Sitting of 25 March 1903

Preamble
The House met at Two of the Clock.
The Clerk at the Table informed the House of the unavoidable absence of the Chairman of Ways and Means.
UNOPPOSED PRIVATE BILL BUSINESS.
  LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL (ELECTRIC SUPPLY) BILL.
  Order [9th March] for Second Reading this day, read and discharged; Bill withdrawn.
Order [2nd March] that the West Ham Corporation Bill be committed, read and discharged; Bill withdrawn.
CHARING CROSS, EUSTON, AND HAMPSTEAD RAILWAY BILL; GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY BILL.
Reported, with Amendments; Reports to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
COVENTRY AND ARLEY RAILWAY BILL.
Reported [Preamble not proved]; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
PRIVATE BILLS (GROUP A).
Sir HENRY AUBREY-FLETCHERreported from the Committee on Group A of Private Bills; That, for the convenience of parties, the Committee had adjourned till Friday, at Eleven of the Clock. Report to lie upon the Table.
GRINDLEFORD, BASLOW, AND BAKEWELL RAILWAY BILL.
Petition for additional provision; referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills.

RAILWAY BILLS (GROUP 1).
Mr. KIMBERreported from the Committee on Group 1 of Railway Bills;
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That the parties promoting the Great Eastern Railway (No. 1) Bill had stated that the evidence of Mr. Norman Scorgie was essential to their case; and, it having been proved that his attendance could not be procured without the intervention of the House, he had been instructed to move that the said Norman Scorgie do attend the said Committee to-morrow, at half-past Eleven of the Clock.
Ordered, That Mr. Norman Scorgie do attend the Committee on Group 1 of Railway Bills tomorrow, at half-past Eleven of the Clock.
Bath Corporation Water Bill; reported, with Amendments; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.
North Middlesex Gas Bill; reported, with Amendments; Report to lie upon the Table.

PETITIONS.
  COUNTY COURTS JURISDICTION EXTENSION BILL.
  Petition from Birmingham, in favour; to lie upon the Table.
DETENTION OF POOR PERSONS (SCOTLAND) BILL.
Petitions in favour; From Canisbay; Creich; Rogart; and Annan; to lie upon the Table.
LICENSING (SCOTLAND) ACTS AMENDMENT BILL.
Petition from Lanark, against; to lie upon the Table.
RATING OF MACHINERY BILL.
Petitions against: from Swansea; and Grantham; to lie upon the Table.
ROMAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY IN IRELAND.
Petition from Dunoon, against establishment; to lie upon the Table.
SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS ON SUNDAY BILL.
Petitions in favour from Stamford; and Wood Green; to lie upon the Table.
SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS ON SUNDAY IN LANCASHIRE.
Petition from Salford, for prohibition; to lie upon the Table.
RETURNS REPORTS, ETC.
  EDUCATION (SCOTLAND).
  Copy presented, of Reports and Papers relating to the Training of Teachers for the year 1901–2 [by Command]; to lie upon the Table.
UNIVERSITIES (SCOTLAND) ACT, 1889 (ORDINANCE).
Copy presented, of University Court Ordinance No. VII. (Aberdeen No. 1) (Foundation of the Burnett-Fletcher Chair of History and Archæology in the University of Aberdeen) [by Act]; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No 93.]
AMERICAN MAIL SERVICE.
Return presented, relative there to [ordered 16th March; Sir John, Leng]; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No. 94.]

LAND PURCHASE (IRELAND).
Return ordered, "of the Resolutions and Statement adopted by the Irish Landowners' Convention on the 10th day of October, 1902, and Report of the Irish Land Conference, dated the 3rd day of January, 1903, and Minute on the Land Conference Report adopted on the 7th day of January, 1903, by the Executive Committee of the Irish Landowners' Convention."—(Mr. Wyndham.)
Return presented accordingly; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No. 89.]

LAND PURCHASE ACTS.
Return ordered, "showing, as far as practicable, for each year (or other stated period) (1) the lowest and highest prices (in each calendar year) of Guaranteed
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Land Stock; and (2) the number and amount of loans under the Land Purchase Acts (as defined in Section 48 (1) of The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1896), together with the total amount of the acreage purchased."—(Mr. Wyndham.)
Return presented accordingly; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No. 90.]

LAND LAW ACTS (IRELAND).
Return ordered, "showing, according to provinces and counties the number of cases in which judicial rents have been fixed by all the methods provided by the Land Law Acts for a first and a second Statutory term, respectively, to the 31st day of December, 1902, with particulars as to acreage, former rents of holdings, and percentages of reduction in rents."—(Mr. Wyndham.)
Return presented accordingly; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No. 91.]

LAND PURCHASE (IRELAND) ACTS.
Copy ordered, "of Report by Mr. W. F. Bailey, Legal Assistant Commissioner, of an inquiry into the present condition of tenant purchasers under the Land Purchase Acts."—(Mr. Wyndham.)
Copy presented accordingly; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed. [No. 92.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS CIRCULATED WITH THE VOTES.

  Visit of Training Vessel to Lochbroom, Ross-shire.
  MR. WEIR: To ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether arrangements can be made for a training vessel to visit Lochbroom, Ross-shire, this summer.
  (Answered by Mr. Arnold-Forster.) The hon. Member's suggestion will be considered when the summer cruises of the training ships are being decided.

  Royal Marines—Separation Allowance while Afloat.
  MR. LOCKIE: To ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether he can arrange that a separation allowance, similar to that made to the Royal Marines detached from headquarters for duty, shall be paid directly to the wives of Royal Marines when serving afloat.
  (Answered by Mr. Arnold-Forster.) As I informed the House on the 16th March,† the question will shortly arise of giving further advantages, either in respect of pay or allowances, to the Royal Marines, as the equivalent of the additional pay proposed for the Army, beyond the 2d. a day increase already granted; and all such subsidiary allowances as that referred to in the Question will then naturally receive consideration.

  New Naval Regulations—Pay of Warrant Officers on Promotion.
  MR. REGINALD LUCAS: To ask the Secretary to the Admiralty what will be the scale of pay for warrant officers promoted to be lieutenants under the new scheme; whether they will receive pensions on a fixed scale, and, if not, what will be the basis for regulating them, and whether he can say when the first list of these promotions will be announced.
  (Answered by Mr. Arnold-Forster.) An announcement will be made shortly as to the rates of pay and pension of these officers. The first promotions will be made at the beginning of the next financial year.

  Bovine Tuberculosis Commission—Report.
  MR. FIELD: To ask the President of the Local Government Board whether he can say when the Report of the Commission on Bovine Tuberculosis will be issued.
  (Answered by Mr. Walter Long.) I am informed that it is impossible to state definitely at present when the Report referred to will be issued.
  † See (4) Debates, cxix., 872.

  Ireland—Tenders for Drugs—British and American Manufactures.
  SIR JOHN ROLLESTON: To ask the President of the Local Government Board whether he is aware that in the forms of tender for drugs issued by the Boards of Guardians in Ireland the preparations of an American firm are specified, and will he explain why British drug houses manufacturing similar preparations are excluded from the list.
  (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) I am not aware that the preparations of an American firm have been included in the list of medicines prescribed by the Local Government Board for Ireland. Perhaps my hon. friend will communicate to me particulars of the preparations in question.

  Scotland—Removal of Sheriff's Court from Inverary to Dunoon.
  MR. ORREWING: To ask the Lord Advocate whether it has been decided to remove the Sheriff Court and the staff from Inverary to Dunoon; and, if so, whether the Court at Inverary can be retained for certain cases instead of being abolished altogether.
  (Answered by Mr. A. Graham Murray.) The answer to the first part of the hon. Member's Question is in the affirmative, and the change will take place in the autumn. The arrangements as to the possible sittings for occasional business at Inverary will rest with the sheriff.

  Persian Tariff on British Goods.
  SIR JOHN LENG: To ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether negotiations have taken place, and, if so, with what result, for the modification of the Persian tariff on British goods, in view of the tariff recently ratified between Russia and Persia.
  (Answered by Lord Oranborne.) I would venture to draw the attention of the hon. Member to the answer which I returned to my hon. friend the Member for King's Lynn on 23rd February.‡ I am not yet in a position to give any further information.
  ‡ See (4) Debates, cxviii., 496.

  Raw Sugar—Average Prices.
  MR. SYDNEY BUXTON: To ask the President of the Board of Trade what has been the average price of raw sugar in each month since November last, calculated on the same basis and the figures of prices for September and November, 1902, given in his speech of 24th November.†
  (Answered by Mr. Gerald Balfour.) The average price of 88 per cent. beet sugar f. o. b. Hamburg in recent months has been as follows: November, 1902, about 7s. 6d.; December, 1902, 8s.; January, 1903, 8s.; February, 8s.; March, 8s. 6d.

  Education Act, 1902—Schedule 2 (ii.).
  MR HENRY HOBHOUSE: To ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether his Board propose to exercise to any, and, if so, to what extent their powers under Schedule 2 (ii.) of the Education Act, 1902, of paying to School Boards before the appointed day Parliamentary Grants accrued before that day, but not in the ordinary course payable until after that day.
  (Answered by Sir William Anson.) The Board of Education do not anticipate that it will be necessary to exercise their powers under Schedule 2 (ii.) in respect of School Boards. Parliamentary Grants accruing during a school year do not mature for payment until after the termination of that year; and apportionment would only be required in the case of a closed school. Board schools will not be closed, but will be transferred on the appointed day to new authorities, who will carry them on without break in continuity. These authorities, as successors in regard to property, powers, rights, and liabilities, will be the proper persons to receive the grants accruing but not yet matured for payment at the appointed day.

  Strabane Railway Station—Right of Way.
  MR. O'DOHERTY: To ask Mr. Attorney-General for Ireland whether his attention has been called to
  † See (4) Debates, cxv., 262.
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  a series of prosecutions at the suit of the Crown against certain car drivers for riot at Strabane Railway Station on the 20th and 21st January last; and whether, seeing that these prosecutions arose out of the stopping of a public roadway by the Great Northern Railway Company at the station, and that previously proceedings had been instituted by the car privers against the porters of the Great Northern Railway Company, will he say at whose instance the Crown intervened.
  (Answered by Mr. Atkinson.) According to the information received by the Crown through the police, the car drivers frequenting this railway station claimed a right to enter upon and traverse the premises of the company in order to reach the adjoining station of the Donegal Railway Company, and there solicit passengers arriving by train. The Great Northern Company deny the existence of any such right. On the occasions referred to, the car drivers and various other persons assembled at the station by arrangement, made a concerted, violent, and riotous attack upon the servants of the company, overwhelmed them, forced the doors of the station, took possession of the platform to the terror and alarm of the passengers, stabbed one of the railway servants, bit off part of the finger of another, threw a third from the platform on to the permanent way to his serious injury, and assaulted more or less seriously several others. Acting on this information, the Crown, of its own motion, and not at the instigation of anybody, instituted a prosecution for riot, as the assertion of civil rights, even if they existed, in such a manner was illegal and criminal, and could not be permitted with any regard to the preservation of the public peace. I am not aware that before the occurrence any proceedings such as are mentioned had been instituted.

  Prosecutions for Sheep Scab.
  MR. FIELD: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state how many prosecutions were instituted for sheep scab in Ireland during last year, the amount of fines imposed, and the localities in which the prosecutions were instituted.

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  (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) There were 221 such prosecutions, resulting in 214 convictions; the total amount of fines imposed was £163 8s. The prosecutions were instituted in every part of Ireland, with the exception of the counties of Armagh, Donegal, Londonderry, Louth, Monaghan, Queen's County, Sligo, and the county boroughs of Belfast, Limerick, Londonderry, and Waterford.

  Strabane Petty Sessions—Remarks of Resident Magistrate.
  MR. O'DOHERTY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been directed to the remarks addressed by Mr. Dunsterville, R.M., to the justices of the peace associated with him at the hearing of certain cases at a special court of petty sessions held at Strabane on the 27th February last; and will he state what action he intends to take in the matter.
  (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) The hon. Member has privately informed me that the date mentioned in the Question is a misprint for the 27th January. I have communicated with the Resident Magistrate, Mr. Dunsterville, who states there was no petty sessions or court of any kind at Strabane on that date. If the hon. Member intended to refer to the proceedings at these petty sessions on the 17th and 18th February, when a number of persons were charged with riot, I can only say that I have read what purports to be a verbatim report of these proceedings published in a local newspaper, and do not find that Mr. Dunsterville used language which could be held to reflect on his fellow magistrates. He assures me that he harboured no intention of the kind.

  Local Government Inquiries in Ireland—Shorthand Writers—Remuneration.
  MR. O'DOHERTY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he will state by whom are shorthand writers employed at Local Government Board inquiries, what remuneration is paid to shorthand
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  writers thus employed, and the total amount of remuneration paid to shorthand writers in Ireland for the year 1902.
  MR. O'DOHERTY: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether his attention has been called to the statement made by Dr. Smith, Local Government Board Inspector, at the inquiry held last week, that he had no power or authority to employ a shorthand writer to take a note of the proceedings of said inquiry; and whether, seeing that inspectors have employed shorthand writers at similar inquiries, can he give any explanation for the statement made by Dr. Smith.
  (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) There is no authority for the employment of, and no provision for remunerating, shorthand writers at inquiries held under the Poor Law Acts. The statement made by Dr. Smith was, therefore, according to the fact. The depositions at such an inquiry are invariably taken by the inspector conducting it. In the case of other inquiries, however, such as those held under the Public Health Acts, the Labourers' Acts, the Housing of the Working Classes Acts, the inspector holding the inquiry may employ a shorthand writer, the expense of whose employment is recoverable from the local authority. Shorthand writers employed at inquiries of this class are remunerated in accordance with a prescribed scale, namely, two guineas for each day's attendance exceeding three hours daily, and one guinea where the attendance is less than three hours a day. The transcription of the shorthand notes is also paid for at the rate of 6d. per folio of seventy-two words. The total amount paid to shorthand writers, including allowances for travelling and subsistence, in the year ended 31st December, 1902, was £2,160 9s. 8d.

  Irish Board of Works—Money advanced for Planting
  MR. CONDON: To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he will state how

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  much money have the Board of Works advanced for planting; under what authority was this advance given; what rate of interest is charged; and what period is given for repayment.
  (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) The Board is empowered by the Act 29 and 30 Vic. c. 40, s. 5 (one of the Landed Property Improvement Acts), to make loans for planting for shelter. It has power to lend for planting generally under the combined operation of the 31st Section of the Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881, and the 20th Section of 46 and 47 Vic. c. 43. Loans amounting to £32,005 have been made for planting for shelter. The amount advanced for planting irrespectively of shelter cannot be definitely stated, inasmuch as the loans are combined with the other numerous loans made under the Act of 1881. The planting loans, however, are few and small, and are believed not to amount to more than £2,000. The period for repayment of loans for shelter under the 29 and 30 Vic. c. 40, is usually thirty-five years. The period in the case of loans for planting generally under the Act of 1881 is twenty-two years. The difference in the two cases arises from the fact that the tenure of the borrower under the former Act was longer and offers a more lasting security than the tenure of the borrower under the Act of 1881. In both cases repayment is made by a rent-charge amounting to £5 per cent. on the sum advanced in the case of thirty-five years' loans, and £6 10s. per cent. in that of twenty-two years' loans. The rent-charge of £5 per cent. includes interest at £3 10s. per cent. That of £6 10s. per cent. includes interest at £3 8s. 3d. per cent.

  Royal Commission on Militia and Volunteers.
  SIR HOWARD VINCENT: To ask the Secretary of State for War if he is yet in a position to state the names of the members of the Royal Commission to inquire into the conditions of service of the officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of the Militia and Volunteer forces; the reasons for the present shortage, and how a great number of officers and recruits may be attracted
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  thereto; the terms of reference; and when the Commission will enter upon its labours.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) I am not yet in a position to give my right hon. and gallant friend the information for which he asks.

  Ashton-under-Lyne Barracks—Cost of Construction and Repairs.
  MR. HERBERT WH1TELEY: To ask the Secretary of State for War if he can state the original cost of the Ashton-under-Lyne Barracks; the amount spent in alterations, additions, and repairs to them during the last ten years; and the number of men recruited in the Ashton-under-Lyne district during the same period.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) The original cost of the barracks at Ashton-under-Lyne was £45,077; the amount spent on subsequent alterations, additions, and maintenance in the last ten years was £5,754. The average take of recruits for the last ten years in the 63rd Regimental District, of which Ashton-under-Lyne is the headquarters, for the Regular Forces and Militia amounted to 1,373 and 1,973 respectively, but these figures include 1,151 and 1,645, respectively, raised in the Manchester recruiting district.

  Army Clothing Contracts—Fair Wages.
  MR. GOULDING: To ask the Secretary of State for War whether he will give the highest and lowest prices paid to contractors for making Royal Artillery tunics since 31st December, 1901; whether his Department has any knowledge of the wages paid by the contractors to their workpeople; whether he is aware that a firm of Government contractors recently offered their hands 2s. 4d. for making overcoats; and whether, seeing that this is below the Pimlico standard of wages, he proposes to take any steps in the matter.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) In reply to the first part of the Question, all contract prices are strictly confidential.

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  As regards the second part, any case, where the War Department has reason to believe that the contract conditions as to payment of current wages are being broken, is fully investigated. As regards the third part of the Question, the reply is in the negative. As regards the last part of the Question, prices are not ruled by the wages paid at Pimlico, but by the House of Commons Resolution of 1891.

  Somaliland—Press Censorship.
  MR. LABOUCHERE: To ask the Secretary of State for War whether a military censorship exists in Somaliland in regard to all Press communications to this country; and, if so, whether this is in order to prevent the Mad Mullah from learning what are the movements of His Majesty's forces.
  (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) A censorship has been established in Somaliland under the usual conditions, the object being to check the dissemination of incorrect reports as to the operations now being carried on.

  Postal Service—Compulsory Retirement.
  MR. JAMES O'CONNOR: To ask the Postmaster-General if he will state what practice is followed in enforcing retirement from the postal service at sixty years of age; and whether in any offices discretionary power is exercised in extending the period of service.
  (Answered by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.) The rule is that all pensionable officers of whatever grade whose conduct, capacity, and efficiency fall below a fair standard shall be called upon to retire at sixty; but retirement at sixty is not enforced in the case of officers whose conduct is good, and who are certified by their superior officers to be thoroughly efficient.

  Postal Servants' Deputation at Birmingham.
  MR. JAMES O'CONNOR: To ask the Postmaster-General whether he is aware that the surveyor postmaster of Birmingham recently refused to meet a deputation of postmen on the ground that it included two men from one
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  office, and insisted on the withdrawal of one of these men and the substitution of a man either from Hands worth or Smethwick; and, seeing that the men chosen had been duly elected at a meeting at which both offices were represented, will he state whether this action on the part of the Birmingham postmaster is in accordance with the rules of the Department.
  (Answered by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.) I am not yet in possession of all the facts in this case. When I have ascertained and considered them I will communicate with the hon. Member.

  QUESTIONS IN THE HOUSE.

    Tower of London-Armour Collection.
    MR. STUART SAMUEL: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War if it is proposed to remove the collection of armour from the Tower of London; and, if so, whether he will make arrangements to leave a portion of the collection in the Tower for the advantage of the visitors to that building.
    THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (Mr. BRODRICK, Surrey, Guildford): No, Sir; it is not proposed to remove the collection of armour from the Tower of London. The responsibility, however, for the care and custody of the arms and armour at the Tower shortly will be transferred to the trustees of the British Museum.

  Royal Engineers and Barrack Construction—Report of Committee.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSE: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether any decision has been come to upon the Report of the Committee upon the employment of Royal Engineers on the construction of barracks; and whether the Report will be published.
  MR. BRODRICK: The various recommendations of this Committee are now under discussion. I have not decided to publish the Report.

  Army Advisory Board.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSE: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War if he will state for what length of time do the appointments of officers of the Auxiliary Forces on the Advisory Board hold good.
  MR. BRODRICK: The tenure of these appointments has not yet been fixed.

  Seamen and Bad Teeth.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty will he state the number of recruits for the Navy who were rejected in 1902 on account of bad teeth.
  THE SECRETARY TO THE ADMIRALTY (Mr. ARNOLD-FORSTER,): The statistics in the possession of the Admiralty do not enable me to give exact figures on this particular point, but it is estimated that at least one recruit in every ten is rejected on account of bad teeth.

  Foreign Naval Expenditure.
  SIR EDGAR VINCENT: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty if he can state the Naval expenditure during the last five years of France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and of the British Empire.
  MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER: The figures asked for will be found in the Parliamentary Return entitled "Naval Expenditure and Mercantile Marine," which is published annually on the Motion of the hon. and gallant Member for Yarmouth.

  Brown Institute—Vivisection School.
  MR WEIR: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, in view of the fact that the Brown Institute was founded in 1871 by means of a bequest of £20,000 for the establishment of a hospital for animals, will he ascertain under what authority a School of Vivisection is now conducted at the Institute; and will he state how many persons who are attached to this school possess vivisection certificates, and the nature of such certificates.
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (Mr. AKERS DOUGLAS,): In 1877 the University of London, which is the governing body of the Brown Institute, applied to have the place registered under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, for the performance therein of experiments on living animals. The place was registered accordingly. Sixteen persons hold licences under that Act authorising them to perform experiments at the Institute. Fifteen of these also hold certificates under the Act—viz., eleven authorising practically painless experiments such as inoculations to be performed without anæsthetics, coupled in five cases with the extra certificate required for experiments on dogs or cats; and fifteen certificates authorising the animal to be kept alive after an initial operation under anæsthetics, coupled in nine cases with the extra certificate for dogs or cats, and in one case for horses.

  The Riots in Trinidad.
  MR. SYDNEY BUXTON: May I ask the Colonial Secretary if he has any information to give to the House with regard to the rioting in Trinidad?
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Mr. J. CHAMBERLAIN,): I am sorry to say very serious rioting has taken place in Trinidad. The following telegram was received at the Colonial Office at eight o'clock this morning from Governor C. A. Moloney—
  "Considerable excitement has been caused during the last few weeks by the introduction in the Legislative Council of a new Water Works Ordinance, the provisions of which have been much misrepresented. This has been increased by several public meetings, called together by those who demand representative government, and the whole excitement was turned in that direction. At the meeting of the Legislative Council on the 16th, a crowd entered the Council Chamber in such numbers that the Bill could not be proceeded with, and the Council adjourned. It was decided, therefore, that admission to the adjourned meeting should be by ticket only, as many tickets being issued as there was accommodation for. A public meeting was held on the 21st to protest against this, and the speakers at the meeting urged those assembled to refuse tickets, and to insist upon their supposed right to be present

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  at all the meeting of the Legislative Council. Accordingly at eleven o'clock the committee of the Ratepayers' Association presented themselves at the entrance of the Council Chamber, and, refusing tickets, demanded entrance. At the time there was a crowd round the door of about 1,000 persons. A large force of police were guarding the buildings. The Council proceeded with its business, though much interrupted by shoutings outside, until a quarter to two p.m., when stone-throwing into the Council room commenced with great violence. This continued for about three-quarters of an hour, completely wrecking everything exposed and sweeping the Council room from side to side, wounding many present. At 2.30 the public building known as the Red House was fired in two places. The Riot Act was read twice from the galleries on each side of the building and the police were ordered to fire. The mob was rapidly dispersed. About this time a large force was landed from His Majesty's ship 'Pallas,' and a contingent of the local force arrived on the scene. All efforts failed to save the Red House, which was completely destroyed with all the records except those in the Registrar-General's vault. The casualties from the firing are nine killed and forty wounded. The police barracks caught fire at the top of the tower, the entrance to which was burnt oat, but the fire was otherwise prevented from spreading; 200 Lancashire Fusiliers are on the way from Barbados. Request immediate Commission of inquiry."
  In reference to this last sentence, I think the matter is so serious that an inquiry is necessary, and I propose to appoint it at once.

