§ LORD GORELL had given Notice that he would ask His Majesty's Government whether it is now possible to amplify the statements which have been made to the effect that not only will the reserve of pilots for the Royal Air Force be largely increased, but that the conditions of training will be modified in such a way as to obviate the necessity for long periods of continuous attendance; and move for Papers.
§ The noble Lord said: My Lords, I have placed upon the Order Paper a Question as to an increase in the Royal Air Force Reserve and also as to any modifications that it may have been possible to introduce to mitigate the conditions of continuous training. I think that your Lordships will agree that in a time when there is so much unrest abroad, when we are daily confronted with rumours and facts of trouble throughout the world, this question is one that assumes very great national importance. In the event, if it should ever come, of another war between so-called civilised nations, I think it can hardly be questioned that in its first 396 phase we should see in very intense form warfare in the air, which differentiates what may be from anything that has been in that there would obviously be no time allowed to a nation that was attacked to get ready afterwards. I would submit that the strength of the Royal Air Force Reserve is almost as important to the defence of the country as the Royal Air Force itself.
§ I have asked in my Question whether His Majesty's Government are able to amplify any of the statements which have hitherto been made upon this topic, but as far as I am able to gather, though from time to time we have understood that this matter has been very practically under the consideration of His Majesty's Government, there have not been very many statements. I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Air in another place on March 17 of this year stated that it was the aim of His Majesty's Government to enrol 800 pilots a year for the next three years. I do not know whether the noble Viscount the Secretary of State for Air will this afternoon be able to tell us how far that aim has been realised. I think it is common knowledge that there were four civil training flying schools, and there are now thirteen, organised by the aircraft industry, but I think the noble Viscount would agree with me that though they have undoubtedly functioned well, their work is subject to two main difficulties.
§ One is that it necessitates a period of attendance for roughly, I gather, eight weeks or so as an initial training, followed thereafter by necessary refresher courses; and one can understand that for just the type of young man whom it is necessary to attract, who is entering upon his life's work of earning his living in other directions, it may sometimes be extremely difficult for him, however willing he may be, to give up eight continuous weeks. A second difficulty which seems to me to be inseparable from a system of civil training schools, is that necessarily the training must take place upon civil machines, and that in consequence it would seem evident that before those so trained were actually able to engage in the defence of their country, they would have to go for some period of further training upon military machines. The civil machine has already diverged in type considerably from the 397 military, and one may hope that as time goes on it will emerge more and more as a distinct and separate type. Though, as I have said, so far as I have been able to gather, the work of the civil schools has been efficient and good, I would hope that in future the distinction between civil and military should in no possible way be confused. I imagine that His Majesty's Government must have been devoting their attention primarily to the difficulty of overcoming this continuous period, and I would ask the noble Viscount whether he can give us any information this afternoon about that.
§ There is one other section of the problem which does not perhaps specially arise out of the words I have placed upon the Paper and which yet seems to me to be very germane to the problem. I do not know whether the noble Viscount this afternoon can give us any information as to the position of the Auxiliary Air Force or University squadrons, and I would like to ask him, if he is able to give this information—one realises that the noble Viscount may not be able to give publicly much information that he himself possesses—whether he or his advisers have been devoting any of their consideration to the question of interesting boys of sixteen to eighteen in the matter of the defence of their country by air; whether there is anything under consideration or growing up which might be held to take the place, as far as the Royal Air Force is concerned, that the Officers' Training Corps and the Cadet Corps occupy in relation to military defence. One knows that every young boy old enough to be able to take out a motor licence drives or is able to drive, or at any rate desires to drive, a motor car, and still more keen is his interest in all matters connnected with the air. One does not in any way desire that the boys and young men of this country should be made in any degree war-minded, but I would like to know how far their definite air-mindedness is being considered by the Air Ministry in relation to this all-important problem of the defence of their country. I do not desire to detain your Lordships with any further observations, and I hope the noble Viscount will be able to give us a good deal of information upon what is a very pressing and a very important national problem. I beg to move for Papers.
