Lords Sitting of 14 December 1943

Preamble
The House met, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
The Lord Meston—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

LANDLORD AND TENANT (REQUISITIONED LAND) BILL, [H.L.]
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT SIMON): My Lords, I rise to move the Second Reading of this Bill which deals with the situation that results when premises that are under lease are requisitioned. When a requisitioning authority takes possession of such premises the tenant, of course, has to turn out, but the lease between the landlord and tenant does not on that account come to an end. Subject to certain special provisions about disclaimer, the parties to the lease remain bound to one another according to its terms. If, for example, a tenant has entered into a repairing covenant with his landlord, that repairing covenant continues to bind him even in respect of damage that is done to the premises after they have been taken over by the requisitioning authority and when the tenant has no control over them at all. The requisitioning authority, as matters now stand, may knock the premises about or fail to keep them watertight or in repair, but this makes no difference to the binding force of the repairing covenant on the displaced tenant.
It may be that your Lordships will think that that is a rather unsatisfactory situation. The intention of Parliament, no doubt, when passing the Compensation (Defence) Act, 1939, was to leave these matters to be adjusted by compensation from public funds, but I am quite satisfied, and I think your Lordships will be very easily satisfied, that amendments are needed, both to deal with the period during which the requisitioning is going on and also to deal with the situation when possession of the premises is given up, when—to use the modern phrase—de-
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requisitioning takes place. The way in which we propose in this Bill to deal with the matter is quite simple and the Bill itself in its main clauses is very easy to follow. We propose that during the period when requisition is operating the repairing covenant is not to apply. If the tenant has been turned out and is not in a position to control the matter he would, under the Bill, during that period be no longer responsible under the repairing covenant, or if, as is sometimes the case, the landlord has undertaken to repair, he would likewise be relieved during that period. That is the first provision. I would point out in passing that the arrangement does no injury to the owner of the premises because his claims are met by compensation from public funds.
There is a second consequence of the present law affecting a repairing covenant when the leased premises have been requisitioned which undoubtedly requires consideration. Under the Act of 1939 compensation for damage which has occurred during requisitioning is paid to the landlord. But unless the landlord is specially bound, when he receives that compensation he is not under any obligation to the tenant to use the compensation to repair the premises. Indeed, under the existing law it seems that the landlord, if he were so unreasonable, might conceivably get compensation from public funds for the damage which had occurred and then claim on the tenant under the repairing covenant. This Bill, therefore, provides, in the second place, that where upon possession being given up after requisitioning, compensation for damage is paid to the person entitled to the benefit of the covenant, no remedy for breach of the covenant shall be enforced against the other party to the lease in respect of that damage. That, I am sure your Lordships will agree, is only fair. Of course, if the compensation from public funds is paid to the party who is under covenant to repair, then that covenant can be enforced against him and he can use the compensation money towards the cost of repair.
There is one further anomaly which we propose to correct and which is indeed rather surprising. It arises under Section 12, subsection (2), of the Act of 1939. Under that section it is provided that compensation from public funds for

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damage to property which is requisitioned shall not be paid to a person who is entitled, apart from the Act, to recover damages or indemnities in respect of the damage. It has been pointed out that that might, at least, be understood to mean this: that the requisitioning authorities who have done the damage, need not pay compensation for it at all if the landlord can enforce the repairing covenant against the tenant, because the landlord has got a second string to his bow—an alternative way of being indemnified. That is plainly inequitable, and it is remedied in Section 3, subsection (2) of this measure.
Those are the main provisions of this little Bill. I have tried to state them clearly. There is no doubt that in their nature they are rather technical, but though technical they are certainly important—very important to some people. I have only this to say further, that inasmuch as the Bill is correcting defects in the situation which would arise from existing war-time legislation in connexion with these covenants to repair, it seems plainly right that it should have effect as from the operative date of the Act of 1939. That Act took effect from August 24, 1939, a few days before the outbreak of war. This point is made clear by subsection (2) of Section 1 of the Bill. I cannot recommend this Bill to your Lordships as stimulating reading for a moment of leisure, but I thought it my duty to explain to the House what it proposes to do. I commend it to your Lordships' support.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.— (The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD PONSONBY OF SHULBREDE: My Lords, may I ask the Lord Chancellor one specific question which might lead him to show the House, even more clearly than he has already done, exactly where the law is altered and how it will stand when this Bill is passed? The instance I would give, but only very generally, will no doubt be known to the Lord Chancellor. It is the instance of Shillinglee, Lord Winterton's house in Sussex. That establishment was practically demolished by fire while in the occupation of the military, and I do not quite know how matters stand with regard to repairs and the payment of the sum necessary for the repairs. It occurs to me that this would
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come under this Bill, and if the Lord Chancellor is cognizant of the particular case he will no doubt enlighten me.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, willingly, with the leave of the House, I will say a word in reply to what has been put to me by the noble Lord. I am afraid that I am not myself informed as to the particular case to which he refers, but the first question that would arise so far as this present Bill is concerned is this: is that a case of a house which is held on lease? If, as I rather suppose, it is freehold, this Bill has nothing to do with it. This Bill is solely concerned with adjusting the rights of parties if the premises concerned are, at the time, the subject of a lease and the authorities requisition them. If I may, I will make inquiries about the case which the noble Lord mentions and perhaps I might communicate with him.
On Question, Bill read 2a and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

EXPIRING LAWS CONTINUANCE BILL.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
LORD TEMPLEMORE: My Lords, as your Lordships are aware, this Bill to continue certain expiring laws always comes before your Lordships at this time of the year. The Bill is in the usual form, and I do not think that I need detain your Lordships with an explanation. I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.— (Lord Templemore.)
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

LOCAL ELECTIONS AND REGISTER OF ELECTORS (TEMPORARY PROVISIONS) BILL.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA AND BURMA (THE EARL OF MUNSTER): My Lords, in moving the Second Reading of this Bill, I, too, need not detain your Lordships for more than a very few

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moments. The Bill, as the House knows, has already received approval in another place. It is designed to extend, for a further period of one year, the suspension of the local elections throughout the country. This is, I regret to say, the fifth time that legislation of this character has been before your Lordships. The case for the further continuance of the suspension has not altered in any way since last year, and although we naturally appreciate the desire for those elections to be held again at the earliest possible moment, it is, I think, quite clear that it would be impossible at the present time. I do not think I need add anything further as to these matters, with which your Lordships are well acquainted, but if there is any information that your Lordships should desire I will do my best to give it. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.— (The Earl of Munster.)
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

COURTS (EMERGENCY POWERS) (SCOTLAND) BILL. [H.L.]
Order of the day for the House to be put into Committee read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this House do resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DOMINION AFFAIRS (VISCOUNT CRANBORNE)(Lord Cecil): My Lords, I beg to move that my noble friend Lord Templemore take the Chair in Committee of the Whole House this day.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee: Bill reported without amendment.

INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION.
THE EARL OF DARNLEY THE EARL OF DARNLEY had the following Notice on the Paper: To call the attention of His Majesty's Government to the fact that the idea of preventing a repetition of the present world
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calamity by a system of universal co-operation instead of power politics, is rapidly gaining ground in the Press and Parliaments of various countries including America, and to urge them to take a lead in the formation of world-wide machinery for this end; and to move for Papers.
The noble Earl said: My Lords, wartime is a time when the finding of scapegoats becomes a prevalent pastime. Your Lordships will have seen the culpability for the war ascribed to many sources all over the world, by different minds in different parts of the world. It has been ascribed to Germany, to Japan, to Italy, to ourselves, to France, to Russia, to the United States of America, to the plutocrats, to the haves, to the have-nots, possibly to Fascists, to Jews, to vested interests, and even the wretched and impoverished landlords have been, I believe, landed with the responsibility. If one starts on a new line, as I try to do, one runs the risk of having the burden put on one's own shoulders. But nevertheless I come before you again, as I said I would, in order to try to dig deeper than is usually done into the causes of this war, in the endeavour to find some scapegoat that is consistent and that is maintainable, and therefore properly punishable. I believe, as I said before, that this accusation can only be truthfully directed against one culprit only, that is the use of intolerant force over long ages of the past in international problems and in using it as a threat, and this idea is rapidly gaining ground in the voices and opinions of the world. If this culprit and scapegoat can be properly caged, and therefore punished, there is really a chance of achieving at last real peace and real freedom. And if it is going to be punished then it has got to have punishment in exact ratio to the horrors and excesses now practised by the current aggressors.
I must confess that the first time I brought this Motion to your notice it got badly stuck in what I might politely but truthfully call the Cecilian Channel, but I still believe that my ship is seaworthy. Although I am afraid I detained your Lordships over long last time, I am going to have another try to put it through, at less length but with equal lack of hostility and equal respect. The first obstacle I met with was the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil, who I am sorry to say is not here

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to-day, although I have given him notice of what I am going to say. He said I should not be content with vague and general remedies; but if you are going to propose some new process you have first of all to have a principle behind it, and the principle has to have some general form. But I venture to say all the same that possibly the greatest truth lies in the simple things rather than in the voluminous tomes that are now written in order to try to prove various aspects of it.
The principle that I tried to produce to your Lordships was that men's actions are best controlled by getting at their minds, and that you can cause them to act rightly when you can get them to think rightly, and without revenge and without resentment. I believe you can see the truth of this in the long ages of history. History consists largely of wars, but it also consists largely of excuses and justifications. Everybody was always right in everything he did, pages were written and spoken about it. The result is that there has been a long saga of wars and excuses, and this has got now to such a scale that the whole of civilization is threatened. The new method I propose is to remove these causes by the joint action of all possible combatants and competitors, and there is nothing vague or general about that. It is only the law of cause and effect in operation, and, if I may say so, of all religions and philosophies, and if they are untrue it is no good our talking further. The noble Viscount was content apparently to call the aggressions of Germany, Italy and Japan political conceptions. Surely that is vague and general to a degree, and it completely denies the law of cause and effect. Just as there has never been a case of a physical conception without at least two causes, so there cannot possibly be a political conception without any cause, as he suggests.
Although the noble Viscount may deny the truth in the excuses and justifications he has heard blared out at him for the last twenty years from the various reactionaries, he must at any rate agree that the people themselves believe in these causes to a man. It is no good considering, for purposes of getting at the truth, that the inhabitants of other countries, if they number one hundred millions or two hundred millions, are all criminals and liars. I suggest that these causes are the
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same usual old strain. There is first of all defeat, then destitution, then there is the precedent of force for recovery, power politics, political jugglery, secret treaties, and unknown, therefore unsolved, disabilities. Last, but by no means least, there is the Phoenix-like rise of dictators and Fascists from the ashes of revolutions and disruptions. These are the same old causes that have continued in dreary and desolate procession ever since history began. It is a certainty that, bad as they have been in the past, they will get worse unless they are annulled. Therefore, however deep the roots, and however long-planted, they have to be dug out this time if real peace and freedom are to be obtained.
The positive idea of the noble Viscount was a new force group composed of the nations that are now in alliance with this country. I suggest that that is only another variety of power politics, and power politics will not do two things. It will not keep upstarts down, and it will not keep allies together. I suggest for your Lordships' consideration that there are two fallacies about power politics. The first is that in any group of independent units like nations the independent forces will not acknowledge the jurisdiction or rule of any other group. It may be that some of them are better— possibly they are; we believe they are— but no power on earth is ever going to make the others believe it. I wrote to an illustrious member of your Lordships' House and asked him to support me in this debate, but he said he could not do so because he believed there should be law between nations and force to support it. Is it not true that you cannot have law between nations—that is to say, you can have it, but you cannot enforce it. In war-time there is International Law, but it can only be supported by your adversary if he has the will to do it. In the same way, in peace-time, you cannot depend on any other nation agreeing to International Law because nations tear it up in the same way as they do treaties. There is no law between them because they acknowledge no judge, they acknowledge no jury, they acknowledge no executive. So what it amounts to is that there are two alternatives. You have either to get agreement with everyone concerned in these questions, or you must have war. As the standard set for every nation is its own pre-eminence, its