  Treaty between United States and Cuba.
  MR. CHARLES MCARTHUR: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether an answer has been received to the representations made by His Majesty's Government at Washington with respect to the proposed reciprocity treaty between Cuba and the United States; and whether he has any information which he can give to the House on the subject.
  THE UNDER SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Lord CRANBORNB,): Yes, Sir; the answer was to the effect that the conclusion of the treaty was based on the prerogative of independent nations to enter into such compacts for their mutual benefit.
  MR. GIBSON BOWLES: Is it a fact that the treaty has been ratified by the United States Senate?
  LORD CRANBORNE: Subject, I understand, to an Amendment requiring the approval of the House of Representatives to the Convention before it becomes operative.

  British Merchants Losses in the French Congo.
  MR. CHARLES MCARTHUR: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether an answer has been received by His Majesty's Government to the proposals made to the French Government with respect to the claims of British merchants for restitution and compensation for losses arising out of the action of the Concessionaire Companies in the French Congo; and whether he can state what is the present position of the negotiations on this subject.
  LORD CRANBORNE: Negotiations with the French Government are still proceeding, but in their present stage it would not be advisable to make any public announcement in regard to them.

  Native Labour in the African Mines.
  MR. CHANNING: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether, in making arrangements for the recruiting of labourers for the South African mines from British Central Africa, His Majesty's Government have laid down such regulations or obtained such guarantees as will make it impossible for these labourers being obtained from the Congo Free State, or through the action of any of the officials of that State or the chiefs within its jurisdiction.
  LORD CRANBORNE: I hope to lay the regulations in question upon the Table in the course of the next few days. It will be seen that they apply to all native labourers engaged for service within the Protectorate, from whatever part of Africa they may be drawn. Whether further rules are required in the case mentioned by the hon. Gentleman will receive careful consideration.
  MR. HERBERT SAMUEL: I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign

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  Affairs whether the Foreign Office intends to authorise the recruiting of native labourers for the Transvaal mines in the Protectorate of British East Africa and Uganda, as well as in British Central Africa.
  LORD CRANBORNE: Pending the result of the experiment of permitting 1,000 natives to be recruited in British Central Africa for South Africa, His Majesty's Government do not, as at present advised, intend to authorise recruiting for a similar purpose in the Protectorates of British East Africa or Uganda.
  MR. WHITLEY: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies if he can state who will fix the rate of wages to be paid to the 1,000 natives to be recruited in Central Africa for the Transvaal mines.
  MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN: The rate of wages will be fixed by agreement between the Native Labour Association and the labourers employed, subject to the approval of the Commissioner of the Protectorate.

  Vaccination.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether, in considering any further legislation in regard to vaccination, arrangements will be made such as will enable a parent, when registering the birth of a child, to obtain a certificate of exemption, by making a declaration to the effect that he conscientiously believes vaccination to be prejudicial to the health of the child.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. WALTER LONG,): The Prime Minister intimated in reply to a Question a few weeks ago that, except for the renewal of the existing Vaccination Act, it was not intended to propose legislation on the subject of vaccination during the present session† In these circumstances, perhaps the hon. Member will excuse me if I do not go into matters such as that raised in the Question at the present time.
  † See (4) Debates, cxviii., 1364.

  Fisheries Board Bill.
  MR. DOUGHTY: I beg to ask the President of the Board, cf. Agriculture if he can say when the Bill for the creation of a Fisheries Board, under the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, will be introduced.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE (Mr. HANBURY,): I hope to introduce the Bill referred to before Easter.

  Prevention of Accidents to Railway Servants.
  MR. JOHN ELLIS: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he will state the steps taken by his Department to carry out The Railway Employment (Prevention of Accidents) Act, 1900, particularly in respect of the making of rules under Section 1, the inspection of railways under Section 13, and the making of inquiries and experiments under Section 15.
  THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. GERALD BALFOUR,): 1. Under the Act in question rules have been made by the Board of Trade dealing with the following matters. The labelling of wagons; the movement of wagons by propping, and tow-roping; the provision of power brakes on engines; the lighting of stations or sidings where shunting operations are frequently carried on after dark; the protection of point-rods and signal wires and the position of ground levers working points; the protection of gauge glasses; the arrangement of tool boxes and water gauges on engines; the provision of brake-vans or other suitable vehicles for trains working upon running lines beyond station limits the protection of men engaged in relaying or repairing permanent way. All these rules came into operation as Statutory Rules on the 8th August last. The amended rule has also been prepared respecting the provision of either side brake levers, such rule being drawn on lines indicated by the Court of the Railway and Canal Commission when

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  the subject was before them last year, The period within which objectors may require the reference of this rule before it is finally made to the Railway and Canal Commissioners will expire on the 20th April. (2.) Local inquiries into the conditions of working on various railways were held in the course of framing these rules, and since August last inspection has been made by the Board's officers of forty-six stations and yards which were represented to the Board as being inadequately lighted, in contravention of the rule on that subject. I am glad to say that all the improvements in lighting which were regarded by the Board's officers as essential in these cases have been or are being carried out by the railway companies concerned. (3.) The Board have not yet considered it necessary to make experiments under Section 15 of the Act, and the position in this matter is still that explained in my answer to the hon. Member on the 12th May last.†

  Railway Couplings.
  Mr. CHANNING: I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether any, and, if so, what steps have been taken to carry out the provisions of The Prevention of Accidents Act, 1900, in respect of couplings which will remove the necessity of men going between the carriages or trucks in coupling and uncoupling.
  MR. GERALD BALFOUR: I presume the hon. Member's reference to the provisions of the Act in question is directed to Section 15, under which the Board of Trade are empowered to make experiments. This power has not hitherto been exercised by the Board, but several railway companies are conducting experiments as to improved appliances, including couplings designed for the purpose mentioned by the hon. Member, and trials have in many cases been attended and watched by officers of the Board of Trade.
  MR. CHANNING: I propose to draw the attention of the House to this matter at the earliest opportunity.
  † See (4) Debates, cvii., 1356.

  Pay of Postal Servants.
  MR. KEIR HARDIE: I beg to ask the Postmaster General, whether his attention has been drawn to the remarks made by Mr. Justice Phillimore, when directing the grand jury at the opening of the Glamorgan assizes, in which he animadverted on the low wages paid to five Post Office employees who have since been sentenced, to various terms of imprisonment, and expressed the hope that the Post Office authorities would consider this state of things; and whether he proposes taking any action in the matter.
  THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL (Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN,): Of the five persons referred to by the hon. Member, only two were in the direct employment of the Department; the remaining three were employed by sub-postmasters who receive inclusive emoluments to cover the whole cost of maintaining their offices, and make their own arrangements to provide themselves with assistance. In one of these cases the assistant was a voluntary learner without pay, as she wished to acquire a knowledge of Post Office work with a view to subsequently securing an appointment. In another of the cases the assistant was the sub-postmaster's son. The third was a girl who is stated to have received 5s. a week. Of the two persons who were servants of the Post Office, one was in receipt of 31s. a week for wages and stripe allowance, exclusive of uniform and boot allowance. The other was a youth who was receiving 22s. a week. I do not consider that the rate of remuneration can be properly described as low in either of these cases; and I see that the; learned judge, in passing sentence, concurred in this view and stated that his former remarks had been misunderstood.

  Vaccination Lymph in Scotland.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Lord Advocate if he will state from whom the public vaccinators in Scotland obtain, their supply of animal lymph.
  THE LORD ADVOCATE (Mr. A. GRAHAM MURRAY,): There are no public vaccinators in (Scotland, as

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  the term is understood in England. Parochial vaccinators, whose duties are confined to vaccinating defaulters and the children of paupers, receive free, on application, supplies of glycerinated calf lymph from the Local Government Board for Scotland.

  Holdings in the Crofting Counties—Purchase of Land.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Lord Advocate whether the Congested Districts Board have under consideration any further purchases of land for the creation of new holdings in either of the six crofting counties; and, if so, will he indicate the counties and the amount which it is proposed to expend.
  MR. A. GRAHAM MURRAY: There are not at present any proposals before the Board in such a position that any public information can be given in reply to the question of the hon. Member. Information to the fullest extent possible will be given in the annual report of the Congested Districts Board.

  Penalties for Illegal Trawling.
  MR. WEIR: I beg to ask the Lord Advocate if the Secretary for Scotland will consider the expediency of introducing legislation at an early date to render the penalties for illegal trawling of a more deterrent nature than at present.
  MR. A. GRAHAM MURRAY: The Secretary for Scotland does not at present contemplate legislation on the lines suggested by the hon. Member, but he will be glad to give fair consideration to any Bill which the hon. Member will himself suggest.

  Scottish Licensing Law.
  MR. CROMBIE: I beg to ask the Lord Advocate whether the expression excisable liquors, sometimes occurring in the Licensing Acts Consolidation (Scotland) Bill in place of intoxicating liquors in the consolidated Acts, is exactly equivalent to the latter; and will he explain why in Clause 52 intoxicating is retained, while in Clause 53 it is altered to excisable.
  MR. A. GRAHAM MURRAY: The expression "excisable liquors" occurs throughout all the Scottish Licensing
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  Acts which have been consolidated, and accordingly will be found in the corresponding sections of the Consolidation Bill. The only sections of the Bill where the expression "intoxicating liquors" is used contain provisions which were either in Acts originally confined to England but subsequently extended to Scotland, or in a public general Act such as the Intoxicating Liquors (Sale to Children) Act, 1901. While the two expressions are practically synonymous it has been thought advisable not to change the original phraseology. The discrepancy referred to in the last paragraph of the hon. Member's Question is due to a drafting error and will be corrected.

  Newport (Mon.) Education Scheme.
  MR. D. A. THOMAS: I beg to ask the Secretary to the Board of Education if he is aware that the amended scheme under the new Act submitted by the Newport Borough County Council to his Department was only adopted by the casting vote of the mayor, and in the face of strong protest; if his attention has been drawn to a communication signed by an absolute majority of the whole of the members of the Council stating that the scheme does not represent their views, and asking the Board of Education to withhold its sanction to the scheme pending its reconsideration at the next Council meeting; and whether, under the circumstances, the Board will withhold its approval.
  THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY TO THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (Sir WILLIAM ANSON,): I am aware that there is considerable difference of opinion in the Newport Town Council on the subject of the scheme submitted to the Board of Education. The Board have sanctioned the publication of the Draft Scheme in order to obtain the views of the Newport inhabitants more effectively than would otherwise be possible. Publication must precede the approval of the Board. Such approval is not given until the various appeals (if any) against a scheme have been fully considered. Any representations made by the Council in regard to the scheme at their next ordinary meeting will certainly be care-

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  fully considered by the Board before approval or disapproval of the scheme is signified.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.
SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: Will the right hon. Gentleman state the business for next week.
THE PRIME MINISTER AND FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY (Mr. A. J. BALFOUR,)Army and Navy Votes will be taken on Thursday and Monday, beginning with Army Votes 9, 15, and 16, and Navy Votes 14, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. On Tuesday the President of the Board of Agriculture will introduce the Bill of which notice has been given.

NEW BILL.
  WOMEN'S DISABILITIES (REMOVAL) BLLL.
  "To amend the franchise by the Removal of Women's Disabilities," presented by Colonel Denny; to be read a second time upon Wednesday 20th May, and to be printed. [Bill 120.]
CONSOLIDATED FUND (No. 1) BILL.
Considered in Committee, and reported, without Amendment; to be read the third time to-morrow.
NEW MEMBER SWORN.
Edward Mitchell, esquire, for the County of Fermanagh (North Fermanagh Division).

IRISH LAND BILL.
THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. WYNDHAM,): Any Minister who asks leave from this House to introduce an Irish Land Bill must claim a special measure of indulgence, and I throw myself on the indulgence of the House. The subject is technical to a degree almost beyond belief; and there is this further difficulty, that I am in this chamber attempting to address two audiences at the same time—one a comparatively small audience who are versed in all the technicalities of the subject, who have discussed them by speech and in the Press at intervals for years, and I might almost say de die in diem during the last few months; and the other a
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comparatively large audience who, in view of the nature of the technicalities, have given them a very wide berth; and yet, in our deliberate opinion, both audiences are, if not equally, still both deeply interested in any prospect of a possible solution of the land question in Ireland. The general interest has, unless rumour has misled me, been focussed latterly—perhaps unduly—upon one point in any possible solution. Now, if I am to retain the attention of those who are now present, the last thing I desire is that as each proposition is explained they should be balancing in their minds whether the proposition should be viewed in one light or the other. The point upon which interest is, perhaps unduly, focussed is whether the Government think it possible to deal successfully with the situation by the use of credit alone, or whether the Government hold that, in addition to the credit operation, there must also be some cash aid. Well, Sir, the Government think that cash aid is necessary. They think it essential or they would not embody it in the Bill; but they think it subsidiary, and they attach more importance to the credit than to the cash operation I have said this at the outset in order that the minds of those who listen to me may not stray away along the path of speculation. All I say must be viewed in the light of the statement that both operations will be employed. I wish, so far as it may be possible, to explain the proposals of the Government rather than to argue in their favour; and still less is it my desire to argue against possible alternatives. I wish very briefly to touch on the nature of the problem; then, briefly also, to gauge its extent; and, in the third place, I shall seek to delineate its shape and the broad features of any solution to be proposed. If I pass hastily over the nature of the problem and come promptly to our proposals, I would remind hon. Members that I may be excused for taking that course in view of the fact that last year I introduced a measure of a far less comprehensive character—it was just a year ago, Lady Day last year—when I did go at great length and in detail into the many reasons which at that time led the Government to hold that some drastic reform in land legislation for Ireland was imperative. Let me say now that those reasons have increased, that they have been aggravated, and that the load of liti-

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gation to which I then referred presses more heavily than it then did on the prospects of the main industry of Ireland.
Coming then, very briefly, to the nature of the problem, I maybe asked at the outset why exceptional agrarian legislation is necessary for Ireland. I may be told that land in England is bought and hired in a free market. That is true, and where that is possible it is eminently desirable. But in Ireland it is impossible; and not only because of the natural state of the case is it not possible, but because it has been prohibited by enactment after enactment passed in this House.
There is a great distinction. Why is this thing so impossible in Ireland, when it is possible in England? I will advance only two reasons. I could advance a good many if there were time. My first is an historical reason. In England our forms of land tenure are complicated, no doubt, though not nearly so complicated as in Ireland. There have been modifications of feudal services and so forth; but still it may be said that they have come down to us without any marked solution of continuity for a period of over 800 years. They depend on statutory enactments, but they are consecrated by usage which goes back beyond man's memory, or, at any rate beyond any popular memory of internecine strife. I need not elaborate the contrast. It is notorious that the case historically has been widely different in Ireland. I will only give one other reason—an economic reason—coming down to the present day. In England, I might add in Scotland, if this or that landlord or tenant unfortunately fails it the pursuit of agriculture, if agriculture as an industry is depressed throughout a whole countryside, there are avenues at hand—too enticing, some think, for the best welfare of the country—leading straight to great centres of industry or commerce. Freedom of trade and free contract in industry and commerce have reacted beneficently upon land transactions in England and in Scotland; but in Ireland that is not the case. These alternatives do not exist for all classes in Ireland, where, for the landlord as well as for the tenant, failure in agriculture means exile beyond the sea. If these distinctions exist—I do not wish to elaborate them
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further—they go far to explain, and if they go far to explain, they go far to justify, differential treatment of agrarian problems in Ireland. If the prosperity of agriculture in Ireland shrinks, it induces stresses and contractions throughout every layer of society, so that, as in geological formations, there is a tendency towards disruption and catastrophe. I have always held the view, and I hold it now, that if any illegality ensues it is the duty of any Government to make those guilty of illegalities amenable to the law. I have never hesitated to express that view or to give effect to it when, to my regret, the occasion seemed to demand it. But may we not, ought we not, to consider the possibility of alleviating these social stresses? And if we ought to do so, if that be a duty, is it not an obligation more easy of performance at a moment when unexampled events have been happening in Ireland, at a moment when testimony reaches us of a general desire, throughout all classes, all creeds, and all parties—throughout the whole community of Ireland—that some lasting basis of agrarian peace shall be found?
I have seen a suggestion which perhaps I ought to scout, and which I do scout, that this unanimity in Ireland is in part simulated; that it covers some indirect approach towards treating constitutional problems on more favourable terms. I am a Unionist, I am a member of a Unionist Government, and I believe that Ireland will always be bound by close constitutional ties to this country. But I would put it hypothetically as high as this. If Ireland, within the political limits of the Empire, occupied a constitutional position analogous to that of Canada, or, to take a more fantastic and more monstrous supposition, if the whole history of the last thousand years had been other than that which it has been, and Ireland, outside the political limits of the Empire, occupied a constitutional position, let us say, analogous to that of Egypt, I should still affirm that, in view of the geographical position of Ireland, it was to the material interest of this country that the main industry of such a neighbour should be prosperous and secure instead of, as now, precarious and decadent. Yes, I take it that that proposition, which would be true under these hypothetical circumstances, is more true under the conditions which

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exist, and is, above all, true at a time when the minds of thoughtful men are turning towards the problem of our food supply in the time of war.
Even if that be admitted in part, even if it be true that under the Union it is right that agriculture should be secured in Ireland, I may be asked how we hope to find a remedy by instituting another Land Act. I think there are forty or forty-two on the Statute-book. I admit that the number does tend to discredit in advance any renewed attempt at legislation. But if hon. Members will examine these Acts they will find that they fall into two categories—into a set of Acts dealing with the relations between landlords and tenants and a set of Acts which abolish those relations by enabling the tenant to become the owner of his holding. I do not wish to criticise the Act of 1881; but the House will find that the first set of Acts has failed of anything approaching to complete success, and that the second set of Acts, in so far as they have been applied to Ireland, have been invariably successful. Under the first set of Acts—and I think that I must make this plain to Members sitting for British constituencies who are, perhaps, not familiar with the subject—any Irish landlord or tenant may once in fifteen years apply to have the rent fixed by judicial process. It follows that these two questions, which are peculiarly unsuited to determination by process of law, namely, the amount due to the landlord by virtue of his ownership in the soil and the amount due to the tenant by virtue of his enterprise and improvements—have become in Ireland the subject of perpetual and universal litigation. The landlord puts no capital into the land; I do not think that he could be expected to do so. The tenant is tempted—we are all human—to "run out" his holding during the last three or four years of this period of fifteen years. The land is starved of capital, and it is starved of industry. I was talking not so long ago with a gentleman farmer, a class which Ireland would do well to keep and cherish, who said to me—
"Perhaps I am the only man in Ireland who does not care, Mr. Wyndham, what provisions you put into your Bill."
At the first blush that might be taken as a compliment to me, as a plenary vote of
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confidence in myself. It was not. What he said threw a light on the situation. He said—
"I happen to own 400 acres, but I have no control over them, and I take no interest in them. I happen to be the tenant of precisely the same area, 400 acres, and I take the greatest interest in the holding, making a clear profit of so much a year. A man next to me has bought, and where he is paying £1 an acre now I would willingly pay £3 an acre." "Why?" I asked. He answered, "Because he has treated the land with basic slag?" I said, "Why do you not treat your land with basic slag?" He replied, "I have every confidence in the Land Commission, but I am not such a fool as to put twenty or thirty tons of basic slag on the land if it is going to be subjected in a few years to examination by the Sub-Commissioners."
The landlords of Ireland are being ruined financially; the tenants are being ruined morally. Agriculture is starved of capital and industry. The taxpayers of this country are paying £140,000 a year for the Land Commission and £1,400,000 for the cost of the police, who are chiefly, and in many districts exclusively, engaged in dealing with illegalities born of agrarian unrest. Is it, then, so miraculous as we are asked to believe that Irish landlords and tenants should have come together and agreed to bury all ancient feuds, and that they should have come forward, with the whole community of Ireland behind them, saying, "We are prepared to do what we conceive to be our part of the contract in order to get peace if the State will give us the necessary facilities?" I do not think we need search for recondite reasons or subterranean alliances to explain so normal and so inevitable a fact as that.
Under the second set of Acts, which may be called the Purchase Acts, there has been uniform success. The State lends its credit to enable the tenant to become the owner of his holding. Nearly 80,000 tenants have bought. 73,000 have actually completed their purchases, and 6,000 applications are in the course of being dealt with. Nearly 80,000 have bought, and the State has not lost a penny. Indeed, the State cannot lose. The advance is secured in the first place cent. per cent. for the whole amount upon the value of the holding. The purchase having taken place, the purchaser does his best, instead of his worst, by the land. If he fail through either idleness or incom-

