Lords Sitting of 3 March 1937

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Several Lords—Took the Oath.

PUBLIC HEALTH (DRAINAGE OF TRADE PREMISES) BILL, [H.L.]
VISCOUNT GAGE: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to amend the law with respect to the discharge of trade effluents into public sewers of local authorities, and to move that it be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.—(Viscount Gage.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

PORTSMOUTH AND GOSPORT GAS ORDER, 1937.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Templemore, I beg to move that the Special Order, as reported from the Special Orders Committee on Tuesday, the 23rd February, be approved.
Moved, That the Special Order, as reported from the Special Orders Committee on Tuesday, the 23rd February, be approved.—(The Earl of Munster.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

ALLOA AND DISTRICT GAS ORDER, 1937.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER: My Lords, again on behalf of my noble friend Lord Templemore, I beg to move that the Special Order, as reported from the Special Orders Committee on Tuesday, the 23rd February, be approved, with an addition.
Moved, That the Special Order, as reported from the Special Orders Committee on Tuesday, the 23rd February, be approved, with an addition.—(The Earl of Munster.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

PRISON CONDITIONS.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL THE EARL OF KINNOULL had the following Notice on the Paper:—To draw the attention of His Majesty's Government to the conditions obtaining in His Majesty's prisons and to ask whether any reforms are contemplated; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, it usually falls to my lot, when I have any Notice on the Order Paper, to speak at about seven o'clock, when most noble Lords have already gone away, no doubt to perform other duties, so I count myself exceptionally lucky this afternoon in that this Motion comes on so early, especially as it deals with a question which I regard as of the greatest importance. I should like at once to ask whether the idea of imprisonment to-day is partly one of revenge—revenge against the person who has broken the social code—or one of the reform of the prisoner. I have recently read a book, which I have no doubt some of your Lordships have also read because it has had fairly wide notice in the Press, and I believe in one Sunday newspaper it was printed as a serial. It is called "Walls Have Mouths," and is by a gentleman named Mr. Macartney, who is an ex-convict. If the statements in that book are true—and as far as I have been able to discover they have never been denied—anybody who has read it must think that if the object of prison is reform, then a great many reforms are necessary.
To start with, he deals with the time when he was on remand in Brixton Prison, before he was convicted. He says that he had considerable difficulty in obtaining writing materials in order to communicate with his solicitor, and that anything that he did write was first of all censored by the Governor and, if it contained anything of use to the prosecution, the information was given to the prosecution. I think that in the case of a person who is on remand and has not yet been convicted, if he is allowed bail he has free access to his solicitor or anybody else whom he wants to see; he is presumed to be innocent until he is convicted. If, on the other hand, he is not so fortunate as to be able to get bail, then he appears to be treated very much as if he were already guilty. I think that some measure of reform is certainly necessary here. You cannot have two positions; you cannot presume that a person who is allowed bail is not guilty, and
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presume—or almost presume—that a person who cannot get bail is guilty.
The author then goes on in this book to describe his experiences in Wands-worth Prison before he was sent to Park-hurst convict establishment. While he was at Wands-worth a man was hanged, and he says that you could hear the noise of the drop all over the prison. If that is so, surely it is barbarous. He also describes the ribald remarks which were shouted out by prisoners in their cells immediately that happened. I know that in Dickens one reads of that kind of ribald remark in the prisons of a century or so ago, but surely to-day it is a barbarous thing to allow other prisoners actually to hear the death sentence carried out and (as would naturally happen in a prison) to have that kind of remark made. It seems to me sheer barbarity.
He goes on to say that certain warders—and I am not saying a word against warders—in their conversations are rather curious. There is one particular passage which I shall quote to your Lordships showing what actually happened to him. When he got to Parkhurst he was put in the tailor's shop, and he says he was asked to stitch up the strap fasteners of a strait jacket, which he refused to do, as apparently prisoners have a right so to refuse to do. The principal warder came up to him and this conversation took place:
"'Do you refuse to work, Macartney?'
'No, I only decline to do this particular job, and I am acting within my rights in declining,' I answered.
'How's that? Convicts have no rights! was the comforting reply.
'This is an article of restraint, and there is a Standing Order that no prisoner can be made to work upon such articles if he doesn't wish to. The job should be done by the instructor,' I replied …"
Warders have no right to talk to a prisoner in that fashion. Even if a man is a convict he surely still has some sort of rights left to him. I think there is room for reform there.
He goes on to say that up to 1934 there was no electric light in the prison. The real reason for that, I think, was that the authorities could get no money to put in electric light. It seems to me ridiculous that up to three years ago no electric light was in this prison; and even to-day there is no running water. Surely, we are out

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of date. We do not want to go back to the castles of two or three hundred years ago in which prisoners were locked up, yet that is what we seem to be doing. Dartmoor Prison is an example of that. In the Du Parcq Report it was stated quite freely that the gaolers and all the officials objected to the prison. It is really a beastly prison, yet nothing has been done about it. It has been stated that the cells were very damp, but I understand that that is not so to-day. But the prison is definitely out of date and should be done away with altogether. He says also a word on the strong cell arrangement. I do not want to say much about that, because it was raised in another place, but he says that at Park-burst in the strong cells there are no windows or heating, and men occasionally put in a winter without a blanket and mostly with only a shirt on. I do not think that in the winter one would treat an animal in that way—put it in a cold cell with only a blanket to lie on. It seems to be going beyond the bounds to treat convicts in that way.
Another thing that struck me in reading the book was the unnecessary amount of duplication that goes on as you pass from one prison to another. You come up before the medical officer and have to give your whole medical history—indeed, your whole history—over and over again although it is all written down in the form in front of him. That seems to me an unnecessary waste of time, and also it must be very galling to the unfortunate convict to have to keep on repeating his previous history, convictions and so on. That sort of thing could be cut out. Another thing that must get on the convict's nerves, as I am sure it would get on the nerves of any of your Lordships who had the misfortune to be sent to prison, is the unnecessary amount of nagging that goes on by warders in the form of orders to "Shut up," and "Keep in line," and that type of thing. When nobody is doing anything there seems to be a gramophone record requesting the convicts to "Stop talking" and "If you don't you will be reported".
I can well understand that that type of thing drives a person nearly insane after any length of time in prison. It must be terrible. Surely that need not go on then the long hours of confine-
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ment must be perfectly dreadful. Take Saturday and Sunday. On Saturdays convicts are locked up for twenty-three hours with just one hour for exercise, with no one to talk to and very little reading matter supplied to them. Can you wonder that after a year or two of that a man eventually breaks out, loses all reason for the time being, and does what is called "smashing up" in his cell, breaking everything in the cell, tearing all the clothes up, and acts of that description? Surely, that treatment is unnecessary. There again it is a question of money. The Government will not spend money on having more warders; that is what it comes to. These people have to have a week-end off, and the only way they can do it is by keeping the unfortunate convicts locked up. The Government are willing to spend £1,500,000,000 on armaments, but will not spend even a few hundreds to remedy a position of this description. If one only looked upon prison as a place of reform instead of as a place purely of revenge it would do something to reform them. These long hours of solitary confinement must be perfectly terrible to anyone undergoing them.
The next question is the question of food. I am not suggesting that convicts should be fed on caviare or anything of that description, but if one gets exactly the same breakfast every morning for months one will eventually get so sick of it as not to be able to look at it. Medical men say that monotony of diet over a long period is deleterious to health. In Macartney's book it is stated that the prison doctors at Parkhurst find it necessary to put convicts in hospital for a fortnight and give them hospital diet in order to get away from the routine which they undergo—every two years, I think it is. It does seem to me that the food might be varied a little so that people may be saved the terrible monotony that now exists.
Another thing that struck me as very hard indeed is this. He describes in the book that when his mother and sister were dying he was not allowed to see them. Surely, one can allow a long-time convict out with a warder to say good-bye to a sister or mother or wife. It does seem to me unnecessarily harsh not to do so. He also describes cases of

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flogging in prison. Apparently one is flogged with a cat-o'-nine-tails in all cases of assault on a warder. I can well understand that as the result of the nagging that goes on a prisoner's brain may suddenly snap, and he may get so out of hand that he darts out of the line and smashes the person who is nagging in the face. I can well understand that happening. In civilian life if one assaults a policeman—and it happens quite frequently—he does not receive the penalty of flogging but gets off with a fine of fifty shillings or so; but if you are a convict and assault a warder you get flogged for it. That seems to me unnecessary brutality, and I do not believe brutality does any good. It is not even a preventative. When a man loses his reason for a moment no amount of fear of flogging is going to stop him doing it again. Macartney quotes cases of men who have been flogged several times, but flogging has not deterred them from doing it again. All that it has done it to make them more like brute beasts.
He describes the punishment cell in which he was once or twice, when his diet was only 8 oz. of bread in the morning and 8 oz. of bread in the evening, with three pints of water per day. He was allowed from 11.30 to 1.45 to read an old magazine, and the rest of the time he was locked up in solitary confinement. I ask your Lordships, whether that is going to do anybody any good. If prisoners have been refractory is that kind of treatment going to reform them and make them a better type of prisoner? I do not think it is. It will have precisely the opposite effect. It will make them feel that they are enemies of society, and that they have a grudge against society, so that when they get free again they are likely to become worse than they were before; indeed I am certain that is so. I would like to make a suggestion. Smoking apparently is one of the great things that prisoners miss. After four years, if you are a convict, you get on to what is a special stage, and you are allowed to smoke at certain intervals. Tobacco apparently has become more valuable than gold in prison. According to this book, with tobacco you can buy practically everything. Instead of depriving people of smoking to start with, why not allow them to do it at first and take it away
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from them if they should turn out to be refractory prisoners? That seems to me a much more sensible way of doing things.
I want to turn for a moment to the question of mental defectives in prison. Personally I take the view that nearly all people who are convicts have a mental kink. I do not say they are mentally deficient, but that they have a mental kink. I think that at any rate 90 per cent, of them would be far better treated by psychologists than they are by means of prison treatment. I find that where people have been sent in for observation because their behaviour was somewhat peculiar they have been kept in the observation landing for years until they have been let out, and when let out they have been promptly discharged to the county asylum. It does seem to me utterly stupid, when quite clearly it must have been known over a number of years whether a person was mentally deficient, to keep him under sentence and then discharge him to a mental asylum. There is surely a great need for reform there.
With regard to visits, the prisoner, after two and a half years I think it is, is allowed a visit every two months, and after four years he is allowed a visit every month, but a great many questions are gone into if he asks anybody to visit him. Inquiries are made about the persons he has asked to visit him, whether they have a criminal record and so on. If they have a criminal record they are not allowed to visit the prisoner. The police are asked to find out the circumstances. In most cases the criminal is not a rich man living in a society which would not know much about the visits of police. These prisoners usually come from the working class, and all working-class homes distinctly dislike any policeman calling at the door even if the occupants of the houses themselves have no connection with criminals. It puts a black mark against them in the eyes of their neighbours, and it seems to me very hard that a number of convicts should not be allowed to see any of their friends for the simple reason that their friends are too frightened to have these inquiries made by the police. It places them in an awkward position, and they would rather keep away from seeing their friend who is confined to prison. It seems to me, again, that unnecessary inquiries are being made, and I do not

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know why they should be. The time of the prison visit in the case of an ordinary prisoner, I understand, is for about twenty minutes, and if the prisoner is in a convict prison it is half an hour. If you have to travel, say, from Sunderland to Parkhurst, that seems a very short time to allow. I think half an hour once every two months to see any one is too short a time.
Before I come to an end I am going to refer to another book, one about prisons in Russia. I know it is anathema to say anything about Russia to some noble Lords, but for all that I am going to refer to it. These restrictions seem to me unnecessary, and I do not see that they can do any good at all. Before that, however, I want to refer to the question of books. When you first enter a convict establishment you are allowed two novels and two miscellaneous books a fortnight. After you have been there some time, say four years, you are allowed as many books as you want, in the discretion of the chaplain. There seems to be no encouragement at all for convicts to read any particular type of book; indeed they seem to be discouraged from reading books. Macartney in his book describes how he had to fight the authorities to get books, though he did not want books to which anybody could possibly object. Why there should be this official idea of keeping books from convicts I cannot understand. I should have thought that the one thing that might do some good to a convict in prison would be to allow him to read good books. Such books would probably improve prisoners' minds and show them how to be decent citizens when they are eventually let out. I cannot understand the idea of keeping books away from them. It does not seem to me a sensible thing to do.
As I have taken up quite enough of your Lordships' time I will only refer to one other point before I sit down and that is the question of money. Apparently a convict is allowed to be sent one pound for special purposes such as false teeth, spectacles, or something of that description, but if a pound note is sent to a convict and the person who sends it does not enclose his name and address the money is; sequestrated. Why should the convict be deprived of that pound because some friend who wishes to remain anonymous has not disclosed
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his name and address to the authorities? It seems to me that that is grossly imposing on the convict and also on the person who sends the pound. It does not seem right, and I cannot see any reason for it. Before I sit down I just want to contrast what is said by a gentleman who went to Russia with what is the case here. He wrote a book called "A Physician's Tour in Soviet Russia." This shows how different in many respects is the treatment of convicts in Russia to that accorded in this country. Let me quote what is said:
"The prison, or correctional Colony, of Levortovski, was formerly a military prison with 205 cells for solitary confinement. The cells are arranged in four long galleries, each of three stories, radiating from a centre. It now houses 615 prisoners, three in a cell. This particular ' Colony has been running for two years …
"Each cell is fitted with a radio loudspeaker above its door. The beds are clean and comfortable. The barred windows are large. The doors of the cells are left wide open, except between one a.m. and six a.m., so that prisoners can visit each other freely. One cell, which we passed, had been padlocked on the outside by the prisoner himself. Presently he turned up, opened the padlock, and welcomed us to his cell. He was a stout elderly gentleman, who informed us that he had been sentenced to ten years confinement for embezzlement of 71,000 roubles from a sugar trust. He is leaving to-day in high spirits, having, by his industry and good conduct, served exactly six years, ten months and seven days. He told us that he has secured a secretarial post in the office of the Commissary of Trade at a salary of 700 roubles a month, and will take up his new duties forthwith.
"Meals are served to the prisoners in their cells, but a comfortable communal dining room will presently be built. Each prisoner is expected to work eight hours a day, knocking off for a meal. There are two separate shifts of workers. If he is illiterate, this defect must be 'liquidated,' and he must learn to read and write, being instructed by fellow prisoners who were teachers in civil life. Non-illiterate prisoners are employed in one or other of the various prison factories, chiefly in spinning, weaving, tailoring, and embroidering. For this work the pay is from 30 to 35 roubles a month. This amount is placed to each man's account, to be handed to him on leaving. He is allowed to spend a certain proportion on clothes, tobacco, &c., but not on alcohol. He has a week's holiday in his own home after one year; this is increased to a fortnight in subsequent years, and if he is a peasant he may be allowed to stay at home for three months to help in getting in the harvest. His friends and family can come and visit him in prison every ten days during the first year and every five days in subsequent years …