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own existence and survival at any cost, so they will break these regulations from the usual argument of necessity as they have done in this war between allies, between enemies, and also over and above neutrals. All that happens in the end is that by trying to impose laws you merely create hatred and rebellion and other claustrophobian symptoms. There is no possibility of by-passing that argument. If you get peace, it is the peace of the caged tiger, and that is useless.
The other fallacy is that it will keep allies together. Allies are also inflicted with this supreme independence, and they will not stand this forced fusion. They have not got any natural affection for each other, and they only make alliances for opportunist reasons. If they keep force in the one hand to deal with their enemies, they will also keep it in the other hand to deal with their friends, if they find some occasion when their national integrity is violated or threatened, or possibly if they find that the liabilities they have incurred through their alliances are unfulfillable. So they will leave these groups just as Japan and Italy left this group at the end of the last war, and in the same way as other nations filtered out of the League of Nations. Their peace and prosperity depend on similar conditions obtaining in their neighbours, and if they can get that into their heads, nations may combine to this extent. Until this is done, war will continue and will get worse, so it is imperative that there should be some combination of this kind.
Force is not everything in this sense. You cannot measure the power of nations by men, guns, tanks and ships. There are also other factors to be taken into consideration such as science and malicious invention. It may be that that is under consideration now. Only at lunch today I heard about some ghastly rocket with enormous power that is going to be used for destruction. If this continues you are going to have science coming in and creating something which, with a small amount of expenditure, will destroy a whole nation before the answer can be found. Even in this war and the last war, I am assured on the highest authority, this country has been in great danger on at least two occasions from submarines, and these represent only a few ships and a few men. So in future, un-
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less these hostile feelings are annulled, this is the kind of thing that may happen. Force cannot be in the numbers of men alone. You have to argue backwards in this question. It is always supposed you have to protect the weak from the strong, and so you have, but you have also to protect, sometimes, the strong from the weak. At the end of the war the people that have to be defended are the winners or the strong from the future aggressions and attacks of those who are then weak and defeated. Similarly your Lordships will doubtless have seen in the German communiqués, when they have suffered a defeat or have been pushed back, that they often describe it as a success or victory, and you have probably derided these accounts accordingly. But they are not so false as they seem, and, if false, it is only in question of time because any defeat or retreat produces predilections and desire for greater aggression in the future. In that way it is true to say that the German victories over the Russians in 1916 and 1942 were much more in the nature of defeats than they appeared at the time.
The last reason why force is useless Is that you cannot chain nations. After a few years, peaceful conditions are apparently restored and the restrictions are relaxed by new Governments who did not take part in the original chaining or who have forgotten. But even under a smiling exterior the desire for revenge will persist, and it will break out one day even if it takes one hundred years. I believe that the only possibility of having real peace and freedom is to dig right down to the source, and remove by the last hidden and hardly discovered roots any possible cause which could make any nation aggressive. You cannot do it by punishment, dismemberment, or disarmament. That is a hard saying in these times with our view fixed on the horrible things that have been done by the current aggressors, but it is true all the same. The noble Lord, Lord Vansittart, may write hundreds of books to prove the permanent aggressiveness of the Germans, but that does not bring permanent peace any nearer.
We all heard his speech in your Lordships' House the other day and we all sympathized with the victims. We all condemn, with him, the horrible deeds we heard of, but there was nothing in the

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nature of preventive cure about what he said, nothing about the original and true problem. Of course criminals have got to be punished but what wants bringing to trial is the original cause—the use of intolerant forces for generations past; and the worse the horrors it produces the more need there is for exterminating it, and the more hope for a more solid world to be erected. I wish the noble Lord and, if I may say so, the most reverend Prelate who succeeded him, had given more of their eloquence to that aspect of the matter.
In talking of treatment for guilt, the following letter taken from The Times might suggest something, so I will read it without comment. It is called "The Rehabilitated Burglar":
"Sir,—As reported in The Times to-day, Mr. Tomlinson, in his speech moving the Second Reading of the Disabled Prisoners (Employment) Bill, gave as 'a humorous illustration' the story of a rehabilitated burglar. Mr. Turton subsequently used the same illustration to criticize the universal application of the provisions of the Bill. In view of these facts, it may be of some interest to your readers to hear the subsequent history of this burglar. 'When alternative employment was suggested to him by the surgeon, he said that if he had a capital of £10 he could start up in business. The surgeon lent him the £10, and for some months heard no more of his patient. One Monday morning a dirty pound note arrived at his house without any covering letter; the following Monday morning a second note, and on the third Monday eight pound notes arrived. No more was heard for eighteen months, when the man arrived at the surgeon's house in Harley Street, and insisted upon seeing him; he had come to offer his thanks in the best possible way by showing the surgeon the final results of his handiwork. Both were affected at the interview, and when the surgeon waved good-bye to his friend, the successful business man and ex-burglar, he watched him driven away by his own chauffeur in his own limousine, fully rehabilitated both physically and morally.
I am, yours, etc.,
THE BURGLAR'S SURGEON."
I think the responsibilities of the Governments of the future towards criminals and towards nations should be on similar preventive lines.
I believe that the only way of fulfilling that obligation is to do away with the old order of intolerance and found a new order of complete and comprehensive co-operation between all nations with the kind of mechanism on which the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil, who I am glad to
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see in his place, is such an expert, and, which may in time produce security in the future. Then, if any upstart again arises and tries to make trouble, he will be laughed at and strangled at birth, not by the rest of the world but by his own nationals. The noble Viscount said last time, he will remember, that nobody would know what was meant if you talked about burying the Old Order. I believe everybody in this wretched tormented world would know what was meant and most of them would rush up with their spades at the ready if only someone would give them a lead. The only place where one might be misunderstood would be in the fishmonger's shop.
Having made what I hope is a respectful and polite attempt to get past Scylla, may I now try an equally respectful push to get past Charybdis, if the noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne, will allow me to refer to him in that way? His chief objection to my speech last time was that if you had co-operation without force it would lead to anarchy, to the strong grabbing from the rich. I suppose he will not mind my saying so, but it could not lead to greater anarchy than exists at the present moment, anarchy not only of deed but also of thought. He quoted the story of Ahab and Naboth's vineyard as an example. I have looked up this story again and I see that Ahab anyhow was much more polite in his demands on Naboth than a modern requisition form, for he offered to exchange the land and he offered to buy it. It was not he who had arranged for Naboth's death but Jezebel, his wife. Of course it is wrong to kill a man in order to get his land, but I believe the noble Viscount has hit the nail on the head in quoting this affair. If a modern ruler wanted a piece of land near his house surely the owner of the land would sell it to him. I venture to suggest it would have been a good gesture on Naboth's part if he had done so too. As nations are notoriously bad distributors of their surpluses in land, materials and food, other nations will take murderous steps, or what is politely called go to war, to get them. If every nation had sufficient land on which to grow their food, to work in peace and plenty, and to grow wine to make glad the heart of man, there would be fewer wars of aggression.
There was a debate recently in your Lordships' House on densities of population, but I think it only referred to the

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British Empire, so I had a look at my atlas in order to find out the densities of population in the world. What I found is interesting reading. Those countries which are over 250 to the square mile, including India, Japan, part of China, Italy and a very small corner in the north-west part of England and most of Belgium, Holland and Germany, include all the aggressors. On the other side those that live at the ratio of between one and ten to the square mile include Africa, the whole of the western side of the United States of America, East Russia, the whole of Australia and the East Indies and those are all on the other side. I must say that the noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne, does not give me much credit as an anarchist. If anyone wanted to act anarchistically, he is not likely to do it in the full publicity of your Lordships' House, although someone, a good many years ago on the 5th November, was trying so to act beneath it.
Of course it is not possible to abolish force altogether or to reduce the world's armaments to a few kites, punts or popguns. What has to be got rid of is the belief that force can be used efficiently to stop aggression or be used as a threat to stop it. I believe that it has failed now for so long that it can be honestly acknowledged that you want to form the opposite of competition—namely, cooperation; that you want to form some co-operative body so honestly formed and so honestly supported that everybody would, perforce, have to use it. You would not expect me, an ordinary labourer, to give an opinion on the machinery either to form or maintain this body in a House so full of skilled mechanics, but it seems to me that, as there is a building by the side of a lake which is now empty, that could be used now, and there is plenty of machinery available seeing that every day some new machinery is formed to deal with the various kinds of debris now being scattered about. The noble Viscount was afraid such an organization would be abused, that it would be used for the strong grabbing from the weak, and for exploiting fancied grievances. In the old days it was the fashion to grab land from savages, but that is now out of date. Most of the claims nations have upon each other are in the nature of reversals of previous
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thefts and war plunderings or possibly harsh terms enforced through defeat in war. Whether they deserved them or did not, the claimants, to a man, believe them to be fully justified. Of course national claims must conflict, but surely claims which arose peacefully could be settled in peace once this international organization acquired stability and credit for the fact that it functioned honestly and wholeheartedly.
There is another matter. Nobody is going to go to war to get a thing if he believes he can get it through some organization that is far cheaper, because it is not in human nature to spend a shilling when a penny will do. It is still the fact that all effects must equal their causes. I believe that the assumption of superiority by any group of nations for the purpose of imposing peace by force on another group does not contain any germ of peace any more than the demand for unconditional surrender or the threat to reduce empires as a punishment will do, although that may be necessary for the purpose of winning a war. I submit to your Lordships' judgment that all nations ought to be treated like counters on a board, one side black and the other side white, and the game of peace is won when the united action of the players enables them to lay all the counters on the table white side upwards. Your Lordships may consider it fanciful but I think there is an analogy in music. In war-time the music of all nations, whether friends or enemies, is broadcast all over the world and equally enjoyed, but for some reason which seems to me to be slightly tinged with hypocrisy if the music is vocal the words are altered to the hearers' own language. Does not that show that the harmony is all there and that it could be made to sound all through the world again, but on one condition, that it must have the author's and composer's own words?
Such conditions as I am speaking of can only be obtained if there is some organization which will apportion land and guarantee trade space, and all the things that nations really need much in the same way as the Government are doing now by control, organization and planning, and have done for many ages in the past by taxation. Even if there were in existence a group of nations superior over the others, is not its working in international affairs a matter of