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petence he is not an object of sympathy to his neighbours. Public opinion sup ports the punctual repayment of the purchase instalments, and that is a moral security which we ought not to underestimate. But added to that moral security there is a further material security, in addition to the cent. per cent. security of the value of the land, which I will ask leave to explain. The Exchequer common to the two countries makes considerable grants in Ireland, as in England, each year for local purposes. An absolute guarantee can be obtained by providing that the total amount of repayments of instalments in any one I year from any one county shall not exceed the limit which the Exchequer considers safe and which coincides with the amount of the Exchequer grants applicable in any one year to that county. I do not know whether I have made myself plain; but it means that, in addition to the security of the land, there is the security from Exchequer contributions which you can keep in your own pocket, and I know nothing safer than that. Land purchase in Ireland is a safe credit operation, it is also a sound investment. It is a sound investment, because as the area purchased in creases the costs of the Land Courts and police decrease. By purchase the State stands to win—financially in consequence of these reductions, politically by destroying the material of despondency and discontent. At this moment an overwhelming majority of Irish landlords and Irish tenants desire that the system shall be universal.
If that be the nature of the problem, what is its size? I can only form an estimate. We have been asked to get at the money size of this problem. I have had the advantage of studying the statistics of the judicial rents fixed by the Land Commission; I have studied the statistics of the new Department of Agriculture; I have studied statistics given me by the Commissioner of Valuation and Survey; and I have studied the statistics of the last census. And I think that out of these—it is not quite easy to reconcile them—we shall get the truest guidance from the statistics of the last census, which deal with the number of agricultural holdings in Ireland and with their valuation. For this purpose
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it does not matter whether the boundaries of the particular farm, or two farms, held by a man coincide with the boundaries of those holdings which are assessed for the rates. We want to get at the money size of this problem. The valuation originally made by Griffiths—the Griffiths valuation, as it is called—has been carefully brought up to date year by year in the Department of Valuation; and since the Local Government Act for Ireland was passed, placing the rates upon the holders, they have been, I need hardly assure the House, very eager to see that no mistakes occurred. For five years they have been giving the necessary information to the Valuation Department in order that these returns should be correct. Another point which must be understood is that second-term rents in Ireland—that is to say, rents that have been twice revised—tend not only to go down to, but to go below, the valuation; so that we have the money size of the problem if we draw it on the basis of second-term rents. This is very technical, but I think it will stand examination. Now, there are 490,301 holdings given in these returns; but of that number more than half, more than 56 per cent., are valued at £10 or under, and more than two-thirds, more than 69 per cent., of these holdings are valued at £15 or under. You may take these 490,000 holdings at a sort of average of £10, and from them you must make these deductions. You must deduct, in the first place, between 70,000 and 80,000 tenants who have bought. You must deduct, in the second place, a number of small town plots, accommodation plots, and market-gardens, which are urban and not rural at all. You must deduct a great deal for large grass farms, on what are called English managed estates, and which, in my opinion, in all probability will never be sold, and farms which go beyond the limit of £3,000, which is the outside limit of what we are prepared to advance under this Act, as it was under previous Acts. If you make these deductions, I think it is a safe estimate to say that the money size of this problem is £4,000,000 worth of second-term rents in any one year. That is an elliptical argument, it is a speculative argument, and I am afraid it is an argument that cannot very readily be followed. I give it to show that we have

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done our best to gauge the money size of the problem.
Let me pass from the size of the problem to its shape. Partly because of the historic and economic causes to which I referred in the beginning of my speech, we find embarrassing features in the present system of land tenure. There are many paramount interests which claim attention. When I first undertook this task I was disposed to brush all these difficulties upon one side, and to believe that they were largely the figments of a legal brain. But it is not so. They are there, and they have to be dealt with. In Ireland large grants of land were made—a county, or more than two counties, to a public institution, or to the general of an Army. There have been subdivisions, and in smaller-sizes this land has been granted out again; and so on until there are two and three, and in some cases even four, of these superior interests, first charges on the produce of the land, before you get to the person whom we call the landlord, and who, we hope, will sell under this Act. But how can he do it under the existing Acts if he is to redeem all these first charges? That redemption, apart from the amount of money which it involves, is a very costly legal process, so he is arrested. Many landlords with these paramount interests above them, even if they wish to sell, cannot sell without walking into the workhouse. Well, although these paramount interests are first charges on the land, and are secure, and must be redeemed at the proper figure, the landlord, as we call him, beneath them, has sometimes become a caretaker, kept there because the owners of the paramount interests do not care to set up machinery for managing land which they have not at their disposal. Although the landlords are kept in that position, still, year by year, a number of these landlords surrender to the owners of these superior interests. Nor is that the end of all these embarrassments and complications. Between the person whom we call the landlord and the occupier of the soil you have one or two intervening. We want to get at the occupier of the soil to enable him to purchase an economic holding upon which a man and his family can main-
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tain themselves. Well, it is difficult in the worst parts of Ireland. Perhaps I ought not to dwell on the worst parts of Ireland; but in the worst part of Ireland there is a state of affairs which no hon. Member who has not been there could conceive for a moment to be possible. Last autumn I was in the uttermost parts of the West. The whole countryside had been granted by a charter of King Charles I. to some great family which has died out, and it had passed, I suppose, during the prosperous years of last century to some shopkeeper who had made money. But the present landlord is in the workhouse, maintained there for eleven months of the year by the rates paid by his tenants. He was bankrupt, and the tenants were living in conditions which you would not find amongst the Kaffirs in South Africa. We have felt that it is our duty, if we can, to remedy this state of affairs. That estate has been in the Bankruptcy Court for thirty years; we hold that it ought to come out of the Bankruptcy Court. We ought to begin to build up the agrarian situation in Ireland from the bottom. Some system of village communities seems in the West of Ireland to have decayed, and at some stage in this decay to have become fossilized. So, if it were not a contradiction in terms, you might say it was at once rotten and rigid. And these are the two classes whom we have doomed to perpetual litigation. The shape of this problem—I pass from that—has impressed itself deeply upon the Conference Report.
It is not possible to go the whole length, or anything like the whole length, of the recommendations in that Report.
We make the following proposals. Whilst withdrawing no rights that at present exist, whilst allowing individual bargains, subject to minute, costly, and prolonged inspection, to go on, if it so pleases the persons in particular cases, we contemplate and we provide that purchase in the future shall, in the vast majority of cases, proceed by the sale of estates. We draw a distinction between estates presenting the problem of congestion in an acute form and ordinary estates. I will revert to the problem of congestion—it is a separate matter—later on. I wish now

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to explain the general policy of the Bill, applicable, as we believe, to some five-sixths of Ireland. In view of a strong recommendation of the Conference Report, and recommendations which have also reached me from many independent and authoritative sources, we provide that a landlord may make his own arrangements with his tenants if these arrangements fall within the limits of the policy in this Bill. They may, if I may so put it, make a comprehensive arrangement and show it up for sanction. This does not obviate the necessity of appointing Estates Commissioners to supervise such a transaction and to conclude it. These officers will be appointed. Their functions will not be judicial, they will be administrative. Being administrative, they will be performed under the general control of the Government, and, through the Minister responsible to this House—the Secretary of the day—they will be open to criticism in this House. An estate does not necessarily mean, nor indeed ought it to mean, all the property owned by a landlord. I have seen it stated that we propose to expropriate Irish landlords and to leave Ireland without the benefit of their residence there. But the policy of the Government and the policy of those who signed the Conference Report was to make it possible for Irish landlords to remain in Ireland and be the leaders of the agricultural industry in that country. An estate does not mean all the property owned by a landlord; it does mean an area which, whether taken alone or in conjunction with untenanted land added to it, when it is expedient so to do in order to remove grave economic blemishes, can be dealt with as a whole, so that those blemishes are removed. It would not be right for us to ask the House to authorise the purchase of a bad fringe of property—of a number of small holdings—and to leave the rest in the hands of the owner, unless adequate facilities are given which will enable us to make the holdings purchased a good and sound security to the State. We propose that this transaction shall be based upon a second-term rental—based upon the amount of rents which have been revised a second time. But only a minority of rents have been fixed twice in Ireland. I think only some 80,000 rents
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in Ireland have been fixed a second time. If we postpone dealing with the other rents—with rents which have only been fixed once—why, we should defeat our policy of increasing the pace of voluntary purchase, and we should defeat our policy of dealing with whole areas—we should have a patch work result.
If we sought to reduce first-term rents to second-term rents now, before the time comes, some judicial process would be necessary, and we should have all the old delay, all the old costs, and all the old acrimony attaching to judicial procedure. We feel that the reduction of first-term rents to second-term rents should be compassed in the bargain made between the parties, but we lay down certain limits within which those bargains should be made. We have found it impracticable to make these limits rigid—to say that rents of this character are to be considered as first-term rents, and that rents of such another character are to be considered as second-term rents. There are cases which will occur to hon. Members who are familiar with Ireland. Take the case of a landlord who has never put his tenants to the trouble of litigation, whose tenants, although they might for twenty-two years have gone into Court, never have done so. It is clear that rents of that kind are presumptive second-term rents, and we allow them to be so considered and placed in the second-term rent category. There are other cases where first-term rents have been agreed to and registered, where the landlord has given a voluntary abatement in years of depression which he has never resumed, and where the tenants have never gone into Court. Such a rent is clearly a second-term rent, and where the agreement so provides, and where the Estates Commissioners think it equitable, such rents may be removed from the category of first-term rents and placed in the category of second-term rents. If the purchase agreement leads to the instalment to be paid to the State being lower by a certain percentage than the rent which the tenant is paying at the time of his agreement, then we say that such bargains are to be confirmed as, of course, by that method we get rid of all the cost and delay which attaches to

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the method now in use; and we hold that that reduction should be sufficient to be an absolute safeguard to the Exchequer of this country, which advances the money. It may also have a reflex action on the views of the tenant as to the desirability of purchasing; but from the point of view of the whole country and of the national Exchequer a reduction is necessary if a man is going to enter into a long bargain with the State. If he had not entered into a long bargain with the State, and there were two or three inclement years, he might—he does—get from the landlord an abatement on those years, but now he enters into a long transaction, and from the outset it must be of a safe and secure character for the State. The limit of reductions within which these bargains are permitted, and which may for convenience be called zones of reduction, are as follows: For second-term rents and analogous rents put into the second-term category, the Conference Report urged that the reduction should lie between fifteen and twenty-five per cent. But circumstances alter a great deal in different parts of Ireland, and we are trying, as far as we can, to provide for the rarer cases both at the top and the bottom of the scale. Therefore we maintain the same mean of twenty per cent., but we say that the limits of this zone shall be between ten and thirty per cent. For the other zone, the first-term rents and rents analogous to first-term rents, we say the limits of reduction of the instalment to be paid to the State below the rate now paid shall be between ten per cent and forty per cent. Some may be shocked at a reduction of forty per cent., but I could not recommend it to the House for one moment unless the Bill embodied a provision that in cases where it is fair to do so the rent may be removed from the first-term rent category and put in the category of second-term rents. These limits have not been arrived at without long and careful consideration. 80,000 tenants in Ireland have bought under the Act of 1896. A man who has given what has been considered a fair price hitherto, about twenty years' purchase, receives in consequence of that Act a reduction of thirty-one per cent.
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after ten years, and forty-one per cent. after twenty years. The State cannot enter into bargains with a greater number of the tenantry of Ireland lasting over a long period and leave these great discrepancies. The fact that between 70,000 and 80,000 men have now purchased, and within a few years will have this reduction, makes it, in our opinion, a matter of importance to deal with this question now, and not leave it untouched much longer. At what rate, then, will annuities be calculated? A tenant now pays £4 for every £100 of advance. If he avails himself, as a great majority of them do, as almost all do, of the decadal reductions provided for by the Act of 1896—the Exchequer does not get its last penny back for seventy-two and a half years. That is the present situation. The capital repaid during a period of ten years is written off, and the debt stands again. At the end of another ten years a further sum is written off, and again at the end of another ten years. The tenant now pays four per cent., and by the method of decadal reductions it is, seventy-two and a half years before the whole debt is repaid. We abolish these decadal reductions, and we say that subject to an important modification, the nature and reasons for which I will state later on, the period shall be sixty-eight and a half years. The reasons for the change are that two dangers have been found to attach to the creation of a peasant proprietary, viz., the sub-division of the holdings so created and the mortgaging of the holdings. In Continental countries where the State has aided in the creation of a peasant proprietary it has been found that after a period of years the local money-lender has come upon the scene and has been the person who has mainly benefitted. We introduce into this Bill stringent provisions against sub-division and against mortgaging; but in our opinion these prohibitions would be futile, and the whole of our policy would be frustrated, if the local money-lender were at liberty in the first year of distress to buy up fifteen or twenty of the mortgaged holdings grouped together and repay the whole of the money outstanding to the Treasury, and then proceed, as if nothing had happened, to create rack rents and middlemen's profits as

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though no Land Act had been passed, and not actuated, as the old order of landlords have always been actuated, by a true consideration of the neighbours amongst whom they lived. The only safeguard is to make a portion of the annuity permanent. If a portion is made permanent that cannot be done. If the moneylender buys such holdings he is paying a portion annually to the State, and he is subject to the provisions against subdivision and against mortgaging. If in the course of thirty years time it is found that these dangers are illusory we can always permit the redemption of that perpetual rent charge, but if we do not impose it at the outset it never could be imposed later on. I now come to the rate of repayment. Seven-eighths of the annuity to be repaid by the tenant purchaser will stand for repayment at 3¼ per cent., £2 15s. for interest and 10s. for sinking fund. The remaining one-eighth of the annuity will stand for interest on the irredeemable portion at £2 15s. Let me apply this rate to the zones of reduction; the superior limit, the mean, and the inferior limit of the reduction on second-term rents. Take the superior limit, a rent of £100. The tenant would be paying £90 a year as his instalment to the State, and that would be for an advance of £2,832. Take the mean limit, a tenant paying £80 in instalments per annum to the Exchequer, being 20 per cent. less than his old rent—that would stand for an advance of £2,517. Take the inferior limit of a tenant paying £70, or a reduction of £30 on the old rent—that would stand for an advance of £2,203. Then let me take the second zone, the first-term rents. Take the inferior limit of 40 per cent. reduction, the purchaser paying £60 instead of £100. That would stand for an advance of £1,888. Incidentally that gives a greater latitude for a bargain to be arrived at, but our object in making this change was administrative, to provide against the danger of sub-division and mortgaging, and of these holdings being bought up and then treated as if no Land Act had ever been passed. In the forefront of this Bill we encourage the landlords and the tenantry to make their own bargains, the landlord to employ his
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own solicitor or agent and merely to come to us for sanction. But there are cases where difficulties have to be decided in regard to disputes as to turbary and other easements, and in these cases where the landlord cannot be fairly asked to conclude his bargain himself, where he is held out for one or two years in composing his disputes, we permit the alternative provided in the Bill of last year—that the Estate Commissioners may purchase an estate from the landlords; but, of course, the price must be estimated within the limits of this Bill, and the instalment must fall within the zone of reductions, and, in respect of untenanted land the price must be estimated in accordance with the portion of this Bill in respect of untenanted land. The Estate Commissioners may not purchase unless three-fourths of the tenants in number and value agree to it, but it may occur—I have known cases in which it does occur—that a holding of one tenant is worth all the rest of the estate put I together, and therefore we must have a dispensing and discretionary power if necessary. In these cases the Estate Commissioners may, with the approval of the Government and the Treasury, purchase without the consent of three fourths of the tenants. After purchase the rights of the tenants under the Bent Fixing Act revive and remain intact until the majority have actually purchased their holdings; but when the majority have purchased, the minority lose their rights under the Rent-Fixing Act. I come now to our provision for dealing with untenanted land. We have first the actual tenant on an existing holding which is sold to him, but some of these holdings ought not to be sold unless they are increased in size; and in the neighbourhood of estates there are congested populations which ought to be dealt with. We, therefore, say that untenanted land may be added to the holdings which are uneconomic-owing to their small size. Such new holdings, created from untenanted land, may be sold under the Bill to tenants on an estate, the sons of tenants on an estate, tenants in the neighbourhood whose holdings are less than ten acres and £5 annual value, and to any person who within twenty-five years before the passing of this Act was the tenant of such a holding. But the amount of laud and

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the amount of credit available are not unlimited, and we wish to relieve congestion in its worst forms; but if that be so, those holdings so created need not and ought not to be of extravagant size. We therefore say that in respect of these new manufactured or created holdings we will only advance a total amount of £500 from the State in any county of which a part is congested. That limit is rigid in a county in which no part is scheduled as a congested district. In a congested county it may in certain circumstances be extended from £500 to £1,000; and that is proper because the size of farms varies through different districts of Ireland. In Monaghan, for example, and in other counties a holding worth £500 would be conspicuously less than the standard of farm prevailing in the district. In the West of Ireland it would be a fair holding. This Bill has created many expectations, and among others among persons who own a great deal of untenanted land in the West of Ireland, where it is most needed if we are to deal with the problems of congestion; and several persons have shown a disposition lately to create holdings on the off chance that the credit of the Exchequer will be placed at their disposal. We therefore provide that the same limit, not more than £500, shall be advanced by the State for any holding which has been created since March 1st of this year. I come now to the owner. We adopt a provision in the Bill of last year and extend it. To an owner advances may be made up to one-third of the aggregate value of the estate, or £20,000, whichever is least. We authorise the Estates Commissioners and Congested Districts Board to purchase an estate in the Land Judge's Court, for the sale of which an absolute order has been made; we authorise the Estates Commissioners to purchase untenanted land for the purposes on which I have touched, subject to the proviso that the amount of land in respect of which no undertaking to purchase has been made, which is vested in the Estates Commissioners, shall at no one time exceed the estimated value of £5,000,000; and we authorise the sale of untenanted land to trustees, to be held for the benefit of communities of small holders, for the purpose of turbary, pasturage, the preservation of existing woods, and the creaton of new
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plantations. I ought not to dwell at greater length on the administrative provisions of the Bill, but if any question arises I can answer it now.
MR. JOHN REDMOND: The right hon. Gentleman knows that I would not interrupt him if I did not think it important for the convenience of the House. Before the right hon. Gentleman leaves this portion of the Bill I would ask him whether he is in a position to give us the names of the Commissioners who are to carry out the provisions of the Bill. It is manifest how much depends on the constitution of this tribunal.
MR. WYNDHAM: It is unusual, perhaps unprecedented, to accede to such a request on the First Reading of the Bill; but I do not wish to stand on points of precedent, if it is understood that I am not creating a precedent. I feel that the situation is itself somewhat unprecedented. I know that this Bill will be examined in Ireland during the Easter recess, and that it would be almost absurd on my part to refuse to communicate the names during that recess and so I had better do it now. These gentlemen are prepared to serve, and their names will be recommended; we have not got beyond that point—the Right Hon. Frederick S. Wrench, Land Commissioner, and member of the Privy Council of Ireland. Mr. Wrench is not only a Land Commissioner, he is also a member of the Congested Districts Board, and he has therefore been brought into close touch with one portion of the work which the Estates Commissioners will have to do. He has been a Land Commissioner since 1887, and he has given me invaluable assistance during the last two years in studying and dealing with the land problem. The second Estates Commissioner will be Michael Finucane, Esq., C.S.I., Commissioner of the Presidency of Bengal. He is an Irishman; he has worked under the present Under-Secretary for Ireland, and his assistance and services I can only describe in terms of the highest praise. Mr. Finucane served under Sir Antony MacDonnell in India from 1873 to 1886, and at intervals since; he was Director of Agriculture under him in Bengal, and was decorated for his services during the famine in

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1896–97. The third Estates Commissioner is William F. Bailey, Esq., legal assistant commissioner in the Land Commission. He has much experience of work in all parts of Ireland, and I may say that he has prepared a very interesting report on the present state of those who have already purchased under the Act, which will be laid before the House either to-day or to-morrow. Having acceded to the hon. and learned Member's request, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I pass very rapidly from any further points of administration?
MR. McCRAE: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman, before he leaves the administrative part, whether he has made any approximate estimate of the cost to the State, taking the average of the reductions he has mentioned.
MR. WYNDHAM: I think the hon. Member will see that he is anticipating the very step which I propose to take, which was to pass from the administrative to the financial provisions of the Bill. I should have liked to explain the provisions of the Bill dealing with congestion in the congested districts, but I recognise that I ought not to ask the whole audience to listen to all these matters. I will ask them to take it from me that we enlarge the credit of the Congested Districts Board by £1,250,000 for purchasing untenanted land. That will add to the working capital of the Congested Districts Board, who, abandoning a policy of buying a few estates here and there and trying to sell them as quickly as possible, will adopt a policy whereby a number of estates will be bought, the tenants being expected to do something to work out their own salvation. I come to the end, then, of these administrative provisions. When they are examined I venture to hope it will be conceded that we have done something, even that we have done much, to arrest the decay of Irish agriculture, and staunch the fatal stream of emigration.
I come now to finance. Advances are now made in Ireland in land stock. There are many objections to that medium. A fluctuating and unstable medium is the very worst when you have bargains which are preceded by months, and sometimes
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years, of tentative negotiation; and we must bear in mind that, I am afraid, the majority of Irish estates are somewhat heavily encumbered. It may be said that if land stock is down the landlord can realise and put into other securities which may be sympathetically depressed; but that will not help him to extinguish his mortgage, which, of course, must be redeemed with cash or its equivalent. So advances in Ireland will in future be made, not in stock, but in cash. To raise cash for the advances to be made in Ireland the Treasury will direct the creation of a new capital stock, to be sailed Guaranteed 2¾ per Cent. Stock. That stock will not be redeemable for thirty years. It is, as I think I have proved to the House, morally certain that a dividend of 2¾ per cent. and a sinking fund of 10s. on, roughly, seven-eighths of this stock will be always forthcoming from the instalments to be paid by the purchasers in Ireland. But it is mathematically certain that, in rare cases of default, and there have been only two irrecoverable debts in Ireland in the last twelve years, interest and sinking fund will be forthcoming from the guarantee fund. That fund has been explained in the earlier portion of my remarks; it depends on the Exchequer contributions, which go from the common Exchequer to local purposes in Ireland. If our proposals are adopted the amount of those Exchequer contributions going to Ireland in any one year will be £2,548,460. Now, as we have lowered the instalments from £4 to practically £3 5s., the amount of credit available is larger than it was when the instalments were £4. Then we could only have so many sums of £4 to add together, which amounted to the Exchequer contribution for the year; but when the instalments are practically £3 5s. it is clear that there are more sums of that amount to be added together than there were sums of £4. In effect, whereas when the instalments were £4 in order to find the amount for which you had ample security you had to multiply by twenty-five, because twenty-five, is a fourth part of a hundred, now we multiply the £2,548,460 by thirty. It will be found, under the principle now embodied by Acts of Parliament, which allows you with the Treasury's sanction to double the amount, having 150 per cent. security instead of 200 per cent. security, that there is available for such

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advances £152,907,960, secured on Irish land and on Exchequer advances to Ireland. Even the most sanguine estimate of the amount which is necessary in order to sell all the saleable land in Ireland does not exceed, in my opinion, £100,000,000; but there is a margin. I have named £150,000,000 as the amount which can be charged on the Exchequer contributions from this country to Ireland in respect of operations which, during twelve years, have exhibited only two cases upon which it has been necessary to come to the Guarantee Fund at all to meet irrecoverable debts. Apart from the security of the holding, the security is ample, and more than ample, but this operation must be undertaken with due and jealous regard to the national credit. The date for the commencement of the Bill is November 1st, so that in no case can we come to the City to endeavour to float a loan until the winter of this year. Nor is that all. We shall not come suddenly for large sums. I say emphatically that it will be neither financially prudent nor administratively possible to expand these operations at a pace so high as to make us come to the City for more than £5,000,000 in any one of the first three years after the passing of this Bill. It could not be done. You could not expect to raise, or if you could raise you could not expect profitably to employ, a larger amount than £5,000,000 in any one of the first three years, and you would not come to the City to ask for money until after November 1st. After three years, in my opinion, it will be possible and desirable to mend the pace. We ought to be able after three years so to mend the pace, as far as we are concerned, as to enable all saleable land to be sold in the course of some fifteen years.
It will be seen, Sir, that we have shifted the stock operations from Ireland to the London market. That transfer involves difficulties very great but not insuperable. Let me illustrate. I said but a moment ago that there had been only two irrecoverable debts in Ireland. Yes, but although there were only two irrecoverable debts in Ireland sums of money belonging to Ireland had been charged with a loss of £70,000,
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accruing solely from the discrepancy between the dates of the quarterly dividends on the stock and the date of the half yearly instalments for repayment. If your dividend day comes first, you have got to find the dividends. How are you to find them? You must find them out of the Guarantee Fund. Therefore, although there have been only two irrecoverable debts in respect of land purchase in Ireland, the Guarantee Fund in Ireland has found £70,000 to meet losses due to these, discrepancies in the dates. That is not the only difficulty which attaches to the stock operation. There may, in the earlier years there must almost inevitably, be losses due to the issue of an amount of stock which is temporarily in excess of the amount of cash you are prepared to advance in Ireland. It is clear that you may have delays due perhaps to some solicitor who has not attended to his duty as he might do, and the sale which you thought might be completed in October is not, as a matter of fact, completed until December. In that case you have to pay your dividend on the stock which has been issued, although you do not get the repayments at the early date which you anticipated would be the case. Then in the third place it is anticipated there will be losses due to issuing such a stock below par. How do we meet this threefold difficulty? We meet it in this way. Last year this House voted an annual sum of £1,400,000 to a purely English purpose, namely, that of education in this country, and we may say that in strict accordance with precedents which have been observed we now owe to Ireland, or Ireland really possesses at this moment in equity, an annual sum of £185,000. The losses which may be due to the discrepancy in the dates, and the losses which may be due to flotation in temporary excess of the amount underwritten in Ireland, will be covered by placing upon this money, which is not British but Irish money, a first charge of £50,000 during each one of the first four years. To meet the difficulty of a loss accruing from issuing your stock below par this Irish money will also be charged with the repayment of any additional stock which you have to