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"Each work-day performed by the prisoner cuts more than a day off his sentence, two days' work corresponding to three days' remission of prison."
I will not read any more, for the quotation is a long one, but it illustrates my point. In Russia they are really trying to reform convicts. It is not just a question of society taking revenge upon them. I have nothing more to say except to express the hope that we shall hear that some measures of reform in this country are contemplated. I beg to move.
THE MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA: My Lords, I confess that I am in some difficulty in answering the noble Earl. His credulity as far as remarks made by members of his own Party are concerned is so great, that I feel that his disbelief in any remarks made by me is certain to be very much greater. In my short experience in your Lordships' House I have never heard a speech containing so many allegations based on one book by one convict without any attempt whatever to produce evidence from outside sources. I cannot possibly—indeed I think it would be waste of time if I tried—go in very great detail into the allegations which Mr. Macartney made and which have been repeated in your Lordships' House. I will take two obvious misstatements which occur in the book. Nagging by warders has been referred to, and I suppose the passage to which the noble Earl referred is this:
"Saturday afternoon exercise was hell in 1928. Assaults on jailers were the feature of the exercising ring. Convicts exasperated beyond control would step out of the circulating ring and assault the jailers."
It may interest your Lordships to know that assaults on the officers of Parkhurst in 1928, 1929 and 1930 were two, three and nine respectively. Then we heard something about the long hours that prisoners spend alone in their cells during the week-end. I have here a list of hours which I shall be glad to furnish to the noble Earl. It shows that the ordinary prisoner is out of his cell for at least nine hours over the week-end and many men are out for very much longer periods. I will take upon myself the responsibility of telling the noble Earl that the story of hearing the drop fall is pure nonsense and complete imagination. It is not possible to hear the drop fall at Wandsworth.
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In view of the fact that the noble Earl's speech was really based on what he himself must admit is an ex parte statement, I think the best thing I can do is to give your Lordships a short review of what has actually been done in the way of prison reform during the last few years. I will preface my remarks by quoting from the Commissioners' Annual Report of 1922–3, which seems to me to show what should be the object of prison reform. They say:
"It is not to make prisons pleasant, but to construct a system, of training such as will fro the prisoner to re-enter the world as a citizen. To this end the first requisite is greater activity of mind and body, and the creation of habits of sustained industry. Longer hours of work are therefore the first item in our programme. Next comes the removal of any features of unnecessary degradation in prison life and the promotion of self-respect, and education on particular lines calculated to rouse some intelligent interest, and to raise the mind out of a sordid circle of selfish broodings. Finally, we endeavour to awaken some sense of personal responsibility by the gradual and cautious introduction of methods of limited trust."
Those were the ideals of prison reform in 1922, and I believe that the results have proved that those ideals, even though they have not been completely satisfied, are directed rightly. In 1910 the prison population of this country was just under 21,000. At the present moment it is only 10,000. Of all the persons recently received into prison for the first time for serious offences during the years 1930–33, 80.7 per cent, so far as is known had not returned to prison a second time up to the end of 1935. Therefore it does seem that we have made reforms—even if the noble Earl thinks we have not gone far enough—in the right direction of keeping people out of prison and preventing people who have been in prison from being forced back into criminal life.
What are the reforms which we have been successful in introducing during the last twenty years? In the first place the principle of solitary confinement, which was in former days the great principle of the penal system of England, has been practically done away with. For both convicts and prisoners serving hard labour separate confinement was finally abolished in 1931. Every prisoner now, unless there is some medical reason, works from the very beginning of his sentence in association with other prisoners. It is quite obvious, however, that association with other prisoners has

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dangers within itself. Contamination may only too easily follow if all sorts of prisoners are allowed to mix freely together. Therefore the object of our reforms has always been to classify prisoners as clearly and definitely as is within our power. The first and obvious classification has been the institution of Borstal, which has at one stroke taken one-sixth of the prison population and put them into places where they cannot be contaminated by older and more vicious criminals. Apart from Borstal it is obviously very difficult to have a system of classification within the prison itself. It is very difficult to have one set of prisoners having one sort of treatment and another set having another sort of treatment. It is quite clear that if you are trying to create some sense of responsibility in them and to give them training your efforts will be hampered if you have different classes; of prisoners in the same prison. Therefore it has been the policy of the Commissioners to reserve certain establishments for certain particular classes of prisoners.
Wormwood Scrubs since 1925 has been reserved for prisoners serving a first term in the Metropolitan area; Wakefield has been reserved for selected prisoners in the Midlands since 1923; and Chelmsford-the latest, I think—has been reserved since 1931 for younger prisoners of criminal habits. Furthermore, the Commissioners have developed the policy—and the very right policy, it seems to me—of collecting as far as possible -those young prisoners between sixteen and twenty-one who are serving very short sentences. At first only people who were serving more than three months were collected, but now I am happy to say that those who are serving as short a sentence as one month go to these collecting centres. But I should like to emphasise—and I am very glad, on behalf of the Government, to have the opportunity of doing so—that, however hard you try, you cannot in these collecting centres give the same training as you can give in a Borstal institution.
The Prison Commissioners have frequently drawn attention to the fact that magistrates and those who have to administer the law should think twice, think thrice and then think again before they send young people to prison, particularly those who have not previously been guilty of offences. Thirty-eight per cent, of the
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boys who were sentenced to imprisonment in 1935 had not previously been convicted of an offence, and it is the firm conviction of the Commissioners and of His Majesty's Government that in many of those cases probation would have met the case far better, and that in the remainder of the cases a longer term of Borstal imprisonment would have done the boy far more good. The only consolation that one has is that whereas in 1932 a total of 2,653 boys received sentences of imprisonment, the number had fallen to 1,608 in 1935.
I have already dealt with Macartney's allegations about the length of time that prisoners were kept in their cells over the week-end, but I should like to emphasise that it is the firm policy of the Commissioners at the moment to reduce to a minimum the period during which the prisoners are locked in their cells. They do that for the very obvious reason that if you want to fit a man to go out and take his part in life again, it is important to approximate as far as possible the conditions of prison to the conditions of human association. Of course all this depends on money, and I am happy to say that since 1934 it has been possible very greatly to increase the staff of prison officers available to look after the prisoners. I have not the exact figures with me, but I should say that with a reduced prison population the staff has increased by one-fifth. This increase has, of course, had the double advantage of enabling things like hair-cutting, washing and suchlike to be done in the evening hours instead of interrupting the work in the shops.
I propose to deal very briefly with the remaining reforms which have been accomplished during the last two years. We have started an experimental system of wages in Wakefield, and that has been extended all over the Borstal institutions since 1929. Evening classes, with the object of improving the mind, have been steadily increased and, not least, the prison library system has been vastly improved. I can assure my noble friend that the insinuations which he drew from the book which he was quoting were not accurate, and I should have thought that it was quite obvious that they were not accurate, in so far as on one page you find Mr. Macartney complaining that no books of a political character were allowed to him, and on the next you find that

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in fact books on Lenin and on Marx were in his habitual possession, as apparently the Prison Governor allowed him access to them. It seems a little unfair that he should take the fullest advantage of all the political literature he could get and at the same time complain that no political literature is allowed. The prison libraries are being steadily increased and a new system of cataloguing has been introduced which enables a prisoner to say exactly and with the greatest ease what book he requires. It is quite untrue, as I think was suggested in at any rate one book on prisons, that the prisoner is handed a book on a plate and told that he can read that or not read anything at all. That is not the principle which is animating the Commissioners at this time.
The only other item of prison reform to which I should like to draw your attention is the weekly news bulletin which is now being produced and which I believe is doing an immense amount of good. Not merely does it give the prisoner something to talk about and something to think about, but it ensures that when he comes out, having read those bulletins, he is not suddenly handicapped all through the first year after he has come out by people referring to events which he never knew had taken place.
I think I have said enough to show that the spirit of prison reform is very much alive at the present moment. The Commissioners are doing everything in their power to fit these people for the new life they will have to take up when they come out. But no one is more aware than they or the Government that all these reforms are quite valueless unless they are accompanied by a very careful selection of the staff who are going to implement them. The Commissioners are fully alive to the importance of the selection of warders, and they are very fortunate in so far as the conditions of service are sufficiently good to give them a very wide choice indeed of the type of man they select. The candidate after an interview has a nine weeks' course of intensive training in all his duties. He then, I think, has another interview. At the end of that between 25 and 30 per cent, of these men who have had the course are rejected and not admitted to the service.
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I think that gives the noble Lord some idea of the strictness with which warders are selected, and I think that much of that nagging of which he complained, which I can well understand, if it did take place, might lead to very unfortunate results, is a memory of the past. That no longer exists, and the present type of warder is quite different from the type upon which Mr. Macartney drew for his imaginary pictures. He will not forget that, despite all those strictures on warders in general all through that book, whenever Mr. Macartney mentions a warder by name he says, "He was not a bad sort"; "he was a good chap." Therefore it was more the general conception of the warder rather than the individual of which the noble Earl, I think, was speaking and of which Mr. Macartney wrote. I have made a long speech, I am afraid, and I have tried to give some sort of account of what the Commissioners have done during the last two years. But I should not like the noble Earl to think that on that account, because reforms have been made, we are complacent or the Commissioners are complacent. We are fully aware and they are fully aware that there is still much that can be done, and, if I may say so, I am very glad that the noble Earl has raised this matter before your Lordships' House, because it is one which should be continually before the consciousness of the public and of your Lordships.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, in thanking the noble Marquess for his reply I am very pleased indeed that some of these allegations of Macartney's have now been denied, because they have never been officially denied before. I was, if I may say so, very gratified indeed to hear from the speech of the noble Marquess that these reforms are taking place and that more reforms are in contemplation. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

HOUSE OF LORDS OFFICES.
Order of the Day for the consideration of the Second Report from the Select Committee read.
The Committee reported as follows:
1. PROVISION OF LUNCHEON AFTER THE CORONATION.
The Earl of Lucan, Chairman of the Sub-Committee on the Refreshment Department,

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submitted the following report by the Sub-Committee on Catering Arrangements for the Coronation:—
Report by the Sub-Committee on the Refreshment Department on Catering Arrangements for the Coronation.
The Sub-Committee on the Refreshment Department have considered the provision of meals in the House of Lords on the day of the Coronation. They propose that a buffet luncheon should be provided in the Royal Gallery at a cost of 10s. 6d. per head for Peers and Peeresses who attend the ceremony in the Abbey to consist of light dishes which can be eaten with a fork, sandwiches of all kinds, a variety of sweet dishes, cakes, etc., with tea, coffee and lemonade. It is proposed that Peers who wish to avail themselves of this buffet should take tickets beforehand, which will be forwarded by the Clerk of the Parliaments. Wines, spirits and mineral waters will also be available in the Royal Gallery for which cash payment will be taken at the time of ordering.
The Committee have been asked by the Earl Marshal to provide breakfast for about 400 Officers of State at 5.30 on the morning of the Coronation. This breakfast can be provided in the Royal Gallery before the buffet is set out.
The Committee have also been asked by the Master of the Household to provide a buffet luncheon for about 200 minor royal personages after the Coronation, It is proposed to provide this buffet in the King's Robing-room and to supply the same dishes as those supplied to Peers in the Royal Gallery.
The menu of the buffet luncheon will be available for inspection at the meeting of the House of Lords' Offices Committee.
It is proposed that the catering should be undertaken by Messrs. A. J. Carpenter (London) Limited, who hold the contract for catering to the House of Lords.
The Peers' dining-room and the Library will not be used for refreshments and will be available as sitting-rooms for Peers and Peeresses.
11th February, 1937.
The Report of the Sub-Committee was agreed to.
The Committee expressed their approval of the proposal of the Earl Stanhope, First Commissioner of Works, to provide buffet refreshments in Westminster Hall for persons occupying certain stands in Old Palace Yard.
2. PROVISION OF LAVATORY ACCOMMODATION IN CONNECTION WITH THE CORONATION.
The Committee approved proposals laid before them by the Lord Great Chamberlain for providing temporary lavatory accommodation on the day of the Coronation.
3. PARLIAMENT OFFICE MESSENGERS.
The Committee sanctioned the inclusion of the post of Messenger attending the Registry among the posts which can rise to the £215—£240 scale.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF ONSLOW): My Lords, I beg to move that this Report be now considered and agreed to. In doing so perhaps I should say one word on paragraph 1. Your Lordships will see that my noble friend Lord Lucan has made arrangements for an excellent luncheon to be provided, but there is nothing to say how your Lordships and your ladies will be able to proceed from the Abbey to the House and I think that is an important matter which your Lordships would like to know about. There is a general idea that there should be a covered way, where the annexe is. They would then come up here. I thought I would say one word on that because the first question that would be asked probably would be: "How are we going to get to the House from the Abbey?" There will be facilities for cars to be parked for those coming here and for those going straight home. The arrangements are not quite complete, but I hope they will meet your Lordships' convenience.
Moved, That this Report be now considered and agreed to.—(The Earl of Onslow.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

EMPIRE SETTLEMENT BILL.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE FIRST COMMISSIONER OF WORKS (EARL STANHOPE): My Lords, this is a very short Bill with really only one operative clause, but it is of considerable importance and, we hope, likely to be of more importance in the near future than at the present day. The main object of the Bill is to extend for a further fifteen years the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, which comes to an end on the 31st of May next. If nothing were done it means that the Government would be unable to provide any arrangements for the Fairbridge Farm Schools. Emigration as a whole has come to a stop, apart from one or two movements of that kind and the union of families which is still going on in some parts of His Majesty's Dominions. That is the main object of the Bill, to allow the Secretary of State to continue to assist emigration for a further fifteen years.

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There are two other points in the Bill. The first is that under the previous Act of 1922 the Secretary of State was not allowed to expend more than 50 per cent, of any contribution which was made on behalf of emigration. The remainder had to be found either by a private society or private organisation or by a Government in one of His Majesty's Dominions. Now, under subsection (2), the Secretary of State is given the power to contribute up to 75 per cent, instead of 50 per cent., primarily to private organisations and voluntary societies. As your Lordships will see, there is a proviso to that to say that he shall not be allowed to contribute more than 50 per cent., instead of 75 per cent., in regard to a land settlement scheme, or "a scheme towards the expenses of which the Government of a part of His Majesty's oversea Dominions have agreed to contribute." The reason for these two provisions is that we felt that a development scheme is quite as much a benefit to the country where that development takes place as it is to us here in sending our people to them, and therefore we felt it only right that at least 50 per cent, should be contributed by the country concerned. Similarly, in regard to schemes in which a Dominion or a State Government takes a share, I think your Lordships will all agree that the very last impression we wish to give is that of desiring to push people out to the Dominions if the Dominions do not wish to have them, and therefore the principle is maintained that the Government concerned in the Dominion shall contribute at least 50 per cent, of the cost.
One further point, which was taken a good deal of notice of in another place, is that under the previous Act of 1922 the Secretary of State was allowed to contribute up to £3,000,000 sterling a year. Under the present Bill it is proposed that that sum should be reduced to £1,500,000, half of what it was before. That does not mean, as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Dominions made quite clear, that we have half the keenness that we used to have in regard to emigration. It is merely bringing the contribution that the State is asked to make somewhere more in accordance with the fact. The fact is that even in 1926, 1927 and 1928, the peak
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years of emigration, the expenditure never exceeded £1,282,000. That was the peak figure in 1927. In 1926 and 1928 it was slightly less. The Government feel that a sum of £1,500,000 is ample to cover the expenditure that is likely to be incurred. At the same time my right honourable friend made it clear in another place that if a really suitable land settlement scheme was brought forward which we and the Dominion Government concerned thought should be supported, he would not hesitate to come forward and ask for a grant from Parliament to cover such a scheme.
He said also that he had not a great belief in these land settlement schemes. Nor indeed have I, particularly after reading what has happened in the past. Not many of them have been a success. In fact some of them have been a bad failure and actually the number of emigrants who went out on land settlement schemes in the ten years before 1931 was only 3 per cent, of the whole. The then Secretary of State, Mr. Amery, expected that out of £3,000,000 at least £2,000,000 would be spent on land settlement and only £1,000,000 on assisted emigration. In point of fact the figures have worked out almost exactly the other way round. Therefore it does not seem very likely that a land settlement scheme would be brought forward. Should such an expenditure be asked for, the Government hold themselves free to recommend it to Parliament if it is thought a wise measure.
I think there is little further I need say to your Lordships at the moment. Inquiries have been made from the Dominions whether there was a likelihood of emigration being started in the near future. There is some slight hope from Australia but very little hope from the other Dominions. Even from Australia only two of the six States thought emigration was at all possible and they were asking chiefly for young farm students such as the Fairbridge Farm School boys or for women to go into domestic employment. So that at present it does not look as if there was a likelihood of any emigration starting again. My right honourable friend felt, however, not only that he ought to be empowered to continue these fine schemes such as we all approve of, like the Fairbridge Farm Schools, but that at any rate we in this country should have everything ready so that, once emigration