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grave doubt? I wonder if the noble Viscount has ever envisaged the working of such an international force. Let us say that fifty years hence when most of the actors now on the stage will have made their exit, the Governor of Northern Ireland pays a visit to Eire, and in Dublin he is assassinated and demands for redress are made and refused. If an armed force goes in to exact retribution and the international force does its duty, I suppose the cities of England and Eire and Northern Ireland will be laid waste because the modern way of stopping war is to destroy the other country's supplies. No expedition to distant countries or to neighbouring countries to put down revolution would be possible because those expeditionary forces would be all sunk en route. There could not be another Boer War. No nation is going to stand such interference with what it thinks its legal rights by an international force. What is more likely is that the international force would split up into parts. I submit that this international force is a farce. It is of course a difficult problem, and if I seem to have suggested otherwise you must put it down to lack of forensic ability. But the problem is a straight one.
Is not this a true picture of how all wars have originated through history? I put it forward for your Lordships' consideration. In the beginning all nations started by playing the primitive and childish games of "animal-grab" and "king of the castle." Thus they divided the world into kingdoms and empires and carved out mottoes and composed anthems to sanctify and isolate them. Later on they thought they would go a bit higher and so they began to talk about perfect peace and freedom. But although they were so minded, they still kept force in one hand fortified and protected by fear and jealousy. So we see at different times throughout history that villains have arrived on the scene, and things have now got to such a pitch that the whole world has to be upset to get rid of them. Not only that but misery and destitution have to invade every human home because of them. That is putting it mildly. There are two ways of looking at these villains. One is that they are
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spontaneously and naturally evil together with their nationals. The other is that they are driven by some cause unseen and unrealized by their adversaries. They cannot be both. It is impossible for both to be true. They cannot be both good and bad. How are you to reconcile the Germany of Luther and the Germany of Hitler, the Italy of Garibaldi and the Italy of Mussolini, the Spain of Franco and the Spain of the plundering Philips, or the Japan which was guarding the Pacific for us thirty years ago and the Japan of to-day? You cannot. They cannot both be good and bad.
The only conclusion you can rightly come to is that all these nations are victims of some system, that they take their cues and become violent according to its directions. In every war since history began there has been, according to the records made by the nations concerned, two villains comparable to Hitler, two sets of atrocities and two Lord Vansittarts to tell the nations about them. This is not to say that the Nazis and their allies have not behaved villainously. Of course they have. There is no Parliamentary word to describe that. The only answer is that intolerant force and villainy will continue until there is universal co-operation. Once more I repeat that the new international force is only a variety of the old power politics and can only lead to what power politics did in 1914. In that year Europe was divided into two groups supposed to be strong enough to hold each other down, but they only proved to be two heaps of gunpowder which the small spark at Serajevo set alight, and the thirty years of muddle, misery, and death that have happened since all trace back to that faulty idea, and its faulty predecessors. And I believe that a new force group will eventually turn out a vicious and true descendant.
There must be something new, and guaranteed and water-tight this time. There cannot and must not be another world war. There must be no repetition of the wholesale massacres of gallant fighting men and civilians, and destruction of art treasures; no subsequent results in despair, bitterness, revenge, poverty and famine, anarchy and disease, and last, but by no means least, in aggressive dictators. There must be improvements in the conditions of the ordinary common or garden men, women and

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children. I have listened to many debates in your Lordships' House on planning for this purpose, but you cannot make bricks without straw—perhaps a more appropriate adage would be that you cannot put new wine into old bottles. I say that if the ex-Servicemen are now to have a guarantee that they are going to get homes, food and work, there has got to be some undertaking that there will be a reasonable method of ensuring that funds will be gradually accumulated to pay for their construction and maintenance, and that those homes will not be destroyed again in a generation.
In a debate in your Lordships' House the other day, Lord Snell, who was replying for the Government, described the difficulties of initiating great reforms at the present moment. He said that those who start out on a journey in a fog very frequently return to the place from which they started. I think, that we can quite accurately describe the present state of affairs as fog, the darkest, wettest, most miserable and heaviest fog that has ever strangled humanity. Unfortunately, Lord Woolton who comes to the task of reconstruction fresh from his triumphs as champion caterer of the world has got to start in this fog. If he is going to emerge into the sunlight and see his homes good, and work buildings shining in the light of reestablished human security, then he has got to have some guarantee that there is going to be something better than the old failure methods, for then and only then will he make to come as a boon and a blessing to men, the Uthwatt, Scott and Beveridge plans. But before this can be done there has got to be, I think, two realizations. The first is that force and betterment cannot and never will be allied. The second is that the force method, however good its object, cannot now protect the innocent citizens and the small nations of the world. You cannot put a line of pikes now between the aggressor and his victims. They only become embroiled in the maelstrom, and they suffer hideously from destruction, famine and torture, before their remnants can be reinstated. So if we know this now, it is clear that what is needed is an acknowledgment that if there is another war on a similar scale to this in the future, and aggressive dictator; do pop up again and spread their terrors, it will be a matter of universal culpability and not a subject for Pharasaism or self-approval by any unit.
This play of the Crusader and the devil is finished. I believe that audience and actors alike are both literally sick to death of it. The modern interpolated scenes such as the competitive destruction of capital cities and the disorganization in food supplies, which cause the deaths of thousands of civilians, have revealed it as a stark expression of primitive struggle for survival. So, I think it is now the duty of everyman, who is the audience and the actor, to consider once again honestly the causes of his misery and destitution and by his opinions, so formed and followed, to influence his Governments at last to write a new straight play. There is no difficulty in finding a plot for this because it is already written in many books and in every human imagination. The noble Leader of the House, Viscount Cranborne, said on the last occasion that I failed to prove my case. Well, this may be due to oratorical inability. But after all it is not my case, and I submit that it is already proved in the writings of the great and the converse is proved in every page of every daily paper to-day.
In conclusion, I would like to give some evidence of what other people are thinking all over the world and to try to prove that other nations are gradually turning towards this idea of universal co-operation. They are turning away from institutions of force, and there is a disinclination for and anxiety about proposed hegemonies of the future which are now beginning to loom rather threateningly in the air. First of all I would quote a recent statement of Mr. Wendell Willkie. He said:
"I am opposed to alliances for offensive or defensive between any two of the principal Allies, if they are on an exclusive basis. Such alliances would divide, not unite, the world. They would in the end originate wars on such a scale that no organizations of nations could possibly stop them."
I think there is much on these lines coming from America now.
Here is a piece of evidence from Spain. I think that your Lordships would like to hear all sides of this question. Senor Salvador de Madariaga, formerly Spanish delegate to the League of Nations, stated:
"We must do all possible to discourage the renewal of German aggression, but the reeducation of Germany by outside schoolmasters is nonsense. The German can only be educated by Germans, except in so far as others induce them to see the light by their own example."
The Christian Mission on World Order in New York on October 29 proposed the

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establishment of "an advisory international political organization, the economic and financial collaboration of national Governments." Here is one from Italy. I know that Italy was lately an enemy country. It is a statement by Professor Benedetto Croce, who is universally esteemed and I believe is now collaborating with the Allies. He said:
"The failure of the Versailles peace and punishment is a lesson to us. The answer is not to inflict vengeance and punishment nor to chain entire peoples. Our aim must be to create for vanquished as well as conquerors conditions that will make it possible for them to thrive peacefully. For this task great courage and understanding will be necessary."
Then there is one from the noble Viscount, Lord Halifax. Speaking in America on November 10, he said:
"Edith Cavell has said that patriotism is not enough. We had to have another war before we discovered the whole truth of those words, and we are going to fail again, as we failed in 1918, if as citizens of a tormented and war-wracked world we do not bring to these problems a new mind, a new eye, and a new heart—an eye to see, a mind to understand, and a heart to claim kinship with all men in all lands."
Then General Smuts on December 8 said:
"The human family continues its long and arduous march, but takes a new turn."
And the Pope in a broadcast said:
"We ask for peace, but let it be a peace that is not founded on fears, or force, or hate, but on truth and justice."
And I think the debate in your Lordships' House on U.N.R.R.A. is significant in that it expressed the hope that this dawning and partial co-operation would be the forerunner of a great change in the future.
As to the coming peace arrangements, I believe most people have some kind of doubts about these things in the future. Here is what The Times said is taking place in Turkey:
"The general tone of Turkish Press comment on General Smuts's speech is one of rather acid criticism. Turks have never concealed their opposition to the establishment of a directory of the Great Powers, and as General Smuts's suggestions for the organization of a system of security in Western Europe under British leadership imply that Eastern Europe should be placed under Russian tutelage it is not surprising that this prospect does not appeal to Turkish opinion."
I believe that the world is now come to the parting of the ways. If we look with the new eye of the noble Viscount in America, we shall see these things as
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follows: The one road leads to a battlefield with new and greater horrors and worse results than to-day, and the other leads possibly to a building at the lakeside at Geneva, where there have been roped in all the competitors and all the nations of the world, in order to co-operate for their mutual protection.
I do not think there is anything airy or idealistic about this. It is just ordinary common sense for common people. Even the edict of Teheran is working round. At first edicts were mostly recriminations against the guilty. In later edicts wonderful things were promised for the Allied Nations. Now these great things are promised for anyone who will join in a complete peace system. So, it is possibly true that this world, which has been so often pushed up the hill by a countless host of gallant Sisyphuses for many centuries, is now near the top again on a safe ledge, where it can be rested, and it just wants a last determined push to land it. But somebody has got to start. So I would appeal to your Lordships to try and direct the strong arms of His Majesty's Government to give now this final push by making the next edict for world peace universally and comprehensively available to all nations. I believe that if such a declaration could be made it would undermine and disarm savagery, aggression and repression, and by so doing shorten the duration of this world shambles, and it would also plant the seed of real peace and freedom. I also very humbly suggest that such an edict would be lighting a candle on the world's coming Christmas tree, perhaps the saddest ever known, and shed a hopeful radiance in every home of this sorry and lamenting world. I beg to move.
VISCOUNT CRANBORNE: My Lords, on June 23 last the noble Earl, Lord Darnley, introduced a Motion into your Lordships' House. The aim of this Motion was to prove to your Lordships that the use of force in the maintenance of peace is wrong under all circumstances and that for the future we must entirely rely on sweet reasonableness in the restraint of international aggression. That Motion, as your Lordships will remember, led to a full debate. The noble Lord made a long speech and I made a long speech in reply and the House had also the benefit, if the noble Earl will forgive me for using so bellicose a metaphor, of

