COMMITTEE OF CIVIL RESEARCH.

HL Deb 30 June 1925 vol 61 cc872-89

VISCOUNT HALDANE rose to call attention to the new Committee announced for Civil Inquiry, and to ask the Lord President of the Council whether he is in a position to give the House information as to the principle of the Committee; and to move for Papers. The noble and learned Viscount said: My Lords, I have put down this Motion in a formal shape, but I have done that only for the convenience of discussion, and not because I have any hostility towards the proposal or, indeed, anything but warm approval of it. Indeed, my attitude could hardly be different, because in the time of the late Government an analogous proposal had been approved, although not carried into operation. The life of that Government came to an end just on the verge of its being so carried. It has been reserved for the noble Earl and the Prime Minister to make what, I think, is a most useful addition to the machinery of government.

Since I put down this Motion there has been circulated the Treasury Minute of June 13, which clears up things in outline. But it is necessary that something more should be said because of the extraordinary confusion that prevails in the public mind over this proposal. I think that arises, partly, from the fact that at the same time there was a discussion which took place about a Committee to deal with the affairs of the Crown Colonies, and there has been in the minds of a great many people a mixing up of the two things, which are quite distinct from one another. No doubt it is true that the proposition of the noble Earl will extent to Colonial questions, if it is desired to bring these under it, but that does not prevent their consideration by other and special Committees, which will have nothing whatever to do with the question which is before the House.

The Government have followed the analogy of the Committee of Imperial Defence. The noble Earl opposite (the Earl of Balfour) was the creator and founder of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and he worked on it for a long time, and sometimes he appeared on it when an Opposition Government was in office and the questions were of sufficient importance. He knows that Committee very thoroughly. I know something of it, too. For more than ten years I was a member of successive Cabinets, and during the whole of that time I sat on the Committee of Imperial Defence, and not merely formally. I have worked fairly closely on it during more than ten years, and I was Chairman of it during the period of the last Government. That office of Chairman was created by Mr. Baldwin's Government, and it was filled by the noble Marquess opposite (Lord Salisbury), who gave a great deal of attention to the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

Now we have got to something which is to be erected on the analogy of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and therefore it is essential to make quite clear what the Committee of Imperial Defence is, and what it is not. The Minute of June 13 which has been circulated makes that, intelligible to anybody who knows; but unless people have given a great deal more attention to the nature of the organisation of government than is generally given by the public in this somewhat slow country, I am afraid that there is still a great deal of want of knowledge of what the principle of the Committee of Imperial Defence is and what will be the principle of the new parallel Committee which, as I understand, is proposed to be set up.

The Committee of Imperial Defence is a peculiar Committee in this respect, that it has only one member. Its sole member is the Prime Minister. Under the arrangement which was made there might be a Chairman. I am not sure that there is a Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence at the present moment, but there was when the noble Marquess was in the penultimate Government. The Committee consists of such persons as the Prime Minister may summon to sit. They consist, mainly but not exclusively, of his colleagues in the Cabinet. There are summoned to that Committee the experts. The nature of the Committee is to be, as it were, a great General Staff for the, Army, the Navy and the Air Force, and naturally the heads of those Services are summoned to the Committee. As I have said, there are also summoned certain Ministers who are supposed to be either intimately connected with, or much interested in, these things. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, for example, sometimes sits, although he is not connected with any of the Services. Also there appear upon that Committee eminent experts, summoned occasionally and individually, who take part in its deliberations. But that is only the first stage; that is the Committee of Imperial Defence.

That Committee works by Sub-Committees. These Sub-Committees are Committees in which a much larger latitude of choice is exercised than is exercised in the case of the main Committee. The Sub-Committees are very numerous and they consist of picked persons who are the best that the Prime Minister can select, acting with the advice of his very competent advisers on the Committee of Imperial Defence. The Committee of Imperial Defence has been fortunate in having as its Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey, a man of infinite tact and resource, than whom probably no one has had greater experience of these things. Sir Matinee Hankey is Secretary also to the Cabinet and Clerk to the Council, and is therefore in close contact with the Prime Minister and the members of the Cabinet. But it would be beyond the powers of Sir Maurice Hankey to discharge the duties of Secretary of this Committee and of its Sub-Committees. Therefore he has a staff, the head offices being at 2, Whitehall Gardens, where the business of the Committee of Imperial Defence is carried on.

