Sitting of 12 March 1918

Preamble
The House met at a Quarter before Three of the clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.
Private Bills (Standing Orders not previously inquired into complied with),—MR. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That, in the case of the following Bill, referred on the Second Reading thereof, the Standing Orders not previously inquired into, which are applicable thereto, have been complied with, namely:
London United Tramways Bill.
Ordered, That the Bill be committed.
Local Government Provisional Orders (No. 1) Bill,
"To confirm certain Provisional Orders of the Local Government Board relating to Carnarvon, Halifax, and Wallasey," presented by Mr. STEPHEN WALSH; supported by Mr. Hayes Fisher; read the first time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 8.]

MILITARY SERVICE ACT, 1916, AND MILITARY SERVICE (CONVENTIONS WITH ALLIED STATES) ACT, 1917.
Copy presented of Order in Council, dated 27th February, 1918, making Regulations as to the Constitution, Functions, and Procedure of Tribunals under the Acts, and rescinding the Regulations heretofore made [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.
REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT, 1918.
Copy presented of Order in Council, dated 4th March, 1918, settling the Forms for Registration Purposes under the Act in England and Wales [by Act]; to lie upon the Table.
WAR.

  WESTERN FRONT (GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FORCES).
  Sir R. COOPER: I ask leave to present a public Petition which has been organised by the party which I represent. It has been signed by 103,000 members of the public and forty-six Members of this honourable House, and respectfully shows that your petitioners regard with concern the possibility of a great concentration of German and Austrian troops on the Western Front, and pray your honourable House immediately to enforce the Military Service Acts in Ireland and help to avert this peril.
  Petition to lie upon the Table.

ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS.
  EXPORTS.

    CEMENT.
    Brigadier-General CROFTasked the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the Committee now sitting in connection with the export of cement to Holland has sent an expert to Holland to inquire on the spot as to the destination with regard to cement ex ported to Holland?
    The MINISTER of BLOCKADE (Lord Robert Cecil): As I have not yet received the Committee's Report, I am unable to say what steps they have taken in the course of their inquiries.
    General CROFT: When is the Committee likely to report, and will the Noble Lord ask if such a representative has been sent to Holland?
    Lord R. CECIL: I do not think that it would be a very convenient form to ask about the proceedings of the Committee until it has reported, when it can be seen what steps should be taken. I understand that the Report is likely to be presented very shortly.

    FOODSTUFFS.
    Sir R. COOPERasked what food stuffs are being exported at the present time to Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark?
    Lord R. CECIL: For many months past practically no foodstuffs have been licensed for export to Holland, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, apart from goods released from the Prize Court. Such small quantities of certain commodities as are exported to those countries at the present time have been licensed chiefly for the use of Diplomatic and Consular officials. Certain raw materials of foodstuffs—for instance, cocoa beans and margarine materials—continue to be exported for the manufacture of the products which are in return brought to the United Kingdom.
    I ought to add, with respect to this question and the next, that the limitation of exports owing to shortage of supplies here is not a matter in which the Ministry of Blockade interferes at all.

    TEA.
    Sir R. COOPERasked what quantities of tea by weight were exported from this Kingdom in 1917 to Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway?
    Lord R. CECIL: The quantities of tea licensed for export in 1917 to the countries concerned are as follow:

    Tons.

    To Holland

    17

    To Denmark

    117

    To Sweden

    2

    To Norway

    8

    Part of the tea exported to Denmark was destined for Russia. I would add that practically no export licences for tea to these countries have been issued since February, 1917.
    Sir R. COOPER: Does that cover all exports going to these countries?
    Lord R. CECIL: I would not like to say that there might not have been some licences issued in the previous year which were worked off in 1917. That is why I answer in that way, but I should imagine that it could only have been very small quantities.
    Mr. BUTCHER: What Minister issues these licences?
    Lord R. CECIL: It depends entirely upon the subject matter. The War Trade Department issues all the licences. It acts under the directions of the Ministry of Food in the matter of food, under the Board of Trade in matters of ordinary trade, and in matters naval and military it acts under the Ministry of Munitions, the Admiralty, and the War Office.
    General CROFT: Who would be responsible for the 600,000 lbs. of tea that went to Sweden in 1916?
    Lord R. CECIL: That would be a joint responsibility of the Ministry of Blockade and the Ministry of Food. If we were in danger of a shortage of food the Board of Trade would take care that there should be no exports of food from here. If it is a question of goods going from this country, that is a matter for the Ministry of Blockade.