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a devastating broadside from the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, which I think, in the opinion of most of us who were present, blew the noble Lord's case completely out of the water. And indeed I thought that we had heard the last of this proposition which, however desirable in theory, has evidently no relation to realities at all. But he has, under cover of a broadly, worded Motion, returned to the attack, and we must give him full credit both for courage and for sincerity, if not for entire realism, in again approaching this question.
On this particular occasion, if your Lordships will allow me, I propose to reply briefly. For though the noble Earl in his speech has dealt with a number of points which were raised in the last debate, he has said nothing this afternoon which has added anything essentially new to the arguments he then used. The hard facts which were enumerated by my noble relative Viscount Cecil of Chelwood remained, to my mind, completely unanswerable. Indeed, in listening to the noble Earl, Lord Darnley, this afternoon, I must confess that I was conscious of a feeling of utter bewilderment. With the very best will in the world—and I hope he will give me credit for that—I simply could not understand the workings of the noble Earl's mind. He started with the story of Naboth's vineyard, and he produced an explanation of that unhappy event which would certainly stagger any student of the Bible, and which was in direct contravention of every fact produced by the writer of the Book of Kings. He said that Ahab had, on the whole, behaved extremely well, he had offered Naboth another vineyard. That seems to be a complete answer to the noble Earl's contention that Ahab needed Naboth's vineyard for the production of food. Indeed, the noble Earl made it perfectly clear that that was not the reason for the request, if it can be called a request. He said he wanted it for garden herbs near his house; in fact, he really wanted it to improve the amenities of his estate. Well, whatever the advantages which were to accrue to him, it does not seem to me that they justified, or could possibly justify, him in having Naboth stoned to death. If the noble Earl replies that it was not Ahab but only his wife who was responsible, he certainly took advantage
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of a very convenient circumstance and assumed possession of the estate.
I feel grateful to the noble Earl for raising this distant incident of history because it seemed to me, on re-examination, an even more exact analogy of the behaviour of Hitler before the present war than I had remembered. Having started away back with the story of Naboth, the noble Earl proceeded to twist and torture all the lessons of subsequent history including those of the last twenty years to suit his case. The whole purpose of his very elaborate argument seemed to me to be to prove that black is white—that we and nations like us, nations who had collaborated to maintain peace, were responsible for the present catastrophe; that it was our attachment to power politics— because that is what I understood him to imply—our unwillingness to consider the legitimate grievances of the Axis Powers, our refusal to sit round a table and find a solution satisfactory to all parties—these were the things that had led to the present position. He recognized that the Germans and Italians behaved very badly in taking the law into their own hands, but he implied, though he did not actually say so, that no attempt had been made to remove any casus belli, and that they were therefore not to be held entirely to blame. That is a very powerful argument if you shut your eyes to every fact, but there is not a single fact which supports his case.
I would ask the noble Earl to recall the actual events of the last two decades. Has he forgotten the League of Nations? None of us would say that the League of Nations was perfect, but it was a positive attempt to get the nations round a table, to enable them to solve their problems by peaceful means. It was an attempt to abolish war by just those means which the noble Earl has in mind. It is perfectly true that, in theory, the League had behind it the sanction of force, but it was not in any case to be used until all other means had failed and, in fact, force was never used except in one case—the case of Abyssinia—and in that case only in the very modified form of economic sanctions. Why did the League of Nations fail? It failed for the precise reason that, like the noble Earl, it relied too much on the assumption that every nation would be willing and ready to subordinate its own individual interests to the good of

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the world as a whole. When Japan invaded Manchuria, did the League of Nations immediately threaten force? On the contrary, it made every effort to try and obtain a peaceful solution satisfactory both to China and Japan. What was the Japanese reaction? Japan refused to accept any compromise, it left the League, it built up armaments to defend its ill-gotten gains, it repudiated all idea of a peaceful settlement except on its own terms. The only chance, as is now clear, of achieving a peaceful settlement in the Manchurian dispute would have been if the material force behind the League had been so strong that Japan would have realized that the methods of the buccaneer did not pay. Then she might have accepted a compromise. In fact, as your Lordships know, force was not available.
The nations of the League had relied too much on their moral strength, and had neglected the necessity of material strength to support it. Exactly the same thing happened with regard to the German claim for Lebensraum. If she had a genuine grievance, she could easily have brought it to the League, and the League could have discussed it to see whether some agreed solution was possible. In fact, Germany made no attempt to find a peaceful settlement. She rearmed, left the League, and took unilateral steps to occupy the territories of her peaceful neighbours. Finally, to give one more example, the same thing happened in the case of Fascist Italy and Abyssinia. In each and all of these cases the machinery was available for the nation concerned to puts its grievances before its sister nations, and try and obtain some peaceful settlement by a compromise satisfactory to all concerned. But they never attempted to get an agreed settlement. They did not want to avoid a casus belli. The noble Lord talked all the time as if it would have been easy to avoid a casus belli. They did not want to avoid it. They felt strong, and they had made up their minds to impose their will on the weak. That was the only thing they were thinking of.
To my mind that is the inescapable lesson of the last twenty years. That is the lesson of Manchuria, Abyssinia, Albania, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland—all of them peaceful nations who were no danger to anyone, and whose only fault was that they had
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something a more powerful neighbour wanted. During that unhappy period His Majesty's Government went to every length to avoid war. They submitted to continued snubs and humiliations. If the British Government of that period were open to criticism, it was that they went too far in the direction that the noble Earl himself has advocated. No one disputes the devotion of the pre-war British Government to peace. But that policy, as Mr. Chamberlain himself pointed out at the outbreak of war, utterly failed, and the reason was that the Hitlers of this world cannot be dealt with in that way. They are only amenable to superior force. Nor is there any evidence to-day, so far as I know, that their spirit has changed. On the contrary, all the evidence is the other way round. It is clear that the powers that be in Germany to-day, in the event of their defeat, would certainly, if they were allowed, renew the struggle for world domination as soon as they possibly could. In such circumstances as that, what use is it for the noble Earl to put forward the kind of proposal he has placed before your Lordships to-day? It simply does not make sense.
What use is it for him to say that we must have agreement between nations when he does not say how that agreement is to be obtained? As the noble Earl himself knows, the only reason why he is able to make his speech this afternoon in this House is because his fellow countrymen are fighting to defend our liberties. That is the only reason. So little sense does the proposition make that I come to the conclusion that the only logical explanation of the noble Earl's speech is that he, although he does not know it, belongs to that school of thought which favours peace at any price. That is the only logical explanation that I see: he is like many other high-minded and excellent people who hate war so much that they will submit to any sacrifice and humiliation in order to avoid it. That is an arguable thesis: indeed, it is much more arguable than the one he has put before us this afternoon. But that is not a thesis which is acceptable to your Lordships or acceptable to the British people. The British people have never deluded themselves as to the issues involved in this struggle. They have never concealed from themselves where their duty lay; and even if His Majesty's Government approved of the noble Earl's proposition,

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which they emphatically do not, it would be futile for them to recommend it to the British people, still less to those unhappy Allied people who have suffered so dreadfully. It would be regarded as a counsel of defeatism, as a betrayal of all those principles for which we are fighting and for which we have made such terrible sacrifices.
All of us, like the noble Earl himself, look forward to the time when force will not be necessary, when selfishness and ambition shall have disappeared from the world; but it is madness to suggest that that time has come yet. It is still far, far away, hidden in the mists of the future. By all means let us take all steps in our power to build up a code of International Law which allows for the redressal of genuine grievances and ensures that the strong shall not dominate the weak by brute force; but let us also provide that code with the necessary force to make certain that it prevails. The noble Earl, deriding this view which I have just expressed, said it was futile to put the tiger in a cage. I would much rather have the tiger in a cage than outside!
The task, which I have indicated just now, is that on which the United Nations are at present engaged. That is the purpose of the Atlantic Charter. That is the aim of the Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement. Indeed, yet further steps have been taken since the noble Lord's Motion last June to prepare the future. There have been the conferences at Moscow, Cairo and Teheran. There has been the Four-Power Pact. There has been the session at Atlantic City of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. All those are the foundation stones of our new order, which I believe will be far stronger and far more durable than that advocated by the noble Earl. Let us build on these sure foundations. Let us give them the material strength that is necessary to enable them to stand up against the storms and stresses of the future. Let us learn wisdom from bitter experience. Let us recognize that mankind is not perfect. There will always be bad men and ambitious men in this world and we must take all steps necessary 1o restrain their ambition. That is not power politics. Power politics is the domination of the weak by the strong. This that we propose is the protection of the weak from the strong, and its object is justice to all alike. It is the preservation
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of all those things which are comprehended in what we mean by the word "civilization."
The noble Lord's plan, on the contrary, however well-meant it is—and it is well-meant—means the surrender of all that makes life worth living. It means a return of the world to barbarism. It means stripping the weak and law-abiding of all means of protection and handing them over to the tender mercies of the strong and the lawless. I know very well that is not the noble Earl's intention. He hopes that by his plan he will achieve peace and justice. But as the great French thinker, Pascal, said a great many years ago, "Justice without force may indeed produce as great evils as force without justice." That is the simple, complete answer to all the elaborate arguments which the noble Earl has put before your Lordships this afternoon. Therefore while fully accepting the purity of his intentions we are, I submit, bound to reject his scheme, which ignores all the lessons of history and can only plunge the world into yet further misery and woe.
VISCOUNT CECIL OF CHELWOOD: My Lords, I do not desire to prolong the debate more than a few moments. My noble friend Lord Darnley was good enough to tell me he was going to bring this matter forward and was so very kind as to ask me to be present. I told him I could not be present at the beginning because I had an engagement I could not put off, but that I would come as soon as I could. It is entirely out of deference to his great courtesy to myself that I desire to say a few words to explain why I must remain, unfortunately, of the opinion that I expressed on the previous occasion when we discussed this matter. I agree entirely with what has just been said by the Leader of the House. He has expressed admirably, if I may be allowed to say so, exactly the opinion which I hold. The only criticism that I wish to make is one which he will no doubt expect and with which he may even agree. I do not think it was really that the League failed; it was really that the Governments would not act on the principles of the League. That is an old controversy which I need not go into any more.
Certainly I entirely agree that the League did try, and with a sanguineness