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starts, there should be no delay whatever in assisting any scheme which may be brought forward. I hope therefore that your Lordships will approve this Bill and will give it a Second Reading.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Earl Stanhope)
LORD MARLEY: My Lords, I intend to say a word or two only on this Bill, but if I might venture to widen the scope of the discussion for two or three minutes I do not think it would be by any means a waste of time. We have reached a stage in the world situation when the question of oversea settlement of unoccupied areas is of very great importance. It is of great importance in view of the very debate which has been occupying your Lordships' House during the last three days, because one at least of the claims of certain of the powers is that we are not making use of the unoccupied spaces of the British Empire, that we do actually have areas such as Australia, which is greater in area than the United States of America, or Canada, which is equally greater in area than the United States of America, both of which have only two or three people to the square mile, compared with a hundred or more in the United States. There is a feeling—whether it is justified or not, it is very difficult to say—that the Dominions are not altogether helpful in this matter, and their present lack of population may be used as a weapon by other countries who claim that they are over-populated and that we are not making use of the lands within the British Empire. This is a serious matter. We have in the past done things to remedy the situation. The noble Earl referred to the failure of certain land settlement schemes, and everybody will have in mind the Victoria settlers' experiment, which was a ghastly failure and which evidently was undertaken with insufficient inquiry beforehand as to the possibilities of success.
I do not think that the claim of the over-populated countries is quite as real as some speakers imagine. In the first place it is a fact that the rate of increase of the population of these over-populated countries is diminishing; Japan, for example, will have a stationary population somewhere about 1960. The rate of increase of the Japanese population is diminishing so rapidly, by reason I suppose of the use of birth control appliances
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or from voluntary abstinence or other reasons, that though Japan may be said to be anxious at present for a population outlet, the necessity will diminish as the years go by. But it is the immediate problem that has to be faced, the problem of the next few years. I would therefore suggest that it might be worth the consideration of the Government that rather more energy should be put into this question, and perhaps a broader examination made of the whole problem of the density of population in the various Dominions. We know that the claim by Germany for Colonies has been put forward for three reasons. I need not go into the reasons of raw materials and markets, but the claim has been put forward for Colonies for population reasons, and we cannot deny that full use is perhaps not being made of the land which is under our jurisdiction. I gather that the attempts made to increase the population both in Germany and in Italy have not been a great success in spite of the propaganda efforts of the Governments. Nevertheless the actual increase of population, even at a diminishing rate, is sufficient to give some force to the claim of those countries for more land for their peoples.
Then we come to the question, which I do not think has ever been clear in our own minds, as to whether in fact we want young men and women to emigrate from Great Britain. Somehow it always seems to me that there is a contradiction in our own minds. We want the best of our people—the finest workers, the most energetic, and the strongest of these young men and women—to remain in our own country, and yet we have a responsibility to the Dominions to send our best to help them in their development. I cannot help thinking that we ought really to think out a little more what we really want. Perhaps the noble Earl would say that we do not press this too much because we do not want to lose these fine young men and women. At the same time we do not want to stop them going if they wish to do; we desire, in fact, to give them some help. But that is not quite enough. I cannot help thinking that the matter is worth consideration from a broader point of view than that of Great Britain. The Empire is vitally concerned in this question of the redistribution of our population, and I would like to see it made much more easy, if possible, for

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people to move about the Empire in order to try out whether they like the conditions, say in Australia or Canada. I am convinced that if this matter were treated on rather broader lines, we should find that the possibilities of Empire settlement are diminishing every year. They are diminishing because our population is increasing at a very diminishing rate. There is less and less possibility of a surplus population. I am not speaking about the unemployed, because that is not the core of this problem. It is not a question of unemployed or unemployable people, it is a question of the young, fit, fine men and women, and I am inclined to think that we shall find that it is increasingly impossible to take any large part in the population of those parts of the Empire which have not been adequately populated.
The inquiry which I have suggested might help us to meet one other problem which is facing the world—a problem which personally I have very much at heart because I am interested in minorities—and that is the possibility of settlement in various parts of the Empire of those Eastern European Jews who are good workers and good citizens but who, owing to economic conditions, are utterly unable to get a living in places like Poland, where the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister have recently told us that they have a surplus population of something like seven or eight million, Jews and non-Jews. Some of these at least might make valuable citizens under the influence of the leadership of those who are governing so well our oversea Dominions. I am inclined to think that this would be worth some inquiry in connection with the matter we are discussing.
That brings me to my final point. Your Lordships will know that we are facing considerable difficulties in one of the British Mandated Territories—Palestine—and one of the problems there has been the enormous pressure on Palestine to take more and more of these Eastern European Jews who do not know where to go and cannot live in their own country. If we could relieve the pressure on these people of Palestine by finding for them some other area within the Empire it would diminish the difficulty we are having owing to the Arabs' resistance to the increase of immigration into that country. We might thus be
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able to make a valuable contribution to a solution of the difficulties which this House has been debating for three days, in helping a large number of human beings in their great difficulties in Eastern Europe, in helping our own Dominions to find, a valuable source of new population and new workers, and in helping to deal to some extent at any rate with the Palestinian problem which is of increasing and not diminishing difficulty among the problems facing Great Britain to-day.
LORD STONEHAVEN: My Lords, I seldom enjoy the luxury of agreeing with so much of what noble Lords on the other side of the House say. Indeed, I was getting quite nervous until I comforted myself with a quotation from a speech made by the very able Premier of New South Wales when he was discussing this question of migration before the Empire Parliamentary Association. This is what he said:
"I am going to take the risk of suggesting that the problem, which I would not call migration, but would rather describe as Imperial development, is much bigger than any one of these schemes ever can be."
That, I think, is thoroughly endorsed by the noble Lord opposite, and I fancy it is also endorsed by all your Lordships; but I am bound to say I was disappointed in two things in the speeches of the Secretary of State in another place and in the speech of my noble friend who moved the Second Reading of the Bill.
My noble friend referred solely to land settlement. The title of the Bill is "Empire Settlement," and I agree wholly with what the noble Lord opposite said, not merely as to the desirability, but the vital and imperative necessity, of attacking this great Imperial question from a much wider standpoint than it is dealt with in this little Bill. We ought to notice that the reduction in the sum which is made available for assisting migration is am indication of the failure of the system of assisted migration. What I was disappointed at in the speech of the Secretary of State in another place—and a similar speech was made by my noble friend—was that the Government seem content to sit down under that failure, and show no indication of realising the seriousness of that state of affairs and the appalling need in the Imperial interest—for reasons given by the noble Lord opposite and for other reasons as well—of finding a solution of this vital question.

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I am not impressed with the complaint of Germany that we have got too much land and she has got too little, because the Germans are excellent colonists in countries which are not ruled by Germany, and there are some places that we all know in Australia where there are most striving German communities who are not only very good Australians who did extremely well in the War, but who are doing equally well in peace. Indeed, so good are these communities that you almost know when you get into one of them because of the state of the housing and the land which they farm. But that is only by the way. The question is how are we going to get not so much migration as the redistribution of the white people of the Empire which is so badly wanted. That must be the result of a process of attraction. It cannot be the result of propulsion. This Bill is mainly propulsion—that is, you endeavour to persuade somebody to go oversea on the understanding that it will cost him nothing and he can try his hand.
The first limitation you must get rid of is the idea that land settlement is the only way to redistribute population. The noble Lord opposite, if he will forgive me for saying so, fell into an error very common in respect to Australia. Australia, it is true, is very nearly 3,000 square miles in extent, but one-third of that is not inhabitable. It always has been uninhabitable, and it always will be, because of the great irregularity of the rainfall. Another third also suffers from such irregular rainfall that it never will be thickly inhabited. I remember asking a man in that area what he considered a living area for a settlement. He said, "40,000 acres." And it was true, because in that district bad seasons were the normal, and a man had to have a sufficient area to get over five or six bad seasons running. Then he would have a boom year and a carry-over. You have also to take into account that 40 per cent. of Australia is inside the Tropics. But you have got 650,000 or 750,000 square miles of magnificent country and glorious climate obviously capable of holding a very much larger population than that country now possesses.
It was agreed, and wisely agreed, at Ottawa that secondary industries must be encouraged in the Dominions, and it is quite clear that by merely increasing the number of people who are producing
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either agricultural or pastoral products you are going to make the situation worse rather than better. Each of these great Dominions—I can only speak with any slight authority about Australia—is determined to be a real nation, a perfectly legitimate ambition and one which all are capable of achieving. But does not that mean that we ought to consider rationalising Imperial industry as a whole? Even agriculture is capable of being rationalised. We are wisely, I think, concentrating—this is not a Party question, all sections of the community are concentrating—on improving nutrition in this country. As one example out of many, we could produce here all the liquid milk and all the manufactured milk that we require, and we could get from Australia and New Zealand all the butter that we require. It is easy to give an example of that kind. It may be quite impracticable, but it is a suggestion worth going into. Secondary industries are far more important because you can absorb far more people in secondary industries than in primary industries, and by increasing the number of people engaged in them you are going to increase your number of customers. There again the question of rationalisation comes in. We here, with our long experience and large amount of capital and wonderful equipment, can produce the more complicated articles of secondary manufacture. There are many things that Australia, with her great resources in ores, coal, water power, and so forth, can produce, but it is necessary that we should agree what we will produce and what Australia will produce.
In that way you will induce people to go overseas, by the only inducement that ever is effective—namely, the knowledge that they are going to enjoy the kind of life that they will like. Things are quite different from the old days when the "gold rush" attracted so many people from this country, because no man can leave this country now without forfeiting a tremendous amount of rights in the way of social services, and, quite rightly, they are not inclined to forfeit these rights. But for the reasons given by the noble Lord, and for many other reasons, it is not sufficient to leave these great Dominions so thinly populated as they are now. My only complaint, so far as the Government are concerned, is that I have not seen any indication in the speeches either

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of the Secretary of State or of my noble friend of their taking advantage of the failure of these Empire settlement schemes to put all their energy into devising something that is likely to be more successful.
In the year 1926, after the Imperial Conference, the very able Prime Minister of Australia, the present High Commissioner here, took great pains to collect a Commission of four business men of very high standing to go out to Australia and report to him. These were the terms of reference:
"To confer with the Commonwealth and State Governments, with the Development and Migration Commission and the leaders of industry and commerce in Australia, on the development of Australian resources, and on any other matters of mutual economic interest to Great Britain and the Commonwealth, which may tend to the promotion of trade between the two countries and the increase of settlement in Australia."
I think the time has come when that work requires to be done over again, and if your Lordships will bear with me for a minute I should like to read an extract from the General Conclusions of this highly qualified Commission, which consisted of the late Sir Arthur Duckham, Lord Hirst, Sir Ernest Clark, who is now Governor of Tasmania, and Mr. D. O. Malcolm, whom many of us know.
The General Conclusions were as follows:
"Our terms of reference, it will be observed, lay emphasis on the problems of the promotion of trade and commerce between Great Britain and Australia and of the increase of settlement in Australia."
All these are things of vital interest to the Empire to-day.
"It early became clear to us that these problems should be approached from the point of view of what is best for Australia herself in the belief that the increase of Australia's prosperity and productivity is an essential condition of increased trade with Great Britain. Given the maximum possible prosperity and wealth production in Australia, the ties between Australia and Great Britain are sufficiently close and the sentiments of common loyalty which bind the one to the other are sufficiently strong to secure that the maximum commercial intercourse will follow. Given the maximum possible power of absorbing population in Australia her determination to remain the most British community in the world is sufficiently strong to secure that it will be from Great Britain that the flow of immigration will come. But if the desired conditions of Australian prosperity and power to absorb population are not present, artificial means of promoting trade with and migration from Great Britain must fail."
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That was written in the peak year of assisted emigration into Australia. It only amounted to 31,000 even then. That is quite inadequate.
I wish that I had much more influence with your Lordships and with the Government than I can possibly claim, but I suggest that now is the moment when they ought to put their best men on to examining the very questions that we were examining in 1926, here in this country, not in Australia so much. We have got this Report on Australia, and it is quite easy to get into touch with Australia. What is necessary is that our great manufacturers here should get a clear idea of what it is that they can profitably make and what it is that Australia can profitably make, and thus rationalise the resources of the two great countries. No doubt the same is equally true of New Zealand, of Canada and of South Africa. I think it is very important that the whole problem should be treated as one Imperial problem, not playing one Dominion off against another. Of course, nobody would do that deliberately, but it might appear to be done. It should be treated as one great Imperial problem. I suggest that there is no time to waste and that the question ought to be discussed at the forthcoming Imperial Conference. There can be nothing more important, and everybody knows that a Conference for which inadequate preparation has been made had much better not meet at all, for it is bound to end in failure and misunderstanding and may even produce very grave results. I suggest, therefore, with all the energy I command, that nothing is more urgent than that the Government, in the short time which intervenes between now and the meeting of the Imperial Conference after the Coronation, should take advantage of the strong Imperial spirit which will pervade the country and the Empire at that time, to try really to get something which will prevent them ever again coming to Parliament with so inadequate a measure as this, which is such a confession of failure, not of their efforts but of the efforts of the country as a whole to tackle our most important problem.
There is more than that. Yesterday one of your Lordships asked what was really meant by collective security, and everybody's face and the back of everybody's head that I could see on this side of the House indicated complete

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blank and ignorance. Nobody could describe what was meant by collective security. If you have collective development of the Empire collective security will follow with it, and I believe that is the only form of collective security which it is possible to achieve. Every other form is merely a phrase. By achieving collective security of the Empire you are going to contribute more to the peace of the world than by any other single step you can take. I trust, therefore, that His Majesty's Government will find it possible to put in hand this inquiry. The time is short, but it is better to take full advantage of a short time than not to do it at all. I believe that if they approach the Dominions in this sense and put their best men on to the job, there is a prospect of getting more advantage out of the forthcoming Imperial Conference than has been got out of any Conference that has been held hitherto.
THE LORD BISHOP OF LONDON: My Lords, I do not often intrude myself upon your Lordships' attention, but I take such a deep interest in this question that I should like to add a few words to what has been said. This is a burning and vital question, much more so than most people imagine. In the first place, I quite agree with my noble friend Lord Marley, that from the point of view of the world it is a most dangerous thing to have an empty Empire in the midst of land-hungry peoples. This dog-in-the-manger policy of keeping the land and failing to fill it with people is a most dangerous one. I do not see any answer to that argument. I regard this question of Empire settlement as a way out of our difficulties at home, not as a way out of our unemployment difficulties but as a check to that miserable propaganda of birth control which I believe to be doing a tremendous amount of mischief. When we came away from the Lambeth Conference with that really misunderstood resolution the Bishop of Athabasca said to me: "We want more children in Athabasca; we want them all the time." The idea that we are to have less and less population here is all wrong, and we are beginning to find out the mischief of it. We shall presently see that our deaths will be greater than our births. This birth control propaganda, which has been carried on for so many years now, is the greatest possible mistake.
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I have just come from Canada. In Canada—and those who know that Dominion will agree with this—their overhead charges are so great that they cannot pay their way. The railways cannot pay their way because they are fitted for 25,000,000 people and there are only about 10,000,000. If they had a greater population the railways would pay and their industries would pay. A leading railway man said to me: "What we want is 10,000,000 more Britishers here." When I was speaking at the Press Conference at Toronto this summer a speaker said they wanted to bring more American money into Canada and make Canada a playground. I burned with indignation at the idea that our great Dominion of Canada should be turned into a playground for the United States. So I stood up and put the other side. I said: "What you want are 10,000,000 more Britishers." I am glad to say I got a rousing cheer.
The great danger is that the Empire may not remain British. In Edmonton thirty languages are spoken. I do not want to prevent people coming in from other nations but we must not have the Empire swamped by foreigners. Of course there are enormous difficulties. My old host in Australia, who spoke before me and gave me such a kind reception, will remember the labour position. Men who had £4 10s. wages were mortally afraid of more people corning in to lower the standard of wages. Mr. Lang, who was then in power, said to me: "We want no more interference from another island ten thousand miles away." I asked him: "Who keeps you safe day and night from the Japanese Fleet?" He had no answer to give. There is that strong labour position. Even in New Zealand, where you get such a wonderfully cordial reception, a man said something to me which was rather disquieting. I had been speaking about their great open spaces and he replied: "Are there no open spaces in England? What about the great parks of your noblemen? Are they all filled up? "Another man said that they had a very nice bit of the world's surface and meant to keep it to themselves. In 1881 when a woman went out with her family to Australia she was hissed in the streets and told that they had quite enough people already. Therefore there is the double difficulty of the fear of wages going down