    1914 STAR.
    Colonel BURNasked the Undersecretary of State for War when a supply of the Mons ribbon will be available for officers entitled to it and who are now serving abroad?
    Colonel Lord HENRY CAVENDISH-BENTINCKasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether he will take steps to hasten the issue of the ribbon of the 1914 Star to those units serving at the front who are entitled to it, seeing that some dissatisfaction is caused by the fact that it has already been issued to troops serving at home?
    The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for WAR (Mr. Macpherson): Supplies of the "1914 Star" ribbon have been dispatched to India and the various theatres of war, and it should now be available for issue except in the more distant theatres. 10,600 yards were sent out to France during January and February, sufficient for a preliminary issue to 95,400 men.
    Mr. HOGGE: Is there a sufficient supply of ribbon in this country to afford a ribbon for the men here?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I think that there is.
    Colonel YATE: Has any progress been made with the issue of the Gallipoli medal?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I do not think that that question arises.

  MILITARY SERVICE.

    CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS.
    Mr. KINGasked the Undersecretary of State for War (1) whether Maurice Applebaum, of Morriston, South Wales, a Russian Pole, born at Warsaw, is confined to Wormwood Scrubs for re-

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    fusing as a conscientious objector to serve with the British forces; whether this man can now be released and allowed to return to his native country; (2) whether he is aware that Erie Fox, aged twenty years, has been four times court-martialled as a conscientious objector and is now awaiting his fifth court-martial at Dover; and whether, in view of recent promises against repeated convictions and the signs shown by Eric Fox of his mind being unhinged, his discharge from the Army will be considered?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I should be glad if my hon. Friend would furnish me with the name of the unit and the regimental number in these cases, if he wishes me to make inquiries.
    Mr. BUTCHERasked the Undersecretary of State for War what steps should be taken by a soldier who has been transferred to the W Reserve, and who, in consequence of disability, desires to be discharged from the Army; and whether a soldier who is suffering from disability caused or aggravated by military service is entitled to receive any pension while he remains in the W Reserve?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: The answer to the first' portion of my hon. and learned Friend's question is that the soldier should report to his officer in charge of records, stating his case fully. As regards the latter part, a Class W Reservist is not entitled to receive any pension. It should be borne in mind that no soldier, under present circumstances, is transferred to Class W of the Reserve on other than compassionate grounds, unless definite employment is awaiting him.
    Mr. BUTCHER: If he has been transferred, and if his state of health is so unfit as not to permit of his getting private employment, can he get his discharge and become entitled to pension?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I should like notice of the question. It raises a difficult point.
    Mr. HOGGE: Is it not the fact that all the man has to do is to go before the Medical Board, and if he gets his discharge he becomes entitled to pension?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I think that is so.
    Mr. WATTasked the Secretary for Scotland whether his attention has been called to the case of Andrew Russell, at
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    present serving his third term of imprisonment, this time for two years, in Duke Street Prison, Glasgow, as a conscientious objector; and, if so, can he see his way to advise the release of this man for work of national importance, in view of the facts that an assurance has been given by the Home Office that men who have twelve months of approved service and conduct will be returned to such work, and that the Act of Parliament made provision for bond fide conscientious objectors not being forced into the Army?
    The SECRETARY for SCOTLAND (Mr. Munro): The answer to the first part of the question is in the affirmative. As regards the remainder of the question, the relaxation to which my hon. and learned Friend refers applies only to men employed under the Committee on Employment of Conscientious Objectors, and not to a case such us that mentioned in the question.

    ROYAL WELSH FUSILIERS (MAURICE ANDREWS).
    Mr. KINGasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that Maurice Andrews, No. 76,095, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, is a Russian subject who, having applied for return, to Russia, was prevented by the day assigned being the day of the Jewish new year, and that he has in consequence been court-martialled, confined for eight days in a singlet and pants in Hereford Prison, and is now in danger of physical and mental collapse; and whether this man will now be discharged?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: If Andrews was called up under the Convention, it would, I think, be a matter for my hon. Friend the Minister of National Service to answer the first part of the question. As regards the second part, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary can no doubt furnish the desired information as to Andrews' condition in Hereford Prison if he is confined there. The answer to the last part of the question is in the negative.