398§ THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOE AIR (VISCOUNT SWINTON)My Lords, I think the House is under a debt of gratitude to my noble friend for raising this question before your Lordships' House adjourns. It is one of great importance and I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity of stating in some detail what our plans are with regard to the Reserve. When we had the general debate in this House on all the problems of defence, I said that I thought none of the three Services could be really satisfied with their position in relation to defence unless we could say with confidence that we had met, or were in process of meeting, a three-fold requirement. We have got in the first place to have a Force in being adequate in size and quality and with a sufficient number of the right kind of men and machines. In the second place we have got to have behind that Force an adequate reserve. Behind that again, we have got to have what on that occasion I ventured to call a war potential. The reserve of this country, whether in men or material, is always great, but you must have, at any rate as far as material is concerned, your potential sufficiently planned and organised that it can come into play without any unnecessary delay.
My noble friend this afternoon has raised the second of these problems—the problem of the Reserve. He spoke in passing, and he asked a question, about the recruiting for the first line, for the Force in being. That, I am glad to be able to say, is eminently satisfactory. We have taken in since April, 1935—entered into training or selected for training—1,350 short-service officers (I leave out regular officers whose scale is being enlarged); some 360 airmen pilots by direct entry, and something like 470 airmen pilots from the Service itself. In regard to all the personnel, skilled and less skilled, required for all the ground services of a widely extended Force, we have put forward what we thought were large claims in the first instance; we have increased our demands more than once, and the programme has been completely filled. Therefore, as regards the Force in being the recruiting, whether it is for pilots or for the ground force, is eminently satisfactory. But it has got to go on. The Force gathers momentum all the time, and it is necessary that that 399 entry into the first line of the Air Force, which has been so satisfactory hitherto, should be maintained.
My noble friend asked about the auxiliary squadrons. They are being extended. I think I made a statement on this to your Lordships in the general defence debate. We are putting up the number of these to twenty, and whatever may have been thought in the past about the efficiency of the auxiliary squadrons, I have no doubt at all now, from experience, that they can be regarded as a very efficient adjunct to the Force. Last year, when some of these squadrons were doing their regular fortnight's training, the experiment was made of taking away from them not only their regular officers but the whole of their regular personnel, and everybody who knows the work and life of the squadrons knows how much depends not only on the pilots but on the skilled personnel who are responsible for the maintenance of the machines. In your auxiliary squadrons you have your voluntary and, if I may so call them, your amateur pilots—amateur in no sense except that they are in auxiliary squadrons. The whole of your ground force is also in that sense amateur. When these squadrons had finished active exercises as extensive as those in which any service squadrons would engage in such a time, the machines went back to the regular personnel of the Air Force to be overhauled, to have the regular overhaul that comes after intense active manoeuvres, and the report which was given upon those machines was that they had been just as well maintained during those active operations by their auxiliary staff as they would have been if they had been maintained by the best equipped and the most efficient squadron in the Regular Air Force. I want to pay that tribute to the officers and men of the auxiliary squadrons, because I think that convinced every single person in the Air Ministry that the auxiliary squadrons were worth while, and that they might be acknowledged as, not worth 50 per cent., but as worth not very far short of 100 per cent. Those go forward. Those will be increased to the numbers I have given. I am perfectly certain we shall get the numbers, for the Lords Lieutenant, helped by their territorial organisations, are giving us great assistance in that regard.
400 My noble friend raised a point that was not in his Question, but I am rather glad he did raise it, about interesting boys. He did not do it, he said, in the least with any idea that you want to get boys war-minded. In this matter I do not think it is a question of being war-minded; rather I feel it is a question of being peace-minded, because I am profoundly convinced that a state of preparedness is going to be the greatest insurance of peace. A man who serves in the Air Force to-day is doing as great a service for peace as any one in the world can be doing. You cannot take a boy of sixteen into an Air Force O.T.C., but you can take him into an ordinary O.T.C. in a public school, and I do want the public schools in this country to be profoundly interested in the Air Force, and to be ready to send boys into the regular service. The competition for Cranwell is at least as great as that for the other great colleges. There is competition for short-service Commissions, and these afford a great opportunity in future life, too.
I am very glad the noble Lord raised the question of interesting the great public schools in the Air Force. I am extremely anxious to do that. I owe a debt—we all do I think—to the Undersecretary of State who has gone round a great many of the public schools of England explaining to them exactly what the Air Force is, talking not only to the boys but also to the masters about it, and we have tried to make connection so that boys can come from the public schools, get their contact, watch, and see an air squadron at work. I have seen one great public school coming out, I am glad to say, in large numbers to one of the squadrons not far from it. I would welcome an arrangement by which they came out on Empire Air Day. I should like them to come not only on Empire Air Day; I should like the contact to be closer and more constant so that the boys from the great public schools can come and have their contact with the Air Force in being and see what it is. When they have seen what it is I do not think it will be only a very small proportion of them that will wish to come into it.