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and the feeling that, having a nice place, they do not want any more people in it.
There is a further difficulty that there is a certain amount of unemployment although it is very small as compared with unemployment in England. What is still worse is the want of markets. As my train left Melbourne they shouted after me: "We will have your people if you will have our plums" I had been round the irrigated land. The more you irrigate the land the more fruitful it becomes; but who is to buy the fruit? That is an important point to realise. There are two more difficulties I want to mention before I make an appeal to the Government. There is the steady opposition at present of the Dominions to taking more people. Of course we cannot do anything about that. They are self governing, and they are suffering from misfits in the past. It was distressing to see in Canada in 1907 the notice: "No Englishman need apply." That is the result of sending out the wrong people. We are suffering now from what has happened in the past and from the wicked system of steamship companies dumping people of all sorts into Canada.
The appeal I would make to the Government is for a more sympathetic attitude. I had a two-hour interview with the Minister for Migration in Australia—a very good man—and he said: "You must realise, Bishop, that development of the country must go hand in hand with migration." Of course that is so. It is no good having a lot of people unless you develop the land. What I cannot help feeling is that we are spending about £100,000,000 on keeping people alive in England and that part of that sum might well be devoted to giving them a happy life overseas. In Canada, New Zealand and Australia, I met a number of people who, when I asked if they would go back to England, replied: "Oh, we would like to see the old place again but we would not go back to stay." I have sent thirty-five nephews and nieces to Canada and four to Australia, and I think we all ought to send our young people out in the spirit of adventure. If the representatives of the Home Government and the Dominion Governments would talk the whole matter over, they might find a way of spending money in developing the country and getting people settled in the Dominions. I hope the Government
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will approach this question in a more hopeful spirit in order to make the Empire more than ever the brightest jewel of the British Crown.
LORD BARNBY: My Lords, I listened with keen attention to the speech made by the noble Earl in moving the Second Reading of this Bill here and also to the speech of the Secretary of State for the Dominions in another place. We are all familiar with the great difficulty when approaching this problem of avoiding attaching one's remarks to any particular Dominon; but it is very difficult to get any view which is general to all the Dominions. Your Lordships will be familiar with the Report issued by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Migration Policy and with other reports which have been issued by various bodies since. There is no lack of recognition of the importance of this problem. It is fortunate that the present Secretary of State for the Dominions has himself made a world tour and that the Under-Secretary has recently paid a visit to two of the leading Dominions. The Government, therefore, have access to full information as to the current position.
I think there is little in the speech of the noble Earl with which one could disagree, but it seemed to me to display a lack of imagination and a lack of realisation of the widespread and intense feeling that here is a problem that demands immediate close examination by the Government. I regret that the opportunity was not seized to give to your Lordships some encouragement to believe and hope that the Government are going to address themselves more energetically to this problem. I also regret that the proposals include a suggestion to reduce the amount of the Vote. On that point, however, it would be not easy to say for what purpose we should keep on the Estimates an amount which in no circumstances, as the mover has said, could possibly be used even in a peak year of emigration; and he gave the additional safeguard that in the event of further sums being needed the Government would undertake to make the necessary provision. But at the moment when this question of the redistribution of the white population of the Empire is receiving so wide an attention, is it not a little unfortunate that the Government should give opportunity to the Press throughout the world to suggest that the British Government, in a counsel of despair, are ad-

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mitting that there is no hope of employing so meagre a sum as £2,000,000 sterling for this purpose? The figures are immaterial; the principle is the thing to which I wish to draw your Lordships' attention.
We are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Marley, for suggesting that the scope of the debate might with profit be enlarged. I am sure that your Lordships will agree that we are fortunate in the intervention of the noble Lord, a former Governor of Australia, who spoke with great authority and knowledge particularly with regard to Australia, with which he is so well fitted to deal. The right reverend Prelate who intervened just now drew attention to Canada. He reminded your Lordships of what you have all heard, those of you who travel: how much the financial stability of Canada requires additional population. Look at the railroad system, which was built for twice the population that uses it to-day. I lived in the United States for the greater part of six or eight years before the War; I lived on the Eastern seaboard, and saw the inflow, ship after ship, and realised what immigration meant. Your Lord ships will remember that the average figures for the four years before the War were between 800,000 and 900,000 immigrants a year into the United States. Can it be denied that this immense inflow gave a tremendous impetus to the plant expansion which was required for the service of so rapidly growing a population, in addition to the enormous growth of prosperity which it brought to the population?
You know how rapidly the population of the United States grows now. I mention this because it has been suggested by the noble Lord opposite that the territory of Australia, for instance, is greater than that of the United States, and he was very rightly reminded by the noble Lord the former Governor-General of Australia that if you apply the same rainfall area to Australia as you have in the reasonably populated parts of the United States, it is only equivalent to one-third and not to three-thirds. Therefore in the United States and in Canada we see, as in Australia, how great would be the development of secondary production if one could assist the inflow of immigrants. That is a point which needs to be emphasised. To-day emigration contemplates not only primary production
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but more particularly secondary production, the development of which ensures the consumption of primary produce. If one remembers that in Australia to-day about two out of every three head of cattle and three out of every five head of sheep which are killed in Australia are consumed locally, one realises the intensity of that problem. But I return to the United States. That great inflow of population into the United States to-day means that if you deduct deaths from births, emigration from immigration, you have a net increase of one every thirty-seven seconds. That Continent to begin with obviously had a small population, but it has grown.
The question of defence is one which comes very properly into this debate. Surely the defence value of the people of the Dominions is obvious. One should always remember, also, that Britishers oversea are bigger potential consumers than if they remained in the United Kingdom, because in most of the Dominions the standard of living is higher. Reference has also been made to the demand from other nations for a bigger proportion under their jurisdiction of the more thinly settled parts of the world. That demand is not absent from the minds of those who feel that this question is emphatically one which needs to be dealt with, and I refer to the hope that there will be less lack of imagination in the Government.
Let us just think for a moment of the question of cost. It is always said that schemes that have been attempted in the past have been failures, have been costly, and that no attempt ought to be made to repeat them. I turned up to-day, as nearly as I could find it, the amount which this country has spent in the distribution of unemployment relief benefits under the contributory scheme—in more homely language, what we have paid in the last eight years to enable people to do nothing. The figures which I was given, and which I think are approximately accurate, amount to over £600,000,000 since 1928, to say nothing of what we spent before. It is hard to believe that Imperial statesmanship could not have devised some means of providing that some of the inescapable developments which have taken place in our Colonial Empire should absorb some of the people who have received that money. It must be admitted that the money spent in the

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United Kingdom on the "dole" all goes into circulation and is spent in various ways to the advantage of this country, but if one regards the Empire as one family one realises that, to take shipping services alone, the carriage of emigrants would materially contribute to lessening unemployment in the shipping industry.
I should like the noble Earl who has moved the Second Reading of this Bill to give, if he can, some indication of whether there is any current examination of the possibility of compounding and making transferable to the different British Dominions where social service legislation already exists the benefits which have accrued, or ought to accrue, to those who have paid contributions under the social service schemes in this country. It is perfectly obvious that unless and until some provision is made for the transfer of the individual with retention of the benefits which accrue from the payments that are made, the inclination of people of the right kind to emigrate will be slowed down unless they can be positively assured of their living in the Dominion of their choice.
In speaking of Canada there is a point which is puzzling that was relatively small. A part of the capital available for the development of industry in Canada has been provided by the United Kingdom. I do not refer to transportation—the railroads, which are so lavish—but in industry itself it would seem that the fact that so large a part of the activities of Canada are carried on by capital provided outside the Empire is a thing which deserves attention. We see appeals for capital for industrial purposes regularly in South Africa. They come rarely from Australia or New Zealand, but that question of Canada is something it is difficult to understand. Perhaps the freer investment of British funds in the Dominions would help. Mr. Bruce has already called attention to that on more than one occasion and has emphasised how important it is.
Of the various industries the noble Lord, Lord Stonehaven, referred to the primary productions in Australia. We realise, as is frequently said, that Australia travels on a sheep's back. We can see that the sheep population of Australia to-day is above where it was in 1891 but the wool production is just
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about doubled. The moral to be drawn from that is that increased and improved husbandry can increase the value of land. The same applies to a larger part of the territory of Australia where, by planned improvement, that is the improvement of herbage and much denser sheep or cattle, population can be carried, and that is the real point of closer settlement. Closer land settlement will come best from the Australian authorities rather than from those abroad. The secondary industries would be better developed by immigrants from this country. I realise that in the case of Australia the big pastoral companies, which represent so large an amount of British capital, have done a great deal in the development of Australia. It seems unfortunate that when there is this machinery of the big pastoral companies, more imagination could not have been used by those directing such funds to collaborate and take a part in this closer settlement. They have access to information, they have the staffs with knowledge and they have the past records and experience. It would have seemed that if instead of working individually they could have studied the collective interests of the Empire they could, without any great sacrifice on their part, have shown the Dominion Governments and the United Kingdom Government what could be done to develop more rapidly what is agreed to be of so much importance.
Remembering that in the case of Australia initiation must come from the States, endorsements must be given by the Federal Governments and a conference mist take place with the Imperial Government, it will be realised that the machinery is very complicated. There are all sorts of by-roads which may be used and give reason for neglect of doing anything, but it is to be hoped that the Government will not take cover in these various by-roads. Would it not be possible to apply to Empire migration the principle of private enterprise? By that I mean that private gain would not be excluded. It is right to assume that some machinery could be used which would be based on private enterprise. I am loth to suggest as examples the great chartered companies and corporations which in the past received grants and subsidies or concessions, but they were al based on the idea of personal gain. Is it wrong that the same thing should

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be applied to Empire migration? In each Dominion there could be some corporation which would charge itself under privileged conditions with the problem of the redistribution of the population as regards that Dominion. I know that proper safeguards would be required and they would be accepted—safeguards that not more than a certain amount of profit should be made. It is often suggested: "Oh, but such an idea of private enterprise could not be allowed"; but is there very much difference between the composure and resignation of the moment to the generous current profits on armaments—profits conceded to individual shareholders out of the necessities of the nation—and the fact that private profits might be made by those who assisted, under proper safeguards I repeat, in the proper redistribution and migration of population? The Overseas Settlement Board has been an official recommendation of various Committees that have sat. The various recommendations of that Board cover a very large part of the ground. There has been no lack of examination of the problem.
In conclusion I would again appeal to the Government to recognise that there is this widespread interest in the need of something being done. To suggest nothing more than is suggested in this Bill seems to be an implied admission of failure. If one compares the figures quoted and the object with the lavish generosity and resolution of the current armaments problem, one would think that more could be suggested. What better rearmament than a flash throughout the world that Britain's intensified development of her family and her Imperial possessions is determined on? We have the intense patriotism of the Dominion leaders, we have the loyalty to the Throne, we have for instance in New Zealand, where there is a Labour Government for the first time, the fervent faith of Mr. Savage in the Empire heritage. Surely we want to refute the suggestion that there is no desire to emigrate. There is still a spirit of adventure, adventure in business and in emigration. That is what we must maintain, and because of that I am willing to hope that His Majesty's Government will realise that an opportunity still exists for acting on the clear suggestion of my noble friend the former Governor-General of Australia, that there is time between now and the
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assembly here of so many Dominion authorities in connection with the Coronation, for something really to be done.
EARL STANHOPE: My Lords, on this occasion at any rate my sins have been those of omission rather than of commission, because apparently I did not make clear to some of your Lordships matters that have been raised by other noble Lords during the debate. May I set at rest at any rate the fears expressed by more than one speaker that nothing is being done in this matter? The Overseas Settlement Board has the problem under the most serious consideration and is examining every aspect of it. His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom are at any rate doing all they can at this end.
That brings me to the point I desire to make. I was amazed to find that in almost every speech, with the exception of that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, this matter was treated as if it were one for the Government in the United Kingdom. Of course, it is nothing of the kind. Everybody in this House knows that His Majesty's Governments in the Dominions are the people who are responsible. It is no good our shipping the best of our people off to the far ends of the earth, only to find that when they arrive in Australia or New Zealand or other parts of the Empire they are not admitted. The reason was given by the Bishop of London when he said that at any rate a good deal of the opposition arises from the fact that there is already a certain amount of unemployment in the Dominions, and the trade unions in particular are anxious that their wages, which are extremely high, should not be under-cut by the existence of a surplus of labour. That does not mean that the Governments there do not realise the necessity for emigration, still less does it mean that His Majesty's Government in this country do not. It is quite clear that there is a danger to the Empire by having wide open spaces with so thin a population. That is a matter which we are taking up, and have been taking up, with the Dominions consistently, but it is for them to say when the moment has arrived when they can take more people without increasing their unemployment and the difficulties which exist there. The noble Lord, Lord Barnby, referred to the amount spent on unemployment

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pay in this country, but if you put a man on board ship and send him to Australia, he does not thereby become employed. He may equally be unemployed when he arrives in Australia.
That brings me to the question of markets. The whole of this question of the re-allocation of the population of the Empire is so immense that in view of other matters coming before your Lordships I must be brief. But if we could extend the markets between this country and the Dominions, and still more between the Dominions and this country, we should go a long way towards solving that problem. But the problem is not quite so simple as that. Noble Lords know—those who are interested in agriculture know it only too well—that the amount of produce sent to the home country from the Dominions has increased by an enormous tonnage and percentage during the last few years, largely as a result of the Ottawa Agreements. The question of markets has to be very carefully watched. If a flood of produce comes to this country greater than we can consume, down goes the price, and not only does the home producer suffer, but so also does the producer in the Dominions. And that is, in fact, what has largely happened. One of the reasons why there has been unemployment and difficulty in the Dominions is that the cost of primary products has fallen so materially in the past few years. That is beginning to right itself, and prosperity is beginning to reappear in the Dominions, as it is here. There is a bigger consumption, and therefore a bigger market, both here and in the Dominions.
That of course reacts on the secondary industries, to which the noble Lord, Lord Stonehaven, referred, and the Government in this country have more than once stated their cordial agreement with the view that to strengthen the Dominions it is essential not only to get population there and to employ that population on primary products, but also largely to increase their secondary industries as well. One of the difficulties with regard to increasing the population of the Dominions is the improved methods of agriculture, which have enabled a much larger production to be made on the same acreage, and unfortunately with less labour than was previously required. Therefore you
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are faced with the difficulty of a steadily rising amount of primary products, and a smaller number of men being required to produce them. That reacts on the secondary industries, as the smaller number of producers require less of the products of the secondary industries. Thus, the question of markets enters into this matter very closely and largely complicates the question.
I have briefly indicated some of the difficulties. It does not mean that we think they are insuperable, it does not mean that the Government are not extremely anxious to get a better distribution of the population, or that we are any less keen than members of your Lordships' House in pushing forward emigration to the utmost possible extent compatible with the benefit of the individual as, well as of the country to which he goes. I should like to question a remark made by the noble Lord, Lord Marley, who suggested that we ought to show much more energy in pressing young people to go out.
LORD MARLEY: No.
EARL STANHOPE: I have got a note that the Government do not press young people as much as they ought to do.
LORD MARLEY: I did not say that. What I said was that we must not press them to go out, but we must make it possible and easy for them to go out if they want to do so.
EARL STANHOPE: I beg the noble Lord's pardon, I entirely agree with the noble Lord. I have been connected with an emigration society for a great many years, and what we have done consistently is rather to emphasise the hardness of conditions in the Dominions, and to tell young people that if they go there they will have to put their backs into it and work extremely hard. We have thus tried to eliminate those who are not really keen and suitable, and the proof of the practice is that we have had very few failures. We have sent them out to Canada and to other parts of the Empire and, with very few exceptions, they have done extremely well. We are proud of them and we think that is the right method. We have sent only the best and most suitable emigrants, and if the best only are sent, you get rid of the cry referred to by the Bishop of London, who said that notices were put up stating that no Englishman need apply.