    BAKEWELL TRIBUNAL (BOOT OPERATIVES).
    Colonel W. THORNEasked the Under-Secretary of State for War if his attention has been called to a statement made at the Bakewell Tribunal by a boot operative in an appeal case; if he is aware that the man in question declared that his employer had declined to appeal

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    or any of his employés any longer because they had joined a local branch of the National Society of Boot and Shoe Operatives; and if he will make inquiries into the matter?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of NATIONAL SERVICE (Mr. Beck): I have been asked to reply to this question The cases of certain boot operatives employed within the jurisdiction of the Bakewell Tribunal have been brought to my notice, and I caused inquiries to be made. From the reports which I have received, it appears that the employers had, in the past, obtained periods of temporary exemption for a number of their men and, from time to time, as the certificates expired, had applied for renewal. Recently, on the expiry of the exemptions of certain men, the majority of whom were under thirty years of age, the employers did not apply for renewal. It is not within the competence of the National Service Department to compel employers to apply for the exemption of their men. When, however, a man's certificate granted on his employer's application expires, it is open to him to apply for renewal on his own behalf. This course has, I am informed, been taken by the men in question, who have obtained further temporary exemption from the tribunal.

    LABOUR BATTALIONS.
    Sir C. KINLOCH-COOKEasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether he can say if any change has been made in the command of the Labour battalions on the Western Front; whether the general who has been so successful has been given another post; and, if so, will he say why this was done and who is now in charge of the Labour work in France?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I understand that the facts are as stated by my hon. Friend as regards the command of these battalions, but that the reorganisation has been carried out in the interests of efficiency of labour. The brigadier-general, lately in charge, who was no longer required under the new scheme, has been appointed Controller of Salvage,

    CONTRACTORS' WORKMEN.
    Mr. T. WILSONasked the Minister of National Service if he is aware that men employed by a contractor but who are engaged on Admiralty work are receiving their calling-up papers; that
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    when they appeal to the Enlistment Com plaints Committee there is delay in their case being decided; that when the date of their calling-up notice expires their employer discharges them on the ground that he dare not employ them after the date they are ordered to join the Army; and. seeing that this is a hardship on the men, whether ho will take steps to remove its cause?
    Mr. BECK: It is not clear to what class of workmen the hon. Member refers. If he refers to workmen employed upon Government constructional work, the necessary temporary protection of such men is given by this Ministry on consideration of the requirements submitted by the Government Departments concerned. If he refers to men engaged in an occupation covered by the Schedule of Protected Occupations, such men, if they lodge a claim with the Enlistment Complaints Sub-committee that they are entitled to protection under the Schedule, are not required to report for service until the claim has been decided. Calling-up notices have a slip attached to them informing men that in such cases they should return the calling-up notice, stating the circumstances. If the claim is allowed the calling-up notice is cancelled. I am not aware of the circumstances stated in the concluding part of the question.

  ROYAL ENGINEERS, No. 260 RAILWAY COMPANY.
  Mr. KINGasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that the wife and family of Sapper F. Davey, No. 190349, No. 260 Railway Company, Royal Engineers, are being threatened with eviction from their house at Royal Oake, Oake, Somerset; that this woman and her children were, in March, 1917, turned out of their home at Hillfarrance, Somerset, and that F. Davey is now suffering from shell-shock; and whether, to protect this family and to relieve the mind and hasten the recovery of this soldier, he will take steps to prevent the disturbance of the family?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: I am afraid that the War Office have no power in such a case as this. The matter is one to be determined by a Court of Law. I understand, however, that the general question is now being considered by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary.

  MAISONS TOLEREES.
  Mr. LEES-SMITH:had given notice of the following question:
  8. To ask the Under-Secretary of State for War whether he has any statement to make with regard to the question of placing the maisons tolerées in France out of bounds for British soldiers?
  Mr. McCURDY: Before the hon. Member answers the question, may I ask him whether his attention has been called to the fact that a statement is already being circulated broadcast in this country purporting to report a speech of the hon. Member on this important subject, and whether that report fairly or accurately represents his views?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: With regard to the question just asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, my attention has been drawn to what I consider a garbled version of the speech which I made in this House. I need hardly say that neither myself nor my colleague are anxious to thrust temptation on our gallant soldiers at the front. With regard to the question on the Paper, I have nothing further to add at present.

  ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS.
  Mr. TYSON WILSONasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether men in the Royal Army Medical Corps who are on ambulance transport and hospital ships are recognised as being on active service; and, it not, seeing that the ships they are on run the risk of being sunk by mines or torpedoed, he will place these men on the active service list and also allow them to wear the red and blue service chevron?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: It has been decided that medical personnel, including nurses serving on hospital ships and ambulance transports, are eligible for chevrons by virtue of such service.