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issue. Supposing we want £5,000,000 of cash for advances in Ireland, and that you issue your loans, let us say, at ninety-five. [An HON. MEMBER: Eighty.] Well, my hon. friend is perhaps good at mental arithmetic and can do the sum off-hand with any figure. I prefer to do it in this way. If you issue your stock at ninety-five, in order to raise £5,000,000 you would have to issue a face value of £5,263,168 in stock. That £263,168 will be repaid out of this Irish money by a three-and a-quarter per cent. rate extending over sixty-eight and a half years. If you issue your stock at ninety-five, the amount necessary to repay interest and sinking fund would in each year be about £8,500, so that that does not present a great difficulty from the Irish point of view, this new charge being placed on new money—money which belongs as certainly, as surely, and as equitably to Ireland as the £1,400,000 voted last year belongs to England. Upon that Irish money will also be charged the added income given to the Congested Districts Board for working capital, an addition of £20,000 to be employed in the improvement of estates. I ought to say that we have tried to make a fair bargain, and if this stock is ever issued above par, then the premiums, of course, will go back to Ireland.
I pass now to one other matter—to the matter alluded to at the beginning of my remarks. We hold that the many embarrassments attaching to land purchase in Ireland, the redemption of paramount interests, the cost of such redemption, the sudden diminution of of income, in the case of a tenant for life, and the fact that seven-tenths of the Irish estates are held under complicated wills and settlements drawn, in a form which has become obsolete in this country—we hold that these difficulties and embarrassments, upon which I could talk at great length, present obstacles which in our opinion would defeat our policy, unless in addition to the credit operation we were prepared to add some cash. We think the justification for adding cash aid is to be found in these complicated legal embarrassments which up to this moment have stopped Irish land purchase in every case, except in the cases of men with other interests and other resources, who have sold their Irish
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property to be rid of it, or in the cases of the few who, when Land Stock stood at 111, took advantage of it. We therefore say that we ought to give cash aid as it may be needed, up to a limit of £12,000,000. In view of the difficulty of the problem in Ireland we hold that I such aid ought to be available as it is needed. If the sale of all saleable land is to be carried through in fifteen years, it is clear that the whole of this additional money will be needed in fifteen years. So that in view of the situation in Ireland this money must be available as it is needed, but in view of the situation in this country, in view of the importance of economy, and of not overloading the Estimates, in view of the absolute necessity that charges which cannot be anticipated shall not suddenly be placed on the Estimates, we have so provided that the maximum charge in any one year upon the Estimates shall not and cannot exceed £390,000. That charge will be slowly worked up to. Additional stock will be issued. Supposing that you require to issue £3,000,000 of stock in order to make cash advances in Ireland, and that you can take this grant at twelve per cent., you will require a further amount of stock. You will issue that, and that additional amount of stock, issued in order to raise money for this grant as it may be needed, will be paid for by a Vote on the Estimates at 3¼ per cent. Supposing land purchase takes fifteen years, it is evident that you will not reach the maximum of £390,000 for fifteen years. The first year a very small amount will be placed on the Estimates, and that amount will gradually increase until in fifteen years, if the operation takes fifteen years, or in thirty years, if the operation takes thirty years, you will reach a sum of £390,000. Supposing it takes fifteen years then the repayment of the total amount will extend over eighty-three years, and during the last fifteen years of those eighty-three years the £390,000 will be diminishing from that figure to nothing. As a set off to that, the Irish Government undertakes, not hastily but after the most careful examination of the Estimates in Ireland, forthwith to establish reductions amounting to £250,000 a year at a minimum estimate. And note that whereas £390,000 comes slowly on the Estimate the reduction of £250,000 ought to be reached in five

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years, so that we shall have effected an economy of £250,000 a year, years before the grant has reached the sum of £250,000. The immediate effect of this Bill will be a reduction of Irish Estimates. I would ask hon. Members who do not sit for Irish constituencies to bear the figure in mind. Finance is not a very engrossing subject, but it happens to be the one which is of fundamental importance in this Bill. The immediate effect of this aid grant will be a reduction, and not an increase of the Irish Estimates. But I wish to point out to hon. Members who do not sit for Irish constituencies that whereas during the last six years there has been an increase of 18 per cent. in the civil Government charges in England, there has been a decrease of 1·6 per cent. upon civil Government charges in Ireland. In fact we have been as economical as we can, and have effected a large saving in the last few years. I never fill up a post that is not required. I may say that I believe that the settlement of the land question in Ireland is vital to Ireland, and that Ireland is well advised to save money in other matters in the hope of settling this question. If there have been these effective economies in the past, and if they are going to be greater in the future, may not we come into this House on a Unionist basis and say, "May not these economies be used for that object which we prize above all others, the settlement of the land question?" As to the allocation of such a grant, we hold that of all the difficulties to which I have referred, only one proposition can safely be asserted, namely, that they press far more heavily on the small than on the large estates. We therefore say that such aid to meet those legal difficulties ought to be calculated on the purchase price, but paid to the vendor, and that the amount of it shall be graduated inversely on the purchase price. We start with 15 per cent. on an estate worth £5,000 or less, we get to 10 per cent. on an estate worth £20,000 or less, and to the minimum of 5 per cent. on estates which fetch more than £40,000. I thank the House for the great patience with which they have listened to me. I shall ill repay
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them if I attempt to summarise, how ever briefly, the administrative provisions of the Bill, but for the convenience of those who may follow me in the debate I will in three sentences recapitulate the three broad features of our finance, for finance is the whole basis of this Bill: it is the foundation on which the whole superstructure is erected. In the first place there is an operation of pure credit. We say to Ireland, "For an object which we all agree in thinking vital to your prosperity, money shall be forthcoming, guaranteed by the Common Exchequer, at 2¾ per cent. and the period of redemption shall be extended to sixty-eight and a half years. "We say to the general taxpayer, so that the credit of the Empire may not be depreciated by this operation, "We shall not come suddenly for large sums, we shall not in any one of the first three years come for more than £5,000,000, and the whole of this credit operation is secured on the value of Irish land, and in addition is mathematically secured on the sums you send across to Ireland and which, if need be, you can keep in your pockets." The second broad feature is a mixed operation of credit and of cash. We say to Ireland, "Because £1,400,000 was voted last year in perpetuity for a purely English purpose, we owe to Ireland £185,000 a year and we intend to pay that debt, and we hold it to be Irish money. We charge all losses that may be incidental to the first credit operation, losses on flotation below par, losses on discrepancies between dates, cost of flotation in excess of the amount immediately underwritten, we charge all this absolutely upon this Irish fund.' Then in the third place, we come to a cash operation. We say that in view of the legal embarrassments, which up to this moment have defeated the Unionist policy of land purchase carried on by Unionist Governments now for seventeen or eighteen years, and let me do justice to Mr. Bright also who first put forward the "Bright Clause"—we say that to meet the legal embarrassments which have checked and impeded our policy, sums up to a limit of £12,000,000 shall be available as required. We say to the British taxpayer that this charge will not be imposed suddenly on the Estimates, but will be gradually reached with a maximum of £390,000 a year, which will not be reached for fifteen years. That charge will be tem

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porary, and as against it we offer at an early date effective economies amounting to £250,000 which will last for ever. Last autumn I said in a rash moment I would endeavour to play the part of "honest broker" between Irish tenants, Irish landlords, and the general taxpayer. It is not a very easy part to play, and I may very well have failed. I can only say I have honestly tried. Such, Mr. Speaker, in outline, are our proposals. We submit them to the examination of the House. I deprecate a hasty judgment—even a favourable judgment—until hon. Members in all quarters of the House, for all quart era are interested, have had an ample opportunity of studying the Bill in which these proposals are embodied. Some may say that Irish tenants who cannot purchase immediately will prove restive; or that Irish landlords will make a point of refusing to sell one acre of untenanted land which is needed and is essential if we are to deal with the problem of congestion. I do not believe it. I believe that Irish landlords and tenants will continue to act in the charitable and reasonable spirit of the Conference Report. If high hopes are to be defrauded, the failure will not be due to the Irish landlord or to the Irish tenant. It will not, I dare to prophesy, be due to the general taxpayer or his representatives in this House; for they appreciate now, and will appreciate still more clearly the magnitude of an opportunity which is unexampled, and which may never recur. Nor assuredly will it be due to any member of the public service in Ireland, who for many months have devoted themselves heart and soul to co-operating with me in this attempt. Failure, if failure there is to be, will be due to my own shortcomings in framing the Bill, for, Sir, this opportunity has enlisted an army of supporters from many sources, including some among the most unexpected. And, yet, why should I say that support from any source is unexpected? There are two alternatives before us. We can prolong for another 100 years, for another 150 years, a tragedy which is none the less, which is indeed the more tragic because it is thin and long drawn out. Or we can to-day initiate, and henceforth
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prosecute, a business transaction occupying some fifteen years, based in common with all sound and hopeful transactions upon the self esteem, the probity, and mutual good-will of all concerned. Sir, I believe this thing will be done. All interests—landlord and tenant, Nationalist and Unionist, British and Irish, can hope for no tolerable issue to any view, constitutional, political, economic, which they severally may cherish until, by settling the Irish Land Question, we achieve social reconciliation in Ireland. Sir, I beg to move for leave to introduce the Bill.
MR. JOHN REDMOND: In the few remarks I have to make on the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, I hope, as far as it is possible, to imitate the tone of his speech, because, whatever view we may take as to the merits of the proposals he has put before the House, I think everybody will admit that the tone of that speech was the tone of a man who realised the gravity of the situation in Ireland, and who was anxious to make a sincere attempt to grapple with it. I hope I can truthfully say I have never risen in this House to speak with such feeling of embarrassment and with such feeling of responsibility. The right hon. Gentleman did not indeed exaggerate the gravity of the problem with which he has attempted to deal. I listened with the greatest pleasure to the words in which he impressed upon non-Irish Members of this House the gravity of this great social question, which, until it is settled, undoubtedly will prevent Ireland advancing on the road of prosperity, and will prevent any permanent peace or contentment in that country. No words could exaggerate the enormous gravity of this problem, or of its urgency. I feel most keenly the responsibility which rests on me, the responsibility lest I should say something which would be taken as a want of appreciation on my part of those portions of the speech, and the proposals which seem to me well-intentioned and valuable, and lest on the other hand any words of mine should be taken as meaning I was giving here, on the spur of the moment, anything in the nature of a judgment on the merits of other portions of the speech and proposals, which, for the moment, do not commend themselves to my mind. The

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situation in which I speak is a somewhat strange one. Some months ago the Irish people were told that no British Government could settle this Irish Land question, that this settlement must come from an agreement between the landlords and the tenants, and the Conference which was recently held was promoted, instigated, and approved by the Government. In other words we were asked to give our advice on this question. And yet it is true that until to-day neither the representatives of the Irish landlords at that Conference, or outside it, nor the representatives of the Irish tenants were put into possession of the main features of these proposals. I do not dwell upon that by way of complaint. The right hon. Gentleman may have had his reasons, but it creates a strange situation, and it certainly creates a situation in which it is impossible for me to offer to the House anything at all in the nature of a mature judgment upon any single point. No man can question that the proposals now before the House are an enormous advance on the proposals put forward on this same question this time last year. I therefore have to congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the fact that he is in possession of sufficiently increased power upon this question to put forward proposals of an entirely different character, proposals which aim really at a settlement of the question, in place of proposals such as those of last year, which would not have led to a settlement of this question at all.
The fact that the Government have proposed this bonus of £12,000,000 to assist this settlement is an indication that they are desirous of settling this question, and have made up their minds to deal in a courageous manner with it. I recognise fully, that although the right hon. Gentleman has to my mind made out a conclusive case to satisfy the misgivings of the British taxpayer, that he will make no loss, but a good bargain, still I do think if the Government did not believe by this means they would be able to make a settlement of this question, they would not in the financial circumstances of the country at this moment, and with the other claims pressing on the taxpayer, have made the proposal at all. Therefore I take this proposal as an indication of the
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sincerity of the desire of the Government to provide a settlement of the Irish land question. All those who are interested in Ireland must feel intensely gratified at the way in which the suggestion of this bonus has been received by the representatives of all parties in this country. The debate which took place on the Address went entirely upon this point, and on the supposition that the bonus was to be much larger than as a matter of fact has been proposed. That debate led to an expression of opinion from all sides of this House, and from the public Press of this country which certainly was gratifying to us, and which strengthened the position of the Government. I offer absolutely no opinion as to whether this bonus is sufficient for the purpose. I reserve absolutely the expression of any definite opinion at all. But I am justified at any rate in congratulating the Government on the main proposal, and in taking it as an indication of their being in earnest in this matter.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I confess myself in some difficulty in dealing with this question; my criticism must be rather in the nature not of censure, of praise or blame, but rather in the nature of interrogatory. In the first place I am not satisfied in my own mind that the bonus should be distributed in inverse ratio to the amount of the purchase money. The object I take it of the Government is to give the greatest amount of relief to the man who needs it most, but it does not follow because the estate is small and the purchase money is small that it is a poor estate. There are many estates in the West of Ireland where the rental is considerable, £10,000 or £20,000 a year. In those cases the landlords who would sell would get very little indeed, but on the other hand an estate might be let out to a number of small tenants, each paying £2 or £3 a year rent, but it does not follow that that is a poor estate. Therefore I say the system of distribution of the bonus will have to be most carefully considered, and at the present moment I am not convinced that the Bill will carry out the object the Government has in view. There is another point—by this system of distribution the small bonus will be given to the large landlord. The number of these large landlords may be small, but

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they have a very large number of tenants; and for the settlement of this land question it is essential that these estates should be brought into the market. Then again, the right hon. Gentleman is going to make a perpetual rent-charge on the land of one-eighth. The object he has in view in reserving that rent-charge is one that every man must approve—it is essential that precautions should be taken to prevent sub-division and sale and mortgage, otherwise in a generation or two Ireland will find herself in as bad, or a worse condition than at the present moment. But I cannot conceive why in order to achieve the object the right hon. Gentleman has in view it is necessary to reserve as much as one-eighth—it seems to me that any reservation, however small, would be sufficient to give the Government this power to prevent re-sale and mortgage. We should very seriously consider this matter, because if in trying to prevent this evil we take away from the Irish people the sense of absolute ownership, we shall do much to defeat the object we have at heart, and injure the chances of the successful working of the Bill. Therefore I would press strongly on the right hon. Gentleman to reconsider this question, with the view to the reservation of a rent charge less than one-eighth.
With regard to the administration—of course the success of any measure of this kind will very largely depend on the personnel of its administration—and with regard to the three gentlemen who have been named, I will take first of all Mr. Wrench. I honestly believe that is a name that will not command the support of either the landlords or the tenants of Ireland. Mr. Bayley, I think, will have the confidence of both landlords and tenants. The, third gentleman has the merit of being absolutely unknown. This can hardly be considered a thoroughly satisfactory tribunal—one unsuitable man, one suitable man, and one unknown man. However, I heartily congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the fact of it being a non-judicial tribunal. Nothing would do more harm to this measure than the impression that it would be run by any of the old gang, whose conduct we are not allowed by the Rules to discuss on the floor of the House of Commons. I am glad the right hon. Gentleman has made
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a departure in that respect, and that the officials will be servants of the Government, whose conduct can be discussed on the Estimates in the House of Parliament. There was one thing that surprised me in the remarks of the light hon. Gentleman. He said there would be no withdrawing of any right that the tenants possessed at present. He used that with reference to the right the tenant had to go in and purchase his holding at the present moment. The right hon. Gentleman will remember perfectly well that Clause 36 of the Bill of last year raised serious opposition. It was denounced on both sides and excited much antagonism. It proposed to deprive the tenants under certain circumstances of the right of having the rents fixed by the Land Commission. The right hon. Gentleman has told us that in the case of the new Commission buying the estate they are to be satisfied before they buy that three-fourths of the tenants are willing to buy back the holdings from them, and he has told us that in special cases a bare majority of the tenants is all that is required. Now I want to know how you are going to deal with the minority of one-fourth and the minority of almost one-half. If I understand him correctly it amounts to this. The tenants in these cases are to be compelled to buy, and are to be deprived of their rights under the Act of 1881. It may be said that is an extreme case, but these matters are best tested by extreme cases. A bare majority of the tenantry on each estate in Ireland might agree to buy, and the remaining half of the tenantry might be unwilling to do so, and then they would lose their right under the Act of 1881 to have then-rents fixed. That is a provision which will excite universal disapproval in Ireland. I know these are exceptional cases. The ordinary transactions will be between landlord and tenant, and therefore this will not arise at all except in cases where the landlord and tenant cannot come to an agreement, and the estate is bought by the Estate Commissioners. But the mere fact that there will not be many cases, will not enable the right hon. Gentleman to get a Clause accepted in Ireland which; will deprive any class of Irish tenants of their rights to get the purchase price fixed under the Act of 1881. If that Clause stands in the Bill it will be as vehemently opposed in Ireland as was Clause 36 of his Bill last year. And as

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he gave that up last year, I hope it is not too much to expect that he will also give up this Clause.
MR. WYNDHAM: They have to pay under another section. In respect of three-fourths under the Act of 1896, they are forced to buy.
MR. REDMOND: The right hon. Gentleman knows that is not an answer to my contention. Section 40 only applies where three-fourths of the tenants are willing. I recognise, of course, it is a most unreasonable thing that a handful of tenants should be able to obstruct a purchase, but it is a totally different thing when you say that fifty-one men out of 100 can coerce the others by saying if you do not agree to our terms you will lose your rights to get a fair rent fixed under the Act of 1881. On the question of finance I speak with great hesitation. It is a matter with which I am not competent to deal, but under any such circumstances it would be nothing short of ridiculous without having beard more details if I expressed any opinion. It is impossible for me now to deal with the number of years purchase, and how it will work out for the landlord and tenant, but it is a matter of the greatest importance and will excite interest and attention in Ireland. As far as I can understand the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, it is clear he does not offer, either to the landlord or the tenant, as good terms as the landlords proposed. I deeply regret that, and I may say that I regret he has cut down the terms to the landlord, quite as much as I regret his cutting down the terms to the tenant. This is a voluntary arrangement, and the only way to make it work is by satisfying the landlords that it is safe and wise for them to sell, and the tenants that it is safe and wise for them to buy. Still, the fact remains that this Bill is a great advance on the Bill of last year.
I do not fully understand the arrangement made with reference to the first-term and the second-term rents. How does this matter stand? The tenants of Ireland had their rents fixed once, and the time for having them fixed a second time has arrived. There are some 80,000 of the second term rents, and these show a reduction on the first-term rents of about 20 or 22 per cent.
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Now, if the second-term rents are to be taken as the basis of this transaction, then, before you enter into your calculation at all, the oustanding first-term rents ought to be reduced to the average of the 80,000 second-term rents. And to say that you will permit a transaction which will give second-term tenants an immediate reduction of from 10 to 30 per cent., and then to say that in the case of the first-term rents you will only give a reduction of from 20 to 40 per cent., I think that is unsatisfactory, and I should like it explained more fully how you arrive at that proportion. The right hon. Gentleman is apparently going to consider his second-term rents-rents of all holdings in Ireland—that have not gone into the Land Courts at all. If this is put in the Bill it will work great injustice, because, as every one knows, there are a very large number of tenants who never went into the Land Court at all. But the right hon. Gentleman is going to take the second-term rents and only give them the reduction of second-term rents. Is he going to take one of the cases which was never in the Committee and say that although there has been a steady reduction of 20 per cent., yet that not being a judicial rent it is not to be taken into account, and the nominal rent is to be regarded as the basis of the transaction? I can assure him that such a course would work the gravest injustice, and I rather think that even the spokesmen of the landlords in this House will agree with the view that the voluntary abatement should be taken into account as if it had been sanctioned judicially.
Then there is the provision as to the reinstatement of tenants. I acknowledge that the right hon. Gentleman has put into this Bill a provision which, in a large number of cases at any rate, will provide a remedy for one of the greatest evils which has existed in the social condition of Ireland for a long time past. At any rate, that is an advance on anything ever proposed in a Land Bill brought forward in this House. What I desire to know is, whether the same opportunity will be afforded to future tenants as if they were judicial tenants.
MR. WYNDHAM: Hear, hear!
MR. JOHN REDMOND: I am glad to hear that. I only hope the same will