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That brings me to the question of emigrants from Eastern Europe, raised by Lord Marley. This raises an extraordinarily difficult question, particularly in regard to Australia and Nov Zealand, where, as the noble Lord knows, the standard of living is very high, and where they are very sensitive to the danger of its being lowered by people coming in who have been accustomed to much lower wages than have long prevailed in those two Dominions. Also, I think most of us would agree that, so far as possible, the more we can keep the Dominions British by sending out a big proportion of British subjects, rather than the subjects of other countries, the better it will be for the Empire, and probably for the general security of the world.
The noble Lord, Lord Barnby, asked a question as regards the compounding of social service schemes. I may tell him that for some time the contributory widows' and orphans' and old age pensions scheme has been carried overseas to other parts of the Empire, but as regards other schemes there are so many differences in the social schemes in force in different parts of the Dominions that so far it has not been found possible to do anything of the kind. The noble Lord realises that the contributions as a rule do not amount to a very great deal, because, speaking generally, they are mostly young people who go out to the Dominions, and therefore the number of contributions they would have made would not be very great. Thus the amount that would be taken by them to the Dominions in support of any social scheme would obviously not be a very large one.
LORD BARNBY: Among those who migrate would be men of the artisan class who are the kind of skilled workers who would be needed in Canada and the other Dominions if we were to send out workers for secondary industries and use them as consumers of primary products in their new country. Unless they have some means of maintaining the advantage which should accrue to them in the way of benefits for contributions they have made, they would be more reluctant to migrate, and it all depends on the development of the social services organisation in the Dominions. That is why I would like to know whether there has been any attempt to arrange for an interdepartmental examination of this question.
EARL STANHOPE: So far it has only been found possible in respect of contributory old age pensions. That, I think the noble Lord will agree, is what a man would think about most. He is, at any rate, justified in thinking he will not require anything to cover him in respect of unemployment, because he will hope to be employed permanently and without intermission overseas. I am glad to find that every noble Lord here warmly approves of this Bill so far as it goes. What happened in another place was rather the opposite. There the Government were being criticised for spending Government time in bringing in a Bill of this character at this time. A great deal of criticism was directed at my right honourable friend from that point of view, and I am glad to find it is not shared in your Lordships' House. It only goes to show once again how much superior this House is to another place.
LORD STONEHAVEN: May I ask whether there is any prospect of this matter being taken up energetically at the Imperial Conference and if adequate preparations are being made for it?
EARL STANHOPE: The whole matter is being gone into very thoroughly. I am not able to say whether it is one of the many matters down for discussion fully. I know it is one of the subjects down for consideration, but whether it is one of the main subjects I cannot at the moment say.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE ACT (AMENDMENT) BILL. [H.L.]
Read 3a (according to Order), and passed, and sent to the Commons.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
Debate again resumed (according to Order) on the Motion, made by Lord Arnold on Wednesday last, That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty for Papers relating to British foreign policy and to the need for a change therein which will bring it more into accord with the realities of the existing situation.
LORD ALLEN OF HURTWOOD: My Lords, I think it will be universally admitted in your Lordships' House that this debate has aroused the greatest possible interest and has been sustained by a series of speeches of quite remarkable brilliance. The few remarks I should like permission to address to the House will be, I hope, of a very definitely constructive character. Therefore, I do not want to take up too much time in passing observations on the speeches already made. But I should like to join in the tributes which have been paid to the noble Lord who opened our discussion for a speech which appeared to me, at any rate, to be one of the most lucid and remarkable I have been privileged to hear in your Lordships' House. I only wish that the constructive character of that speech had been as remarkable as the lucidity with which he expressed his point of view. I cannot help but feel that speech after speech that has been delivered in this debate has been of a negative kind, and that had there been present in this House, or reading our debates, some representative of a nation which might have been considering aggression, that representative would have derived great hope and satisfaction from the course of the debate in your Lordships' House.
Speech after speech was delivered which proved that this country, at any rate as expressed in the points of view represented in this House, had very little to say by way of opposition to any potential aggression which might take place in Europe. That was confirmed, unhappily, by observations made in a speech otherwise remarkable and inspiring by the noble Viscount who leads this House, at Southampton, confirmed also by the Prime Minister himself in speaking in the debate on Defence in another place, in which both of them underlined—I think not altogether discreetly—that anyhow until our rearmament was complete, our use of that rearmament for the purpose of repressing aggression would not be very likely to take place in certain areas. I feel that to announce in advance your intention not to use your armaments, and to confess to the weakness of your armaments, must be very encouraging to certain nations at the present moment, having regard to the condition of Europe.
With regard to the speech made by my noble friend Lord Lothian, he delivered
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as he always does a delightful and eloquent discourse on the question of sovereignty. Over and over again he has pointed out in this House and elsewhere that national sovereignty is a great impediment to the organisation of peace, and he told us that there were twenty-six nations in Europe operating under that national sovereignty. Who denies it? We all know perfectly well that national sovereignty is an impediment. I waited and waited to hear from the noble Marquess his constructive proposals as to how, in the year 1937, we were, notwithstanding that disadvantage, to promote the peace of Europe, and I am bound to confess that the more I listened to his delightfully phrased and charming speech the more confused intellectually I became. I understand my noble friend is in favour of what is described by himself as a procedure of non-intervention, and he referred to America. He then proceeded to ask us to honour our obligations under Locarno. How you are to maintain a procedure of non-intervention and to honour your obligations under Locarno certainly passes my comprehension, and I think it will pass the comprehension of some of the countries in Europe.
My noble friend then went on to make a most startling remark. He said that in his judgment it was the economic frontiers of Europe which were the dangers to-day, and that there were nations which were prepared to go to war with regard to economic frontiers but not to go to war with regard to political frontiers. A remark more in entire contradiction of the atmosphere of nationalism in Europe I can hardly imagine. If there is one thing outstanding to-day it is this, not that economic frontiers are not difficult and are causing confusion, but that in Europe the spirit of nationalism and nationalist ambitions with regard to political frontiers have never been a more outstanding characteristic than at the present moment. I am therefore bound to confess that the speech of my noble friend both confused me and charmed me as all his speeches in recent times have done.
So far as the speech of my noble friend Lord Arnold is concerned, I do not want to enter into disputation with him as to whether it is possible for this nation to be armed and to go into isolation and remain free from the entanglements of

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Europe. That speech has been dealt with by subsequent speakers. I would point out to my noble friend that in his opening remarks he made it clear that he did not propose to discuss pacifism. Had he done so perhaps he might have had a stronger case for isolation, but to say, as he did say, that it was permissible to fight in defence of this country or to go into isolation fully armed, in my judgment is to invite an armaments race which in due course can only contribute to the factors that make for war. If nations are allowed to remain armed and each is to go into isolation, that can only result in an armaments race, each nation resorting to armaments for the purpose of its own security, and nations arming one against the other will ultimately lead to the position constantly described by Lord Lothian. The volume and momentum of scientific armaments in the world to-day will itself overturn all your efforts at conciliation, and when the order for mobilisation is given that order for mobilisation will make all attempts at the preservation of peace completely impossible. As I listened to my noble friend's speech I could not help feeling that whatever else he had done he had made no contribution whatever to the two objectives for which foreign policy stands, or should stand, the objective of the prevention of war and the objective of the reduction of the amount and the danger of armaments. On neither of those two subjects had he any contribution of any kind to make.
Now may I be permitted to address to the noble Viscount who is to reply a few questions which I hope are not indiscreet—if they are I am sure he will not reply to them—and to offer a few constructive suggestions? May I first of all say this? I feel that one has no right whatever to make a speech on foreign policy, at the present moment, unless one is prepared to state one's point of view with regard to the Government's rearmament proposals. I want to say quite frankly and without any qualification whatever that I support the rearmament proposals of His Majesty's Government. I regret that the pacifist policy has not been adopted. I know perfectly well that there is no prospect whatever of pacifism being adopted as a political policy in the immediate future so far as this or any other country is concerned. In those circumstances I venture to think
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that, whatever we may feel about the past and however we may believe that the present rearmament might have been avoided, we are compelled in the name of peace to support the rearmament proposals of His Majesty's Government. I believe that it is absolutely useless continually discussing the mistakes of the past. If you wish to make peace you have to take the position as it is year by year, and under the conditions of to-day I believe the rearmament of this country will make not for disorder but for the pacification of Europe.
I believe it is impossible to read with any care either the newspapers of other countries or the speeches that are made by their statesmen without knowing perfectly well that the decision of this country at this moment to rearm, and to rearm in a startlingly dramatic fashion, has brought confidence to some of the smaller countries of Europe, and may indeed introduce an element of some caution into the policies of dictatorial countries which have tended to become increasingly irresponsible. I believe, even judged from an economic point of view, when those nations come to compare their economic resources with our own, and when it is realised how the value of the raw materials which are necessary to rearmament may rise under the rearmament of this country, that even this realisation may contribute an element of caution, leading possibly to a restraint in armaments which would not otherwise have occurred. I feel I should not be honest in making such comments as I have to make on foreign policy unless I were to say that perfectly frankly with regard to the subject of rearmament.
Now as I understand the position of the Government it is this. They believe in the League of Nations. I read with the greatest interest the speech of the noble Viscount at Southampton and I read also the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Plymouth. I personally understand the position of the Government to be this: We believe in the League; we believe even that it may be necessary under that League that armed force should be used; but our opinion is that the League at the present moment has become weak; it may become strong; its membership is less complete than it was, and we do not believe that in those circumstances we can place upon the back of the League the responsibility that we

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would like to have placed upon it, and that we hope one day we may be able to place upon it. That I understand is the frank position of the Government now. I accept that position. I do not happen to share it, but I fully understand it. If, therefore, whilst we are rearming, it is the desire of His Majesty's Government to reconstruct the League, to rebuild it so that it may later on become powerful enough to carry the responsibilities that we desire to place upon it, what is the policy of His Majesty's Government so far as rebuilding the League is concerned?
Here I would like to address a direct question to the noble Viscount if he would be gracious enough to consider whether he can respond to it when he replies. The first attempt of the Government in the course of rebuilding the League is to create, as I understand from the speeches of the noble Viscount and the noble Earl, Lord Plymouth, what is called a system of regional pacts. That has been made quite plain. I want to question that method. I can perfectly well understand a system of regional pacts, but what I cannot understand is one pact. I can quite understand that if in Europe to-day the Covenant of the League applied and if the League was respected and was strong, it would be possible by means of a system of regional pacts to underpin the League, to strengthen it in certain areas. But that is not the position, and I cannot understand how His Majesty's Government imagine that by the creation of one regional pact, not by the creation of a system, they are going to rebuild the League. You could underpin it, but you cannot rebuild it. Indeed I will go so far as to say that the creation of one pact at the present moment might even lead to insecurity in Europe instead of security.
To me the meaning of the regional pact is this. You find an area within which two conditions apply. The first of those conditions is that the nations composing that region have amongst themselves the will to peace. The second of the two conditions is that within that region there is a capacity for preponderant power against any one nation in that region that may possibly become an aggressor. It is possible that in Western Europe you may have an area—like Mr. Eden, I
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say "may" advisedly—in which it could be said there is the will to peace, a very doubtful proposition but one which I can understand. You may even have an area in which it is possible to say that there could be preponderent power against any aggressor which may desire to break the law. But in what other area of Europe does any similar region exist? Does anyone believe that in Eastern Europe or South-Eastern Europe there is at the present time the remotest possibility of a pact in which there is the will to peace or preponderent power against a potential aggressor? If that is not the case all that would happen unless we are extremely wise would be, by making one pact which we have not yet created but which we might possibly get in the West, we should bring security to the West but disorder and insecurity to the East. I cannot for the life of me understand how it is expected that you are going to rebuild the strength of the League by means of creating, not a system of regional pacts, but one pact.
I think both Mr. Eden and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have made it abundantly clear that you cannot divide Europe in this way, and I venture to ask permission to read the Chancellor of the Exchequer's own words. He said:
"… you cannot divide peace in Europe. Under the League we are interested just as much in the preservation of peace in the East of Europe as we are in the West, and our obligations under the League will apply equally whether aggression takes place in the Eastern or Western parts of Europe."
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs said:
"We must neither mislead others nor be misled ourselves by any of those comfortable doctrines that we can live secure in a Western European glass-house."
Therefore I put it to my noble friend that under the conditions of Europe to-day if the policy of His Majesty's Government is to rebuild the League through a regional pact and not regional pacts there is very little prospect of the League being rebuilt.
The other difficulty of regional pacts is that a regional pact may possibly create strength but it cannot achieve the one objective which Europe requires at the present moment, that is, the remedying of grievances. You cannot remedy grievances by means of a regional pact. The noble Viscount will be perfectly