I return to the main purpose of this Motion, the Reserve. In the past the Reserve of the Air Force has been created mainly by the short-service officers who 401 pass out of the regular Force at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six. They have a, long flying life, therefore, before them, and they pass into the Reserve highly efficient and ready when called upon. So long as the size of your Air Force is constant that is an adequate, and indeed an admirable system. If an equal number of men is taken as short-service officers into the Force in a year, and an equal number pass out at the end of that year, your Reserve is adequate and that system works very well. But—and this must be apparent—the moment you increase enormously the size of your first-line Air Force obviously you have got to increase concurrently with it the size of your Reserve. The officers now passing out came three, four or five years ago into a Force a third the size, say, of what it is now, and they would be a quite inadequate Reserve, because the Force next year is going to be three times at least its original size. In the fullness of time that will right itself. You extend your Air Force, say, 200 or 300 per cent., and at the end of five or six years there will be passing out approximately the same number of officers as you are passing into it; in five or six years time your ratio has come to balance again. For the next few years, however, your ratio is quite inadequate. We have got to have a system in which we can in these next few years create a Reserve Force which is proportionate to our real first-line strength.
Some ten years ago, in addition to what I call the normal process of the short-service officers passing through the Regular Force; to the Reserve, we instituted a system of direct entry into the Reserve. A man could enter rather as he entered the old Militia or the third line: he could enter direct into the Reserve. That on the whole has worked very well. The Universities and the University squadrons have played a great part. Many men from the Universities, and men who have served in the University squadrons, when they have gone into civil life and civil jobs, have joined that Reserve. To show how well it has worked, I will give a few figures, but I do not propose to trouble your Lordships with many figures. There were sixty direct entrants into the Reserve in 1933. Last year there were 290. In this year—and I use the period from April to 402 December—we shall be taking no fewer than 400 direct into the Reserve.
As the noble Lord, Lord Gorell, pointed out, the method we have hitherto adopted—and it is the ideal system as long as you can get enough people for it—has been that these young men who come into the Reserve have had to do an initial eight weeks' training, approximately, straight off. After that they naturally are fairly efficient, and then they come up for their fortnight's training every year. If you can do that and get an unlimited number of men who can give that eight weeks straight on end, that is no doubt the best form of training and the easiest; but, as my noble friend said, in the next three years we want direct entrants into the Reserve at the rate of something like 800 a year. When you are making a demand of that kind the initial training of eight weeks is really a practical difficulty. What is it we want to get? We want to get as many as possible public school boys and secondary school boys who have gone into business, who have their regular civil employment. These, I am sure if you can give them the opportunity, will be very keen to come into the Air Service. I have made many appeals to manufacturers and to employers, and they have responded very well, to give a man eight weeks off. Well, it is a very difficult thing to do. The young man who is in some profession on his own, the young barrister, the young solicitor, the young accountant, can do his training at weekends and take a fortnight off, but if he has to be away eight weeks he finds it very difficult. It is difficult for the young man on his own to make that cut in time. It is difficult also in many businesses and the better the man the more difficult it is to let him off. And I want the best men.
That is my problem. In what other way, which will give me adequate results and bring me the men, can I get what I hitherto got in eight weeks' training? If I may put it in this way, I have tried to find a scheme which will bring the training to the pilot rather than the pilot to the training. I have been enormously helped in this by what my noble friend Lord Gorell has already referred to; that is, the great increase we have made and the great efficiency we have attained in the civil flying training schools. Without their great expansion and efficiency we 403 certainly could not have carried out this enormous increase of entry into the Regular Service. These civil flying training schools are manned by officers of great experience and skill who have passed through the Air Force. We can rely on them just as much as upon the skilled instructors in our own flying training schools. We are relying on them to-day to do the whole of the preparatory training for the short-service officers who go into the Regular Air Force. They are doing the whole of the training for the ab initio reservist.