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apply to the caretakers. What has constantly taken place for years past under the eviction-made-easy Clause has been that merely by serving a man with a notice he has ceased to be a tenant but has been left in possession as a caretaker. He continued to pay rent from year to year but had no legal status, not even as a future tenant. I should feel very much assured if the right hon. Gentleman would say that the same opportunities would be given to such men of purchasing their holdings. [NATIONALIST Cheers.] The right hon. Gentleman need not be afraid that this measure will meet with any unfair criticism or reception in Ireland. The Irish people are quite in earnest in desiring to settle the land question by an honest purchase transaction. Irish tenants and landlords are absolutely agreed in the desire to settle this question as speedily as may be and in a perfectly straightforward manner. [NATIONALIST Cheers.] I think the right hon. Gentleman will find, that whatever may be the fate of this Bill, it will not meet with unfair or dishonest criticism. I am not going to say that the Bill is satisfactory or otherwise; but it will be criticised by the people who have come together in perfect sincerity to endeavour to bring an end to the social trouble which exists in Ireland.
We, on these benches, have great responsibility in this matter, and I speak with a feeling of that responsibility. But I am fortified by the knowledge that this Bill will be discussed in every town and village and hamlet throughout Ireland. The Irish people are quick witted and are not likely to be led blindfold by their leaders. They will easily understand the meaning of this Bill and its purpose, and will soon find out whether it will be advisable for them to take advantage of it or not. They will soon have an opportunity of discussing the measure, because on 14th or 15th April there will be held in Dublin a National Convention, summoned specially for the purpose of deciding whether the Bill is to be accepted or rejected. Even if I were in a position to do so I should hesitate to express my judgment until the Convention has spoken. There has been some misunderstanding as to the constitution of this Convention. People
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in England are rather inclined to disregard its authority, describing it as a gathering of delegates of the United Irish League. That is not the case. Reading the names of the Members of the Convention it is impossible to construe in any country in the world a more absolutely democratic and representative National Assembly than that which will have to give a decision on this Bill. The clergy and every organised public body in Ireland, political or non-political, will have representatives at this Convention, and the right hon. Gentleman will therefore have the consolation of knowing this Bill will be discussed and decided upon by a thoroughly democratic and representative body in Ireland.
I will end, as I began, by telling him that he need not be afraid of unfair criticism. The Bill will be judged by the Irish people as a measure which will either settle the Irish land question or else be worthless. The time has passed when any measure such as that of last year—which could not possibly settle the question—is likely to be accepted by public opinion in Ireland. If the Irish people come to the conclusion that the Bill affords a reasonable hope of a settlement of this question it will be accepted by them. More than that I cannot say at present. I do not think it would be altogether wrong of me if I complimented the right hon. Gentleman on the lucidity with which he explained the Bill, which although so complicated, was made so clear to us. It is the greatest effort ever yet made to settle the Irish Land Question by purchase. This is a great Bill, and I confess that it is a safe Bill, because the right hon. Gentleman has proved to demonstration that the British taxpayer can lose nothing, and is almost certain to make financial and moral gains. Under these circumstances I do not think that the Irish Members from this quarter of the House will think it necessary to debate the matter at any length to-night. We will leave it as it is now. I say in conclusion that the decision in this matter will rest with public opinion in Ireland, and the right hon. Gentleman will have the consolation of knowing that that public opinion will be honestly elicited and honestly expressed.
COLONEL SAUNDERSON: I have had the honour and good

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fortune of having spoken in this House on many occasions on Irish Land Bills, and I have always observed one distinguishing feature in these Bills; they all meant to plunder the Irish landlords. This Bill is quite different from all these. It is the only Bill that I ever knew of which induced the hon. and learned Member for Waterford to stand up on that side of the House and I on this side of the House to give our approval—not an absolute but a qualified approval. I say qualified, and for this reason; that it is a most complicated measure. My right hon. friend has admitted in his speech that it has taken a year and a half to prepare; and a year and a half's preparation was boiled down into an hour and forty minutes of the time of the House. It would be very absurd on my part, who have only listened to that hour and forty minutes explanation to express any definite opinion as to the merits of the details of the Bill. The speech of the lion, and learned Gentleman opposite was remarkable in this respect, that his objections to the Bill, so far as he understood it from listening to the speech of the Chief Secretary, were limited in character; that that part of the Bill which deals with the tenants whose rents have not been fixed by the Land Courts, met from him apparently a slight objection; at all events the hon. and learned Gentleman was not perfectly certain in his own mind what the Bill contained on that subject. But it must be satisfactory to my right hon. friend that no greater objection to the Bill has presented itself to the hon. and learned Gentleman. The hon. and learned Gentleman did not touch on the finance of the Bill, and probably the objection to the finance in the mind of the hon. and learned Gentleman is the same objection which occurs to my mind, viz.—that the financial concessions accorded in this Bill do not go as far as he thinks they ought to go; and in that I quite sympathise with him. There is one particular fact at any rate which it must be difficult for any Member who has sat in this House for any period of time to realise; and that is, that this is the first opportunity of their having been able to see within these walls a united Ireland. On former historic occasions we used to
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see one side of the House bent on plundering the other. Members of this House from Ireland, I believe, represent absolutely the feelings of the Irish people, at the present moment, on this matter. They desire a settlement of this long-vexed question, and I venture to say that during the last 800 years such an opportunity has never presented itself as this to the Parliament of England. I do not think we are asking too much. I do not think that the demands are extravagant on the part of the landlords. What we have asked is this—that when we have settled the land question, you will not deprive us of the power of living in our native land in the future. I say that that is an appeal which we Irish landlords make to the British House of Commons and to the British people; and we say that it is founded on justice and fair play. We are Irishmen just as much as the tenants are, or as the hon. Gentlemen opposite are. We love our native land as much as they do, and I believe that the people of Ireland, represented as they have been by their leaders, have come to the conclusion, that Irish landlords, after all, are not so black as they have been painted in former years by their present admirers.
The main principle of the Bill, which I gathered from the speech of my right hon. friend, is that when this settlement takes place it will be such a settlement as will enable the Irish landlords to live in Ireland, though they will not enjoy quite as much income as they do now. There is a difficulty which I have always foreseen, though I do not think the difficulty lies with the right hon. Gentlemen, or with the Party I represent. I think we are both willing to be moderate in our demands, for both desire a settlement. What I am afraid of, however, is John Bull. The usual idea out of doors, and even amongst some Members of this House, is that this Bill is based on the principle that the unfortunate British taxpayers will have to empty their pockets to the tune of many millions. I think that they may put that idea out of sight. If the right hon. Gentleman's computation is correct, and if it is possible to save £6,000,000 on rent in Ireland, the British taxpayer during the first year will be burdened to the enormous extent

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of £32,000 or £33,000. It will increase as the years go by, until all the land in Ireland is bought, to a burden of £390,000 a year. If this is a success, and if by the passing of the Bill you secure peace and prosperity in Ireland, the cost will not exceed a quarter of the price of one ironclad. When you are able to spend so many millions on war, you might give a few thousand pounds to peace. I think the British taxpayer, who includes the Irish taxpayer, need not fear that ruin will stare him in the face if the Bill be passed. Besides that, there are economies which my right hon. friend indicated which will form a considerable part in diminishing the expense to which the taxpayer will be put. This is to be carried out by a Commission, and I quite agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman that it was essential that this should not be a Judicial Commission. The Commissioners are Mr. Wrench, Mr. Bayley, and Mr. Finucane. I have no doubt they will act fairly. I do not suppose that any of them will be on the side of the landlord too much. Certainly Mr. Bayley will not. With regard to Mr. Finucane, I do not know anything about him, except that he comes from India. I do not know why they chose a gentleman from India. I suppose he has an acquaintance with tigers, which may be useful to him in Ireland. On the whole, I think we may be satisfied that this Commission will act fairly to both sides, or rather between the three iiarties—the British taxpayer, the landlord, and the tenant.
I have no intention whatever of wandering through these financial mazes, in which my right hon. friend trod with such an easy and fairy step. I should only get entangled and involved. This Bill requires to be read carefully, and to be carefully considered. In that matter I can reiterate for my colleagues, what the hon. and learned Gentleman has said on behalf of his friends, that the Bill will receive a fair and candid consideration. We, at any rate, do not intend to throw any obstacle in the way of a final settlement of this question, and I am glad to learn that hon. Gentlemen opposite are animated by the same spirit. I thought it rather a formidable prospect which the hon. and learned Gentleman alluded to, namely, that this Convention would
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seize this Bill and examine it in all its parts—a Convention representing apparently the Irish land interest, the Roman Catholic clergy but certainly not the Protestant clergy [NATIONALIST cries of "All denominations," and "Brother Sloan."]. I am sure the hon. and learned Gentleman will see that it will receive fair and candid consideration, and then with both sides united, and with that condition of mind existing in Ireland at the present moment which never existed before—why, Sir, there is no smell of blood in the air in Ireland now; the condition of the public mind is more at peace and more filled with hope than it has ever been before—I say with that condition of affairs existing, with a good-humoured Ireland to deal with, with a peaceful Ireland to deal with, it would be to my mind an insane thing on the part of the British taxpayer to grudge these few thousand pounds, which after all he never can feel;, because the money which is to be expended is a trifle compared with the larger part of the money asked for, and which is absolutely secure. It is a small trifle that is asked for, and if it secures peace and prosperity for Ireland it is the cheapest money that Great Britain has ever laid out.
Sir H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: I shall only interpose for a few moments, mainly in order to deprecate on the part of those in this House who represent the taxpayer beyond the circle of the Irish Members on either side, the formation, and still more the expression, of any summary judgment on the great scheme which the right hon. Gentleman, with so much power and persuasiveness, has expounded to the House. It is not only that it is a scheme, as we all were able to gather by listening to his speech, of extraordinary complexity, but also that the issues involved, and which it raises, are grave and almost momentous, and therefore it ought not to be made the subject of a rash and possibly partial opinion by any Member of this House. The Members of this House, I believe without exception, are anxious that peace should be restored in Ireland—if restored is the proper word—because the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down says that this war has lasted for 800 years, and that this is the first good opportunity the House of Commons has had for dealing with the

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question. The House of Commons has only had during a hundred of these years any right to interfere in the matter. But however that may be, we wish to see an end put to the disastrous social and agrarian conflict which has hindered the prosperity and the advancement of Ireland. We also recognise that for that purpose there may be sacrifices and efforts which ought to be made by the people, not only of Ireland but of this island, and not only for the sake of Ireland, but for the sake of ourselves, because we shall directly be advantaged quite irrespective of anything that may happen within the circuit of Ireland itself. But the very fact that we have to face certain efforts and sacrifices, that we are to have, what is almost more serious, our Imperial credit hypothecated to such an enormous extent, makes it our duty not only to look into the detailed provisions of the Bill, in order to see that equity is preserved between those affected, but also to see, as it will be our obvious duty to see, to the best of our power whether this scheme will really attain the object for which those sacrifices and efforts are to be made. That can only be learned in process of time by seeing how it is received by all classes of men in and out of Ireland, and on these grounds it is eminently and obviously a case where we ought not only not to be expected to express a definite opinion, but ought not to indulge in the opportunity of offering any definite opinion.
There are one or two points which the right hon. Gentleman, with all the fulness and frankness of his speech, has left still in some doubt. The first of these is as to the provisions against mortgaging and subdividing holdings. There is no question that that is the curse of peasant proprietorship in many countries, and, although the right hon. Gentleman said that certain provisions were designed for that purpose, I think we should like to know a little more as to how this is to be effected. The second point is this—it has been already referred to by the hon. Member for Waterford—what will be the mode in which the cash aid is to be estimated and distributed? Is every selling landlord to have a share? That is the point. In what way is that to be distributed and applied? Another point is this. What comes of the rent-fixing operation that has been going on under the Act of 1881, and of the
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tribunal and machinery established by that Act? I next come to another point which the hon. Member for Water-ford referred to, and which I noted in this way. If the tenants do not choose to purchase—those who are the outstanding fourth on an estate—do they remain under that Act—do they retain their advantages under it? And, coming to the other side of the picture—what becomes of the landlord who declines to sell? What will be his position in the future of the agrarian economy of Ireland? My last question is this. Is the sum of £12,000,000, named for the aid grant, a real Estimate of the amount which will probably answer for the purpose, or is it the extreme limit which is not to be exceeded? On these points I think the right hon. Gentleman will do well to take an opportunity before the discussion closes to give the House the information that is required. I assume by all that has been said that there will be a considerable interval before the next stage of the Bill, and in the meantime I would advise all those with whom I have any influence to content themselves with the expression of our appreciation of the manner in which the right hon. Gentleman has laid this great scheme before the House and the country.
MR. T. W. RUSSELL: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that Members would be very daring and rash who ventured to give any definite opinion upon a complicated measure of this kind. But there are some of us who have been in this struggle for many years, and have followed the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary with extreme interest today. Speaking for myself, I believe that the proposals he has laid before the House are epoch-making proposals, and I believe, although I am not pledging myself to any particulars in the Bill—and I shall have to ask the Chief Secretary some questions before I sit down—I believe that from to-night a new era will start in Ireland upon this land question. There is one difficulty which I fear will not be solved—as anyone can see who knows anything about the question—and that is the question as to what is to happen upon those estates where either the inducement to the landlord is not sufficient to make him sell, or where no inducement will make

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him sell. That brings us to a difficult point. You will find in the province of Ulster a large number of landlords with feudal ideas rooted in their minds whom no inducement will tempt to sell. You will find the same feeling prevailing in certain districts in the South and West. You will find this unwillingness to sell upon any terms; and what we shall be face to face with in a few years is this most difficult problem—I admit it is difficult—you will find a large number of landlords declining to sell, and you will find a large number of the best of the Irish tenants unable to buy. They will be penalised for their very virtues, whilst men who have given trouble will get the advantages which ought to have gone to all. I know what questions are raised by a problem of this kind, and I merely state the problem in order that the House should see that there are difficulties not touched by the right hon. Gentleman's speech. There is a curious omission from that speech of which I would like an explanation. According to the notice paper, this is a Bill—
"to amend the law relating to the occupation and ownership of land in Ireland, and for other purposes relating thereto; and to amend the Labourers' (Ireland) Act."
But not a word has been said with regard to the labourers' question. That is an omission which probably arose from pressure of time, but I am bound to tell the right hon. Gentleman that it is perfectly impossible to hope for any final solution of this question which will please the labourers if they are left out of account. I take it from the Chief Secretary that there is no desire to leave them out of account, and that the Bill will be as it is described on the Notice Paper.
I regret to hear from the right hon. Gentleman that the decadal reductions are to be abolished. The decadal system, first brought into play in the Act of 1896 by the present President of the Board of Trade, has been accepted by almost all the tenants in Ireland, and has no doubt extended the period of repayment. The Irish tenant, as a rule, has rather the notion that posterity should bear some of the burden, and the decadal system has been seized upon almost universally. I really cannot see why it should be left out of the Bill, because after all the basis of the decadal system
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is that at the end of the decennial period the amount of the capital paid is estimated, and the interest has not to be paid on the capital which has been repaid. That will be a point for discussion in Ireland, for the tenants are very firmly wedded to the system.
There is another matter of extreme importance. The basis of purchase, according to the Chief Secretary, is to be second-term rents. I tried to follow the right hon. Gentleman very carefully, but I confess I failed to grasp his argument on that point. At the Land Conference it was decided that the basis of purchase should be the second-term rents, or their fair equivalent. But, as my hon. and learned friend opposite put it, the difference between the first-term rents and the second-term rents is a matter of 22 per cent. I assume, from the fact that the contrary has not been stated, that the Land Commission as a rent-fixing machine is to go on, and that, instead of any automatic reduction in fixing the second-term rents, the Commissioners will proceed as they are now doing. That is a very serious matter. There is no use in blinking the fact that ever since the Land Conference Report was issued, and the basis of purchase decided to be the second-term rents, the Land Commission has been raising rents. I may give the Shirley estate in County Monaghan as an example of that. There 600 tenants have gone into Court; forty-seven have had second-term rents fixed, and forty out of sixty-five have been left alone. Therefore this question of second-term rents, and the fixing of the basis of purchase on those rents is a very serious matter, and will have to be seen to before the Bill is read a second time.
As regards the question of mortgages, I pressed that as hardly as it could be pressed at the Conference. I agree with the principle enunciated to-night by the Chief Secretary, but the amount to be made irredeemable is a totally different question. If it be merely the right to intervene in cases of improper mortgage that is required, then a nominal quit rent would be as effective as one-eighth of the purchase money. I agree that mortgaging and subdividing must be effectively controlled, or in fifty years hence we shall have a position worse even than at present, but the amount is a serious matter. It takes away from

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the sense of ownership, and to take away that sense is to imperil a good deal.
As to the rights of tenants under the Act of 1881, I did not understand the Chief Secretary as interfering with those rights at all. I understood him to say that the present laud purchase proceedings would continue if people chose to avail themselves of them. I may be wrong, but I did not understand him to deal with the question of fair rent at all. But I do say that the Government may make up their minds that the Irish people in every province will not consent to any infringement of the rights of the tenants under the Act of 1881, until the freehold of the farm is conferred on every occupier. Nothing will induce them to give up that position. The Irish tenants, if they gave that away, would be like an army in a battle without ammunition, and the Chief Secretary may take it for granted that if this measure contains anything like Clause 36 of the Bill of last session, there is a bad time before this House and the country. That is the one thing the tenants will never consent to. We shall have an opportunity of discussing the Bill in Ireland during the Easter recess. My right hon. and gallant friend the Member for North Armagh is not in his place, but we are to have a Convention in Dublin, and if he does not care to attend that in Dublin perhaps he will honour us with his presence in Belfast. I believe the Bill is a great Bill, designed for a great and beneficent work, and I hope that in the outcome Irish Members on both sides will be able to give the Government their cordial support.
MR. M'CRAE: I think the right hon. Gentleman is to be congratulated on his lucid exposition of the Bill. I do not wish to press him too hardly on the First Reading, but I do not think he quite answered the question I put as to whether the amount of cash to be granted had been arrived at after a careful estimate had been made of the sum that really would be necessary under the scheme. In the present situation all sides were willing to go a great way in order to secure a satisfactory solution of this problem, and it would be a mistake to estimate the tax on the British people at an inadequate sum. The right hon. Gentleman said that apart from the credit loan the
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sum the British taxpayer was to be responsible for was £12,000,000. That in my opinion, is quite inadequate for the purpose. It bears a very small proportion to the reduction which the right hon. Gentleman estimated to be necessary. On the second-term rents he spoke of the reduction as being between 15 and 25 pet cent. or on the first-term rents between 20 and 40 per cent. On the other side, taking the capitalised rental of Ireland at the right hon. Gentleman's figure of £152,000,000, the £12,000,000 represents only 8 per cent., and it is only 12 per cent. on the reduced figure of £100,000,000. I know the right hon. Gentleman does not expect the whole of the land to come into the market, but I think it would be well for the House and the country to be assured that the sum of £12,000,000 has been arrived at after careful consideration of the sum which is likely to be required from the British Exchequer.
MR. GIBSON BOWLES: I should like to ask my right hon. friend, whom I congratulate on his speech, one or two questions. I do not thoroughly understand some of the financial portions of the scheme. I understood there was to be an operation of credit at 2¾ per cent., but I am not sure whether he said that that operation of credit would amount to the raising of £100,000,000.
MR. WYNDHAM: That would be the outside sum.
MR. GIBSON BOWLES: So that it would be an operation of credit to raise £100,000,000, of which only £5,000,000 would be raised in any one year?
MR. WYNDHAM: Of the first three years.
MR. GIBSON BOWLES: And it may subsequently be increased. The tenant is to pay 4 per cent. on that.
MR. WYNDHAM: No.
MR. GIBSON BOWLES: That is the point on which I wanted some explanation. Then my second point is, I understand him to say that there is a sum of £185,000 a year which he considers to be due to Ireland, to be in fact Iris money; that will be on the Estimate

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I presume. That £185,000 is to bear the losses on flotation and such things as that. Then I understand that he proposes to place on the Estimates a sum of £390,000—not all at the beginning, but as a maximum. I should have added the £390,000 to the £185,000, but perhaps he will explain whether I am right or wrong as to that. I also understand him to claim economies amounting to £250,000 a year on the Irish Estimates. I suppose those economies have been already realised?
MR WYNDHAMmade a remark which was inaudible in the Press Gallery.
MR. GIBSON BOWLES: Then we may understand that there will be a diminution to the extent of £250,000 on future Irish Estimates. Those are the only points to which I desire to refer at present.
MR. COGHILL: We must all congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the way in which he has introduced this Bill. His speech shows that he has a clear grasp of its provisions, but I am not sure that we are all in the same position. The Bill bears a strange resemblance to a Bill which had a great deal to do with bringing me into the House of Commons for the first time in 1886: I mean Mr. Gladstone's Land Bill—a Bill which was strongly denounced, and was certainly not acceptable to the country at large. The right hon. Gentleman has drawn a picture of what is to happen if this Bill passes, but he prefaced it with a very large "if." What guarantees can he give us as to the finality of this scheme? Ever since 1886 we have been engaged in passing Land Bill after Land Bill, and I am rather weary of the process. If this was the first Land Bill of which I had heard, I must say, that after the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, I should be inclined to say, "By all means pass your Bill, and let us have no criticism upon it." But, unfortunately, that is not the position. It is all very well to say that these are the proposals now, but will the proposals remain as they are, or will they be increased as time goes on? Then we are told that these proposals will bring peace to Ireland. After the experiences of the last 100
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years I think I may be forgiven if I am a little sceptical as to that. I am not at all sure that after the passing of this Bill Ireland will pass into the peaceful period which has been predicted. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford the other day announced that he for one would not give up his opinion with regard to the need for Home Rule. [NATIONALIST cheers.] I quite understand the view of the hon. Gentlemen opposite, and I know they will try just as much to obtain Home Rule after this Bill passes as they did before. But supposing a feeling of tension arises again between Ireland and this country, what will happen in regard to the payments under this Bill. Suppose, for instance, that the "no rent" manifesto was issued again with regard to the payment of the loan? Would the right hon. Gentleman then take proceedings against the whole nation?
MR. WILLIAM REDMOND: We should make you Lord-Lieutenant, and then it would be all right.
MR. COGHILL: When it comes to the question of a free gift to Ireland it is a totally different matter, and I do not think that we should be called upon to make this large free gift to Ireland. It seems to me that there is one very suspicious circumstance at the present time. We find now that there is a union between Orangemen and Nationalists, and all because there is an alluring prospect of a raid upon the British Treasury. We find my hon. and gallant friend the Member for North Armagh speaking in a totally different way, for he now recognises in the Nationalist Members the wisest of patriots, and in every sense considers them very good fellows. When we find a union of this kind between two Parties, I think it behoves the representatives of the British taxpayer to look very closely into these proposals. When any sort of raid is made upon the British Exchequer, we have a right to say to the Chief Secretary for Ireland that this is not the time to make a demand for £12,000,000 upon the British taxpayer. We have just had large demands made upon us in regard to the Army and Navy, and I have willingly supported the Government with regard to those demands, but when it comes to a free gift of £12,000,000 for a scheme, the success of which is very uncertain, I say this is