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entitled to turn to me now and say: "Then what is the way of rebuilding the League in order that it may be strong enough to carry those burdens that we feel ought ultimately to be placed on it?" I will put it in as few sentences as I can. I believe that we have had in this debate, and that we have in general far too much discussion of the League of Nations as an instrument of force and far too little discussion of the League of Nations as an instrument of justice. I suggest for the moment that our primary need is not for further amplification of what we will fight for and where we will fight, but for a much more precise and definite invitation than any we have yet made to Germany to join in the discussion of her grievances and to negotiate a new settlement for Europe. We have never yet approached Germany in the right way. We have never approached her with a friendly, frank, public invitation to join in a discussion of all her grievances and to come to the conference table on a basis of absolute equality. That is the only way of being fair to Germany and clearing the road for the protection of peace. By that means we can either relieve the tension in Europe or prove who is on the side of peace and who is determined for war.
It is by making clear our intention to use the League as a means of promoting justice that we can justify our determination to give it precision as an instrument of force. I am quite convinced that the noble Viscount will now turn round and ask: "Is not that exactly what we are attempting to do? Are we not attempting to negotiate with Germany? Are we not attempting to create a situation under which a general settlement for Europe can be come to?" I am sure that is the intention of the Government. I only say that the procedure is open to criticism. Every invitation extended so far to Germany has been an invitation which has arisen either out of some isolated crisis or out of some isolated subject or in some isolated geographical area. Germany occupied the Rhineland. Instantly out of that isolated crisis we proceeded to try to patch and then to negotiate a general settlement. Failure resulted, or has done so until this time. Why? Because the approach to Germany is psychologically wrong. It arises out of crises where her dignity and past memories are involved. There is no starting point of equality.
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Then we try to negotiate out of some separate subject such as raw materials. We know that Germany says she has a grievance with regard to raw materials, and so we set up a Commission under League auspices to go into the question of access to raw materials. What happens? Germany declines. She will not come into the discussion. And why? First, because the Commission is set up under the auspices of the very League with which she is in disagreement, and secondly, because the subject was being dealt with in isolation. It does not necessarily deal with Colonies at all, and Germany is not coming into a discussion—I am not saying whether she is right or whether she is wrong, I am only trying to state facts—which deals with some separate subject and does not deal with the inter-relations of one subject with another.
Now comes the question of Colonies, and I hope when I am dealing with that that my noble friend the Earl of Plymouth will not think me too critical. I can imagine nothing more disastrous in Europe to-day than that this nation and Germany should become locked either in short distance or long distance discussion separately upon Colonies. I read the speech of the German Ambassador, who seems to negotiate in this country at one moment and make political utterances in Germany the next, and I read the speech of my noble friend the Earl of Plymouth in reply to the Motion of Lord Noel-Buxton with the greatest interest. I cannot conceive any speech more likely to contribute to ill-feeling in Europe at the present moment than the non possumus position taken up by my noble friend in that reply. When dealing with the question of Mandates the noble Earl went so far as to say—I have his words here:
"Instead of the work being done by a few distinguished gentlemen of long experience, such as my noble friend Lord Lugard and his successor, Lord Hadley, who are prepared to devote a few weeks during each year, it would … require the organisation of a large international staff in constant employment throughout the year."
Why not, my Lords? Is it to be our argument at this moment, with Europe in its present dangerous psychological state, that the noble Lord, Lord Lugard, or his successor cannot give more than a few weeks every year to the organisation of peace, but that we can spend £1,500,000,000 on rearmament? When

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it is asked that Colonial administrators should give a whole year instead of a few weeks to a task my noble friend the Earl of Plymouth says that that sort of thing is administratively undesirable!
I do put it to the Government that they will never achieve the foundations upon which a settlement can come unless Germany is approached with an invitation which covers all subjects and which starts for the first time since the War from the standpoint of absolute equality. I am not asking, as the honourable member Mr. Grenfell asked in another place, for an unwieldy world conference. I do not believe an unwieldy world conference is wanted at the moment. We have had far too many such conferences. What we want is not an unwieldy world conference but a general invitation to Germany frankly including every point. And then, when that invitation has been issued—and accepted, as I hope—you can create for the purpose of examining each one of these technical subjects—raw materials, disputed territories, Colonies—Commissions of a more expert character, and those Commissions can in due course ascertain the facts and report back to the diplomatists. Then it will perhaps be possible to bring together some kind of peace conference which shall take the place of the war conference of Versailles under whose ægis we are still living.
I hope I have not taken up too much time in trying to plead for this constructive approach to the psychological difficulties of Europe at the present moment. I cannot believe that what we need now is an over-emphasis of the discussion of the League of Nations as an instrument of force and an under-estimate of what might come to Europe if only we could reach into the heart of nations which, rightly or wrongly, think they have grievances. Unless that is done we make no headway. On the question of Colonies, we use arguments of the most unhappy character. We proceed to point out that the Colonies are of no value to anybody, either from the population point of view or from the trade point of view, and, having pointed out that Colonies are of no value, we then proceed to make it most emphatically clear that we will keep all that we ourselves possess. We go further than that. Lord Stonehaven made a speech which I felt was one of the most
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helpful speeches in the debate that took place a little while ago. He said many things which I thought were wise, but one thing in which I could not agree with him. He said—I hope I am not misinterpreting him—"We cannot consider the readjustment of Colonies, because of their strategic value." How much longer do we expect to go on occupying Gibraltar, occupying Malta, perhaps quite rightly, for strategic purposes; keeping Colonies that were once Germany's for their strategic value and then turning to the Germans at the present moment and saying that for strategic reasons they cannot have any adjustment of the situation? Unless we can reach some kind of technique which will either reveal what Germany intends or do her justice, I see no hope whatever of rebuilding the League in Europe.
I know it is usually thought that you must not have world invitations and you must not have world conferences until you have explored the position diplomatically. I have been in some of these discussions. You must find your agreement before your invitation is issued. I understand that rather more discreet and private diplomacy, but I do not agree with it. But to say that you believe in the international diplomatic exchange of more discreet persons than politicians finding your measure of agreement, and then let them make these speeches from the housetop from nation to nation, seems to me an absolute contradiction of the very technique which the Government say they desire to employ. But I do not believe that that is the way to the heart of Germany to-day. I believe that the technique of cautious diplomacy and of this subtle handling of countries is wrong, and I beg the Government to consider whether the tension in Europe to-day may not require a bolder initiative. The taking of the risk of making a public and more generous approach to the nations defeated in the last War has, I submit, been too long delayed. I have not asked that Britain should be weak. I have supported the Government's point of view so far as rearmament is concerned. I only ask that we should confound and outwit ambitions that may be unjust by offering the same justice as we claim for ourselves and for our own country. In Europe to-day the spirit of understanding might prove a more formidable check to

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the aggressor than the piling of commitment upon commitment to resist his aggression. I earnestly hope that the noble Viscount, when he replies, may be gracious enough at least to say something on that side of the approach to a new settlement for Europe.
LORD RANKEILLOUR: My Lords, the noble Lord who has just sat down always commands more than attention and respect for the depth and courage of his convictions and the lucidity of his utterances, but in the multiplicity of subjects which this debate opens he will forgive me if I do not follow him. I should like, however, to say how warmly I agree with what he said about the force and cogency of the speech of Lord Arnold in opening this debate, a speech with which in many respects I and other Conservatives have the greatest agreement. At the same time I cannot follow him in his proposal that we should immediately drop the understanding that we have with France. In the first place, that will mean abandoning Belgium. I do not see how it can be otherwise, because we alone, in the circumstances that we may have in mind if Belgium were attacked, could not save Belgium entirely. For that reason I could not follow him even if it were that alone. But I think it is not that alone. I believe that the French understanding at the moment is in fact a great guarantee for the preservation of peace, even with the complication of the Franco-Russian Pact.
Suppose, at its worst, that the Franco-Rusian Pact were in full play and a war broke out between Germany on the one hand and France and Russia on the other. I know it was said by the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, that in that event the Germans would concentrate all their force, according to the dictum of their military advisers, on the Western front and attack France. My Lords, I find it almost incredible that they should do so. The Schlieffen plan, which involved the violation of Belgium and the attack upon France, brought ruin to Germany last time, just as the Plan 17 of the French very nearly brought ruin to France. If it is possible to learn any lesson of strategy in history, it will be that neither country will repeat those mistakes. Even if France were alone on the West, I believe the attempt to attack her in that way would be subject to the
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gravest risks. But why should the Germans, in the conditions about which we are thinking, take a step that would immediately bring a new enemy against them—namely, ourselves? I think many strategists are of the opinion that last time, if the Germans had been on the defensive in the West and had attacked Russian Poland in the East, they could have done all that their ambitions desired, and that is what their own interest, if no other reason, will dictate to them again. Indeed, you may take it the other way: that by our agreement with France the French in turn will not make an attack upon Germany, because in that instance we should never help them. I believe and hope that the very pact with France itself sterilises the Western danger-zone from the bacillus of war.
But having said so much, I do not believe that our understanding with France is a thing enshrined, so that no word of hostile criticism or even of friendly criticism by one country of the other should be allowed. Neither do I believe that it is something which needs continual reaffirmation or needs buoying up with the flowers of rhetoric. I have constantly seen expressions of this kind—"the two great democracies of the West" and "the twin pillars of Western Europe." I do not know if your Lordships are acquainted with the works of M. Tardieu, but I think that the bracketing of our institutions and theirs is, to say the least, inappropriate. Then, why should criticism be silent? Is the understanding so brittle that we dare not say a word of criticism about France? For example, we have rightly called attention to the contributions to the Civil War in Spain from Germany, Italy and Russia. But from the very first there was a continual stream of volunteers through, and from, France—it has been going on the whole time. Because, I suppose, the French Government might not like it, our Press, up till lately, has been strangely silent upon it. The understanding with France was based upon interest, and has been cemented by honour, but it must not bind our freedom, either of criticism or of action beyond its scope, and if it be possible to make such an overture as the last speaker has suggested, to Germany, that can be done, I believe, with perfect loyalty to the obligations we have taken on ourselves.

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If I turn to Germany, of course no one can deny how difficult the German internal policy makes it for those who wish to be friends with the Germans. It seems to us amazing that a nation can get greater strength from racial discrimination, and when a nation is engaged in a struggle with the Red Revolution it is no less amazing that it should be estranged from the forces of organised religion. Signor Mussolini has done differently. In Italy Jewish officers go to synagogue in uniform, and he has made a pact with the Church which, at any rate, has been a splendid bargain for the State, whatever it may be for the Church. I do not think all this should affect our policy with Germany. Many of us may dislike, intensely dislike, the system in Germany, but many of us dislike even more the system prevailing in Russia, but there is a difference between the two, because the Germans do not seek to propagate their doctrine for use in other countries and to subvert the institutions of other countries. No evidence has reached me at present that there is any subterranean and submarine communication between Berlin and Nuremburg and the headquarters of Sir Oswald Mosley. If such an action could be proved, I might revise my opinion, but at present it appears to me that any agreement we make with Germany can be, and ought to be, done without looking into their internal affairs, and while we think that, do not let us be too particular as to the past.
I agree very largely with what my noble friend Lord Stonehaven said, but I wish he had not brought in that matter of Mein Kampf, because surely a man's past, and far past, may be ignored in a case like this. After all, Germany's frame of mind is the result of terrible sufferings, greater sufferings, I suppose, than any country outside Russia has suffered. I do not know whether any of your Lordships heard the speech of Lord Melchett the other day, in which he pointed out that the economic troubles of the last few years were the final blow that destroyed the attempt at constitutional government in Germany. But that economic distress was by no means the first. There was another and a worse one in 1920–24, when the savings of a lifetime were dissipated in a moment. I am afraid that the Germans have got
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into the position where they feel they can get nothing by remonstrance, and get nothing unless they take it, and although one wants to say as little as possible about an unhappy man who had a tragic fate, still I believe that the refusal of M. Barthou to make any accommodation on arms in Germany was almost the turning point of whether a successful arrangement or not could be made for many years. All these things we have to remember, and I do trust that we shall not approach that part of this great problem in what I may call any nagging of vindictive spirit.
It is sometimes said that what we have to fear is the danger of war breaking out in the East. It is very difficult to envisage such a war without involving the violation of Poland. Of course, on the map it would be possible for an army to march through Latvia and Lithuania, but the front would be so narrow that they could never effectively deploy. Therefore, Poland is a vital factor in any Eastern obligation, and it is of the first importance that we should do nothing which would drive Poland into the sphere of Russian policy. You may say it is unlikely, but you never know what a Government will do under great o stress and fear. There is that curious Slav mentality which makes it easier for Poles to understand and be mutually understood by the Russians, after all their differences, than it is by the Germans. That is what I think my noble friend Lord Lothian mentioned, but it is too often ignored.
I have little more to say, but are we ready for a general settlement? It seems to me that until we are ready for it, it is of no use to talk of mandated territories and the like, and at the same time the League is far too weak to bear the burden of any such settlement now. I trust that it may be stronger in the future, but to rely on any such settlement through the machinery of the League now is I think, a vain dream. Of course we always have difficulty in talking about foreign affairs because we know only in part, but I cannot help thinking that we have all along been too eager to attempt large general settlements and have not pursued the humbler part of making partial settlements of particular difficulties as we went along. That is why I think the Naval Agreement with Germany was a real piece of successful statesmanship. I trust that other partial agreements may

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follow upon that, and they can be brought about with perfect loyalty to our obligations to France and Belgium.
I believe at present the danger, or the twin dangers, are fatalism and fear. If a large body of public opinion really believes that war is coming, that is the way to make it come. If every indiscreet speech is broadcast and magnified, if every unfortunate incident is made the most of, that undoubtedly is the way of danger. And equally fear brings about the same danger. I think it was Mr. Burke who said that fear was a greater evil than revenge, and I see indications of a temper which would precipitate the very evil that is apprehended. I have seen strange symptons of an unpleasant disease in the most unlikely places. I do not like to call it by the name of blood-thirst, so I will designate it by the name of philaemic neurosis. I will give two examples of it. One is a very distinguished man, a great supporter of the League of Nations, who lately strongly advocated intervention on the side of the Spanish Government, not the least on the merits of the quarrel, but because he was afraid of Italy. If a policy to consort with Spaniards because you dislike Italians is not the best kind of Bismarckian Realpolitik I really do not know what is; and it was a remarkable suggestion to come from a lifelong peace-loving Liberal. Then there was another case. I observe a gentleman writing to advocate an alliance of ourselves with Russia for the purpose of fighting Japan, Germany and Italy, and this man is a distinguished economist who has long and faithfully written for the Liberal Party.
What we want in all the madness of the world are steady nerves and a strong arm. Both of these, I suggest, are given by rearmament. I do not believe in the theory that guns go off by themselves. I believe on the contrary that you may make (although you cannot prove it) a very strong case that the peace of Europe was maintained for decades by the strength of our Navy and of the German Army, say from the year 1880 to 1911. I trust it may be possible to revive the League and use it to good purpose, but for the moment I am glad to agree with the last speaker that our power alone is the greatest guarantee of peace, and it is on our strength and our wisdom that the future of Europe hangs.
LORD SNELL: My Lords, if any excuse were needed for this long debate, it would be that the subject is infinitely important, and that it is a good thing to have to review our position in these matters from time to time. It is necessary also because the Government, like all Governments, tell us as little as possible about their intentions in the foreign field. And it is necessary from time to time to remind the Government that Parliament itself has some responsibility in these matters. The information that we have been accorded so far has not been extensive, and not particularly reassuring. We have had some amiable references to the League of Nations, but singularly little about well-defined policy for the future. I confess that the debate has depressed me a great deal, because it has shown very little faith in the good will of mankind, and none at all in the possibilities of what we roughly call collective security. We have retreated on insular prejudices, and our main outlook is a preparation for war through rearmament. As I understand what has been said, arms are to secure us peace and so on, and the organisation of international good will is a futile dream that we shall have to abandon. I believe I am right in saying that militarism has failed a thousand times, and yet we have an almost childlike faith in it. On the other hand the League of Nations has not wholly failed. There are a great many things to its credit, and yet everybody almost is ready to denounce it and to renounce it. The noble Lord, Lord Newton, in his interesting speech, speaking of the League of Nations, said that we were the only people who believed in it.
LORD NEWTON: Well, who else does believe in it?
LORD SNELL: Well, if nobody else does, that shows that we have already the isolation of sanity in the matter. We are to judge international questions, according to that outlook in life, in the terms of our own interests. Japan could do as she liked in Manchuria, cut slices out of the side of China because it was no concern of ours. Abyssinia was to be sacrificed to the white angel of civilising peace on the part of Italy because no interest of ours was touched. Well, that is the authentic voice of Toryism, but it is not to me a voice that we ought to listen to too attentively.