Basing ourselves on that experience and on these facilities—and we could not do without them—we are proposing to introduce next year a new Reserve Force. His Majesty the King has approved the title of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve for this new Force. The way we intend to work is this. We propose to establish centres in London and in other great cities which will enable young men in civil life to join the Reserve, to train in the evenings and at week-ends, and to have a fortnight's continuous training in each year. In that way we shall spread over the year that initial training which now requires eight weeks continuous attendance. We intend that that training, while it will naturally begin on the training machine and the civil machine, shall be a training not only on civil machines but on military machines as well. As time goes forward we shall no doubt be able to arrange that part of the great war reserve in machines shall be made available in these training schools, so that a man training on his training machine to start with will pass on and serve when he is fit to do so upon the most efficient machines—exactly the machines on which he would serve should ever the need arise. I may say in passing that one of the most interesting developments of some of these new machines is that, whereas many of those responsible for their design thought in the first instance that when you designed a machine of enormously increased performance in speed you would get a sort of Schneider Cup machine which would be difficult to fly, that has not proved to be the case. Many pilots who had entertained that view—they have flown me in two of them—have said to me: "This thing is as easy to handle as any machine I have ever flown." That is a very satisfactory feature in design.
404 Therefore the training will be exactly of the kind at which my noble friend thinks we ought to aim. We shall establish these schools either at aerodromes or in the cities that are close to aerodromes. Let me explain what I mean. If you have an aerodrome conveniently situated near a large town that you can get to easily by bicycle or motorcar, then we shall have a training centre and do flying training in the same place. I think that would probably be the case in London. That is the ideal. But where the aerodrome is further away we shall have to establish a training centre in the town. I think "a headquarters" is technically the correct expression, but it will be probably something more like a club. All the evening training, training in mechanics and all the ground training that must be given, will be done there and then these young men will be taken out for flying training upon the aerodrome. These centres will be run much in the same way as the University squadrons are run now. Everybody who is familiar with the University squadrons will agree with me when I say that the training in them is extraordinarily good.
Not only is there very efficient training but there is a rather agreeable social centre as well. I do not want to dissociate the two in the least. I want to make these centres places which will give efficient training from the air point of view. The air staff will have charge of them, and that will be their responsibility. We shall select very carefully the officers to be put in charge of these centres. But I want to see not only something which is really efficient, but something which at the same time is not unattractive to the boy in civil life. I hope we shall get in these great cities local committees to be associated with us. It is quite possible, if you have the right men in charge, to get discipline and training all right and at the same time make the thing extraordinarily attractive from the human point of view as well. That is what we are going to aim at and that is what, with everybody's assistance, we are going to get.
These young pilots will enter on what I may call a common-entry basis. They will come in, all of them, on the same level as airman pilots, which is a term well known to my noble friend. Nominally they have the rank of sergeant, 405 in very much the way in which you would. enter the senior ranks of an O.T.C. Later, those who show most proficiency and suitability will be advanced to commissioned rank. The age of initial entry will be from eighteen to twenty-five. They will join for five years and accept universal service if they are called up, and will be invited to renew for further periods of five years up till the age of thirty-eight. That is the regular practice in the Reserve to-day.
They will not be out of pocket by this: they will get their yearly retaining fee and they will receive pay and allowances during training. All the young men to whom I have talked who are in the Reserve to-day tell me that they can do quite comfortably upon it. Moreover, as was pointed out to me upon a Scottish aerodrome the other day where there was Reserve training going on, quite a number of them are not only drawing the pay and the retaining fee provided by the Air Force but are also enjoying full pay from their employers. This, therefore, was quite a proper arrangement, and they were by no means out of pocket on the transaction even if they entertained some of their friends. Selection Boards will have to sit in London at first, and where a Selection Board sits in London we shall of course follow our regular practice of giving full travelling expenses to anybody who comes up to London for the Selection Board. Later on I hope we shall be able to decentralise and have Selection Boards sitting in the localities.