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not the time to make such a demand. No matter how golden the opportunity may be, this is not the time to come to the taxpayer and ask for a free gift of £12,000,000 to the people of Ireland. I do not wish to raise any other objection to this Bill, beyond saying that these proposals ought to be scrutinised very closely. Willing as I am to do anything I can to assist the people of Ireland to come to a settlement in regard to the land question, I must say that I do not entertain the opinion that if the land question were settled the feeling of unrest would cease to exist in Ireland. I feel that there are other questions which will arise, and it is in that belief that I am unable to accept the proposals of the right hon. Gen leman.
MR. T. M. HEALY: The hon. Member has entertained the House by weeping salt tears over the disappearance of Donnybrook Fair. When we were engaged in recrimination, and when we were disorderly, we were a disgrace to the House of Commons, and now when for the first time an Orangeman can speak well of a Nationalist, the hon. Member who has just sat down thinks the glories of Britain have departed. I think the landlords have got off very handsomely indeed, but you must remember they have been doing your work in Ireland for 800 years. You have just been lavishing "£30,000,000 on your Navy, and £30,000,000 on your Army, and £2,000,000 on those new submarines, which may pay a premature visit to the bottom of the sea; and it is strange that on the first occasion since the Union of Great Britain and Ireland an hon. Member should get up and protest that Irish Members were for the first time united. What do you want us to do? Do you want us to walk across the floor of the House to the hon. and gallant Member for North Armagh and say to him, "Will you tread on the tail of my coat?" I am glad we have arrived at this stage, when only one Englishman out of the entire body of 670 British Members has risen to object to the very moderate proposals which the right hon. Gentleman the Irish Secretary has made. I certainly do not
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intend to enter upon a long debate on this occasion, but I would say that hon. Gentlemen opposite, and especially hon. Gentlemen like the hon. Member who has just spoken, should remember that undoubtedly Members on this side of the House with whom I disagree to some extent have made large sacrifices of opinion—I will not say of conviction—but large sacrifices in what they conceive to be the interests of peace. The Chief Secretary said this was no simulated feeling. A nation cannot play the hypocrite. You cannot get people who have been divided in the past, who have been at war with one another—you cannot get these people simulated for the first time to a false and pretended affection, unless there is some new light thrown upon the minds and hearts of both parties with regard to the situation. I certainly will not in this House take needless opportunity of disagreeing with my hon. colleagues who have signed that Report.
There are two or three matters which seem to have escaped notice which I wish to ask about. I cannot agree with what the hon. Gentleman the Member for Waterford said to the objection in principle, if indeed he raised it, with regard to the retention of one-eighth, if it be intended that one-eighth shall fructify in case of local taxation, and for the benefit of the general body of the people of Ireland. But if the one-eighth is to come perpetually to the British Treasury, a more extraordinary or extravagant proposal never was made. If the one-eighth is to go in perpetuity to the British taxpayer in exchange for the £12,000,000 a harder bargain was never made, and unless I have some assurance on that point I shall certainly object to the form in which the proposal now stands. In sixty-eight and a-half years by the Sinking Fund you will have paid off seven-eighths. Then why not begin some system of Sinking Fund and pay off the remaining one-eighth or, instead of making two bites at a cherry, why not clear it off altogether? Of course I know it can be said the Government are only getting bare interest on their loan, but why is an eighth selected, as irredeemable, to found a plea for State intervention about mortgages and sub-lettings? A mere peppercorn reservation would secure the State full power for

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such purposes. On the other hand, if the Sinking Fund principle was applied to this eighth, a valuable asset for the Irish nation would in half a century arise. There is a tendency to look at this question from the point of view of catching votes and talking to the gallery, and from that which constituents would consider best in their own cases. Yet if you consider the interests of the urban and labouring population, whose taxes will, to some extent, go as an insurance fund, this great boon to the agricultural population leaves them almost untouched, and they may argue that there is a great deal to be said in favour of applying this one-eighth to the case of local taxation and for the benefit of the country as a whole. If I understood the proposal in that sense I should cordially adopt it, but if I understand that this one-eighth is to go in aid of the British taxpayer I should only compare it with the proposal made by Mr. Gladstone, of whom I do not wish to speak disrespectfully. After the Irish Famine, with regard to the striking off of the famine loan, which I do not think amounted to more than £4,000,000 Mr. Gladstone put upon us the income-tax, and increased our whisky duty with the result that a free gift of £4,000,000 cost us £50,000,000 or £60,000,000. That is a new way of paying old debts. If the Government mean that we shall be charged for this £12,000,000 and that we shall have to pay a perpetual rent-charge of one-eighth, I can only say that a graver and more serious proposition never emanated from the Treasury Bench.
MR. RITCHIEdissented.
MR. T. M. HEALY: I am glad that the Chancellor of the Exchequer shakes his head, and I assume that a more reasonable course will be adopted and that something further will be put into the Bill. It may be that the Government have yet some further proposal dealing with this one eighth, and I shall wait very patiently to see what is suggested. We pay our taxes the same as you do, and, further, we have never admitted that equal bargain of the Union as you now construe it; and even if we did, the promises which you made at the time of the Union have all been broken. At the present moment our
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contribution to the general fund out of which you maintain the Empire amounts to £10,000,000 per annum. The £12,000,000 which the Government is going to give is only a very little more than one year's contribution which Ireland makes to this country. I do not grudge this money being given to the landlord for the sake of peace, and ending an ancient feud. If they can make any impresssion on the Government and get more they will have my hearty support, and I do not think any objection will be made from this part of the House. But there will be innumerable delays in getting this scheme of purchase on foot. You are dealing with 500,000 small holdings, and will have the question of titles mortgage, quit-rents, tenants for life, the remainder man and chargeants to settle, all of which must take up a considerable amount of time. I do not say that the Land Judges Court is a very swift method of procedure, because a Court which has to give one man's property to another must necessarily go slowly. If you put an estate into the Land Judges Court, the earliest period in which a title can be cleared and a sale effected is three years, the result being that they have not been able to digest £1,500,000 a year during the last eighteen years. I therefore think it is an almost extravagant hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to arrange to dispose of £5,000,000 in any one year for a considerable time to come. There is, however, one means by which the tenants of Ireland can get some satisfaction. As there must be delays, and as of course it would not be politic to disappoint the tenants, I suggest that the applications for these £12,000,000 should be limited to those owners who declare themselves ready to sell within the year after the Bill passes. I do not think that twelve months would be too long, because there are questions of trustees to consider, of landlords on the Continent or in Australia, and even of landlords who, strangely enough, cannot be found at all. But even if the Government provide that the applications shall be made within twelve months, every tenant in Ireland will know who is inclined to sell and who is not. At any rate, tenants who were going to get their farms would have additional peace of mind which would be

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desirable in the interests of the community.
I have been fairly long in this House—long enough to get tired of it—and I never before found any man getting a job that I was glad of until I heard the name of W. F. Bailey. He is a landlord, a Protestant, a Conservative and a Unionist, but he is a clear-headed man who knows the Irish system and knows the world from San Francisco to Bokhara. I would not take a mile off it. With regard to the other gentlemen, we have, of course, been constantly at war with Mr. Wrench, but, in all probability, he has learnt a great deal in the fourteen or fifteen years he has been in office. He is an Englishman who came over without very large experience to our country, who was very heartily abused, no doubt, but profited by it, and I notice of late has figured more largely on the Congested Districts Board than on the Land Commission. He is responsible for one thing—the introduction of the hackney strain of horses, which I do not think met with general approval. He will be better known for that by the public than as a Land Commissioner. But there must be a balance, and when you have on the one side a man who is supposed to be on the tenant side, you balance him by a man who is raddled and ear-marked on the other side. As regards Mr. Finucane, I place great weight on any recommendation Sir Anthony Macdonnell makes. I think his desire is to bring in a man who is substantially neutral, and who has had experience of a country which is in many parts even poorer than Ireland. Sometimes, however, these Indian officials bring too Oriental a view to a too Occidental situation. When Colonel McKerley was at the Board of Works in 1881, he was much abused. I was approached by the late Mr. Blake, who then sat for Waterford, and he said to me—
"The Government are going to appoint an Indian general for Ireland—General Sankey; will you give me a written guarantee that you will hold your tongue about him for twelve months?"
We did. And at the end of that time Mr. Blake came to us and with a slight shake of his head and a slight stutter said—
"Well, now, you can abuse Sankey as much as you like."
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All I will say with regard to Mr. Finucane, I would give him the same period of grace and not abuse him for at least a year certain
There are great difficulties in facilitating purchase transactions, not merely in the question of title, but by reason of another interest—that of the agents. This is to be a voluntary Bill. Landlords in Ireland are not very clever—you see a lot of them sometimes in this House, and they are very largely in the hands of their agents. It is perfectly clear it cannot be in the interest of any Irish agent to lose his salary. Take the case of a lady living in England not acquainted with finance, whose agent writes over, "This Bill will ruin you. It is the worst measure ever passed for Ireland, and I advise you to hold on until a Liberal Government comes into office." In Ireland there is always some future Government which is going to settle everything. That power of agents and receivers, and the straits they will be in to avert loss of livelihood is a serious matter. In the case of the Huntingdon estate, the matter was delayed for three or four years by the bogus pretext of the agent that a loan was going to be raised from some imaginary English financier to clear off the whole mortgage. These men have to live the same as everybody else, but it appears to me if some of these £12,000,000 were to go to the agents instead of the landlords you would have much quicker land purchase. We remember how Mr. Goschen got through his great conversion scheme. He gave the honest broker 2s. 6d. per cent., and by that means every broker in the City advised his clients that there was nothing better in the world, and that 2¾ per cent. was far better than 3 per cent. In the same way, not that I have any love for them, but looking at the matter from the point of view of human nature and a desire to bring purchase into operation, I would urge the Government not to omit this question from their consideration. It argues well for the country and the position of affairs generally that this measure should receive the reception it has from the general body of the House, and that this great measure of appeasement should not be grudged to Ireland by a Conservative administration.
MR. WYNDHAM: I notice that no other Member has risen, and I feel the time has now come, not to reply, for that will hardly be expected of me, but to notice some of the questions that have been raised, and to repair some of the omissions in my speech. The hon. and learned Gentleman who sat down last referred to the fact that on the score of time I had probably deferred the explanation of some matters of secondary importance. It is true that I cut my speech shorter than I originally intended that it should be, because I felt I was putting before the House a mass of details that they could not assimilate. When food is not assimilated it does the body no good, and that is also true of Bills; if they are not understood at the moment it is no good hammering at provisions of secondary importance. Then the hon. and learned Gentleman referred to the eighth which will remain a perpetual rent-charge. So far from the Treasury profiting by that eighth, in respect of that eighth the Treasury is giving up a sinking fund; it is financing the loan on its own responsibility, without getting 10s. per cent. back from Ireland to redeem the advances. From the Treasury's point of view, it is, I think, a generous provision. Then the hon. and learned Member asked me whether I had accidentally omitted to say that at some future time, if not now, this eighth would be collected by, and, I presume, administered by some local bodies in Ireland. I have given a good deal of thought to some such project as that; and, speaking for myself—and I speak for no one else on this matter—I should like to see some such project carried out. I believe it would be a good project. I believe that it would be wise for local bodies in Ireland to collect some part of these instalments and hold them as a perpetual form of income, of course surrendering some of the grants given from this country in exchange. I think it would be a very sensible thing to do to interest local bodies in Ireland in land purchase. But this is a long Bill. I want this Bill to pass. I am afraid of overweighting it, and I have been persuaded to the belief that to bring anything in the nature of a Local Government Bill into this Bill would be to risk the loss of it. On
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matters of local government there is not that agreement between all parties in Ireland which, thank Heaven, there is now on the matter of land purchase; and had I persisted in bringing local bodies into this Bill, I might have thrown down a possible bone of contention between parties who are drawing so close together on the question of land purchase. If that is ever to be done, it must be done in the future, in a separate measure, on the responsibility of a Minister who feels it is safe to do it. It would not be safe, we think, to do it now—quite safe from the point of view of Ireland, but not safe from the point of view of this Bill. The eighth has nothing to do with the £12,000,000. It is an eighth of the money advanced, the total amount of which I estimate at about £100,000,000.
MR. T. M. HEALY: What I suggested was that in return for the £12,000,000 you are making us pay a perpetual eighth of the entire bargain.
MR. WYNDHAM: There is no connection between the two. It will be for hon. Members to consider this proposal of a perpetual rent charge. I gathered that the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Waterford said he considered we had good grounds for having something of the kind, but he reserved the right of considering whether our proposal was excessive. Most hon. Members have reserved their right of revising their opinion of the Bill, and in all fairness I must have the right to reserve my judgment on some of the points which have been raised. I do not think it would really be for the convenience of the House that I should start a ragged debate now, taking up one point and then another. I have taken notes of the points, and of the omissions detected in my statement, and to these I will give my best attention.
I ought to answer a specific question put to me by my hon. friend the Member for King's Lynn in regard to the finances of the Bill. He suggested that our proposal may mean an advance of a sum of £100,000,000 to Ireland. I think that is an outside estimate. It may turn out to be only £90,000,000. I am assured that it could not possibly be advanced in a less

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period than fifteen years. The hon. and learned Member who preceded me said he has good reason for saying that is a sanguine estimate, that we shall never be able to raise and advance more than £5,000,000 in any one year, even if we reach that amount. If fifteen years is a sanguine estimate from my point of view, it is a consoling estimate from the point of view of the City of London. My hon. I friend asked me whether the £185,000 a year, upon which all the losses incidental to flotation would fall, will be put in the Estimates. It will not be in the Estimates; it will be in a Bill for reasons which I had better give when I introduce the Bill. It will be in the form of a perpetual grant to Ireland—I would rather not be drawn now into an explanation—as an equivalent for the grant to England under the Education Act last year. We hold that Ireland ought to get it, and we can discover no means by which she can get it unless we embody it in a Bill. The third point was in respect of the £390,000 a year. Yes, that will be in the Estimates. It is the maximum which can be reached in fifteen years if we take the most sanguine estimate of the pace at which we are likely to proceed. I would refer to the fact that we have been very economical in Ireland. There has been an increase of 18 per cent. on the Civil expenditure in England, but there has been a decrease of over 1 per cent. on Civil expenditure in Ireland; and there are other economies which will be instituted forthwith if this Bill finds favour with the House. They are based upon investigations which have already been conducted into the establishment of the police and of the Land Com mission in Ireland. That further economy, estimated at a minimum of £250,000, will be perpetual, as against a temporary increase in the Estimates of £390,000 a year.
The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition asked me whether I would give the provisions as to subdivision. They are rather technical, and perhaps he will wait until I have the Bill. I hope it will be in the hands of Members to-morrow, or early on Friday. In the case of intestacy it is a difficult matter to deal with. We say no tenant purchaser is to mortgage his holding to a higher amount than ten times its valuation—that is about a third of its market price. But there is a danger in Ireland of persons
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dying without making wills, and then their holdings ought, of course, to be divided amongst the children equally. That involves a difficulty, and therefore the Land Commission can give leave to encumber the holding for a greater amount. I would not go further than that. Briefly, those are the lines on which we work. The Leader of the Opposition also asked me to go at greater length into the allocation of this aid grant. The £12,000,000 is the limit. We do not mean to go further than that. We might have said we estimate this problem at £4,000,000 and three years purchase. We might have said we will add 10 or 12 per cent. in every case; but we did not say so because, in our opinion, it would press more heavily on the small than on the large properties. We have said we will give 15 per cent. on £5,000 and under, and graduate it inversely when we come to estates of greater value. When we get to £20,000, an estate worth £800 a year, we add 10 per cent., and at £40,000 we give 5 per cent. That is the minimum, but it will be available in every case. In the Bill of last year there was a clause saying that the State would give such facilities as may be thought proper. This is in lieu of that and all other promises. The hon. Member for Louth said we should do better to allocate a part of this aid grant to the agents. We think that with this assistance the landlord ought to make proper provision for a trusted servant. We cannot provide in the Bill for the creation of a new hierarchy, and a large establishment of officials. The Estates Commissioners will work, so far as they can, through the agents and solicitors of Ireland. They may temporarily employ such persons to act under them. I think if land purchase last, as I am sure it will last; for fifteen years, there will be good work, and acceptable work, to be done by the best Irish agents over the whole of the country, and a good deal of money to be made out of it.
MR. WILLIAM REDMOND: Are there any provisions for the labourers?
MR. WYNDHAM: Yes, there are, but I did not mention them because I did not wish to weary the House with what is a very minor part of the Bill. There are three clauses relating to the labourers. I do not myself say that that

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is not a very important part of the Bill, for I feel sure that the labourers ought to be included, but compared with the financial magnitude of the proposals, which it was my first duty to explain to the House, these clauses deal with what, after all, are minor administrative reforms.
MR. SHEEHAN: I think it would be of great advantage if we could have a statement with regard to the labourers clauses.
MR. WYNDHAM: Time is going on, and I think the hon. Member might wait. It is not from any wish to spare myself that I ask this, but there are many hon. Members in the House who, I think, are getting rather tired of hearing the sound of my voice. The hon. Member will be able to read these three clauses in the next forty-eight hours, and I hope he will not think it necessary for me to go into them to-night.
SIR JOHN COLOMB: I do not know whether my right hon. friend would think it proper to make any statement with respect to sporting rights.
MR. WYNDHAM: We leave them under the existing law when it is so desired. We do not force a landlord to sell his sporting rights if he does not wish to sell them; but my hon. and gallant friend will see what we do with them when the Bill is in his hands.
SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: There is the question of the duties of the Land Commissioners.
MR. WYNDHAM: As the area of Ireland is purchased, the necessity for the Land Commission diminishes, and certainly the necessity for some seventy temporary sub-commissioners ought to be diminished very rapidly, and, as they are appointed from year to year, we may look to them for a very effective source of economy. But, pending the adjudication upon the great number of outstanding appeals, and the necessity there must be for a judicial tribunal to determine all points of law, the three Land Commissioners will go on, at any rate, for the present. Whether it will be necessary to reappoint new ones in the
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event of a vacancy is a matter on which we will be better able to judge when we see whether this Bill succeeds, as I hope it may. I thank all hon. Members for the way in which they have received the Bill. I ask them to pass no hasty judgment upon it. Everyone has refrained from doing so; and that, I believe, is the best that any man, however sanguine, should have expected to befall this afternoon. I hope; that when the Bill has been studied a judgment will be passed upon it, and that with the great majority in this House that judgment will be favourable. For the moment that must be an aspiration.
Bill to amend the Law relating to the occupation and ownership of land in Ireland; and for other purposes relating thereto; and to amend the Labourers, (Ireland) Acts, ordered to be brought in by Mr. Wyndham, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Attorney-General for Ireland.

IRISH LAND BILL.
"To amend the Law relating to the occupation and ownership of land in Ireland; and for other purposes relating thereto; and to amend the Labourers, (Ireland) Acts," presented accordingly, and read the first time; to be read a second time upon Wednesday 22nd April, and to be printed. [Bill 121.]

COUNTY COUNCILS (BILLS IN PARLIAMENT) BILL.
Order read, for resuming adjourned debate on Question [24th March], "That the Bill be now read a second time."
Question again proposed.
Debate resumed.
MR. CALDWELLsaid he had no objection to this Bill being read a second time, the only thing that he would like to know was whether Scotland could not be included. The reason he asked for the inclusion of Scotland was that both the Scotch and the English law were exactly the same, and therefore if any Bill gave particular powers in the case of England it would naturally follow that the same course should be adopted with regard to Scotland.
LORD EDMUND FITZMAURICEsaid he hoped the Second Reading of this Bill would be allowed to pass. It was a Bill which had been most anxiously desired for many years by the County Councils of England, and they ought to be thankful to the right hon. Gentleman for having taken the case up in the manner in which he had. He had only one word to say with regard to the Bill itself, and that was on the second clause with regard to local enquiry and notice to the overseers. He thought that clause was unnecessary. He could not help thinking that the appearance on the County Councils of a representative of any district must be sufficient protection against any one district of the Council being unduly charged, and he thought they might rely on the representatives of the parishes in the county to defend those parishes against any job that might be attempted to be perpetrated. But rather than lose the Bill he would accept the clause. As he understood, the reason for the Government insisting on this clause was that they thought there ought to be special protection given to the ratepayers, and if the Government pressed the point he should offer no opposition to it. In regard to the question raised by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Mid. Lanark, he could not help thinking that neither Ireland nor Scotland was prejudiced by not being inserted in this Bill, because both could use the Bill as an argument for its future extension to those countries. If it was thought the Bill should be made general, then there could be an instruction to insert Ireland or Scotland, or both. He did not object to that, but he asked that neither Scotland nor Ireland should be allowed to stand in the way of this Bill becoming law this year.
MR. BUCHANANsaid the Scotsmen had no desire to prejudice the passage of the English Bill. All they wanted was the inclusion of Scotland, and he did not think that would in any way prejudice the measure. The object of his rising was to ask whether the Government were prepared to accept an instruction to the Committee to make the Bill apply to Scotland.
MR. HENRY HOBHOUSEsaid that he hoped that the proposed extension of the Bill to Scotland would not prevent this country from getting the reform which it had desired for the last fifteen years. Nothing could be more absurd than the present law, which denied to the largest County Council powers which had long been granted to every small town. At present County Councils had to promote Bills at the risk of a few individuals. Such a state of things required immediate remedy.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. WALTER LONG,)thought it might be convenient if he stated the position of the Government with regard to the extension of this Bill to Scotland and to Ireland. As President of the Local Government Board he was only responsible for legislation for England and Wales, but he had promised the hon. Member for Mid. Lanark that he would consider whether this Bill could be made general. The difficulty in regard to Scotland was not the same as that with regard to Ireland. He would be happy to consult with his right hon. friends the Chief Secretary and the Lord Advocate as to the possibility of similiar powers being granted in Ireland and Scotland.
Question put, and agreed to.
Bill read a second time, and committed to the Standing Committee on Law, etc.