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The question of rearmament has of necessity loomed large in this debate. The little sum of £400,000,000 has to be accounted for and excused in some way, and we notice that the first results of it have already begun to appear. We reply with armaments, presumably to Germany, to the extent of £400,000,000. Italy immediately replies to us with an amount she has not yet specified. It is obvious that our view as to armaments is not shared by people in other countries. We regard armaments in other countries as provocative and dangerous, and we regard ours as harmless, necessary furnishings in the temple of peace. Well, other nations do not think so. We notice a second result of a fall in the credit of the nation. A fall in securities, a great amount of which is held by working class organisations and friendly societies, is a very severe loss to people in this country who cannot well afford it.
I rose only to try to put in a few words what I conceive to be the policy of the Labour Party for which I speak. We support the armament plan of His Majesty's Government to the extent that it will enable us to fulfil our proportionate obligations in an attempt to secure world peace, provided always—I ask that that should be taken into account—that it is accompanied by a clear-sighted policy of appeasement amongst other nations. We have had no clear explanation from His Majesty's Government as to why this particular degree of armaments has been decided upon, and I want to ask what assurance the Government are able to give us as to the future. Perhaps the noble Viscount will be good enough to tell us in a few minutes. I only register my own opinion that the subject is so immense and so desperately urgent that we ought to make a contribution to the general good will in a large way. Small contributions are of no good at all. John Stuart Mill said:
"Against great ills small remedies do not produce small effects: they produce no effect at all."
That is the position we are in to-day. This new armament race is a great ill, and small remedies will not do what we require. Therefore this expenditure could be justified only if it were associated with remedies equal to the measure of the evils, and we frankly do not see these remedies on that scale.
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There is something to be said for a policy of complete pacifism. There is something to be said for a policy of isolation. There is something to be said for a more vigorous endeavour, through the League of Nations or in other ways, to organise the good will of mankind. But there is nothing to be said for a lukewarm policy of support of the League of Nations while at the same time piling up armaments and erecting tariff barriers. Something has been said to-day about regional pacts, and some of the criticisms of the noble Lord, Lord Allen, were valid, but at the same time, whilst the Labour Party would look for a world acceptance of conditions that would secure world peace, it may be that the problem could be approached in detail with some chance of limited success. Some advance might be made. I agree that one regional pact would perhaps be dangerous, but a system of regional pacts where the thing could be specialised might have some advantage. For instance, to illustrate, tale the Pacific. If a regional pact for that area could be arranged, you might have some of the hesitancies, say, of America abolished. She would know her maximum commitments, and that would count for something, with some loose relationship to Geneva, the Pact of Paris, and so on. If the Government have any views on that matter, perhaps the noble Viscount will tell us in a minute or two.
I shall not delay the House long, but I should like to trepass upon its patience to say a word about isolation. The noble Lord, Lord Arnold, in acting as the apostle of that faith, seemed to me to express an old faith out of which I thought both he and I had grown some time ago. Isolation was possible in the old invasion-proof England. It was possible when we had a system of free trade. But it does not seem to me so attractive after the scientific developments of the last generation and after the experience of the Ottawa Conference. I do not believe there is any particular virtue in isolation as a theory. I do not believe that the monastic life is any better for a nation than I think it to be for an individual. My noble friend was fortunate, or unfortunate, in that he was at once hailed as a new prophet by Lord Beaverbrook. I am quite sure he did not deserve that painful embrace. I have just one other tiny quarrel to settle with him, and that is that he went out of his way to throw

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bouquets at the Government, and said it had kept us out of war so far. I do not mind throwing a single flower of neighbourly good will to His Majesty's Government, but I like my enthusiasms to be restrained. The Government is quite capable of putting all the beauty spots on itself that it requires.
I would, before I conclude, just say this. Much has, of necessity, been said about Germany. I shall not go into that to-night, but personally I have never been unfriendly to Germany. I owe her teachers far too much to be unmindful of all she has meant in the civilisation of the world. I have never believed that she alone was responsible for the World War. To that extent I am sympathetic to her. But I do not take all the statements made in Germany at their face value, and I thought some speakers in your Lordships' House who have done so showed an innocence that most of us have lost. What I believe we ought to do is to try to have a good-neighbour policy of proper relationships with Germany as far as possible. The world will not be healed by hatred or by large armaments. It will be healed by understanding and give-and-take. Let us remember, in criticising Germany, all she has gone through. I am not concerned with her system of government. I frankly confess I would prefer rather to die than to live under it, but I have not to live under it, and if Germans are satisfied with it that is their business; but I do think the time may have come when the Government might in that large way suggested by Lord Allen make an inquiry as to what accommodations are required and whether an understanding can be reached.
If the Government cannot do it, it may be possible for an unofficial examination to take place. It is just twenty-five years since I had the privilege of organising in London a great English-German Understanding Conference. It assembled at the Guildhall and we spent three' days in very close examination. Sir Frank Lascelles, our late Ambassador in Berlin, was our President, and a distinguished German committee and a very distinguished German delegation came over here and for three days we sat and discussed these difficulties between the two nations. The result was a great clarification, but the unfortunate incidents of 1914 prevented that Conference from having a
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lasting effect. I feel that if I were twenty-five years younger I would like to start that business again, and see whether anything could come from it. In conclusion, I want to ask the Government if they can tell us more, if they have anything to say about Spain, and if they have anything to tell us about the result of Mr. Runciman's visit to the United States. If they have, your Lordships will be glad to hear it. What I do feel, however, is that peace will not come through isolation; it will not come in a mechanical transference of our affections from France to Germany; it will not come in a rearmament policy unaccompanied by a clear and planned policy of peace, and it will not come in an aimless drifting in regard to America; but probably will come only in a large-scale effort to remove the causes of irritation, and in a foreign policy which recognises our share of the responsibility for the peace of the world.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (VISCOUNT HALIFAX): My Lords, you have come to the end of a three-day debate. In the course of that debate a great number of speeches have been delivered, sincere and thoughtful speeches, and each one, I think, characteristic of the man who made it. I owe an apology to the noble Lord who initiated the debate for having been perforce absent on the first day of it, but by all I have heard, and by what I have been able to read, I am conscious that I was the principal loser by not being able to be in my place to hear the noble Lord's speech, although, as I say, I have informed myself of it through the Press. In all those speeches I think it has been remarkable that there has been, with perhaps some slight exception in the last speech of the noble Lord opposite (Lord Snell), a very little trace of Party sympathy in the strict sense of the word, and it was, if the noble Lord will allow me to say so, the more remarkable that, in his own characteristic and charming fashion, he should have, in banter, resorted to that, because he happens to lead a Party that, in this debate, has, I think, been responsible for expressing not less than three different opinions upon the matters which have engaged our attention.
Nothing I think has been more significant than the frequency with which these debates recur in Parliament. That is a measure of the new national interest that

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is gathered round foreign policy and foreign affairs, and, as such, it has to be welcomed, though the House will not fail to appreciate the difficulty that it imposes upon any spokesman of the Government who has to reply for the debate at the end of three days. He must either say the same thing as his colleagues have said here and elsewhere, which is apt to be dull, or he must run the risk of saying something different, in which case he is exposed to the higher criticism of Lord Snell and Lord Ponsonby. Well, that we cannot or do not, all of us, succeed in saying anything new, is not, therefore, to be attributed to our fault, but is I suppose the consequence of this, that the main elements of the problem are not always changing from month to month, and that when, as my noble friend Lord Stonehaven said, we pull up the plant from time to time to see how it is growing, we are anxious to do so tenderly in order not to damage the general prospects of the ground.
The main burden of this debate has been the examination of the relationship in which this country ought to stand to the obligations and the theories of the League of Nations. With all respect to my noble friends Lord Allen and Lord Snell, I do not think that this debate, even if that were all that it had produced, would have been so unconstructive as they appear to think. It is perfectly natural that those issues, lying, as I see them, alongside the old international obligations, should excite thought and should in many cases give rise to some anxiety, and during these three days more than one of your Lordships have examined what, in regard to these matters, are the possible directions in which a course may most wisely be steered over seas that are necessarily stormy.
Pacifism has claimed its advocates, although more than one of them has, with the great candour that we always associate with Lord Allen, explained that he does not regard pacifism to-day as practical politics. I only make one observation upon that head. I understand and I respect the attitude of my noble friend Lord Ponsonby, and from the Christian point of view, as he got into clash with the most reverend Primate, I would say this. I do not think there is any subject
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that needs to be more constantly searched by Christian thought, and although this is not the place to argue that, if I could see my way to a general pacifist system in which all nations would resolutely and finally abjure war I should be glad, for that, of course, is what we all want. But I cannot myself believe that for a single nation, in the conditions of the world to-day, to forego both the will and the power to defend what it believes to be right, is either politically practicable or morally imperative.
Then some of those who have spoken have referred to the alternative of the automatic invocation of military force against all infractions of the Covenant and of peace. The noble Lord, Lord Arnold, rather unkindly but perhaps not untruly, immortalised certain persons as victims of the bitterest disappointment if there was a war anywhere and they were not in it. If I were quite sure that such an interpretation of collective security would in fact keep the peace I would naturally support it, but I venture to think you cannot be quite sure, and it is because you cannot be quite sure that it is important to define what you are willing to fight for. Otherwise you are, as I see it, participating in a huge bloc and there is a real danger that, as the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, said, what might be a local war would become a world war. The most enthusiastic supporter of the League of Nations would not admit that it was any business of the League to promote that end. The opposite alternative which has been discussed is to say that in no circumstances will you fight unless you are attacked—isolation. The noble Viscount on the Cross Benches drew our attention yesterday to the political dangers of isolation. He may be right—I think he probably is—but in my view it is only small countries that can with any assurance claim the privileges of isolation, and I am quite certain that the centre of a great Commonwealth such as ours, with interests in all parts of the world, could not in fact isolate itself. On the moral side I should certainly feel that no great country has a right, even if it could, to throw away its power and its capacity to exert influence on the problems that lie at its door.
Therefore, having exhausted those possibilities, I come to the position of His Majesty's Government which the

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noble Lord opposite deems to be indefinite and uncertain. It has in fact, of course, been repeatedly defined by the Foreign Secretary, and I will not weary your Lordships by repeating that definition here. It rests, as you know, upon the drawing of a distinction between cases for which arms would certainly be used and other cases of possible disturbance of peace in which this country would be free to judge of the merits and the circumstances at the time subject to our Covenant obligations. That is not disloyalty to the League. When the noble Viscount said that my noble friend the Earl of Plymouth had in the course of his speech said that he would only fight for vital interests, I think he unwittingly did my noble friend less than justice. What he did say was:
"I venture to say that nations cannot be expected to incur automatic military obligations except where their vital interests are concerned."
Your Lordships will observe that that is a very different thing.
The noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, said that he thought my right honourable friend's speech at Leamington was wise and statesmanlike but that subsequently the landscape had become a bit blurred. Others have suggested that His Majesty's Government's policy is therefore to that degree uncertain. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, even charged us with vacillating indecision and I think the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, also used language not dissimilar. The future is always and unnecessarily uncertain but so far as it is possible to be definite I suggest that His Majesty's Government's policy is crystal clear. I would make this assertion without fear of contradiction, that as far as I have had the opportunity of reading history—over which the noble Marquess, if he will allow me to say so, led us rather a fairy dance yesterday—I should be prepared 1o maintain the position that never in the eighteenth or nineteenth century was British policy so clearly defined in advance as it has been by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary in recent months.
I know perfectly well, and indeed I largely share, the anxiety to which the noble Lord, Lord Arnold, and the noble Marquess and others have given expression in this debate of the possibility of what I may for brevity term an Eastern entanglement. I am not oblivious to that
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and I am not oblivious to the anxiety of those who see indirect but grave danger to the West of Europe from possible complications in the East linked, as in the judgment of many observers East and West are, by the Franco-Soviet Pact. I do not know whether your Lordships have in your minds a question and answer in the House of Commons on February 8 last. Mr. Lambert asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs:
"whether any commitment exists whereby under the Franco-Russian Pact Great Britain could be involved in a European war; and, if none does exist, has this fact been made clear to the French and Russian Governments?"
That question was answered by Viscount Cranborne. He said:
"The answer to the first part of the question is No, Sir. As regards the second part of the question I think the French and Soviet Governments are fully aware of the position."
I think that is a pretty definite Parliamentary answer to one side of the kind of question that the noble Lord who initiated this debate had in his mind.
I would go a little further than that and I would say that unless you are prepared on the one hand to say, "I will fight in every case on behalf of peace, which is one and indivisible," or on the other hand to say, "I will only fight when I am myself the victim of attack"—unless you are prepared to take one of those two positions there is an inevitable no-man's-land of uncertainty lying between which is quite incapable, as I think, of antecedent definition. Therefore it is that if we are unable to define beforehand what might be our attitude to a hypothetical complication in Central or Eastern Europe, that is not to say that we disinterest ourselves in the fate of those parts of Europe. We have repeatedly maintained our determination to carry out to the best of our ability our obligations under the Covenant, and if those obligations are not capable of prior definition with precise exactitude that is a feature—and I venture to think not an accidental feature—of the Covenant itself. If it is true that the League itself is crippled, as indeed it is, by the defection of important Members, that does not mean that this country is without influence and authority which she would use in endeavouring to prevent such a conflict arising. I suggest that that influence and autho-

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rity will be greatly reinforced, as Lord Allen, indeed, himself recognised, by the steps that we have now decided to take in the matter of rearmament.
Lord Allen asked me if I had any views on the question of one regional pact. I followed, of course, what I understood to be his thought—namely, that if you have one regional pact immunising, isolating, keeping in permanent peace one area, you will be likely to leave to the greater danger of disturbance the other parts of Europe. I hope that what I said a few moments ago will have assured him that that is not the way in which His Majesty's Government see the problem with which we are concerned. The regional pact is not in competition with the League, nor is the pact the instrument to which we should look for the remedy of injustices which we, not less than he, would desire, when opportunity offers, to see remedied. I have seen it suggested that the best guarantee, or a guarantee, against war would be that immediately on the outbreak of war, whatever the merits, the Prime Minister should be hanged, somewhat on the principle by which I understand the Chinese ceases to pay his doctor when he ceases to be well. I should not greatly mind that being done if everybody conformed, especially if a war synchronised with the advent of a Labour Government to office—which indeed, to judge by many speeches that have been made by Labour orators in the last six months, might very well be the case!
But the real guarantee against war, or against war for any but the clearest and most overwhelming of reasons, is that which the noble Lord, Lord Arnold, referred to in his speech when he said that it was impossible for any democratic Government in these days to make war unless it could count on the overwhelming support of the country behind it in doing so. That is true. And what is not less true, but I do not think the noble Lord mentioned it, is that it would be impossible for any Government in this country to decide on a declaration of war unless they were morally confident that not only this country but also the whole Empire was associated with them, or prepared to associate itself with them, in their decision. Our judgment and our expectations in these matters no doubt vary
500
according to our several temperaments, and I can only repeat that His Majesty's Government do not desire in regard to European peace to be ranked among those prophets of fatalism and fear to whom Lord Rankeillour referred and of whom I agree with him that there are all too many. I confess that I rubbed my eyes and my ears when I heard Lord Ponsonby say that the Government was responsible for the talk about war.
LORD PONSONBY OF SHULBREDE: Hear, hear.
VISCOUNT HALIFAX: I am sorry to find that he is unrepentant, because I and, as far as I know, most of my colleagues spend most of our time saying exactly what I have just said and endeavouring to discount the influence of what I may call the unrelieved pessimist. Therefore, if Lord Ponsonby has honestly thought that up to this moment, I hope that from this moment he will change his view. It is of course quite natural that the nerves of Europe should have been frayed when so many things have happened so quickly and so differently from what people would have anticipated. It is also true that new danger-spots are constantly in process of manufacture. Spain has been mentioned, and if I may do so in parenthesis, I would answer two or three specific questions that the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil, put to me yesterday. He asked how the Non-intervention Agreement was going to work and what was to be done about the naval cordon; what security there was that a food-ship would not be arrested by German or Italian ships. The answer is that the ships of the Navies taking part in the supervision scheme will have no powers of arrest or any right of search. Their duties will be confined to establishing the identity of all ships proceeding to Spain in order to verify whether they have or have not conformed to the obligation imposed upon them—namely, of taking supervisors on board—under the Agreement. Apart from that, the position remains unaltered—namely, that we make ourselves responsible for the protection of our own shipping. He further asked whether there would be officers of another nation on board, for example, a German ship. I am advised that the answer to that question is that, in view of the zones which have been provisionally allocated to the four Powers concerned, it is not