During the time when I was Lord Chancellor, through the consideration of my noble friend the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack, I was dispensed from the hulk of my judicial duties and was able to spend about three hours a day at 2, Whitehall Gardens on the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence—enough to enable me to see, if I had any doubt of it, that the work of that Committee is very heavy and requires the services of the whole of the comparatively small staff to look after it. But the essence of that staff is that it is the staff of the Secretariat of the Cabinet. It is not a new Government Department. The Secretariat of the Cabinet carries on the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

The questions which come before the Committee of Imperial Defence are, of course, great questions of strategy. They are questions as to what ought to be the relation to each other of the three vital Services. They are questions of whether we are properly organised for war. They are questions of what steps should be taken to put the organisation for war into proper shape, and they have culminated in that most valuable product of the Committee of Imperial Defence, the War Book, which contains all these things brought up to date. I am glad to think, speaking for myself that, however small our Army may be and however moderate may be the dimensions of our Air Force, we are probably as well prepared, so far as the thinking is concerned, as any other nation in the world. That is what the Committee of Imperial Defence has done and has been able to do.

Now let us see how things stand in regard to civil inquiry. There is some provision far research into scientific questions, not merely by special Committees but by Standing Committees. Under the noble Earl as President of the Council, there is a very valuable body which deals with the application of science to research—to medical research, to industrial research, and to a variety of things. That, I understand, will go on uninterfered with under the new proposition. It is a very valuable body. To begin with, it possesses funds and it is able to undertake researches which cost money. That has been going on for a long time.

When I listened yesterday to the speech of my noble friend Lord Oxford and Asquith about cutting down expenditure, it filled me with dismay, only relieved by the fact that I am sure he was not thinking of it without discriminating. If we are to recover our position in the world—and I am one of those who are optimistic enough to think that we have a good chance of recovery—we shall do it by the great qualities that made us a great nation at the time of the new movement in the 'twenties and 'thirties of the last century. The industrial revolution may have operated harshly on the working classes, but it operated splendidly in bringing about the application of capital to industry and the ability and knowledge of very large numbers of manufacturers in this country who were stirred for the first time by the opportunities which the period offered them for manufacturing in this country and selling in foreign markets. How did they succeed? By their energy and by the means at their disposal. How are we to succeed in recovering foreign markets? I believe only in virtue of the same energy and the same ability, aided, as it must be aided, by increased knowledge.

Nowadays, science is coming into industry in a way in which it never did before. I am glad to see indications that the manufacturers are beginning to appreciate the immense help which the Universities and learned bodies can give them and that they are eager for more research to be placed at their disposal, in order to enable them to give a larger flight to their imagination and to work out, with less waste and less difficulty, the problems that confront them in their daily life. No business to-day can stand still. In ten years its products are antiquated. You have constantly to be applying your mind to discovering new products to take the place of those which have gone out of use. That can only be done if you have adequate knowledge. A great deal of that work is done by private research. A great deal is being done now within Universities and learned bodies themselves, and a great deal is done by the organisation over which the noble Earl, as President of the Council, presides, by the scientific research of different kinds which is being done there.

It is only in a very broad way that it will be dealt with by the new organisation, as I understand it, which it is proposed to set up. I have not any doubt that this organisation will contribute largely to the solution of some problems, but the problems will be different. I think in this country we have gone lightheartedly into legislation, into Budgets, into a variety of things, without having clearly and exactly before us the facts and figures which we require to guide us. It is of no use saying that the Departments can get that information. Departments are not organised to get it, especially as in many cases, I might almost say in most eases, the work of more than one Department is required for the purpose of producing the result which is necessary, in order to form an exact judgment as to what the policy should be.