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which I wish I could imitate in the ordinary affairs of life, to work a system of universal co-operation, in the words of the Motion before us, without force. That is exactly what they did try. They tried by successive concessions and by perhaps undue subservience to those who were evidently bent on a war-like policy to avoid the consequences of that policy by inducing them to be reasonable and to accept the general idea of co-operation. That experiment, whether we regard it as unjustifiable or not, has been tried and has failed disastrously. We cannot go on and do it again. Therefore I am entirely of opinion that, though universal co-operation is essential ultimately and as soon as possible, nevertheless it cannot be secured unless you begin by securing the world against interference with peace. It is the same in every department of life— in private concerns, in a club, a nation, a university, a Church, or whatever it may be. You cannot get on, as far as I can see, without some force in the background to maintain even the most admirable system that is designed to be set up. For those reasons, I am afraid, I could not agree with the noble Earl's proposals to-day.
I feel myself that we have had a very great lead in the Moscow Conference, that what is there laid down is exactly right, that people should really care for peace, and that they should do their utmost to support that policy with all their strength. That is my own feeling. The only addition I would make to it—and I would ask the Government to consider it at their leisure—is whether they cannot say a little more in detail on the fourth paragraph of the Moscow Declaration which is admirable as far as it goes. I feel that we have a kind of obligation— I am not so much thinking of Germany— to the unhappy people who are suffering untold hardships at this moment. We have an obligation to say to them: "Hold on, do not give way, a better time is coming. We have a definite scheme for preventing in the future these things occurring again. Therefore you have every inducement to hold on to the utmost so that in the end the world may become a better place for peaceful people to live in."
THE EARL OF DARNLEY: My Lords, listening to the noble Viscount who answered for the Government what struck
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me was that we were talking about completely different things. The noble Viscount upbraided the modern aggressors, deplored the misery that their victims suffer. He has planned the future on one basis and I am planning it on another basis. It is no good abusing these men. They are possessed by the devil and you have to stop the devil from existing, not in the form commonly spoken of but in the form of misery. You have to get right down into the roots of the old tree and root them out. It is no good grumbling at Hitler as the aggressor. It is no good resorting to similar methods to produce in the future what has happened in the past. What has to be done is to root out all those germs from your path and stop them from entering upon it in the future. Then you will not get any Hitlers, you will not get any aggressors. It is impossible. That is what I am aiming at. I do not think the noble Viscount and I are really talking about the same things. Nevertheless, I have very much enjoyed my duet with the noble Viscount this afternoon in a new song called "Naboth," though his tenor did seem somewhat stronger than my bass. My hope is that we may one day find it possible to have it again, perhaps with a fuller chorus. All I can do now is to ask leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

COMPENSATION FOR REQUISITIONED AGRICULTURAL LAND.
THE EARL OF ROSEBERY THE EARL OF ROSEBERY rose to call the attention of His Majesty's Government to the compensation given to owners of agricultural land on the derequisitioning of their property; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, I have brought forward the Motion which stands in my name to-day for two reasons. The first is that there has been very little dis-requisitioning of land up to date, and I thought it better that the discussion should take place before much land has actually gone back to its owners. The second reason is that I have discovered that a large number of people who own land have not the slightest idea under what terms they are going to get their land back. The Act to which I am referring is the Compensation (Defence) Act, 1939. That was an Act introduced by a previous Government the moment war broke out, no doubt

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with the laudable desire that no one should make money out of this war. Under the provisions of that Act an owner whose land is requisitioned cannot, when the land is restored to him, get as recompense more than the capital value of the land. If you break a jar it is obvious that the only recompense for the damage done is the capital value of the jar, but the position is very different when you come to deal with land. It is quite easy there to do damage far greater than the capital value.
Let me point out in passing that the capital value of agricultural land is very often, or nearly always, very much less than the capital value of urban land. In the instances I am going to put before your Lordships I shall confine myself entirely to land requisitioned by the Air Ministry, partly because it has been very difficult to find cases of disrequisitioned land as so little has been done yet, and also because very small examples will serve to drive home the point. It has come to my notice that in Scotland the Government have disrequisitioned a patch of land in the middle of a field on which a balloon was staked. The Air Ministry-put asphalt down, erected a Nissen hut, and put down all the paraphernalia to which balloons are attached. Then they came to the conclusion that the balloon could be better employed elsewhere. They took the balloon away and handed back the land to the farmer. The farmer went to the contractor who had been employed in the first instance by the Government and said: "Will you please put this land back into the state it was before, so that I can plough it?" This patch was in the middle of an arable field. The contractor sent in a bill for £177 and the farmer sent it on to the Air Ministry, who sent back a cheque for £50 in full settlement because that was the capital value of the land.
I went into the matter with the farmer and I found that what was stated by the Air Ministry was correct. The capital value of the land was £50 and under the Act of 1939 the Air Ministry were not empowered to pay more. Therefore the farmer has to find £127 out of his own pocket. Suppose that balloon had been anchored on urban land or land near a town. That land would have been worth very much more, and probably it would not have been damaged to the same
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extent, but because the land was worth more the owner would have been able to get £177 because that would be less than the capital value of the land. The farmer is very hard hit whereas a man holding up land for speculative purposes gets paid in full. That, I submit, is hardly a fair transaction.
There is another point I would like to make here. If damage is done by the enemy the landowner is paid in full. It is far better if you own land which is not very valuable for it to be "blitzed" by the enemy than to have it requisitioned by the Government. That surely is not a fair proposition. I can give your Lordships particulars of various cases in which farmers have had bombs dropped on their land. In one case the land was worth about £1 15s. and the War Damage Commission paid £12 3s. for filling in the crater. In another case where the value of the land was £1 the compensation paid for damage was £9, and in the third case where the capital value of the land was about £1 7s. the restoration was carried out at a cost of £87. Those three cases are cases of damage done by the Germans. If, as I have said, the damage had been done by our own Government the farmer would have have had to pay out of his own pocket to have his field put right. If he did not have it put right the county war agricultural executive committee would come along and say: "Look at this desert in the middle of this field, breeding weeds and growing no crops. You must put it right or we shall take it from you." Some members of your Lordships' House, I know, take the view that the only solution is that all should be taken from him, but that hardly seems a fair argument on this occasion at any rate.
Then we have the case of runways for aerodromes which cut right through the heart of farms. I know one case in England where the farmer has got practically nothing left of his farm except the farmhouse. A lot of farmers have had runways for aeroplanes cut right through the middle of their farms. It is inconceivable that damage done in that way could be put right except at a cost far exceeding the amount they can get back from the Government under the Act of 1939. As your Lordships know, a farmer has to pay 100 per cent. E.P.T. on any excess profits he makes at the present time. Yet he will be left to put this damage right

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out of his own capital. I submit that that is an injustice which was never contemplated in 1939 when the Act was passed. I can only think that whoever drafted it was under the impression that it was impossible to damage land to a greater extent than its capital value. Moreover these farmers will have their land valued on prices ruling in March, 1939. Since then I think it will be agreed the value of the pound has been reduced by nearly 50 per cent., while building costs—I think it was stated by the noble Lord, Lord Portal—have gone up by 105 per cent. The farmer will have his land valued at half what it was worth and will have to reinstate it at double the cost.
I want to make it clear that I am not speaking to-day as a Regional Commissioner, but I should like to tell your Lordships something about what is happening in the Highlands at the present time. As your Lordships all know, because it has been published in the newspapers, certain land in the Highlands is being cleared for war practice. The people living there have been taken away and the place is going to be shelled from the sea. There is no secret about it. I went to see those people and, first of all, I had to reassure them. They remembered the wicked evictions in the Highlands eighty or ninety years ago, and they were not at all sure that they would ever be allowed to go back. When they were fold that they would be allowed to go back they were content. When it was explained to them that the land was being taken solely because it was hoped that the result would be a very great diminution of casualties, they said not one single word of complaint at being turned out. I have seldom been so moved as I was when I saw these people leaving their homes knowing that possibly many of them would be razed to the ground, and not saying one word in protest simply because they were told that it was going to save lives.
But you must remember that when this derequisitioning comes on in great volume the war will be over. People will be in a much more critical state of mind. You will find farmers coming back from the war, or farmers' sons coming back, and saying: "Where is my farm? I hope that it has been well looked after during my absence by my relations." One can imagine a man after looking over his
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farm saying that it has been very well looked after except that there is a large concrete runway bang through the middle of it, in respect of which he will have to pay two thirds of his capital to put the land right. I do not think that, if you look at it in that way, it is in accordance with justice that the people of this country who have their land requisitioned by the Government should suffer loss while people who are "blitzed" are given adequate compensation. I beg to move.
LORD MOTTISTONE: My Lords, my noble friend was good enough to write to me, and to point out that in my county we are greatly affected by this matter, perhaps even more so than they are in most parts of Scotland where he is Regional Commissioner. I inquired how far it was so, and I ascertained that in the county there are a great many cases and that we shall have land being derequisitioned on a very large scale. Naturally, one does not wish to see farmers and landowners—and especially farmers—suffering the sort of losses described by the noble Earl. While the noble Earl was away from the House for a moment, I believe that the noble and learned Viscount who sits on the Woolsack said something which may give him the answer he seeks. The first Order on the Paper related to a similar Bill to that which we passed in 1939. This was a measure amending it. The measure was really a landlord and tenant requisitioning Bill, and the Lord Chancellor explained to the House—which was a very thin House at that moment—that the Government of the day, in 1939, had made a series of three quite extraordinary errors—errors as extraordinary as those to which the noble Earl has drawn your Lordships' attention. The Lord Chancellor asked us to pass a Bill putting matters right. I hope that he will be able to say that this is a similar case, and that the kind of grievance which a man would certainly be likely to have in regard to his derequisitioned land will not, in fact, arise because the Government will introduce legislation to prevent it.
May I remind the House that it is not only in Scotland but in England also that there will be many of these cases where, if you limit the amount payable to the farmer to the capital value of the land, he will be a very heavy loser? All over