501
considered necessary to post on the ships of the various Powers, officers of another nation.
While I am on that subject, perhaps I might mention that it will be the duty of the Government in this House to bring before your Lordships at an early date a short Bill giving power to bring this Agreement into force, a Bill which I hope, when it comes, your Lordships will be prepared to treat as an emergency measure. I can hardly leave the question of Spain without adding my word of tribute to the persistent and persuasive patience of the noble Earl, Lord Plymouth, to whom I think we all owe a real debt of gratitude for the way in which he has pursued his task.
I am not one of those who do not think that there is more than one reassuring element in the present situation. I think it is something which we can be pleased to learn that the Chancellor of Germany should have assured us on January 30 last that the era of surprises was over. The second thing that I ponder with some degree of satisfaction is that, so far as I can judge, any nation who wanted it could have had a war any lime they liked during the last six months over Spain. They have net had it, though if they had wanted it they could have had it. Therefore it is that I disagreed with Earl Russell when he said that rearmament meant that the Government foresaw war as likely. We have no such gloomy anticipations, and I would state my feelings in terms exactly the reverse: that in our view, as in the view of others who have spoken, the programme of rearmament is calculated to make war far less likely. At this stage of international adjustment I do not believe that this statement is capable of challenge—namely, that the stronger this country is the less likelihood there is of war.
I go the whole way with all noble Lords who have deplored the waste of money on armaments. I go the whole way with them when they say that rearmament in itself is no solution. It is only a means to an end. But it may be the only means to an end, and that end is not selfish nor aggressive but is the end of securing for this country due weight in European councils, and I do not believe that any loyal Member of the League of Nations anywhere in Europe would disagree with that assessment of
502
the situation to-day. I would like the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, if he would, to re-examine the process of thought that leads him to state that our purpose in this matter is, as he suggested, not defence, but preparation for attack. Really the noble Lord must take it from me that that opinion is one wholly without foundation.
LORD PONSONBY OF SHULBREDE: May I explain to the noble Viscount that in saying that I meant that defence in the air does mean preparation for attack.
VISCOUNT HALIFAX: I think if the noble Lord had made that point in his speech it might have been better, because I think the words he used were liable to considerable misconception. The noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, asked whether the Government had given up disarmament. I can assure him most emphatically no. But he will not, I think, disagree that the prolonged trial that we made of unilateral disarmament had no other result than to convince us at least of its futility. The one lesson that we have learned has been the impossibility of getting other people to make sacrifices and come down to a low level, when we had already made sacrifices in advance, and had therefore proportionately less inducement to offer to other nations to follow our example. The writer of the fable of the fox and his brush had a great deal of human wisdom stored up.
LORD STRABOLGI: May I ask the noble Viscount who refused to bring down their Navy to the level of the British Navy?
VISCOUNT HALIFAX: I think the noble Lord is endeavouring to lead me on to the dangerous swamps of generalities. I think I am right in this. The difficulties, such as they were, about the Navy—and as he knows it was not there that the principal difficulties arose—arose principally from the definition of several categories, and if the noble Lord refreshes his memory by looking at the Disarmament discussions at Geneva I do not think he will find that we were on any point of substance the obstacle to any reduction in quantity or quality.
LORD STRABOLGI: Very successful, up to a point.
VISCOUNT HALIFAX: The time may come, and we hope it will come, when

503
it is possible to negotiate with more success reasonable equilibrium in armaments, and I would emphasise this, at a much lower scale than at present we are being compelled to build. The settlement of all these problems depends, as I say, on two things: first, the intrinsic elements in the problems themselves—racial, economic, political and the like—and secondly, the spirit of approach that all countries can make to the problems and the degree of understanding that they can bring to them. Those who heard it will not have failed to be moved by the speech that my noble friend Lord Addington addressed to the House last night. Those who heard Lord Allen to-night, whether they agreed or disagreed, must have felt much of the conviction he felt when he spoke on the same part of the subject.
It is too often suggested that rapprochement with one country must involve estrangement from another. That is not our conception. A great deal is said, as I said just now, about collective security. That, if it means anything, must mean reality, and if it is dangerous to be deluded by phrases that do not correspond to reality, it is not less dangerous to bury our heads in the sands of isolation, which the first gale will blow away. When Lord Ponsonby spoke of his mistrust of regional pacts which he saw in the terms of a Pact between A, B and C, subsequently inviting D and E, but knowing that D and E would never, in his view, come in, I am entitled to remind him of the continuous efforts that this Government have made for the last twelve months to make the Five-Power Pact inclusive of all the nations concerned. The essence of collective security is that we do not believe in exclusive alliances, which, as Lord Lothian and the Marquess of Crewe said, are the only effective alternative before us. We seek always the method of co-operation as opposed to any plan that would divide those whom our whole policy is to bring together.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, complains that we have never invited Germany to the council table on terms of equity, and he answered in advance the reply that I should naturally make, that that is exactly what we have been seeking to do, as I have said, for the last six or twelve months. He himself would prefer what
504
he called a more constructive approach, not indeed by way of a world-wide conference, but by way, as I understood him, of a small conference in which all questions of possible difference would be brought into the arena of free discussion. But as he spoke I said to myself: "Who would be participating in such a conference? Russia?" He would know well, presumably, the difficulties an invitation of that sort might encounter. There are other people whose interests might be affected, because we know the only people who would wish to participate in such a conference, if it were ever held, but whatever might be my first judgment about such a proposal as that, I can certainly assure him that any talks at any time that might seem likely to lead to fruitful results or better understanding, would always secure the sympathy and the good will of His Majesty's Government. That is, indeed, the spirit in which they are constantly seeking to approach European problems, and the same spirit in which we should always welcome the co-operation of the United States, of which the noble Marquess spoke yesterday. I do not think I have anything more to add in reply to what Lord Stonehaven asked about Mr. Runciman's visit than has already been said publicly on that, but I will convey what he said to him.
The other thing I want to say is this. I want to emphasise the point made by Lord Rankeillour, which I think is profoundly true, that though we believe that the cause of peace is in fact one, it may well be that an approach to a general settlement may be advanced by the solution of particular questions, which can be treated separately, although they must ultimately form part of a larger whole. It is for that reason that we have been attempting to bring the five Western Powers together. It is for that reason that we took the initiative in the proposed raw materials inquiry, and it is for that reason that His Majesty's Government would welcome any agreement anywhere that was honestly devised to promote the cause of peace.
I hope I have said enough to show that, in my view at least, the policy of His Majesty's Government is not negative, is emphatically not the policy of despair, and is not one which leads us to feel with Lord Snell that international good

505
will is no more than a futile dream. We still, retain our faith in the ideals of the League of Nations and in the possibility of finding means to make those ideals prevail. Whether the world will or will not succeed in that—with all due respect to my noble friend Lord Newton who, I see, is not in his place—no one here and now can say, but it is quite certain that we can make no contribution to that end unless we are in a position to play our part. And therefore it is that all the efforts of His Majesty's Government, diplomatic, military, industrial and all other, will be subordinated to the single aim of endeavouring to build peace upon a foundation of justice, that can alone support a durable structure under which all the nations of the world can be at peace.
LORD ARNOLD: My Lords, your Lordships were good enough to give me a patient hearing during the long speech with which I introduced this Motion, and I shall certainly not make any protracted remarks now. It is obviously quite impossible to deal with all the issues which have been raised in these three days' debates. So far as my own speech was concerned—and may I say how deeply I appreciate the kind references which have been made to it by various noble Lords?—the main reply was made by the noble Earl, Lord Plymouth. But I hope he will forgive my saying that it seems to me clear that his speech in reply to mine had been prepared before he heard my speech and was not altered after he had heard my speech, because he really did not deal in detail with the main arguments which I advanced, and for the most part his observations consisted of vigorous assertions that the Government's policy was the best of all possible policies.
That, of course, is the question at issue, and perhaps he will allow me to say, with respect but with emphasis, that assertion is not argument. Neither is evasion discussion, and the noble Earl did evade many of the points, no doubt difficult points, about which I should have liked to have some information. For instance, I told him in advance, in response to his request, that I should raise in a very definite form the difficulties and dangers of the Franco-Soviet Pact, and yet in his reply he never mentioned the Franco-Soviet Pact, did not say one syllable about it, although in my speech I had devoted a good deal of attention to it.
506
The noble Viscount, Lord Halifax, has said something about the Franco-Soviet Pact, but I will not discuss that very delicate matter now. All I should like to say to the noble Viscount is that I hope he will bear in mind what was said by The Times. As he was not here when I quoted it, perhaps I might quote again three or four lines from an important leader in The Times, which said:
"No Englishman in German shoes would consent to accept the commitments of a new treaty while the Franco-Soviet Pact … is still in force."
The noble Earl, Lord Plymouth, also asserted vigorously that isolation is impossible, but he did not reply to various arguments which had been advanced on the other side. The noble Viscount, Lord Cecil, did go rather more in detail into that policy, but I found his arguments against it unconvincing, and one or two of them, if I may say so with respect, impossibly fantastic. The noble Earl may think isolation is impossible, and the Government may think it impossible, but I would very much like to know what they really think of certain aspects of isolation.
However, their attitude is that, at any rate for the time being, it is impossible. But the fact remains—and I have no doubt about this—that there is a large and a growing body of opinion in the country which does not take that view, which holds that, so far from isolation being impossible, it is the policy which should be adopted. And, after all, isolation over a long period of history has been the traditional policy of this country, and I dealt in my speech with the changes brought about by air warfare and so forth. I have made most careful inquiries, and the fact is that the people, or many of them, are getting sick and tired of these Continental commitments. I do not wish to attach any very great importance to my own small experiences, but it may interest the noble Earl and the Government to know that, as a result of my speech, I have had messages in very large numbers from all parts of the country, strongly approving of the kind of policy which I endeavoured to outline, and in a great many instances assuring me that the writers of their own knowledge can affirm that such views are widely held in their own particular neighbourhoods. Those

507
are, I think, factors which have in a small way at any rate to be taken into account.
I emphasised last week—and there must be a good deal of agreement about this—that no Government can take this country into a war on the Continent unless it has behind it the support of at least go per cent, of the people. I think it is quite clear, in view of the large body of persons supporting isolation, that the Government cannot get 90 per cent, unless this country is attacked. I do not believe that that is going to happen, and therefore I hold that there is every prospect that, if there is a next war, Great Britain will be kept out of it. It has been said that isolation does not give an absolute guarantee. The noble Viscount or some other speaker suggested that this country will be kept out of war. But under isolation the chances of this country being kept out of war are, I think, very great, and the risks of its going into war are enormously reduced; in fact they are reduced to a minimum; whereas under the policy of the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil, and his friends they are at a maximum. Under that policy, whatever the war is, wherever and whenever it is, you are certain to be in it. Of the two policies, for my part I prefer the one which I ventured to outline. I think it is infinitely less risky for this country.
I thank the noble Viscount for his very careful and long reply. He will not expect me to be satisfied with it, but I thank him. It did not go as far as I wanted, but although the noble Viscount has not said very much, he has said something, and I hope, if I may say so with respect, that he will think the more. I hope also that the Government will, as time goes on, still further change their policy away from commitments. They have done something in that direction. Their policy has changed. It is not what it was. There has been a material alteration, and I urge upon them that they should do more. Let them move away from this so-called collective security, the definition of which, by the way, was still further whittled down by Lord Cranborne in another place last night—further reservations and qualifications.
I do not want to use strong language, but I do not think it is an over-statement
508
that this unfortunate phrase has really become a farce, and I suggest it is undesirable—to use no stronger word—to reduce an important definition of grave international issues to farcical conditions. May I say this? In the recent by-elections everybody has been struck with the smallness of the polls. I have no doubt that one reason for that is that there is a large number of people who, on this question of foreign policy—which is the major issue of the day and what people are thinking about and talking about—do not find their views represented either by the Government candidates or by the candidates of the Left, and a large number of them are abstaining from voting.
Finally, I want to say something which is not very easy for me to say but which I ought to say in all honesty. I incurred, apparently, in a mild way the displeasure of my noble friend Lord Snell for, as he said, throwing a bouquet at the Government. I was not aware I had gone as far as a floral decoration, and I do not think I really did, but I must be fair though the heavens fall, and on the occasions—not very frequent—when I can say something in favour of the Government I do not mind doing it. Even at the risk of still further incurring the displeasure of my noble friend, I must say something more. My admiration of your Lordships' House has always been restrained. It continues to be restrained. In fact, to use a phrase of my noble friend Lord Snell, it is "under strict control." I have been a critic of your Lordships' House, and I am still a critic, both as regards its composition and its powers, but it is only fair to admit that your Lordships' House is a platform for expressing independent views. I feel impelled to say that because it has been pointed out in the Press in the course of this debate that under Party affiliations and so forth it would have been very difficult for a member in another place to have given expression to the independent views which I endeavoured to voice in introducing this Motion. It is right that I should admit that.
If I may be permitted to conclude with a further personal reference, I would say this. Again and again I have been asked—in the last year particularly—why is the kind of policy which I endeavoured to outline in introducing this Motion not placed before Parliament. Again and

509
again I have been assured that vast numbers of people are thinking that way. I say that I have been asked why are these things not said in Parliament; so at last, as they do represent my strong convictions—and not hastily formed—I said, "Very well, if no one else will say these things, I will say them myself," and through the medium of your Lordships' House I have done so. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

PUBLICATIONS AND DEBATES' REPORTS.
Message from the Commons for leave to Mr. Edward Cliffe Vigors, C.B., Principal Clerk of Private Bills and Private Committees, to attend to be examined as a witness before the Select Committee on Publications and Debates' Reports appointed by them on the 16th day of November last.

—

Total Imports.

of which from:—

United Kingdom.

France.

Belgium.

Germany.

Italy.

Japan.

Kenya and Uganda:

£

£

£

£

£

£

£

Proportion of Total Per cent

1933

4,818,757

1,815,984

60,975

90,642

153,077

54,895

633,007

13

1934

5,583,238

2,055,547

62,811

95,739

198,465

61,796

856,219

15

1935

6,522,032

2,379,131

70,615

117,752

294,853

35,474

1,007,382

15

Tanganyika:

1933

1,946,687

567,021

24,907

24,118

197,775

14,193

416,846

21

1934

2,343,185

645,767

28,792

34,108

230,022

14,039

522,797

22

1935

2,989,600

865,960

27,548

40,240

317,719

12,050

655,825

22

Nyassaland:

1933

629,245

341,484

3,791

3,454

15,941

9,219

77,125

12

1934

518,146

250,111

4,382

2,390

8,860

7,439

115,375

22

1935

628,499

279,461

5,065

5,269

13,422

8,730

178,252

28

Zanzibar:

1933

809,678

113,780

4,009

4,058

12,549

4,872

85,675

11

1934

707,405

130,254

5,410

2,846

8,939

3,664

84,564

12

1935

915,241

152,325

5,639

6,400

13,440

3,937

129,963

14

Belgian Congo:

Thousand Belgian Francs.

1933

389,359

52,561

12,256

168,489

25,264

3,534

22,019

6

1934

377,606

51,291

11,868

156,885

18,801

3,077

37,693

10

1935

524,592

73,616

15,629

201,077

24,932

4,693

67,837

13

Ruanda-Urundi:

1933

23,279

1,630

594

3,800

1,337

370

8,531

37

1934

26,610

2,283

652

4,914

1,780

221

8,967

34

1935

34,108

3,431

696

6,599

1,791

53

10,196

30

Leave given accordingly, and a Message ordered to be sent to the Commons to acquaint them therewith.