BERWICKSHIRE COUNTY TOWN BILL.
Read a second time, and committed for Monday next.
BOROUGH FUNDS BILL.
Read a second time, and committed to the Standing Committee on Law, etc.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT (TRANSFER OF POWERS) BILL.
Order read, for resuming adjourned debate on Question [9th March], "That the Bill be now read a second time."
Question again proposed.
Debate resumed.
MR. CALDWELLsaid the object of this Bill was to transfer certain important powers from the Local Government Board to the County Councils. This matter was one that was raised in the Local Government Bill of 1888. The transfer of these powers was inserted in that Bill, but was afterwards withdrawn, and the matter was left to the Local Government Board, who might apply for a transfer of the powers to the Local Authorities. In 1889 the Local Government Board made a provisional order under the Act of 1888 for the transfer to the County Councils of certain powers; and a confirming Bill was introduced and referred to a Select Committee of this House. That Bill received considerable opposition from the non-county boroughs, and the result was that it was withdrawn. That was the position in 1889, but the matter did not end there. In 1897 an attempt was made by the County Council of Yorkshire to obtain a transfer of powers and again an enquiry was held, with the result that for the third time these powers were refused, and the Bill was again withdrawn. The objections of the non-county boroughs were that they would be put under the authority of County Councils, an authority which they recognised was no more in dependent or important in its own sphere than were the non-county borough councils themselves; that questions of difference would arise between the urban and rural elements of the counties and that the tribunal to decide those questions should be the Local Government Board, and not the County Councils on account of the conflicting interests with which they would have to deal. The County Councils did not want these powers. They had lately had new powers imposed upon them by the Education Act, and were already overburdened with their increased duties, and now it was proposed to transfer to them duties, not of an administrative, but a judicial character. Those were the objections which the non-county boroughs had to the Bill. They objected to being placed under the authority of the County Councils in matters seriously affecting their interests. He had no objection to the Bill itself because it was an English Bill, and he had no concern in it. He had only intervened because the parliamentary agents of the non-county boroughs had placed the position before him, and he
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thought under the circumstances it should not be read a second time without a discussion being raised upon it.
SIR FRANCIS POWELLsaid he could not help feeling that the non-county boroughs were quite able to fight their own battles. He had been largely concerned with local government, and he was of opinion that there were no more powerful bodies in this country than the non-county boroughs. He had no doubt that when this Bill was read a second time and sent to a Committee, the non-county boroughs would be found quite competent to fight their own battle and allocate their own course. He was glad to see this Bill which he thought had been too long delayed.
MR. BRIGGsaid that the County Councils were of opinion that it would be a most desirable thing if these powers were delegated to them. There had been objections raised to these proposals on former occasions, but when he had examined the statements of those who objected he had never been able to find any real ground for opposing the passage of the Bill. He therefore had great pleasure in supporting the second reading.
MR. LLOYD-GEOEGEwas glad the hon. Member for Mid Lanark did not intend to press his objections further. There was general agreement on both sides of the House with regard to the matter, and speaking for the Welsh councils he could say there was a keen desire that the Bill should be carried through. The opposition of certain districts in England a few years ago had the effect of preventing the Local Government Board putting something of the same sort into operation then, and doubtless in some counties the same difficulty still existed. But there were large tracts of country, especially in Wales, where the non-county boroughs did not object to this proposal, and as the Bill proposed to give the Local Government Board power to deal with certain counties in which that difficulty did not arise, he hoped it would go through.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVEENMENT BOARD (Mr. WALTER LONG,)said the re-

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marks which had been made were doubtless correct so far as the past history of the Bill was concerned, but it had been overlooked that the present Bill sought only to enable the Local Government Board to do with regard to one county or a set of counties what hitherto they could do only with regard to the country as a whole. Action would be taken by means of Provisional Order, so that the position of the non-county boroughs would be in no way damnified by the Bill.
SIR ALBERT ROLLITpointed out that the Bill perpetuated the distinction between county and non-county boroughs which in practice had often worked badly and created much friction. Although the Bill only gave power to deal with a particular county, it should be borne in mind that this might be a dangerous method of proceeding if the general principle was objected to. It might be comparatively easy to take such a step in a particular instance without provoking much opposition, whereas if the step were proposed to be taken generally the non-county boroughs would be able to combine, and thus be better able to resist changes to which they might object. The Bill was at present under the consideration of the Municipal Corporations Association, and when the measure next came before the House Amendments would probably be moved. In the meantime he was not disposed, if he were able to do so, to resist the progress of the Bill, but it seemed to be a tactical movement, calculated to carry out seriatim what might be regarded as objectionable.
Question put, and agreed to.
Bill read a second time, and committed to the Standing Committee on Law, etc.
And there being no further Business set down for the Afternoon Sitting, Mr. SPEAKER, left the Chair until the Evening's Sitting.

EVENING SITTING.

  ARMY ENLISTMENTS.
  Mr. PIRIEsaid the Motion which stood in his name on the Paper was slightly different in form
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  to that in which it originally stood. That was due to the fact that since yesterday the whole question of enlistment had been materially altered by the issue of the War Office Memorandum, which had been welcomed by every military reformer both in and outside the House. His object in bringing forward this Motion was to strengthen and reinforce the hands of the Secretary of State for War in completing the work that he had commenced by the issue of that Memorandum, in obtaining a satisfactory class of men to uphold the prestige of the Army. Many of our difficulties would become infinitely more simplified by the concession of the Secretary of State for War in admitting inquiries as to character to be made on enlistment of recruits. If such inquiries could be made, this Motion was only another step in completing the work of ascertaining correctly the age and qualifications of the men who offered to enlist.
  The Inspector-General, in his Report of this year, had stated that the one subject which created anxiety at the present moment was the deterioration of the physique of recruits. That was not only a serious thing for the Army, but a still more serious question for the nation, and therefore the question was transformed from a purely military into a national question. The percentage of rejections of the ordinary recruits who submitted themselves for examination was, according to the Inspector's Report, shown to be increasing; in 1900 the percentage was 27·4, in 1901, 29·04, and in 1902s 32·22. Those figures, however, did not show the whole of the rejections, because they were taken from the numbers of men who had been allowed to offer themselves for medical examination; 80,000 men were not allowed to take that preliminary step. The waste of the Army was enormous. It was idle to compare our standard with that of any Continental standard, because when conscription was in force, and all had to serve, the physically unfit were drafted into shops and stores, turned into artificers, clerks and hospital orderlies, of which large military Powers required three or four times as many as we ourselves, and, therefore, to compare our standard with that of a continental Power would be misleading.

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  He would leave the question of the physique of our recruits to other hon. Members more qualified to deal with it, but would deal with the question of wastage, and the main cause of it, which, he thought, was our false system of enlistment.
  Last year 8,800 men were discharged as invalids, 1,600 as men not likely to become efficient soldiers, 400 for making false answers, 2,900 for misconduct, and 8,000 for miscellaneous reasons not returned. If to those figures was added the net amount of the desertions, it gave a total of 25,000, and if the desertions from the Militia were included, 34,000 men—the loss of whose services laid a large debt on the Army, and a large charge on the Exchequer. A great number of these undesirable and worthless recruits had been the result of the false system under which they had been taken into the ranks, which allowed boys of fourteen years of age to join the Army. The present system of inducing these boys to become soldiers was not worthy of a great nation. Upon the attestation paper there was a direct inducement for these boys to make false statements, and not to tell the truth. Eighteen questions were put to the recruit, which he had to answer before he was attested. As to the first six he was not warned of the penalty he incurred for making a false answer, and among those questions was the most important one, "What is your age?" Before the seventh question the recruit was warned that if he gave a false answer he would be subject to two years' imprisonment, and certainly Question 4, "What is your age?" should be placed in the category in which punishment should follow a false answer. If the law was properly enforced it gave the right to punish a person for any false answer he might give, because Sections 33 and 99 of the Army Act clearly laid that down. But the law was a dead letter. All hon. Members would admit that a false entry into life by a boy in this way might have a most serious effect upon his career, character and life.
  It had been said on other occasions, both by the Secretary of State and the noble Lord the Financial Secretary to the War Office, that recruits
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  could not be sent to tropical climates until they had had two years service, and until they were twenty years of age. If that were so, why were these boys who enlisted at fourteen and fifteen, after two years' service, sent out to India at the ages, of seventeen and eighteen? The life of a cantonment in India could not be otherwise than dangerous to young men, but it was absolutely fatal to the frame of boyhood, and nobody who had seen the hospital ships coming back from India, with soldier after soldier ruined for life from the fact that he had had to submit to the temptations and evils of Indian life with only a boy's frame and a boy's mind, could rest until he had tried to remedy this blot upon our system. In addition to the 9,000 men discharged as invalids last year there were 4,000 deaths in the Army, and many of those deaths would have been averted, and there would have been many less invalids, if these young fellows had not been sent to India until they were twenty years of age.
  With regard to the Home force it was not fair to the officers and men to ask them to have to deal with men of whose ages they could not be certain. They had to inflict punishments, and those punishments should be inflicted according to the capacity of the person punished to bear them, and it was wrong to expect a boy to do the work of a man, and to withstand temptation, unless he had a man's frame and a man's mind. Battles now had to be fought often at break of day after long marches and on an empty stomach, and unless they had men in the Army such work could not be done. Therefore, it was essential that the age should be truly given by a recruit entering the Army. The authorities of a public school knew the ages of the pupils, but all that the Government had done in this matter was to adopt a non-possumus attitude. Why was it impossible to obtain the correct age and character? In every arsenal and dockyard there was a certificate of age, character and physique of every man employed; at every board school the age of every pupil was known; and even the military authorities themselves pretended they could obtain certificates of age, because in the Army circular issued yesterday

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  they had asked not only the year but the month! He did not wish the Government to be held down to a hard and fast rule in this matter. He only asked that the regulations should be enforced wherever possible. That left a loophole for those who wished to hide their identity and did not desire their antecedents to be too closely enquired into. He congratulated the right hon. Gentleman on what he had done, which had constituted one of the greatest improvements that could be made with regard to enlistment, and at the same time he hoped the right hon. Gentleman would be able to make some concession on the lines he had now suggested. He begged to move.
  MR. PEEL: In seconding the Motion said this was one of those questions upon which the opinion of the civilian Members ought to be fully heard in this House, as it was one of those questions upon which civilian opinion had and must have a much wider range than military opinion. His object in supporting the Motion was to strengthen, if it were possible, the Secretary of State for War in the good work the right hon. Gentleman had already done in his determination to raise the standard and qualification and age with regard to enlistment in the Army. There could be no doubt that public opinion on this question had been thoroughly aroused, and great interest was taken in it. People might not understand the technicalities of the matter, but they clearly understood that what they required for the money they paid was a proper article suited to the needs for which it was destined, and there was a general consensus of opinion that if the right hon. Gentleman would adopt some of that enlightened opportunism which had been spoken of in the House he would, in his endeavour to raise the standard of the Army, have the unanimous and unfailing support of the opinion of the country behind him. He submitted that no comparison could be made between the standard of our Army and that of Continental nations. In countries where the principle of conscription obtained, it was necessary to make the standard as easy and as low as possible, because the
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  Army in that case was for home defence, and if it were not fighting in its own country it would have to fight in one the climatic character of which was not dissimilar to its own, and therefore it would be possible in a case of that kind to take men whose strength and physical attributes were not sufficient to bear the storm of every climate of the world. If any comparison was made it must not be with the standard of the armies of France or Germany as constituted for home defence, but with such a force as Germany collected for service in China; and if it was desired to find an Army which was at all comparable to ours we must go to Holland, where the Army was organised to some extent on the same lines as our own.
  This change in raising the standard of height and age constituted a great innovation in the system of the Army, and he could quite imagine persons who had lived under the old system seeing no reason for the change, and pointing out that we still had the class of men who served under Wellington or followed Colin Campbell to Lucknow. But in the last 100 years a great change had come over this country. The old system sixty years ago took men with a less rigid examination than they were subject to at present, but at that time two-thirds of the people of this country lived on the land and one-third in the towns. Now three-quarters lived in the towns and one-quarter in the country, and that brought us face to face with a totally different standard of men from those who joined the Army then. Under modern conditions we had to look for a better and higher class of men, able to stand greater strain and greater labour than was sustained by men who fought in India fifty years ago. A greater strain was put on the physique and intelligence of the soldier of to-day. We had now to develop the intelligence of the individual; under modern conditions a soldier had to depend on his own intelligence and fight on his own initiative in a way he had never had to do before. It was not sufficient now to have the scalliwag and undesirable; we must now apply to a higher class of man in order to cope with the greater strain which would be put, not only on his physique, but on his intelligence. The change made by the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for War had

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  made further demands upon us, because he now asked, not for the 25,000 recruits annually that were required twenty years ago, but 50,000, and if we were going to get 50,000 we must apply to a class far different to that on which we had hitherto relied. We should have, he contended, to study the distinctions and prejudices of class and how far class distinctions were involved in our social system, and we had also to consider the feelings and prejudices of the parents, who might strongly object to their children being sent to associate with people whom they did not like them to meet with in ordinary life. He had found, in spite of the changes that had been made in the Army, a strong objection on the part of parents to send their children into the Army. They said they were sending them there to learn bad habits, and they would not send their sons anywhere where they risked being corrupted. That was the kind of sentiment and prejudice which the right hon. Gentleman had to get over and destroy. A great improvement had been made in the conditions of service in the Army, in pay and in pension, but the very changes which the right hon. Gentleman had introduced had given us the right to demand a different and better class of men than that which was required when the Army was organised on the old system.
  He contended that the present system; under which recruiting returns were considered in the War Office was a direct premium on these false balance-sheets. How were the officers and the sergeants at the recruiting depôts judged? They were judged largely on the results they produced—whither they had got a long list of recruits. If one man sent in 1,000 recruits, and another, a conscientious man, said he could only produce 500 first-rate recruits, how could they exactly compare the class of recruits gathered together in one district with those gathered together in another district? The tendency of the present method was to take the number rather than the quality of the recruits. What wonder was it then that, in spite of the desires of the Secretary for War and the opinion of this House, those recruiting agents who honestly tried to get the best men they could should have recourse, when the recruiting season was coming to an end, to
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  those persons who threw such discredit on the Army? What wonder was it that any trousered thing was taken? What wonder was it that the doctors should less severely scan the arch of the instep, or the hollow tooth, and were ready to believe that a few weeks of military training and good food would fill up the narrow chest? It was against all this that the Secretary for War should be continually fighting. It was so easy to take the number of recruits as the test of the efficiency of the recruiting officer. They were all grateful to the Secretary of State for War for all that he had done in reference to character, but he thought that the Secretary for War had spoken in some ways rather disparagingly of the kind of character required for our recruits. The right hon. Gentleman said truly enough that he did not want a Sunday School army for recruits. He did not take any absolute or pedantic rule for the character of the recruits; all he wanted was a practical test. Men should not be enlisted for service in the Army with whom their comrades would I be ashamed to associate. He was not going to say that we ought to enlist angels, but he wanted to have men of a good class and the highest character. He was glad to notice that in Manchester, one of the Divisions of which he represented, a better class had been going into the Army than formerly, but he was met with this difficulty: parents said "I should like my son to embrace a military career for a few years, but I do not like the men with whom he would have to associate." He knew from experience in the Yeomanry that one or two men might alter the whole character of a squadron or a company.
  There was another matter which had a bearing on the question of character and the class of men enlisted for the Army. It was often very difficult for a man discharged from the Army to obtain employment, and it was very sad to notice that numbers of these men found their way to the police court. What was that due to? It was due to the prejudice on the part of employers against these men. Destroy that prejudice, and make it clear to the country that a better class of men were enlisted, and the whole attitude of the employers of labour towards the Reservists would be changed The experiment of asking

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  would-be recruits for certificates of character and of examining into the character of the men had recently been tried in the Royal Marines. That body consisted of 20,000 men, and he was quite aware that a comparison between them and the general Army was, perhaps, hardly fair, because they were a picked body. That had always been the case; but in 1901 a standard of character was introduced into the Royal Marines, and the most extraordinary change had come over that body. The percentage of criminal wastage was always low, but for the six months after this further inquiry into character had been instituted the wastage was reduced by no less than 50 per cent. There was no reason why similar results should not be reached in the Army at large.
  As to the question of age, he thought that that inquiry should be a little stiffer and sterner than before. The question had become ten-fold more important since the recent changes had been introduced into the Army. The Army Corps were to be sent abroad to fight, and everybody knew that a man should not be sent abroad until he was twenty years of age. That standard had not been adopted frivolously or for no reason, but because any man under twenty years of age was less capable of meeting the hardships of foreign service or foreign warfare than a man over that age. It was therefore becoming increasingly important that the men enlisted for the Army should be not less than eighteen years of age. They were told that there was some difficulty in ascertaining the age. He was quite well aware that some men did not know their age, and others were unable to produce their birth certificates. The Secretary for War lived in the county of Surrey, where the vision was not disturbed by a vast array of smoking chimneys, but those who lived in the North knew that this matter of age was a problem which had to be faced in every factory. There everybody knew how complex was the system for the protection of children and young people of various ages, and how important it was to know precisely what the age was of the young persons employed. What was done by the manufacturers in the
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  North—done, indeed, under penalties—might be perfectly well done in recruiting for the Army. It was not enough to look to the general physique of a man; one might be deceived readily that way, and the development of a man might not be a sufficient test of the endurance he could display in foreign service and in foreign wars. But he maintained that it was possible in most cases to obtain a certificate of birth, or at any rate to make more accurate inquiries than had ever been done hitherto for ascertaining the age of recruits.
  These were the principal points on which his hon. friend and himself had submitted the Resolution to the House. They had been well met on the question of character by the Secretary for War, and the recent Army Order had been very reasonably and well drawn, but they wanted something done with this question of age. They also asked that the standard of physique should be made rather more stern and stiff than before. These were matters which commended themselves to the country, which was taking more interest at the present moment than ever before in the question of getting value for their money. That was a matter which had been most keenly discussed. It was not a matter of party at all. In this House party divisions were kept up through the sessions of Parliament, but in the country, except at election times, this antagonism did not exist. Men went about their ordinary business, and formed a good, ordinary, common-sense opinion on these matters which no Minister could possibly disregard. If the Secretary of State for War could meet them on this point he would meet the average sane, common-sense opinion of a large proportion of the people of this country; and if he did so he would do something which would give greater satisfaction than anything he had yet done. He would place his Army on firm and solid foundations; he would earn a reputation which would be as great as that of any of his predecessors; and he would enjoy the satisfaction, sincere, profound, and lasting, and as attractive and agreeable to himself as the sonorous tramp of all his Army Corps, or the nice equipoise of his linked battalions.
  Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House, while welcoming the recent War Office Memorandum regarding the character of recruits, is of opinion that, in order to adequately fit the British soldier for his duties at home and abroad, greater efforts should be made and precautions taken to secure a higher standard of physique of recruits accepted; and that as regards age a birth certificate or other reliable evidence should, wherever possible, be requited; no man being accepted or retained who is known or believed to be under the age of eighteen years."—(Mr. Pirie.)
  MR. PRIESTLEYsaid that the few remarks which he wished to make with the indulgence of the House would be specifically directed to one part of the Motion, and that was the question of the physique of the recruits. He did not wish in any way to indicate any lack of appreciation of the value of our recruits, or what was termed character. So far as the formation of character was concerned, he was not sure that it was in the power of the House of Commons or of any Government department to make any great development; but it was in the power of the State and of Government departments to create a very great and radical change in regard to the physique of the recruits. He believed that it was universally admitted in England that the alteration in our economic condition was producing a very serious result in the condition of the physique of the people of this country. It was inevitable that it should be so. The favourable and healthy conditions of country life have produced in England one of the finest race of men in the history of the nations for stamina and determination; but during the last few generations there had been a great change, which was producing results that demanded the attention of those who had the power to deal with the matter. The question of recruiting was one that affected not only men of eighteen years of age, because the physique of the individual was formed long before that age was reached. The higher classes had opportunities of getting proper physical training, but the great masses of the people had been neglected in this matter.
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  It was not the occasion for any wholesale criticism of our system of national education, but he often thought that the mental and intellectual powers of children would have been considerably benefited if we had introduced into our board schools and national schools a system of scientific physical education, to enable them to make the best of their physique during the most susceptible period of their growth. It was not a question which it was either difficult or impossible to deal with. Other countries, Sweden particularly, had for years realised the necessity of cultivating the physique of the youth of the nation as a matter of national importance, just as in this country it was considered necessary to deal with their intellectual and mental powers. During the late war a deplorably large number of recruits had to be rejected on account of varied physical imperfections.
  MR SPEAKER: I think the discussion of the question of physical education in schools is going beyond the scope of this Motion.
  MR. PRIESTLEYsaid he quite appreciated that ruling. He would just say that the object of his remarks to show that unless we had a national system of physical education we could not get the best class of recruits—men who were capable of fulfilling the duties they were called upon to perform. We must get the best raw material we could, and we must improve it as much as we could. The tendency now was for the raw material to decline in power from generation to generation. He hoped the military authorities would associate themselves with the education authorities for the purpose of instituting a national system of physical education entirely independent of any form of military training, but based upon a foundation of physiological demands and applied by specialised and scientific methods.
  THE FINANCIAL SECRETARY TO THE WAR OFFICE (Lord STANLEY,)said that in listening to the hon. Member for South Manchester he thought he discovered the real reason why the Motion was

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  brought forward. The hon. Member stated that the opportunities for private Members speaking were so few that no opportunity should be lost. He did not know whether to congratulate the hon. Member on having got the opportunity of speaking, or to condole with him for having to deliver a rather belated speech, because, if he might say so, almost all the questions put forward had, as the House would admit, already been dealt with by his right hon. friend the Secretary of State for War in a generous fashion. It had been urged that our recruits should be men of good character, and of good physique, and that they should not be accepted under age. With regard to character, he did not think anybody could go further than his right hon. friend had done. The questions which were now to be asked regarding candidates for enlistment, were these—
  "(1) In what capacity have you known So-and-so? (2) How long have you known him? (3) What time has elapsed since yon last saw him to speak to? (4) What do you know of his character? Is he sober, honest, and respectable? (5) Has he, to your knowledge, served in the Army, Navy, Royal Marines, Militia, Yeomanry, or Volunteers? and if so, please state which; and (6) Is he married or single? If a widower, state number of children, if any.
  He thought the questions which were put constituted a good investigation into a man's past life. Nobody could contend that, if honestly answered, they were not broad enough to exclude from the Army the undesirable characters who had obtained entrance to it hitherto. He quite agreed with his hon. friend that one or two undesirable men might absolutely contaminate a whole regiment. In addition, power was reserved to the commanding officer to strike a man out of the battalion if he should think him undesirable.
  MR. ARTHURLEEasked whether that power could be exercised by commanding officers without reference to the War Office.
  LORD STANLEYsaid he did not think they had to refer to the War Office His impression was that they had only to notify the War Office if this had been done. He was speaking, however, without actually knowing, and he should only confuse the House
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  if he made a definite statement. On the question of physique he felt considerable interest, for he was once a special, and could not fulfil the weight qualification—an objection which drill and good food had removed. Certainly his right hon. friend would prevent the enlistment of recruits with underdevelopment of chest or physical deformity; the standard would not be diminished. On the question of age some discretion must be allowed. The age was marked on the inquiry sheet, and the person supplying facts as to character could correct it if the age was mis-stated. If, however, a man fulfilled all requirements, if he was fit to take all duties of a man of the required age, it should not be necessary to sacrifice that man because it could be proved he was a few months under regulation age. Physical development must be the ruling qualification, but the recruiting officer should not be bound to get a birth certificate. His right horn friend would undertake that every effort should be made to keep out of the Army those youthful recruits to whom allusion had been made. His right hon. friend had endeavoured to meet the wishes of hon. Members to the fullest extent; he had done more than any other man to raise the standard of the Army in character and physique, and with regard to age he, while as far as possible only taking recruits up to age, must be allowed some discretion to retain a man who, though below age, was in development equal or superior to other men a few months his seniors.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSEsaid that the concluding words of the noble Lord would lead one to think that the Secretary of State for War was willing to accept the Motion.
  LORD STANLEY: No.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSEsaid he understood then that the Secretary of State for War was not willing to accept it. If that was so what became of the remark that this was a belated discussion? There was no proposal before the House to reduce the Vote for the Army, and surely advantage might be taken of the present opportunity to discuss the question of recruiting without casting any reflection upon the Minister of that Department.