In the case of the Army. Navy and Air Forces, the Committee of Imperial Defence solved that problem by bringing the minds of the various Services together. This new Committee, I hope and believe, as intended to solve that problem by bringing the minds of experts of different kinds from different Departments and outside the Departments together to bear upon problems which will be submitted to them. It is not for me to speculate upon what those problems will be, and even if refer to them it is only by way of suggestion of the kind of question which will have to be dealt with. Yesterday we had a discussion which depended on a hypothesis, or rather, I should say, upon a set of contested hypotheses. Lord Oxford took one view, Lord Arnold took another, and the question was what was the national income really, and what was the national income as compared with what it really was before the war. We had the views quoted of very eminent men, to whose opinion I pay great attention, but these are the men who would be the first to tell you that they could not say for certain without systematic inquiry and investigation.

Take the question of the national income. How much of it goes in wages, and how much of it goes in profits? should like to know that., but from experience when I was concerned with the analogous proposition with which we had to deal and when I took it, up with the best experience that I could get together, I found that it was one of the things upon which information was most vague. Yet I was assured by the great Government Departments that they had the material and, without disclosing secrets, that they could tell us a very great deal that would be useful upon that subject. These things guide policy when they are known, and, of course, there is an infinity of other things.

The great subject of electricity is likely to absorb the attention of Parliament for some time to come as soon as the schemes are set on foot. In that domain there is an infinity of questions which will require a solution in the interest of the nation and not merely in the interest of manufacturers. There are involved there great questions of principle, in regard to many of which guidance may be required and there surges before my mind a multitude of other questions—analogous questions of principle—questions in which the understanding of well-founded principles is required and upon which e possess practically no information. That shows that there is a great field for The Committee which the noble Earl proposes to establish under the Treasury Minute of June 13.

One great advantage of this new organisation is that it costs practically nothing. It is to be worked through the Cabinet Secretariat, which is an existing body, and I am glad to say that a very able member of that Secretariat, Mr. Thomas Jones, has been appointed secretary. A more suitable person for the subject I cannot conceive, because he has the scientific imagination and—I do not know that this will commend him to everybody—he has been a professor in his time. He is, at all events, a very able civil servant. You will have the assistance of others, it is suggested, from the Department. The Cabinet Secretariat is an existing organisation and very little money indeed will be required for the service of this new Committee. There will, of course, be the railway fares of witnesses, and that sort of thing, but we have the machinery. I do not know where the headquarters are to be, possibly, in 2, Whitehall Gardens, along with the Committee of Imperial Defence. But there is no reason why you should not put it wherever you wish in any of the premises which are available for Government purposes.

I think I have said enough to show that there is ample scope for this machinery acting and that if it is fully occupied it may be occupied with the utmost advantage to the State. My hope is that the right hon. gentleman, who I trust will be the Chairman of the Committee—I see it stated in the Minute that there must be a Chairman and there is no one more suited for this purpose than the President of tee Council by his personal qualification—will regard it his duty to institute a very large number of inquiries. The machinery can undertake a large number of inquiries simultaneously because, as it is suggested in the Paper, people will sit upon the Sub-Committees, which are the important things, and the Sub-Committees may be selected from every quarter in which you can find experts of sufficient character and reliably trained for the special work which you have in hand. I have only to say that, speaking for myself, I regard this plan as one offering a great advantage to the machinery of Government and one which. I hope, will mark a fresh stage on that process of enlarging the national knowledge on which I, for one, set more hopes than on anything else for the recovery of the position of this country. I beg to move.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (THE EARL OF BALFOUR)

My Lords, my noble and learned friend who has just sat down has made a speech which was not only very interesting in itself, but was marked with a sympathetic courtesy which, on this subject, we all expected from him. I do not mean that he does not show it on many subjects, but on this particular subject he himself has played so great and notable a part in the working of the parent Committee, if I may so describe the Committee of Imperial Defence, through the years of preparation before the great War, that he speaks with an authority equalled on that subject by none of your Lordships, and, therefore, we value all the more his approval of the scheme that we have initiated, which follows, as he rightly says, the unfulfilled intentions of himself and his colleagues in the late Government.