  ARMY DENTAL TREATMENT.
  Mr. PENNEFATHERasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether any instruction, marked confidential or otherwise, has been issued to the effect that the inspection of soldiers for dental
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  treatment is not to be delegated to dental officers; and, if so, will he state the terms and date of such instruction?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: The answer is in the negative. There is nothing beyond the instruction with regard to which my hon. Friend asked me a question on the 14th February last.

  CHISELDON CAMP, WILTS.
  Major NEWMANasked the Under-Secretary of State for War whether the sanitary condition of the camp at Chiseldon, Wilts, is now regarded as satisfactory; have any works to improve the drainage been undertaken and completed; can he say that the hutments have been made weather-proof; and has he any in formation from the medical authorities as to the health of the troops stationed at Chiseldon during the past winter?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: I am informed that the sanitation at this camp is satisfactory. The health of the troops has teen good during the past winter, and continues so at the present time. The system of sewers is complete and in good order. Subsoil drains are being substituted for surface drains, and the work will be completed before the autumn. The hutments are weather-proof.

  APPLICANTS FOR COMMISSIONS (OVERSEAS SERVICE).
  Mr. JOWETTasked the Under- Secretary of State for War if there is in force at present an Army Council Instruction which, in effect, disqualifies applicants for commissions who have not served over seas; and, if so, whether it is observed in all cases alike?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: No, Sir; there is no Army Council Instruction to this effect. On the contrary, there are two Army Council Instructions which deal with the acceptance of Officers Training Corps Cadets and of selected men from young soldiers and graduated battalions. These provide for the selection of candidates for training for temporary commissions from among young men who are not even old enough to go on service overseas.
  Mr. HOGGE: Is it the case that no application is now being made from the ranks unless the man is a non-commissioned officer?
  Mr. MACPHERSON: No; if my hon. Friend had done me the honour to listen to my statement on the Army Estimates he would have heard that I pointed out that, as far as possible, we limit candidates for Cadet Corps to soldiers who have served overseas and who have reached the rank of non-commissioned officer. As to exceptional cases in this country, we give them exceptional treatment.

  PELICAN PRESS.
  Mr. ANDERSONasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he is aware that the police have visited the premises of the Pelican Press, Gough Square, Fleet Street, E. C., in respect of a leaflet printed by this firm; whether he knows that the leaflet announced a mass meeting organised by the Acton and Chiswick Trades and Labour Council and the Acton Food Vigilance Committee in respect of the distribution of food, and that the police have informed the printers that they have broken the law in printing such a leaflet; if he will state on whose instructions this visit was made by the police; and for what reason such action was taken?
  The SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Sir George Cave): I am informed by the Commissioner of the City Police that the leaflet referred to has not been brought to his notice, and that nothing is known of the alleged visit by the police to the premises in question.

  SPECIAL CONSTABLES (STEEL HELMETS).
  Sir STEPHEN COLLINSasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department why the steel helmets cannot be given to the London special constables so that arrangements can be made for those constables who reside at a distance from their respective stations to take the helmets to their homes that they may be available for them to wear the moment they are called out on duty?
  Sir G. CAVE: I would refer the hon. Member to the answer given to a question by the hon. Member for Tottenham on the 27th February.

  PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.
  Mr. PENNEFATHERasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the Proportional Representation Commissioners will hold any inquiries in connection with Liverpool; and, if so, will political associations, municipal authorities, public men, and voters generally be entitled to give evidence or express opinions upon any scheme which may be proposed?
  Sir G. CAVE: I understand that a local inquiry is to be held at Liverpool, and that at this inquiry, as at all other inquiries proposed to be held by the Commissioners, an opportunity will be afforded to all persons interested to attend and be heard.
  Mr. BURDETT-COUTTSasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what authority attaches to the recent communication to the public Press purporting to give a list of the constituencies now under the consideration of the Commissioners for the application of proportional representation; whether the list is complete; and whether the Commissioners will supply this House with a complete list, together with the dates and the local inquiries to be held and the pro posed nature and extent of such inquiries?
  Sir G. CAVE: I understand that the list referred to is not authoritative or complete. I will inquire whether a complete list can be published, and at what date.
  Sir J. D. REES: Whatever may be taken away from the list, can anything be added to it?
  Sir C. KINLOCH-COOKE: Can the right hon. Gentleman give the names of the Committee and the Chairman?
  Sir G. CAVE: They have already been given. Mr. Speaker is Chairman.