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  He ventured to say that this was not a belated discussion. On the contrary, the Motion afforded an opportunity for the discussion of a question of principle in which all who were interested in the Army might unite in pressing on the Minister concerned the views which they thought essential to the welfare of the Army. The circular emanating from the War Office yesterday was satisfactory so far as it went, but such divergent views had been expressed by the right hon. Gentleman from time to time that they could not afford to accept his ipse dixit on the matter. They must get, if they could, a definite Resolution of the House on the matter.
  The noble Lord has just referred to a very important matter, namely, the power of commanding officers to get rid of undesirable characters in the Army. His hon. friend the Member for Fareham did not seem to take the same view as the noble Lord. He could assert without fear of contradiction that in cases of that sort, so rarely was the consent of the War Office given that the general officer commanding in almost every case sent an undesirable man to the district Court-martial for the purpose of getting rid of him. [Mr. BRODRICK shook his head.] He spoke from experience, and he knew the practice was as he had stated. Referring to what was sometimes done by magistrates in recommending persons brought before them to go into the Army and recover the character which they had lost, the hon. Member said he objected to the Army being regarded as the dumping-ground for criminals of the lesser sort. There was one point with regard to which the noble Lord was very reticent. The noble Lord the Financial Secretary had said a great deal about the physical standard required for recruits. On page 8 of the Inspector-General's Report reference was made to a Committee appointed last year to lay down the physical requirements for the future, and it was there stated that "as a result of experiments, a system was adopted," but not a word was mentioned as to the nature of the system, the evidence upon which it was adopted, or the way in which it would ameliorate present conditions. The Report also stated that the Inspector-General required a minimum
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  chest measurement, but there was no indication as to what that minimum was. Why could not the Secretary of State or the Financial Secretary depart from this reticence and be a little frank with the House? They desired to know whether the standard had really been raised, whether the report was a real and genuine report—he did not suggest it was not—and whether there were any foundations for the congratulations addressed to the Secretary of State by the Financial Secretary on the excellent work the right hon. Gentleman was doing for recruiting in the Army.
  He passed next to the question in which he was more directly interested, and that was whether the noble Lord would make some inquiry into the physical condition of the drafts sent lately to South Africa, The noble Lord, in reply to a question, said that perhaps they were not aware that there was no limit of age as regards drafts for South Africa, and, therefore, drafts were despatched as soon as possible, South Africa being considered a suitable training-ground for young soldiers. He had asked whether recruits of seventeen or eighteen were sent out there, and the reply was that recruits were sent out now just as they were sent to the home battalions, with the view of seeing whether they would continue the system. But that was not the answer which the Secretary of State gave sometime before, because on March 19th he said nothing about recruits of seventeen or eighteen. Speaking of these special enlistments, he said:—
  "We do not treat them as boys, and we do not count them as fit or eligible to go abroad."
  How could the right hon. Gentleman reconcile his answer in debate on March, 19th with the answer deliberately given across the floor of the House on March 23rd?
  THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (Mr. BRODRICK,): I do not recognise the quotation of the hon. Member, but undoubtedly the words. "go abroad" were used in the sense of going to India or on active service.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSE: We really ought to have a dictionary of the terminology of the War Office. "Abroad" is not in South Africa or the Mediterranean apparently.
  MR. BRODRICK: I hope the hon. Member will not press this. I do not know where he gets the quotation from about going abroad.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSE: My authority was The Times newspaper, quoting a speech of the right hon. Gentleman on March 19th.
  MR. BRODRICK: The Times newspaper, which is usually more than accurate, is mistaken as to the remarks I made. I particularly stated, when somebody asked me about it, that it referred to India or going on active service.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSEsaid, of course, it was very difficult for hon. Members, when they endeavoured to interpret a speech of a Minister, if they were met with a declaration that a verbatim report in The Times newspaper was not accurate. He should like to have it made perfectly clear what the term "abroad" meant, so that the House could judge of the conditions to which boys of seventeen or eighteen might be subjected when they enlisted. Then, to go a little further back, the right hon. Gentleman stated on March 14th, 1902, that no men were sent by us to the colonies not properly trained. A different system was now in vogue, because it was stated that recruits of seventeen and eighteen were sent to South Africa for the purposes of training. He wanted a clear definition from the War Office. Did they or did they not mean to send these boys, these children, abroad as representative soldiers of this country? Were they to be trained before they went abroad, or were they to go abroad for the purpose of being properly trained? Those were plain and straightforward questions to which he hoped the Secretary of State would reply.
  Another instance of the difficulty of reconciling the answers of the Secretary of State occurred during the war in connection with the Imperial Yeomanry. When the second contingent of that force were being recruited, the Opposition described the recruits as "riff-raff and worthless," while the hon. and gallant Member for the Chelmsford Division went so far as to call them "corner-boys." The right hon. Gentleman then declared that Members had no right so to describe these recruits, because, as a matter of fact,
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  they were yeomen. But a little later, when it was found that this force had become a sort of ambulatory depöt for the Boers, the Secretary of State said they were "raw, inexperienced lads." Would the recruits who were to bring characters from their previous employment undergo a similar transformation? In each of these cases he had quoted from Hansard. These irreconcilable descriptions were constantly being given.
  MR. BRODRICKsaid there was a great difference between speaking favourably of the class of men who came forward, and then, when speaking of their conduct in South Africa, admitting that they were not fully trained. As he said at the time, they were sent out in consequence of Lord Kitchener's desire to have the men on the spot.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSEsaid that here again he found it somewhat to reconcile the "yeomen who could ride and shoot" with the "raw, inexperienced lads," who, as one hon. Member described them, were unable to distinguish one end of their rifles from the other.
  MR. BRODRICKbegged the hon. Member to be a little more accurate. He denied ever having said that the Members of the second levy of Yeomanry were yeomen in the sense of having belonged previously to the Yeomanry force. They were 15,000 in number, while the whole Yeomanry were only 11,000.
  MR. CHARLES HOBHOUSEsaid that if the right hon. Gentleman doubted the accuracy of his quotations he would be happy to supply the dates and references, and, if the quotations were inaccurate, to apologise for having made them. There was a great desire on the part of all sections of the House to do something for the physical equipment of the recruit. A Committee had recently reported upon physical training in Scotland, and made valuable suggestions which he hoped the Secretary of State would be able to do something to forward. It was quite possible that the failing physical equipment of some of the classes of the country might be stimulated and renovated by greater

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  care of the children, and the recent circular issued by the Board of Education, more or less was the connivance or under the authority and at the suggestion of the War Office, although in some parts it went beyond the mark and in others was defective, contained the foundation for valuable assistance in the gradual building up of the muscle and strength of the children of the country. In order to get a better class of recruit, the recruiting houses should be removed from the squalid surroundings in which they were too often situated, so that respectable men would be able to go to a respectable house and offer to the State those services which at present were not available because the men would not go into low and disreputable quarters to offer them. He would also suggest more supervision of recruiting agents methods, The worst recruiting officer was the recruit who had been deceived, while the best was the man who was able to go back to his relations and declare that all the conditions held out to him had been fulfilled to the very letter. If the War Office would only attend to some of the remarks and suggestions of their own recruiting agents and of the Inspector-General of Recruiting, he had no doubt they would secure the class of recruit they desired.
  MAJOR RASCHhoped the Government would be able to accept some of the excellent suggestions made by the hon. Member for North Aberdeen, who was an expert in this matter and had given much time to its study. The difficulty in recruiting had not been to discover the accurate age or the religious conviction of the recruits, but to get the men at all. A writer in The Times had said perfectly truly that there was no royal road to recruiting, and had suggested that the only way to get recruits was to pay them better and give them short service. To those suggestions he would venture to add a third—namely, to take a lesser number. The Government had endeavoured to give them short service, and, as the hon. Member for Fareham had often pointed out, the United States had tried the plan of paying the men better. As to taking fewer men, it seemed to him there was no doubt that, when the Reserve reached its normal figure, they would be able considerably to
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  reduce the number of men with the Colours and to have fewer men at £60 a year and a larger number of men in the Reserve at £9 a year. Perhaps the House would permit him to recall the physique of the Army in the Crimean days. The Army then consisted of about 90,000 men, and according to Lord Haliburton's book the number of recruits was only about 7,000 a year. The result was that when this, country sent 27,000 men to the Crimea, in point of physique they were the finest Army that ever left the shores of England. On the other hand, in the year when the-abnormally large number of 91,000 presented themselves for service, because of the large number that were required to be sent out of the country, 29,000 were sent back by the doctors, 6,000 absconded, and 14,000 deserted before the end of the first year. They were now getting a very fair class of recruit in Essex, and Sir William Gatacre had recently stated that the recruits coming into the Suffolk battalion were of good quality, and that they were getting more than they knew what to do with. The reason for this was the improvements which had been suggested and carried through by the War Office dining the last eighteen months, and if that policy was continued he had no doubt the authorities would be able to pick and choose, and get the class of men the country desired. If the rations of the recruits were improved that would go a long way, as there was no doubt that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach.
  MR. JOHN BURNSsaid there were some parts of the Motion he could support heartily, but others he desired to criticise. If it was possible to get a high standard of character in the Army, he did not object to it; and if the production of a birth certificate would help to make a good soldier and develop his chest measurement he would also be in favour of that. But they might try for too high a standard of character, and fail to get it. It was not altogether so necessary as some hon. Members thought. The employers of labour generally managed to conduct the industry and commerce of this country exceedingly well without insisting on any of the long rigmarole of questions which were now addressed with regard to recruits. Characters would not im-

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  prove the physique or the morale of the Army to the extent that hon. Members below the Gangway seemed to suppose. Speaking as one who knew industrial and workshop life fairly well, he might say that it was the invariable rule of sensible and shrewd employers to engage men disproportionate to the number of testimonials they brought, because the more testimonials the worse the workman, and the more parson's testimonials the greater duffer the man was. It was also an error to assume that education and moral qualities were the same thing. It was possible to have the greatest personal immorality with the highest education. The highly educated recruit would not stay long in the Army, and if the soldier had the character some hon. Members wished him to have, they would find that he would not be possessed of better fighting qualities in consequence. [An HON. MEMBER: Oh, yes.] If the hon. Member doubted him, let him ask, or rather consult, the Duke of Wellington. Personally he believed that the best Army this country ever sent out anywhere was the Army of the Peninsular, and of that Army its commander had a very poor opinion from the point of view of morals and character. He thought that hon. Members by insisting upon the production of a birth certificate and other conditions as to character, were asking too much from the Secretary of State for War. This Motion was based upon the assumption that there was an inexhaustible reservoir of men who, given better treatment and better pay, and having to give a better character, would readily join the Army. He believed that to be an utter mistake. This reservoir of unlimited men that had been assumed was more limited than hon. Members recognised. The men of good physique and character whom they wanted in the Army had not been attracted by the better pay and treatment which had been offered within the last four years. And why was this? Simply because they went elsewhere to seek the freedom the Army, as constituted, could not give.
  There were some 52,000 of the best men in this country, with regard to physique, in the Metropolitan and local police
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  force. Then they had got some 12,000 men in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and if he were a military man he would as soon command those men as any other body of men on earth. They had also got large numbers of men in municipal employment and employed as railway servants; and they had now 1,000,000 men, as compared with only about 150,000 at the time of the battle of Waterloo, who had to pass for the Navy, Army, the Militia, the Volunteers, and various Reserves a physical test that drew upon an enormous number of men; and this was a fact which they had not to consider during the Peninsular war and at the time of Waterloo. Wellington only had 26,000 troops of British birth to hold the fort of liberty, and when they contrasted the small number wanted at that time with the large number insisted upon now the surprise to him was not that they got the few they did—but the wonder was that they recruited the large number of men of good physique which they were now able to obtain. They would not induce those men who now joined the police force to go into the Army if they paid them the same rate as the police. This was because the Army did not give to the soldier and the non commissioned officer those prospects of promotion which every policeman looked forward to, and which he invariably received. If they wanted to make the Army more popular and more attractive they would have to arrange for more promotions from the ranks.
  MR. SPEAKER: Order, order! These are questions which do not arise upon this Motion which does not raise the question of promotion and the general attractiveness of the Army. It simply deals with the precautions to be taken to secure a higher standard of physique and character of recruits.
  MR. JOHN BURNSsaid it was difficult in discussing the question of character and birth certificates to get at why recruits had not joined and why the Army was unattractive. What hon. Members hoped to get by this Resolution could be got by giving greater freedom to the men, and

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  that free flow of promotion which they got in other services. He came now to the question of securing a higher standard of physique for recruits. They could not get the class of recruits they wanted by adopting this Motion, for reasons that the Secretary of State for War could in no way be held responsible. The change in agriculture, the town drift, and the social and industrial conditions were such that they were attracting into other services the type of men who used to go into the Army in the old days; and instead of impeaching the War Office, as this Motion did, for not getting the proper standard of recruits, hon. Members who supported this Motion ought to have made their proposal wider, and they should have gone down to the bed-rock conditions that made the War Office have to accept the lower standard of physique which this Motion was directed to stop. This was really a wider question. The real difficulty was to be found in the paragraph of the Report of the Inspector-General of Recruiting, in which it was stated that the one subject which caused anxiety as to the future of recruiting was the gradual deterioration of the physique of the working, classes from whom the bulk of the recruits were drawn. So long as industrial conditions were what they were, so long would the physical, mental, and moral fibre of the working classes deteriorate. This Motion would not be a substitute for badly-cooked food, for tinned food, and adulterated food. It would be no substitute for the lack of milk and good bread for children when they were young, nor for their excessive labour during the period of growth. It would be no antidote to early marriages and intermittent employment, and other influences which
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  produced the moral wrecks and physical wastrels who went to the recruiting sergeant.
  The other day he was reading a wonderful book, written by four Edinburgh doctors, in which they stated that the food supply of the working classes compared unfavourably with the dietaries of workhouses, prisons, and lunatic asylums. So long as that condition of things was chronic, it was no use blaming the Secretary of State for War. This was a social, national, and Imperial question, and if they would remove the condition of things which produced the low standard of comfort alluded to by those Edinburgh doctors, he was sure they would go a long way to remove the evils that this Motion hoped to remedy. The sad thing about many of these recruits was, that although the patriotic spirit was strong within them, their bodily strength was weak. But they should not blame the men or the War Office for this state of things, but they should try and remove the causes that prevented men's bodies being equal to their spirit, and the patriotic principles which inspired those weak bodies to enlist. If a country yielded to its people a sufficiency of food and stamina, that country would never lack vigorous defenders. Good though physical education, character, and birth certificates might be, this was only touching the fringe of the whole subject, and all those questions were subordinate to better homes, stronger physique, and better constitutions. That would have to be made and developed long before the Army age of recruiting was reached. Why did they not tackle this subject in a better way? Why did they not remove the causes which drove men of

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  good physique out of the Army? Out of 2,887 desertions from the Army of recruits, 1,302, or 70 per cent., were men who had done under three months service. These men were of good physique, and wanted to be in the Army, and why did they leave within three months? Because even with men of good physique the system of drill was too violent, and the change from civil life to rapidly enforced discipline made them leave the Army, and this made the Service unpopular.
  Look at the way the poor fellows were punished for the most trivial thing. Among the civilian population the number of punishments was fifty-six per 100,000, but in the Army it amounted to 600 per 100,000. In other words, the punishments in the Army were eleven times worse than for offences of a worse type amongst persons outside the Army. If they would treat the soldier less like a child, and give him more freedom, and allow him more time out of barracks, and treat him as the American people treated their soldiers, they would not want motions of this description. He believed that this was the wrong way to do the right thing. He wished some hon. Member would put down a Motion to draw attention to the rapid deterioration of the physique of their industrial classes. When they were able with greater latitude to discuss the whole of this question, and when they could go back to the root causes as to why weak recruits were produced and why medical officers were compelled, under a national emergency, to pass this type of recruit, then they would get at the real reason why the standard in the Army had got to be reduced. Until then they would be obliged to support
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  this Motion in one part and condemn it in the other, because it only dealt with the fringe of the question.
  If they wanted men of strong physique and good character, the time for developing those qualities was when they were between ten and thirteen years of age. He asked hon. Members not to "chevvy" the Secretary of State for War too much on matters like this. There were some lads in the Army who were better men at sixteen or seventeen years of age than some town lads were at twenty or twenty-one, and it would be preposterous to compel the right hon. Gentleman to discharge such men because the rigid rule had to be adhered to. There must be a certain latitude and discretion, and if they tied the Secretary of State's hands in this way it would do more harm than good. If they wanted to make the Army popular they must do it in other ways. Until this country realised the evils of sweating, of slum dwellings, of bad housing of the poor, of excess of drinking, the prevalence of vice and gambling, and other things—until these matters were recognised as worthy of national consideration and prompt and earnest attention, they would never solve this problem. It was because he believed that the Army could be made ten times more attractive in other ways that he had spoken in this way. He regretted that they had been circumscribed in the debate by the ruling of the Chair. After the experience of the Duke of Wellington and our own experience in the South African War, he thought they would agree with him that birth certificates and character would not enable men to get their officers out of very tight places. Roughness of character was not incompatible with the highest qualities of the fighting soldier. He hoped hon. Mem-

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  bers would not ask for a Sunday-school gilt-edged certificate as to the number of times a person went to church when they were taking recruits for the Army. If he were a general in a tight corner he would rather have with him, in order to get out of it, fifty corner-boys than one hundred curates.
  SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMANsaid he could not agree with the Financial Secretary to the War Office when he said that this had been a barren debate. On the contrary, he thought it had been a most useful debate. If he were to select any particular part as being more to the point than another it would be the speech of his hon. friend the Member for Battersea, who was, with regard to some of his remarks, promptly and necessarily ruled out of order. As my hon. friend has elaborately shown to the House, the real avenue for good recruits is to get a good, well-nourished, and well-developed population from which to draw the recruits. If you are going to choose a commodity from a certain source, you cannot have the commodity better than the source from which yon choose it. His hon. friend the Member for Battersea had set the example of quoting French; and now that Latin appeared to be altogether out of favour, perhaps the House would allow him to quote a French epigram which was very much to the point:—"Pourquoi nos généraux sont ils si bêtes? Parcequ' on les choisit parmi les colonels." You cannot have better recruits than your population can give you, and when you complain of the low standard and the defective physique of the young men
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  in the Army, in order to cure that you must deal with the housing and the surroundings of the population from whence they come. His hon. friend who had just sat down said that moral character was not necessary for the good soldier, and that was no doubt perfectly true. They had to consider the effect of having bad characters in the Army. They might fight very well and might be very good soldiers, but those who were engaged in the work of making the Army as popular as they could, had in the first place to make parents believe that their sons would not be injured by going into the Army. He would advise his hon. friend to leave out of his Motion the words "or retained." Some of the youths enlisted under eighteen might develop into muscular and intelligent men. If they agreed to that, and if, instead of binding the Secretary of State to insist upon a certificate of age, they provided that no man should be accepted who there was reason to believe was under eighteen years of age, he hoped the right hon. Gentleman would accept the resolution so modified, and would save them the trouble of a division, which would misrepresent the general feeling of the House.
  MR. BRODRICKsaid he thought the right hon. Gentleman had fairly interpreted the opinion of the House on this subject. They desired to obtain the best they could for their money, but they must be careful not to go too far. The age of eighteen was adopted, not because it was the minimum age at which men were, fitted for the service but because it was the average age below which they did not wish to take them.

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  He thought it would be a fair compromise if they adopted the suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman. He did not think they ought to be bound closely to the age of eighteen, nor ought they to put obstacles in the way of recruits enlisting. He was not inclined to accept the words "higher standard of physique." That would be understood to mean that the present standard was not sufficient. He would accept the words "adequate standard of physique," which would be an expression of opinion, but did not oblige them to adopt a higher standard than that which was now taken. He would accept the right hon. Gentleman's suggestion that the latter part of the Resolution should read "and that as regards age no man should be accepted who is known or believed to be under the age of eighteen years."
  Amendment proposed—
  "To leave out from the word 'secure,' to the end of the Question, and add the words 'an adequate standard of physique of recruits accepted; and that as regards age no man should be accepted who is known or believed to be under the age of eighteen years.'"—(Mr. Secretary Brodrick.)
  Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."
  SIR CHARLES DILKEcriticised the wording of the Resolution as proposed to be amended, and said the whole Resolution as amended would be extraordinarily vague. He trusted the House would not, for the first time, accept eighteen as a "good average age."
  COLONEL KENYON-SLANEYsaid the hon. Member for
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  Battersea had begged the House, or rather he had begged what he called "hon and gallant Members," not to "chewy" the Secretary of State for War. Well, chevvying the Secretary of State for War was not the part taken by those Members of the House who knew most of the Army. The chevvying of the Secretary of State for War came from irresponsible enthusiasts. Those Members who were entitled to attach hon. and gallant to their names would not chewy the right hon. Gentleman, but would leave that singularly ignoble pursuit to those who spoke not altogether in the interest of the readministration of the Army, but for purposes closely connected with self-advertisement. He took it that outside these walls and in military circles the gentlemen who assumed that attitude would be well understood, and the motives of those Members would be pretty accurately diagnosed. He personally did not attach very much military importance to the hon. Members to whom he referred. An appeal had been made by the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition to accept the attitude which the Secretary of State for War had taken up in this matter. Of course it was impossible to satisfy those who wished to secure a little petty score off the right hon. Gentleman. He put them on one side. They were, he thought, not of very much importance either here or elsewhere. There would be a general consensus of opinion that the right hon. Gentleman in his first speech, when he introduced the scheme, and in all the replies he had made to the various mosquitoes that had buzzed about him, had shown his sympathy with everything that could possibly be done to improve the status of recruiting, to improve the qualification of recruits coming forward for the Army.

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  He thought it would be acknowledged that the right hon. Gentleman could hardly go further than he had gone. Soldiers inside and outside of this House would infinitely prefer to have the Army recruited from the highest and best classes of agricultural labourers and artisans. They would prefer to have the Army recruited from classes which could furnish them with the most orthodox birth certificate and with the highest possible character. But the objection to that was that they could not get them, and if they could get them it would mean that a certain number of men joining the Army would be withdrawn from the first-class of the working population, whether agricultural or artisan; but it should be remembered that beneath the highest and above the lowest class of men there was a large number of excellent men whose characters, perhaps, were not absolutely as high as would satisfy the requirements some of these purists would demand, but who were first-class fighting stuff. They were men who, for reasons personal to themselves, or out of a spirit of adventure, preferred to spend a few years in the Army before returning and settling down in life. Look what would be the result with respect to that class of recruits if the Motion were adopted? They would possibly have to refuse them, because they did not come up to some imaginary standard of purity, and the only effect would be that they would not obtain a class of men who were quite suited for the service. There was one matter in connection with the subject of recruiting to which he desired to call attention. He suggested that there should be throughout the country local bureaux, at the head of which there should be the Lord-Lieutenant of each
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  county, where the names could be registered, and would have a right to apply for employment after they had returned from service with the Colours. It would be better to do that than to set up an artificial standard for character. He did say in this House, and to the larger audience outside, that the attitude of the Secretary of State for War on this question had been all that any responsible statesman could be expected to take up, and that he was dealing with this in a manner which was absolutely the best in the opinion of the heads of the Army. Those who found fault with the right hon. Gentleman were inspired only by the unworthy motives of those who pretended, to have the interests of the Army at heart, but who were only acting in the interest of a political cabal.
  Question put, and negatived.
  Words added.
  Main Question, as amended, put, and agreed to.
  Resolved, "That this House, while welcoming the recent War Office Memorandum regarding the character of recruits, is of opinion that, in order to adequately fit the British soldier for his duties at home and abroad, greater efforts should be made and precautions taken to secure an adequate standard of physique of recruits accepted; and that as regards age no man should be accepted who is known or believed to be under the age of eighteen years.'
  Adjourned at seven minutes after Twelve o'clock.