He began his speech, I think, by telling us, and telling us most truly, that there is a great deal of confusion in the public mind as to exactly what this Commission has to do. I think that is, partly, the result of the name which, fortunately or unfortunately, has been given to it. We have called it the Committee of Civil Research. Now research has already a rather technical and narrow meaning, confined in the popular imagination to purely scientific inquiries into scientific and closely allied subjects. There is a Committee of Industrial Research, there is a Committee of Medical Research, and there are other organisations by which investigations are carried on, and, therefore, people naturally ask themselves whether this new Committee is to absorb the old Committees, whether it is to be a new Committee on the same lines, and whether the change is a beneficial change from the point of view of organisation, or whether we really are going to pile Research Committee on Research Committee, spending a large sum of public money, and perhaps duplicating the functions of these invaluable bodies. All that arises out of a misconception of the meaning of the word "research" in the title of the Committee. This Committee is not a Research Committee in the sense that the Industrial Research Committee or the Medical Research Committee are Research Committees. It is not a Research Committee at all in the sense of those invaluable bodies which great industrial corporations set up for the furtherance of their own businesses. Its analogy is the Committee of Imperial Defence; and it no more deserves the name of a Research Committee than does the parent Committee on which it has been modelled.

What is the purpose and function and place in our governmental administration which the Committee of Imperial Defence has fulfilled for more than twenty years, and which is going to be partially occupied by the new Committee? How exactly would a constitutional investigator describe it? I regard it as an additional wheel required to complete the mechanism of Cabinet government. What was the machine, and is still in the main the machine, of Cabinet government? It consists of Departments, each dealing with a sharply marked province of public administration, each having at its head a Minister of the Crown, meeting in Cabinet under the presidency of the Prime Minister, thereby giving a unity to the general policy which these separate Departments are intended to fulfil. So far as it goes that is a very admirable system. We are all familiar with it. We all understand it, and no human being would for a moment think of substantially modifying it. Nor does the new Committee in any sense substantially modify it. It simply adds a new instrument to enable this traditional machine more effectively to carry on in the old way its well-known functions.

One of the defects of the old machine was that Departments, by their constitution and by their tradition, could not help working in more or less watertight compartments. Indeed, if they did not work in watertight compartments the whole scheme of government would fall into confusion, and there would be such endless overlapping that I do not believe the administration of the country could be usefully carried on. But these watertight compartments, each with a Minister and a fixed staff, are incapable of rapid modification in order to meet a particular emergency. Departments of that kind under a Minister cannot carry out all the functions which we require from our system of administrative Cabinet government. I can give a sort of example in order to make this quite clear to the House. Such an instrument as these watertight compartments, with a Minister at their head and meeting in Cabinet, finds it difficult to deal with and to solve those problems—and some of them are the most important and complicated problems with which we have to deal—which lie between two Departments but which are not, clearly, the business either of Minister A or Minister B; problems which do not fall within the traditional limits of either Department but which, nevertheless, raise questions of the utmost importance and require solution.

The only method at present of dealing with them, unless there is complete agreement between the Ministers concerned, is to bring them before the Cabinet. But it must be remembered that the Cabinet is a very hard-working body. They find, as every member of a Cabinet present or past who is listening to me now will agree, that it reaches the limits of their time and strength to dial with the pressing daily questions that are necessarily brought before them by members of that body, and it is impossible that they should devote a large amount of their time to dealing with problems which lie on the margin between two Departments and with which the machinery of neither Department is very well capable of dealing. That is one of the defects which I think a Committee like this will remedy. Then there are other questions that arise, which in a sense, are entirely within the limits of the Departments but which are abnormal in their character and raise problems of unaccustomed magnitude, questions with which the fixed organisation of the Department is not very well capable of dealing. A Department suddenly finds thrown upon it a responsibility not contemplated when the Department was organised and which the Department can only imperfectly meet; there is no machinery in existence which can conveniently come to its assistance. That is the second defect, as I think, of the Cabinet and Departmental system under which we and our fathers have so longed lived.