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the land, farmers will be losing hundreds of pounds on derequisitioning because it will cost ever so much more than the capital value of the agricultural land to get it back again into a cultivable condition. To add one more argument which seems to me to be conclusive. Suppose, instead of Lord Sherwood and his Air Ministry going and destroying the value of land by putting down arrangements for balloons or aerodromes, the Germans had done similar damage. The whole of the damage done, whatever it might be, £200, £300 or £400, would have been paid without demur. If you ask Lord Sherwood to pay he says: "On no, £30 an acre is the maximum; that is the value of the land." Which, as Euclid says, is absurd. I agree with the noble Earl that such a thing ought not to be allowed, but I am sure that the Government will not turn a deaf ear to our appeal, that they will put right what I think is a manifest injustice, and will set at rest the minds of a great many farmers throughout England and Scotland.
LORD HASTINGS: My Lords, I feel that Lord Rosebery has brought forward a Motion which at the moment is extremely timely, and which should, most certainly, be brought forward. Very little derequisitioning has occurred up to date, but we hope that the time is in sight when it will occur on a very large scale. My noble friend Lord Mottistone mentioned the introduction by the noble and learned Viscount who sits on the Woolsack of a Bill which I understood concerned only questions of landlord and tenant. We are now talking of capital value of land. Capital value of land is a matter which does not affect the tenant, it affects the landlord. Although I hope for the best, I have not yet brought myself to believe that the Bill, the introduction of which has just taken place, is really going to affect this issue.
LORD MOTTISTONE: My Lords, if I may be allowed to interpose for a moment may I say that I did not make myself plain? I did not say that this was the same sort of grievance. Of course in one case, as Lord Hastings points out, it is a matter of landlord and tenant. Here it has nothing to do with that. I merely meant to point out how in 1939 absurdities were created by the Legislature and are now being remedied, and to suggest that this also was something which could
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be put right by the noble and learned Viscount who sits on the Woolsack.
LORD HASTINGS: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Mottistone has made it clear that what he wishes to point out is that the Government are clearly in a frame of mind to understand that error was committed three or four years ago. There are certain aspects of this matter which are really of national importance. Lord Rosebery has selected, very wisely, a few small cases where grave hardship will attach to the occupier of the soil. There are, of course, much larger cases that can be quoted. I would, if I may, quote a case with which I am very familiar because the land in question happens to be my own property. I happen to be the owner of a detached property of about 1,000 acres the centre of which is being requisitioned for an aerodrome. If your Lordships imagine a soup plate you will have in mind more or less the area of land to which I refer. Now the business part of the plate has been taken for the airfield, and the rim only is left to me. It is very difficult to know what to do with rims agriculturally or otherwise. If compensation were to be paid only—as it could only be paid—for the land requisitioned, what account would be taken of this derelict rim? Clearly the state of this rim must be considered in relation to the state of the plate as a whole.
But there are other aspects of this matter even more important than that. Up and down this country, estates are controlled and owned by trustees. Let us suppose that a trustee estate has upon it an airfield or any such other large encampment and that the capital value was, as it might well be in East Anglia, not more than £20 per acre in 1939—and the light lands in East Anglia are very favourable for the establishment of these airfields and other such places. Let us say that some hundred acres have been taken for the purpose, and at the time of derequisitioning the compensating authority agrees a capital value of £20 an acre and says "We agree that the entire capital value has been destroyed, and here with one hand you have your land and here with the other you have £14,000." To the ordinary layman it would be almost inconceivable that a landowner should dare to ask for more than the capital value of the land, particularly when you give him the land

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back as well. What more can any man want than the capital value of his land and the land as well? It is almost unanswerable. I must say I should be very much puzzled to find the answer to it myself. What does the trustee do? He says to the land agent: "Go and get the cooperation of a surveyor. Present me with a reconstitution plan and an estimate of its cost." In due course in comes the plan together with the estimate of the cost. And the estimate of the cost is not £14,000, but £40,000. What, then, does the trustee do? Mind you, he is not a private individual. He cannot spend £40,000, which possibly he has not got, but at any rate he would not have the power to spend to recreate a property of the value of £14,000—because that is all we recreate. He could not make it more than it was before; that is beyond the power of man, but he would have to spend £40,000 to create a property worth £14,000. What does he do? What must he do? He takes the £14,000 and compensates the estate for which he is responsible by investing it. His estate is fully compensated, but the estate goes into dereliction, and there it remains.
Now we are up against the national aspect of the question. We hope that the ever-diminishing quantity of our agricultural land is not going to be permitted to diminish any more, and that what there is will be got into proper condition and made the best of. What is the State going to say to the trustee who invests the £14,000 and allows the 700 acres to go into dereliction? It cannot say, "You have to spend £40,000," which he has not got. It might say, "Very well, you shall not have the land back, for we will keep it." The State might say, "We will pay you £14,000, and you are satisfied." But then what will happen? Then the taxpayer has to spend the £40,000, plus the £14,000. So it is going to cost £14,000 more than it need. The £14,000 at least will come off the £40,000 if it is in the landowner's hands, but it is to be added to the £40,000 in the State's hands. That is logic, it is exactly what will happen. So when the ordinary layman gets up and says "What more could the landowner want than his land plus the capital value?" the answer is that he may not want any more, but the State must have a great deal more because the State has a greater interest in the land than it has in
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the money. The land is of a value which cannot be assessed exactly in terms of money now during the war, when food is so very much more important than its value in cash. And so it may be again. In fact, so it will be for a very large number of years in this country, with its small area of agricultural land and its immense population and its ever-diminishing area of agricultural land. For that is what must happen when the various schemes which have to be put into operation begin to take effect; our agricultural land must then still further diminish. That which is recoverable must be recovered, and unless an Act such as that which is now under discussion is amended appropriately we have to make up our minds to the permanent loss of many scores, and even hundreds of thousands, of acres more of agricultural land.
I do not know that the case really requires pressing any further. The noble Earl, Lord Rosebery, has done, I think, a great service not only to the landowner and the farming community, but to the State itself, in bringing to notice on this timely occasion an Act of Parliament which, however well intentioned it was, is going to have exactly the opposite effect to that which was intended, and is going to act as a very grave hindrance to the reconstitution of the land, when its intention really was to put it in order. I believe that there is in official minds the belief to-day that it is to be put into order, because I observed that on the 29th November last there appeared— obviously a release by the Ministry of Information—a general statement on the construction, the cost and the reconstitution of airfields, which contained this:
"A large proportion of the airfields constructed for war purposes cannot in any conceivable circumstances be used either for postwar military purposes or for civilian aviation. Therefore at the end of hostilities the British Government will be faced with considerable liability for the reinstatement of sites and the restoration of land to its former uses."
Now that presupposes that at the Ministry of Information there is somebody who believes that that absolutely represents the facts; but it does nothing of the kind, and the general public, I have not a doubt, firmly believes that the State will be at the expense of restoring these camps to their original condition.
But let us not deceive ourselves. Whereas the intentions of the Ministry of

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Information, and indeed of the Government, may be admirable, nobody will be more ready to tell us than the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack that when the compensation courts come to consider the cases they will not be governed by the expressions of the Ministry of Information but by the law of the land, which is interpreted by the Compensation (Defence) Act of 1939 mentioned by the noble Earl, and that Act limits the compensation which may be paid to the capital value of the land. The case has been made, and I am hoping that when the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack replies he will tell us that an error has been made— though it was a very wise and proper provision at the time—and that it is the intention of His Majesty's Government to produce amending legislation which will ensure that the national interest will be served by paying such compensation as will enable this land to be brought back into its agricultural use.
THE EARL OF CRANBROOK: My Lords, there was one point touched on by the noble Earl who introduced this Motion to which I should like to reply. He has seen the beginning of these battle training areas, and I have seen the middle, and although the beginning is grim and heroic, the middle is merely grim. These areas are places where Allied troops and our own can carry out exercises under conditions which approximate as closely as possible to those of war itself. Tanks and other vehicles can move without restriction, and live ammunition is used. Accordingly, the whole population have to be evicted. Like the noble Earl—and I should like to make it clear that I am not speaking in any way as a Deputy Commissioner and representing the Minister of Home Security—I saw the beginning when people moved out from my own part of the world. It was a very rural area. Most of the people had lived there all heir lives, and many of the families have been there for generations. But when it was explained to them that by moving they would be doing a great deal towards helping to win the war, they left their homes willingly, but fortified with the hope, and indeed with the undertaking given them by the military and civil authorities, that they would be able to return at the end of the war. The land has now been exercised over for more
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than a year. The arable land has been uncultivated, the grassland has been unmown and ungrazed. A good deal of it has been damaged by shell, mortar, and small arms fire, and tanks have gone over the fields, the hedges, and the ditches.
I should like to pay tribute to the soldiers who have done their utmost to prevent damage to the houses and buildings. Very strict orders were given that these were not to be indicated as targets and not to be fired on deliberately, but accidents must occasionally happen. A burst of machine gun fire goes through a roof, a shell lands near a house, damages a window, or dislodges a few tiles, or tracer bullets go through the thatch of a barn. The weather gets access, and your Lordships can imagine the result. You may have been unfortunate enough to see land left derelict for a year, and know how it grows weeds and rubbish, and when you add the inevitable damage caused by military operations, again you can imagine the result. I am not suggesting for a moment that this is anything like what many of your Lordships saw in France in the last war. It is not so bad as that, but I have seen it and consulted people who knew the land before, and who know it better than I do, and I am quite clear that while the position is not going to be as serious as Lord Hastings has suggested, at any rate the value of the land will not pay for the cost of reinstating it.
I am not concerned with the hardships to individuals. What I am concerned with is the hardship to whole communities. In these battle areas in my part of the world, several villages and hamlets were evacuated. If the landlord loses his land he gets compensation, but those people who left their work on it, and who are looking forward to returning to working there again, will not be able to do so unless the land is reinstated, and they will get no compensation. Before I sit down I should like to say once more that we are dealing not with a small number of individuals but with whole communities. These communities from the depths of the country are much more tied to their land by sentiment and tradition than are the more sophisticated urban population. I was struck, as was everyone else, by the magnificent spirit they displayed in going out. They went with the undertaking that they would be able to return, and I hope that the noble Viscount who

