it is principally in their interests that I am asking the noble Earl at the head of the Admiralty to make this addition to the Nautical Almanack. It would be a boon to mariners to publish it, and it would be one of those boons that do not consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul. With the permission of the House, I will quote an extract from an article recently written by Mr. H. B. Goodwin, who was at one time Naval Instructor at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Mr. Goodwin wrote—
  "To give an idea of the magnitude of the errors to which the sextant is liable. we may mention the result of thirty years' experience at the Kew Observatory, taken from a report made to the British Association at its meeting at Aberdeen in 1885. For errors in centring and defects in graduation, 20 per cent. of the instruments gave half a minute of error, 30 per cent. gave one minute, 25 per cent. gave two minutes, and 7 per cent. reached three minutes."
  Now, a minute of angle is one sea mile at the surface of the globe. In Staff-Commander Martin's work on "Navigation," a sextant is referred to which had a centring error which varied from nothing to ten minutes. Many years

  225
  ago the late Admiral Sir Charles Shadwell, under whom I had at one time the honour of serving, and from whom I learnt much, published a little book that contained a table which gave the angular distances of twenty-seven pairs of stars. The last edition came out in 1870, and is therefore more than thirty years old. These pairs of stars were, however, not selected with the view of correcting sextants, but for the purpose of shortening the calculations for obtaining the latitude by a method that has now become obsolete. The principle on which these pairs of stars should be chosen, is that the seaman should have the opportunity of correcting his sextant at about every 15 degrees of are. Different pairs of stars should be selected for different zones of latitude, and the seaman should be able to correct his sextant for all angles during the first and middle watches of two consecutive starlight nights, at any time of the year and at any place on the globe, except, of course, in high latitudes in summer time when stars cannot be seen. I would suggest that this table be published separately at first, and afterwards as part of the Nautical Almanack.
  To sum up, I suggest that the seaman should take the angular distance of a pair of stars in line with the zenith, apply the error due to refraction, and then take the difference between the observed angle and the one in the Admiralty table. That will be that total error of his sextant, which is what he wants. I wish to enable every navigator to find the error of his own sextant while on board his own ship, instead of running the risk of being drowned while on his way to Kew to find it out. I do not wish it to be understood that I am saying anything disrespectful to the Kew Observatory. I look upon it as one of the most valuable institutions that the country possesses, and whether this table is published or not, I think that a man is unwise who purchases a sextant that does not possess a Kew certificate. I now beg to ask the First Lord of the Admiralty the question of which I have given notice.
  THE FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY (The Earl of SELBORNE): My Lords, I am afraid I am at this great disadvantage, that I have none of the
  226
  personal knowledge of this very scientific question which the noble Lord himself possesses. All I can do is to give him and the House the opinion of the expert advisers of the Admiralty and the Board of Trade on the point that he has brought to your Lordships' notice. I am advised that nearly all the errors of the sextant can be readily ascertained by an ordinary observer without any difficulty. The only errors that cannot be so ascertained are due to false centring or graduation. These are usually supplied with a good sextant after it has been tested at Kew Observatory, but they are usually so small that it is unnecessary to consider them in ordinary navigation. When very accurate positions are required, these can be obtained by observing celestial objects on each side of the zenith at, or about, the same altitude. This not only eliminates all sextant errors, but also those due to refraction of the horizen, a much more important matter. It is not, therefore, considered neccessary to calculate angular distances between stars, or to publish tables, which would never be absolutely correct owing to the differences in the refractoin at different altitudes. I am afraid that the answer does not correspond to the noble Lord's views, but the opinions it contains are those of the experts, not only of the Admiralty but of the Board of Trade.
  LORD ELLENBOROUGH: It scarcely corresponds with the facts that I have quoted.

  PATENT LAW AMENDMENT BILL.
  Amendments reported (according to order); further Amendments made; and Bill to be read 3a on Monday next.
  House adjourned at five minutes before Five o'clock, till Tomorrow, half-past Ten o'clock.