Another is that there is no natural method by which the Dominions can be called into council at their desire if any question is raised in which they find themselves specially interested. You can have, no doubt, the elaborate machinery of the Imperial Conference, you can ask the Prime Ministers of the great Dominions to meet you in London, but that must, front the nature of the case, be a rare proceeding and a proceeding involving great inconvenience to the eminent statesmen who are asked to come thousands of miles overseas to consult in the Motherland; an smaller questions they cannot easily be consulted under the existing system. The Committee of Imperial Defence, however, on the questions which come before it, and the new Committee upon the vast body of unsolved problems with which it hopes to deal, is so flexible in character that any Dominion which desires to take part in one of the discussions can send representatives, with the consent of the Prime Minister in this country, for that particular purpose and that purpose alone, representatives who shall adequately explain the views of their Governments and the best method by which the joint efforts of the various members of the British Empire may conspire to obtain the most satisfactory result. Those are three defects in the simple Departmental and Cabinet government of the country which it is hoped may be adequately dealt with by the two Committees, the Committee of Imperial Defence and the new Committee, both of which have been set up, but the second of which has had, as yet, a short existence.

If it be admitted that there is a certain defect in the ordinary administrative machinery of the Government, how otherwise can you cure it than by the method that we have adopted? I venture to say that you cannot cure it by anything in the nature of Commissions—Royal Commissions, or other. Royal Commissions have a great function. They have conducted in the past, and are conducting at this moment, investigations of great importance. They are conducting them largely in public. Often upon these Royal Commissions different, interests are represented, and questions are threshed out at a length which certainly leaves nothing to be desired in the way of completeness in the ultimate Report or Reports, but which certainly does not conduce to rapid administrative action, nor can it, nor indeed is it necessarily intended, to conduce to such action. I think there have been cases, unless rumour is very calumnious, in which a Royal Commission has been appointed, not to hasten, but to retard the course of practical action.

At any rate, I think that everybody will admit that a Royal Commission, or a series of Royal Commissions, is very unfitted to do the sort of work that this Committee will, I hope, perform. To begin with, in a Royal Commission you have to have a fixed reference, and when you have fixed your reference nobody can go outside it, whatever the temptation. In the second place, it is not a regular part, as I understand, of the practice of Commissions of this sort to appoint a Sub-Commission, or, indeed, a whole hierarchy of Sub-Commissions, to help them in their inquiry. In the Committee of Imperial Defence there are questions upon which Sub-Committees are appointed, as my noble friend knows, in very large numbers. The inquiry starts, and it comes up against a particular difficulty. It appoints a Sub-Committee to deal with that particular difficulty. It goes on with its inquiry, and another difficulty comes up. The same course is adopted, and the result is that the parent inquiry blossoms out into various special inquiries and, under the main Committee, you will find going on simultaneously, with admirable results, smaller investigations, all of which lead up, and lead up rapidly, to the final conclusion.

Then again, there is one very fatal defect in this system of working through fixed Committees or Commissions. It is that the membership is an unvarying membership. So many gentlemen are appointed to carry out the work of the Committee. They remain a constant quantity, unless one resigns or dies, in which case his place is filled with somebody who has the same qualifications as himself. It is a fixed and rigid body with a fixed and rigid reference utterly unlike the easy flexibility which characterises the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence. There is another defect which these Commissions are apt to have. It is that upon them separate interests are represented. I do not at all say that a Commission on which separate interests are represented is a bad instrument for certain purposes, but I do say that it is the very worst possible instrument for conducting the kind of business which the Committee of Imperial Defence and the new Committee place before themselves as their ideal.