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is going to reply will be able to say that that undertaking will be implemented not only in the letter but in the spirit.
LORD WHARNCLIFFE: My Lords, nobody interested in the land could help agreeing with the reasonable case put forward by my noble friend Lord Rosebery. One point he might have put, and that is that in the circumstances, if a farm becomes vacant, it is very difficult to get a new tenant.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the House I am sure feels indebted to my noble friend Lord Rosebery for having raised what is, beyond question, a very important matter. I agree with him that it is timely to have this discussion now, probably a preliminary discussion, because, as has been pointed out, the process of handing back requisitioned land—I am not sure whether it is rightly to be called "derequisitioning" or "disrequisitioning"; both words seem equally objectionable—has only just been entered upon. There has been a great deal more of giving up of works erected under the Defence Regulations upon land which has not actually been taken over than there has been of the actual return of land requisitioned. Therefore, it is very timely to raise the question now. What has been said by the speakers in this debate will show any fair-minded man that it is a very difficult question. We must not treat the authors of the Act of 1939, as Lord Mottistone was disposed to do, as some well-meaning but blundering people with whom we have no concern at all. I would remind your Lordships that that Act, like other Acts, passed through the scrutiny of both Houses of Parliament, including all those who are so well acquainted with questions relating to land in this House, and that not even in time of war but before the war actually broke out. No doubt there may be things to correct in it —I do not dispute that, because of the Bill I introduced earlier. We must all admit it is not a very easy subject, and it has to be looked at from all round.
What is this problem of reinstatement? It is a very wide problem, and I agree most warmly with my noble friend Lord Hastings that it is not entirely a question as between the Government and the owner. It is a national question. It has to do with post-war policy, and may
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form a very important branch of it. It is all very well to take a simple case of land with a fee simple worth £50 in the middle of a field and build from that, and it may be a very good illustration; but one must realize that the subject extends over all sorts of cases. It extends over cases in which large tracts of country have been requisitioned and used, as Lord Cranbrook said, for battle areas. It extends to cases where constructions have been put up on land, perhaps land of very little intrinsic value, which the public interest would not require to be removed because the expense of doing so would be out of proportion to the advantage gained. Therefore we have to look at a very important and rather varied problem. I say that not to excuse the limitations of, what I have to say. I shall do my best to be clear, and I have an observation to make which I hope will bring some degree of satisfaction and comfort.
The Government have not decided, and cannot at the moment decide, what is to be done in many of these cases. It is not possible for the Government at this moment to give sweeping assurances, for, as I have pointed out, this particular problem dovetails in with agricultural policy and general planning; and while it must not be left behind or forgotten, it really can hardly be dealt with by a specific statement from me now. At the same time I hope to be able to give a more limited assurance which may be thought of some value at once. First of all, I ought to say a word as to the Statute, though it was most accurately stated by noble Lords who have spoken. If your Lordships take Section 2, subsection (1) (b), of the Act of 1939, you find that the compensation payable in respect of taking possession of land, in addition to the payment of a rent, which we are not talking about now, during the period it is taken, includes also—here I am quoting the words—
"a sum equal to the cost of making good any damage to the land which may have occurred during the period for which possession thereof is so retained (except in so far as the damage has been made good during that period by a person acting on behalf of His Majesty), no account being taken of fair wear and tear or of damage caused by war operations."
It is quite true, as Lord Rosebery first pointed out, and has been emphasized by Lord Hastings, that there is a proviso (ii) in the same section with this limitation:

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"There shall not… be payable in respect of damage to any land a sum greater than the value of the land at the time when possession thereof was taken…."
I do not propose to discuss whether the date on which you value is justifiable or not. That is not the main point of this debate. The main point is the limitation which is put by the Act of 1939 on the compensation for damage done to requisitioned land that the amount to be paid shall not in any event be more than the value of the land. In the particular instance which my noble friend Lord Rosebery gave for convenience at the opening of his speech he told us I think that £50 was the fee simple value of that small bit of land. I believe that in that particular case that was actually the figure which was put upon the fee simple value by the owner himself and there is no dispute therefore that that was an adequate figure. At the risk of provoking some protest, I must say that if one leaves out of account for the moment the consideration of rational interest, which cannot of course be left out in the end, and if you simply consider it as a bargain between the owner of the land on one hand and the Government on the other, there does not seem to me to be anything very monstrous in saying "I require that bit of land of yours. I will pay you a rent for it while I am holding it and I will pay you the full fee simple value of the land when I hand it back to you, but I will not pay you more than that under the head, of compensation for damage." As I think Lord Hastings very logically said, from the point of view of a bargain between the Government and the landlord you may say "Way give him the value of the land and the land too?" That is not a very unnatural observation to make. I think if the owner receives the full value of the land at the time possession is taken and compensation rental during the period of occupation of the land itself (even if damaged), that is not in principle an unreasonable scheme.
The ceiling, as I think it is called—that is to say, "do not pay more in damage than the value of the fee simple"—is the thing that has to be considered. It is very difficult to say that in all cases such a ceiling is not reasonable. There certainly are cases, and there will be cases, where the area that has been taken has during its occupation by Government been so used as to have been completely trans-
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formed, or skinned if you like, where for good or for ill you really could not replace it in its pristine character without the most appalling expense. Nobody argues, for example, that in the case of Richborough it would have been reasonable to find all the necessary money and offer to dig out at Richborough everything that was there and to move everything from there and restore the place to the position of agricultural land. There must be such cases therefore there is not anything fundamentally illogical or wrong in this provision of a ceiling. But I do agree with the observation that has been made both by Lord Rosebery and others that there may be cases in which further consideration has got to be given in the national interest as to what is the fair thing to do.
For this purpose it is useful to refer to parallel provisions. There are cases where, under Defence Regulation 50, the Government do not actually take over requisitioned land but where they exercise their right under the Defence Regulation to go on to the land and to erect on it or under it all sorts of structures, digging vast trenches and sometimes much more elaborate arrangements than that. In that class of case there already has been a good deal of handing back, much more so than in the case of requisitioned land. It has recently been found possible to abandon defence works erected under Defence Regulation 50. The compensation structure in that case is really Section 3 of the Act. That is because the land has never been requisitioned, but the procedure that is actually followed, as I am informed, is this. Where the national interest requires the land to be reinstated, the Crown does reinstate even though the cost exceeds the compensation otherwise payable. To be more precise, if the war agricultural executive committee considers that a particular piece of land should be reinstated for the purpose of food production or the like during the war, then that reinstatement is being made by the Crown.
I have to make plain to your Lordships that I am not speaking of the case of requisitioned land which is raised now, but of an analogous case which I think it is useful to refer to because of the practice which is being followed. I say again that there is a great deal of land in this country over which the War Office or other Department like the Air Ministry claims to enter-on and to erect structures upon or to dig

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or use for some other war purpose without actually taking over the land. In such cases the practice which is followed is this. Where the war agricultural committee represents that this piece of land ought to be restored to its predisposition for the purposes of agricultural production that is a course which is being followed. On the other hand where no adequate national interest requires it, or where the expense of doing such a thing is perfectly out of proportion to the injury, then in such cases the land is not normally reinstated but compensation is paid in accordance with She section to which I need not refer again. That is the practice that is going on and I think it is useful to know that that is happening. It shows in at least a parallel kind of case that there is a national interest to be considered and not merely the claim of the owner as such. It shows that in fact it is recognized as regards land that is not actually requisitioned.
As yet relatively little derequisitioning has taken place, but I am authorized to say, and this is the assurance I wish to give to my noble friend, that consideration will be given to the application of analogous treatment corresponding to the one I have described where the national interest requires reinstatement in the case of land which is being derequisitioned. Of course regard has had to be had to the relativities of cost and value. Labour is extremely scarce and is very difficult to get for such a purpose, because it must be used for the first priorities. I am not offering a guarantee in the sense of offering the terms of a contract, but I am saying with full authority from those who are responsible that consideration will be given to the claim that provision should be made on similar lines for restoring in a proper case in the national interest land which is handed back after requisitioning. That is the assurance which I am authorized to give. I do not think with great respect my noble friend is right when he suggests there is for this purpose a distinction between agricultural land and urban land. My noble friend points out that if the particular site he was talking about was building land worth £200 then the £200 would be enough to pay this £177 necessary to restore it back to its own condition. That is quite true but that is merely because building land is more valuable than agricultural land, and when
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you are valuing the one or the other you must have regard to the true value. The ceiling is as much as £200 in the case of building land, but it is only higher because the land is more valuable, and if the land is worth £200 an acre and it is made unusable by the action of the Crown then it is right that £200 should be paid because that is the measure of the loss. I do not think really that there is a distinction in principle between the treatment in the agricultural case and the treatment in the urban case.
Let me say a word about the speech made by my noble friend Lord Cranbrook. He referred to those large battle training areas in which the cost of reinstatement may in some cases at any rate exceed the pre-war value and, as he points out, may be beyond the power of individual farmers to meet. That is undoubtedly a very serious consideration. My conception of the national policy which is likely to be developed is that we have to look at this whole subject of getting the land of the country back after the war into future use not by reference solely to the measure of the rights of individuals or the measure of the value of the piece of land. We have also to bring into account national considerations connected with planning and with agricultural policy. I am asked to say to Lord Cranbrook how much the Government are indebted to him for his helpful interest in some of these areas, and how much we are indebted also to Lord Rosebery whose story about the Highlands was, I thought, particularly moving.
I conclude, therefore, by repeating that the Government do appreciate that this is a problem—ultimately a post-war problem—of the greatest importance, as has been illustrated by the speeches of your Lordships to-day. It will come under consideration not merely as a matter of compensation but in relation to national policy and especially, of course, in relation to policy with regard to agriculture. It is clearly impossible for me to-day to go into details. I would like to leave the debate to-day on the note that the Government do recognize that as in the case of the abandonment of works which are erected on land not requisitioned so also in the case of return of requisitioned land, there is a public interest which has to be provided for. As it is being provided for in the case of land not requisitioned on the representation of