The Reserve is an essential part of the Royal Air Force, and the training and the control of it must be a Service responsibility which you cannot share with anybody else. But I want to pay a tribute to the light aeroplane clubs of this country. We have subsidised them. We have sometimes been criticised for doing that. I do not think we had any particular military idea in our minds in doing so. We shall continue to subsidise those clubs, and we shall subsidise equally these new business clubs which are in contemplation, if they come into being, in exactly the same way as we are subsidising the light aeroplane clubs to-day. I think their activities in the past will probably help the creation of this Reserve. It is also very likely that, as flying increases through this Reserve and in many other ways, the membership of the flying clubs, so far from diminishing, may increase. 406 I hope it will, because I look on these civil flying clubs, and these business clubs which are contemplated and will come into being, as something in the nature of a third line. They may assume no responsibility for service to the State, but I have not much doubt that if ever the time came and the need arose, anybody who was able to fly and was a member of a club—and a few people of whom I can think and of whom some of your Lordships can think, people of a considerably greater age, attempted it and succeeded in it during the last War—would be found among the earliest volunteers to come forward.
I have given but an outline of this scheme, I hope not of undue length. I wanted to tell your Lordships and the country what is in our mind, what we are planning about this. Organising is easy to talk about, but organising a great scheme of this kind to function throughout the country takes a tremendous lot of doing. It cannot be done in a moment, particularly on the top of everything else, but I think we shall get it working early next year, and in the meantime the direct entry into the Reserve, as I said, is going very well. We have these 400 who have already come and are ear-marked for training. We shall publish particulars in due course, and men wanting to join will know exactly the conditions and how and when they are to apply.
I am only going to add two things. I made some time ago an appeal to employers to give that extra bit of leave to their men. I know the response which has already come. I have been to one of these training schools where the Reserve was in training, and I found man after man there, pilot after pilot, in all sorts of different careers in life and in different kinds of businesses, who had been given leave on full pay by his employer to come forward and train. I am encouraged by that to renew this appeal. I am trying in this to create a scheme for the Reserve which will fit in as practically as possible with all the exigencies of civil life, to make it as easy as possible for the pilot and as easy as possible for his work, the job in which he is engaged. I renew my appeal to employers, and I do so with confidence based on results, to make it easy for young men to come and join this Reserve. When it comes to the fortnight's training—and 407 there must be a fortnight's continuous training for the man in the Reserve, just as in the Territorial Force—I appeal to his employer to give him that extra fortnight of leave in order that he may be able to come without cutting into the other fortnight that he gets away from his job. I make that appeal, and I am sure that it will be responded to.
We have tried to devise a scheme as practical as possible, one that fits in with the ordinary civil life of this country and the life in our great cities. The appeal is open to a wide field. The boy at the public school, the boy at the secondary school who has passed into civil life. We have tried to make it practical, and I hope and I believe that it will be possible. I say only this in conclusion, echoing something which the noble Lord, Lord Gorell, said in opening. Speak of armaments and inevitably in one sense you speak in terms of war. But nobody supposes that any force of this country—first line, second line or third line—is ever going to be used for any purpose but that of defence and the preservation of peace, and I am absolutely certain that anybody who joins this Reserve is doing as great a service as he can to preserve the peace of this country and the peace of the world.
THE EARL OF CORK AND ORRERYMy Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount one question arising out of his very interesting discourse? He mentioned that 470 pilots have been obtained from the Service men; would that mean promotion from the ranks?
§ VISCOUNT SWINTONThat was direct entry into the Service? Yes, I can answer that. Of the entry into the Regular Service—I treated the Reserve separately—between April, 1935, and now 1,350 short-service officers have been taken direct out of civil life; there have been 360 direct-entry airman pilots; and 470 airmen pilots promoted from the Service itself.
LORD STRABOLGIMy Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount a question on a different point from that which was put by the noble and gallant Earl, and may I apologise for not having heard the whole of the speeches of the noble Viscount and Lord Gorell? I asked a noble friend, who informs me that this particular point was touched upon by neither speaker. In 408 the scheme of the Government I do not find any place for women, and I am going to ask the noble Viscount very seriously indeed—I am not making a joke of this at all—if he has considered this point. I know a great many of the purely civil flying clubs, which have nothing to do with this scheme at all, and a very great part is played there by women, who are very keen pilots indeed and we must not, I suggest, close our minds to the times we live in.