If I may give one more example of the difficulties of this alternative system, I would point out that, while it may drag on to an unlimited extent the particular inquiry assigned to it, when that inquiry is finished it comes to an end and there is no continuity. In the case of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the new Committee there is absolute continuity. From subject to subject, from year to year, from Government to Government, there is the continuity given by the system of Civil Service in this country. The staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence consists of civil servants. They keep a record of the transactions, they are absolutely confidential, they are absolutely to be trusted, they serve with equal fidelity all the Ministers with whom the Parliamentary system successively supplies us and there is, therefore, a thread of continuity going through all these investigations which is invaluable if you are going to turn them to the best practical account.

It will be seen from this short criticism that I have made upon what is, perhaps, the most obvious way of bringing in help to the administration on practical matters, that I have indicated the merits which I believe to attach to the Committee of Imperial Defence and which can in no other way that I know of, or that anybody has ever suggested, he provided by a different organisation. It is perfectly true, as the noble Viscount himself truly said, that it sounds paradoxical to say that a Committee consisting of one man is to be counted as a Committee at all. That is quite true. It is an unusual and a new arrangement, but I am certain that it is the right arrangement. The Prime Minister, or his representative, must be the person, with the aid of his advisers, to decide how you are going to pursue a particular line of investigation open to you. The Prime Minister will, of course, summon all his colleagues who have an immediate and direct administra- tive connection with the problem concerned, so that when the question comes before the Cabinet the subject has been thoroughly threshed out by Ministers who are members of the Cabinet and who are in sympathy with the Cabinet, and there has practically, so far as my experience goes, never been any difficulty in obtaining Cabinet assent to a decision which has been arrived at after adequate discussion in the Committee of Imperial Defence.

There is one other advantage—perhaps the greatest of all—which I think you can obtain in this way and in no other way. If this new portion of the administrative machinery which I have described is to work, it must work with the full assent and co-operation of the existing Departments. The idea of setting up any new body which should be a kind of super-Department, which should be a Department controlling other Departments, which should be a Department having power to give orders to other Departments, which should have any other function, indeed, but that of aiding other Departments, would be sheer insanity. No governmental machinery would stand the strain, and almost the most valuable characteristic of the Committee of Imperial Defence and of the new Committee is that they have no right to give an order to any man. In military language, they cannot order a corporal's guard to move. Everything that is done is done through the Cabinet, or the Ministers who belong to the Cabinet. All that the Committee of Imperial Defence can do is to embody the suggestions which their investigations lead them to reach. That is invaluable.

The relations between Departments are necessarily sometimes both difficult and delicate. I believe that the Committee of Imperial Defence, under the admirable management of its Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, instead of increasing friction between the Departments, instead of inciting jealousy against itself in the minds of the Departments, has been an influence of inestimable value in making all the Departments of the State work, tits they ought to work, as elements in one coherent machine. That can only be done by making this Committee a Committee without executive power—a Committee which has no right to dictate in the smallest degree to any Minister, or to the Department of any Minister, and still less, of course, to the Cabinet of which it is the servant and the creature.

I admit that it is very difficult for those who are not familiar with the ordinary working of our Constitution, and perhaps for many who are familiar with the ordinary working of our Constitution, exactly to grasp the position of this new machinery. We cannot help the temptation to think in terms of Commissions, of Research Boards and of Departments. That is so engrained in the public mind that to think in terms of organisation which is neither Commission nor Research Board nor Department is a task of extreme difficulty, but I think we shall get more familiar with it, especially through discussions like this, and I am quite certain and quite confident that when we are familiar with it we shall then, and only then, realise all that such organisations can do and, indeed, have done for the public good.

The precedent, as the noble Viscount has said, and as I have repeated, I am afraid, often to weariness—the precedent for this Committee is the Committee of Imperial Defence. I do not believe that anybody who has not been in the Government during the years preceding the War and during the years in which the War lasted, and in subsequent years, has the least conception of how great a service the Committee of Imperial Defence rendered in that critical period. I say that with the less reluctance because it was, after all, the noble Viscount himself and his then colleagues who brought up our pre-War preparations to the point which made them as efficient as they were. I had nothing to do with it and I should not be blamed if the case had been otherwise, and I shall not be blamed because it is as it is, but my personal conviction is that if it had not been for the care which had been bestowed on all the inter-Departmental work required by a great War we should have found it impossible to carry on successfully the earlier stages of the great War, and if we had then failed completely I do not know what the result of that failure would have been, but I believe it must have been disastrous.