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the county war agricultural committees so the Government are prepared to consider taking a corresponding course in the case of land either derequisitioned or disrequisitioned, whichever may be the proper word.
LORD MOTTISTONE: My Lords, may I have the leave of the House to ask the noble and learned Viscount whether he would add to his assurance some words like these: "But in no case will such compensation payable be less than that which would be paid if the damage were caused by enemy action"? It seems to me that that would be eminently reasonable.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot do that. I do not carry in my mind, and I doubt whether my noble friend knows, exactly what the formula is. I have gone as far as I can go.
THE EARL OF ROSEBERY: My Lords, I am most grateful, and so I am sure are my supporters, for the very full and sympathetic speech to which we have listened from the noble and learned Viscount I think he has shown that the Government are prepared to deal with the matter. There are one or two points which he made which I do not propose to traverse now, although I should like on another occasion to deal with what he said about the difference in agricultural and urban values to the individual and the State. I only took that illustration as a concrete one on which to found an argument. I was aware of the method of compensation when land was not requisitioned and it was largely for that reason that I brought forward my Motion in order to try to get everything on all fours. The matter, as your Lordships will realize, is very difficult to deal with when different sections of the Act have to be applied. I am dealing for the Navy in regard to a large tract in the Highlands under Section 51 and for the Army in regard to land ten miles away under Section 52. There are different rights of compensation and different values. It was because of that and in order to ascertain the views of the Government before the land is handed back that I brought forward this Motion. I ask leave to withdraw my Motion, but before doing so I should like to express great regret that we have not had a legal
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opinion whether the right word is derequisitioning or disrequisitioning.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

HOUSE OF LORDS OFFICES.
Order of the Day for the consideration of the First Report from the Select Committee read.
The Committee reported as follows:
1.—Estimates.
The Estimate for the House of Lords' Offices for 1944 was laid before the Committee and approved.
2.—Civil Service War Bonus.
The Committee sanctioned the application of Treasury Circular No. 20/43 for payment of War Bonus to the staff of the House of Lords to whom it applies.
3.—Senior Messenger, Due for Retirement.
The Committee sanctioned a pension and additional allowance under the Superannuation Act, 1909, to James Park who reaches the retiring age on December 16, 1943, after 20 years' service, and also sanctioned payment of salary to Mr. Park from that dare on his re-appointment as a temporary messenger.
4.—Sub-Committees.
The Sub-Committee on the Refreshment Department was re-appointed as follows:—The Earl of Lucan, the Lord Stanmore, the Lord Jessel, the Lord Atkin, the Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, the Lord Southwood, with the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Clerk of the Parliaments.
The Library Sub-Committee was reappointed as follows:—The Marquess of Crewe, the Earl of Ilchester, the Earl of Onslow, the Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, the Lord Stanmore, the Lord Atkin, the Lord Macmillan, the Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, with the Clerk of the Parliaments.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF ONSLOW): My Lords, I should like to make a very humble apology to your Lordships for being absent when the House went into Committee on the Courts (Emergency Powers) (Scotland) Bill. There were three Burma Special Orders which the India Office was anxious to get through and so a meeting of the Burma Committee was called to meet shortly after the assembly of the House. I had every reason to believe that there would be time to get the Orders through before the Courts (Emergency Powers) (Scotland) Bill was reached by your Lordships, but I was mistaken in my estimate of the distance between the Committee Room and this Chamber. It is not inconsiderable and I was unable to get here in time, to serve your Lordships in the way I ought to do. May I, in apologizing to your Lordships, express my grateful

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thanks to my noble friend Lord Templemore, for so bravely filling the breach? I have now to move that the First Report from the Select Committee on the House of Lords Offices be considered and adopted. It is the usual Report we have at the beginning of the Session dealing with estimates and so forth, and I do not think it is necessary to say anything more about it. It is purely formal.
Moved, That the Report be now considered and agreed to.—(The Earl of Onslow.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

UNEMPLOYMENT: SIR R. HOPKINS'S LETTER.
LORD DAVIES: My lords, I beg to ask the question standing in my name.
[The question was as follows:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they have sanctioned the ban imposed by Sir Richard Hopkins forbidding discussions on unemployment between Sir William Beveridge and members of the Civil Service; and whether they concur in the view expressed in Sir Richard's letter that he did not think "officials of any type in the Government Service could engage in such discussions without the risk of a doubt hereafter arising whether in some degree they may not have made known or implied the lines on which the Government were attacking this question."]
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the answer is in the affirmative. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has already explained in answer to a question which was put to him in another place on Tuesday, December 7, that the ruling to which the noble Lord refers was no more than a re-statement in this particular case of the accepted general principles governing the conduct of civil servants. It was directed more especially to the undesirability of an exchange of views between someone conducting an independent inquiry on a matter which must be the concern of the Government of the day and those civil servants whose personal views on such a question would be inseparable, in the public mind, from their official work for the Government.
LORD DAVIES: My Lords, arising out of that reply may I ask the noble and learned Viscount whether he does not think that, so far as the country is concerned, it would be an advantage if, when these two Reports appear, the Government Report and the Beveridge Report, there were certain similarities in them? I would further ask him if he is aware that the instructions in this letter have been resented by many distinguished economists at present serving in the Civil Service.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I think the letter was in perfectly proper terms. It is really manifest that on a matter on which the Government have to produce a policy, as the result of consideration, and with the help of their own special staff, it is hardly possible for someone conducting an entirely independent inquiry to make contact with that special staff. It may well be that that special staff never dreamed of doing anything of that kind. That is the more reason for saying that it is a perfectly proper regulation.

POPULATION DISTRIBUTION IN THE EMPIRE
LORD BARNBY LORD BARNBY had a question on the Paper to ask His Majesty's Government, whether in view of the increasing attention developing to post-war redistribution of population within the Empire on grounds of defence, they are able to make any statement on progress with regard to:—

(a) Mechanics of transfer of accumulated contributions to Social Welfare schemes;

(b) Plans by individual Dominions on immigrant reception conditions;

(c) Combined responsibility for present preparation and later reception by Dominions of orphaned or other juveniles.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, in asking the question standing in my name, I fully recognize that initiative in this matter must remain with the Dominions, and further that there has been no ambiguity as to the attitude adopted by His Majesty's Government who have made clear their sympathy with arrangements for migration. But it does seem that in the past there has not been sufficient stress laid on the angle of defence which is

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involved in this matter, also that the attitude of the Dominions has undoubtedly been bused on a belief that an inflow of population would tend to lessen prospects of employment. But experience, particularly the history of the United States, shows that an appreciable inflow of population must stimulate the demand for labour in the reception country. Now there is undoubtedly a keen interest in this matter among the number of bodies who have in the past been of great service to the State in matters of migration, and who are anxiously hoping to do more in the future. The discussion in this House on a Motion by my noble friend Lord Bessborough emphasized what the position was. It drew a sympathetic report from the Government, but it did not take us very far.
There has recently been evidence in the dispatches—particularly those from Australia and New Zealand—of a livening of interest in this matter. This is indicated by certain schemes which have been put forward by responsible members, and which reflect what is being done in the countries concerned. We have had lip service paid to this matter. There have been visitors to this country from the Dominions, and they, together with the Empire Parliamentary Association and other bodies, have emphasized the desire of the Dominions to receive immigrants. But in practice, there seems little evidence of real progress. The situation with regard to Canada, it is true, is rather different. Since I put my question down I have received information of the presence in this country of Colonel George Drew, the Premier of Ontario, who recently assumed office. In the past when I visited Canada I met him, and I learned of his deep interest and strong views in this matter. I would repeat that I wish to assure the noble Viscount the Leader of the House that it is not in any spirit of criticism that I raise this matter. I am sure that before the House adjourns it would be helpful if there could be some authoritative statement, and a statement could not come from anyone of greater authority, or from one who is known to be more sympathetic to this question, than the noble Viscount the Leader of the House. It is in that spirit that I have put down this question.
VISCOUNT CRANBORNE: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, has raised very important issues in the question he
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has asked and in the speech which he has made. He will, I am sure, forgive me if I answer him briefly to-day. First, with regard to the question of the transfer of social security contributions of migrants to the Dominions. He will remember that when he raised this matter in the debate in this House on May 25, I pointed out that the proposal, while a most important one in connexion with migration, presented very considerable difficulties, and I explained the nature of these difficulties. We are trying to find a way out of them, but I cannot pretend that it is easy. I can however assure him that the matter is at present the subject of close consideration by the various Government Departments concerned. If we can devise a satisfactory solution, we will. I can say no more to-day.
As regards the attitude of the individual Dominions to migration from this country, we are, as the noble Lord is aware, in consultation with the Dominion Governments. No definite replies have so far been received from them, though the noble Lord will have seen from the Press that the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia have taken steps to set up a comprehensive inquiry from the Australian point of view.
In regard to any suggestion of delay on the part of the Dominions in tackling this question—I thought I detected a suggestion of that in the noble Lord's speech —he will I know be the first to recognize that this matter raises important issues for the Dominions themselves, since the Dominion Governments must clearly consider the position of their own ex-Service people and the effect of migration from outside upon the economic situation of their countries in the years immediately following the war. These are difficult questions and it would not be fair to expect the Dominion Governments to express their views until all local aspects have been fully considered by them.
The final point raised by the noble Lord, that of the migration of juveniles, orphaned or otherwise, is one of which His Majesty's Government, like the noble Lord, fully recognize the importance. The success of the Fairbridge scheme shows what can be done on these lines. When the details of migration schemes come to be worked out with the Dominion Governments, I can assure him that this aspect will not be forgotten. If I can say no more to-day, it is because

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this, like other aspects of the problem of Empire migration, must inevitably depend on the replies which His Majesty's Government in this country receive from the Dominion Governments.

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA (ADAPTATION OF ACTS OF PARLIAMENT (AMENDMENT) ORDER 1943.
Report from the India and Burma Orders Committee, That they have examined the Draft Order as required by the Standing Orders of the House; that in their opinion the Order docs not raise important questions of policy and principle; that the Order is founded on precedent; that in the opinion of the Committee the Order cannot be passed by the House without special attention, but that no further inquiry is necessary before the House proceeds to a decision on the Resolution to approve the said Order.
Read, and ordered to lie on the Table.

GOVERNMENT OF BURMA (INDIA AND BURMA FINANCIAL SETTLEMENT) ORDER, 1943.
Report from the India and Burma Orders Committee, That they have examined the Draft Order as required by
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the Standing Orders of the House; that in their opinion the Order does not raise important questions of policy and principle; that the Order is founded on precedent; that in the opinion of the Committee the Order cannot be passed by the House without special attention being called to Section 3 of the Order, but that no further inquiry is necessary before the House proceeds to a decision on the Resolution to approve the said Order.
Read, and ordered to lie on the Table

GOVERNMENT OF BURMA (AUDITS AND ACCOUNTS) ORDER, 1943.
Report from the India and Burma Orders Committee, That they have examined the Draft Order as required by the Standing Orders of the House; that in their opinion the Order does not raise important questions of policy and principle; that the Order is not founded on precedent; that in the opinion of the Committee the Order cannot be passed by the House without special attention, but that no further inquiry is necessary before the House proceeds to a decision on the Resolution to approve the said Order.
Read, and ordered to lie on the Table.
House Adjourned.