If I were responsible for building up an Air Force rapidly, and I could get a number of suitable, skilful and active modern young women as flyers, I should be very glad to have them. It is ridiculous to suggest that they are not efficient. I do not want to go into particulars, but I can recall one who is connected with the constituency which I once represented, Miss Amy Johnson, and others, who have played a great part in flying, and other nations are recruiting women. I think it is worth consideration, and serious consideration, and we should not simply wave it aside and say that women should have no part in the Fighting Services. In the last War they did play a great part in the various auxiliary services. I do not want a detailed answer from the noble Viscount, but I think the matter is worth consideration, if there is need to build up an Air Reserve as rapidly as possible.
§ VISCOUNT SWINTONMy Lords, I should be the last to underrate the capacity of women for this or anything else, but what I am concerned with here is the building up of a Reserve, and the noble Lord, if he had heard both speeches in their entirety, would have appreciated that this is a Reserve which is to be called up in an emergency directly to play its part and fill the ranks of the Fighting Force. It is the second line behind the first line strength. But when I hear it suggested that into a military formation of that kind, which is the immediate reserve for the fighting line, we should recruit women pilots—
§ LORD MARLEYWhy not?
§ VISCOUNT SWINTONI take note of the suggestion which is made by the two leaders of the Party opposite, that we should directly recruit the women of this country into the fighting line. I hesitate a long time before I subscribe to a proposition 409 of that kind. I very much admire—anybody who served in the last War must do so—the part which women played and would play again, but I do not, frankly, think that their place is in the fighting line. War is beastly enough, and we do not want to add that to it. Women, alter all they did in nursing, in transport driving and in munitions in the last War, might very well in the next war have a part to play in the piloting of machines. May be you will see ambulance machines. When I was Colonial Secretary and toured the Colonies, I saw them bringing in sick people great distances by aeroplane. It may well be that air ambulances will, in a future war, play their part, and that just as women drove lorries and motor cars in the last war, aeroplanes will be used, not only in the front lines and in fighting, but in ambulance and other work. Most certainly I think there may well be a place which women would fill not only readily but very efficiently in work of that kind. The fact, however, that they certainly may be called upon for work of that kind is not a reason, I respectfully suggest to your Lordships, for asking women to serve in the fighting line or the first line.
LORD STRABOLGIMay I explain on behalf of myself and my noble friend? We take great interest in matters of defence, but in this thing we are not expressing the opinion of the Labour Party. I personally would be very glad of women pilots if I were in a hole and needed flyers; but this point has not been discussed by the Labour Party, and I cannot commit the Labour Party, nor can my noble friend.
LORD GORELLMy Lords, I am sure no one would have expected the noble Viscount to say more than he has done about the last surprising development of the debate. I think everyone would agree that women might play an auxiliary part, but I should hesitate very gravely before wishing to embroil them in anything further. There is only one thing which I wish to say in answer to the very lucid statement which has been made by the noble Viscount. It is very difficult to pick up all the details of an elaborate scheme from a single speech, and I was not clear as to the part which light aeroplane clubs were going to play. I do not press the noble Viscount to 410 answer anything further, but I hope that they will not be left at all on one side, since their members are definitely people who have been the keenest in flying, and would naturally be potential members of any Reserve. There is just one other point. I was not quite clear from the noble Viscount's speech whether there were any Papers which he was prepared to lay. It seems to me that the statement he has made, covering a wide field, is one of great importance, and, as he knows, a single statement in this House does not always get the consideration and study which it deserves. Therefore I hope that it will be possible for something embodied in the form of a Paper for the public to ensue.
§ VISCOUNT SWINTONMy Lords, may I be permitted to answer the noble Lord at once? Most certainly, with regard to the last point, it is our intention, when the scheme is complete, to publish an absolutely full statement of the whole of the scheme, the terms of service, the method by which people could volunteer, and so on. That will be done as soon as in can be made ready, and certainly before the scheme can start. With regard to light aeroplane clubs, I thought I had made that plain. This is an integral part of the Air Force, just as much of it as a first-line squadron, and the control and training must be under the Air Force—the Superintendent of Reserve and their officers. Nothing else, I am sure my noble friend will agree, would be possible, but that the flying clubs will contribute I have no doubt at all, and I hope the fact that a very large number of people will be learning to fly, so far from being detrimental to flying clubs will, in the long run, add to their numbers.
§ VISCOUNT SWINTONI had not noticed that my noble friend had moved for Papers. I would ask him to withdraw his Motion, because I am not going to lay Papers in this House but to publish to the world the conditions as soon as those conditions are ready.
§ Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.