It has to be remembered that it is perfectly useless bringing your Army up to a state of perfection, or your Navy up to a state of perfection, if, when the Army and the Navy are called upon to do their work, there has not been infinite pains taken by other Departments to carry out the functions which even the most pacific Department has to carry out when, unhappily, war breaks out. The noble Viscount must know many illustrations of that obvious truth, but perhaps it would be improper, and certainly it would be irrelevant, if I were to dwell upon that at the present time. You may, however, take it from me, as an independent and quite impartial judge, that but for this organisation it would have been impossible either to protect our commerce or to concentrate our forces in this country, that the confusion incident to a great war would have been overwhelming in its character, and that only by this flexible instrument were we able to save the country from irremediable disasters.

The new Committee will, I hope, have nothing whatever to do, even remotely, with war and warlike operations, nor can we expect it to have the dramatic justification for its existence which I have just tried to indicate to your Lordships; but I do believe that the flexibility which it confers upon the administration, the assistance which it can give to Departments, the way in which it can bring Departments together, the way in which it can face great problems of a complicated character, with which no single Department is capable of dealing—I believe that all those qualities, the analogue of which is to be found in the Committee of Imperial Defence, will be inherited by its child. And as I have ventured to look back for twenty years and describe without hesitation all the benefits which I think the Committee of Imperial Defence has conferred upon us, so I believe that twenty years hence it will be possible to look back upon this new Committee and to services to the country no less great.

VISCOUNT HALDANE

My Lords, I rise to ask your Lordships' leave to withdraw the Motion which I have moved. The noble Earl has described to us, with a richness of knowledge which it is difficult to imitate, the individuality, as I will call it, of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and the individuality of the new Committee. No one who is not alive to the former can realise quite what it means or what it is. The noble Earl said that it had effected great changes. I think it effected a revolution within twenty years in our modes of approaching the problem of organisation for war, and in my belief, after seeing something of the inside of other great General Staff organisations, it was superior to any organisation of the kind which any other country had. The reason was that, it brought in civilian Departments as well as the others, and made everything culminate in the War Book, which I only mention because it has already been frequently referred to—a book which, I hope, will never be published but will always be kept locked up, as much as is compatible with the changes made in it.

Now, the noble Earl used an expression which gave me a new thought—something which I had overlooked, and that is the position of the Dominions in this new Committee. I think they can come into this new Committee just as well as they can come into the Committee of Imperial Defence, and look at the result. A question arises between us and the Dominion of Canada, we will suppose, in some most friendly way. We will take the subject of emigration. It is a very complicated subject. There is one view there and another view here, but how much could be cleared up if, sitting upon the new Imperial Committee of Research, the two Governments were represented in common as they are to-day frequently on the Committee of Imperial Defence. You get a mind undistracted by any sense of obligation to any particular chief brought to bear upon your problem, and a unified mind. I only throw that out as a thing that is worth thinking of in the future.

In fact, this Committee may effect a revolution. It will take a long time to get to work, but remember that the Committee of Imperial Defence did its work in less than twenty years. It has done a great deal of work in much less time than that, and the noble Earl may be proud of his child in that respect; it grew up very rapidly to maturity. And I think that the new Committee, when it sets to work—and we shall be always driving at the Government to see that it is set to work—with the variety of Committees which it sets up may make a revolution, a revolution of the kind which will supply us with a body of knowledge which we do not possess now, and which will penetrate not only administration but legislation. I quite agree that this Committee has no authority. That is one of its advantages. The other is that is costs nothing. But within these limits the other Committee which is its analogue has been able to effect an enormous change in our system of government in certain Departments, and I have at least a hope that this Committee may be the beginning of new things, of bringing to bear a knowledge of science eh is, I think, the essential condition of recovering our position in the world, and which, if it is brought to bear, will, I have confidence, enable us to see that recovery realised.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.