  NAVAL AND MILITARY PENSIONS AND GRANTS.
  Mr. BYRNEasked the Pensions Minister whether it has yet been decided to increase the pensions of widows and orphans and discharged soldiers and sailors?
  The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of PENSIONS (Colonel Sir A. Griffith-Boscawen): I regret that I am still unable to make any announcement on this subject.

  FOOD SUPPLIES.

    GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION OF LAND.
    Colonel STIRLINGasked the Secretary for Scotland whether the farms of Bandeath, Alton, Drypow, and a large part of the farm of Throsk, in the county of Stirling, all arable farms in a high state of cultivation, have been taken over by the Admiralty; and, if so, whether they will be thrown out of cultivation as the result of their occupation by the Admiralty?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the ADMIRALTY (Dr. Macnamara): I have been asked to reply to this question. I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the reply which I gave on Thursday last to the Member for Stirlingshire regarding the same area of land. Since Thursday last I have made further inquiries regarding the taking over of this land, and I am satisfied that we had no alternative.
    Colonel STIRLING: Can the right hon. Gentleman say to what extent the farms have been turned out of cultivation?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I explained last Thursday that land which is not being used will remain in cultivation as long as possible. Perhaps my hon. Friend will consult me, and I shall be able to give him greater and more precise details.

    FISHERY BOARD (SCOTLAND).
    Mr. HARCOURTasked the Secretary for Scotland whether the Fishery Board have power to extend the three-mile limit within which trawling is prohibited; whether it is proposed to do so and, if so, on what grounds; whether requests for this extension have been made by line fishermen who previously opposed it a the ground that trawling was a wasteful and destructive method of fishing, which tended to diminish the total supply of fish; and whether, if an extension is granted, it will be only temporary?
    Mr. MUNRO: The Fishery Board for Scotland have power under the Sea Fishing (Scotland) Order, 1917, to permit trawling within the three-mile limit, and they have exercised their power by an Order applicable to a limited stretch of coast, and for a limited period, under certain conditions as to size of boats, etc. The request for relaxation of the restrictions on trawling was made by line fishermen.

    FERTILISERS.
    General CROFTasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether the Board has made any calculation of the annual loss in fertilisers by the London County Council in not making proper use of the London sewage as recommended by the Royal Commission of 1884; and has he any official information showing that the estimate of the loss made out by competent experts is over £500,000 per annum to the London ratepayers and over £1,000,000 in extra food production is incorrect?
    The, PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of AGRICULTURE (Sir Richard Winfrey): The Board are aware that estimates of the kind referred to by the hon. and gallant Member have been made, but they are advised that under existing conditions the cost of recovery for use in agriculture of the fertilising materials contained in the sewage of London would exceed their value.
    General CROFT: What steps are the Board of Agriculture taking to aid the collection of fertilisers throughout the country?
    Sir R. WINFREY: I do not know. The matter has been considered.
    General CROFT: Is there not a shortage of fertilisers in the country, and that being so, does not the matter of cost enter into the question, which is one of food production?
    General CROFTasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether the London County Council is taking any steps to collect and treat the sewage of London with s, view of providing increased fertilisation to the soil; and, if not, whether he will at once appoint a committee to inquire into the possibility of using the sludge which is at present discharged into the sea?
    Sir R. WINFREY: The Board are informed that the London County Council is fully aware of the possibilities of recovering usable products from sewage and that any practicable scheme would receive careful attention. As regards the second part of the question, I will gladly confer with my right hon. Friend the President of the Local Government Board on the subject. I should, however, like to remind the hon. and gallant Member that

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    the Royal Commission on Sewage Disposal, which had been sitting for many years, has only suspended its operations since the outbreak of war.

    CALF-REARING (FEEDING STUFFS).
    Major NEWMANasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether he is in communication with the Feeding Stuffs Department of the Ministry of Food relative to the question of food for calves; and whether, in view of the urgency of the matter, he can make any statement to relieve the anxiety of calf rearers?
    Sir R. WINFREY: It is proposed to allow priority certificates to owners of calves for the purchase of controlled feeding stuffs. The subject is still under discussion, and an announcement may be expected shortly.
    Major NEWMAN: Will the Board of Agriculture impress upon the Ministry of Food that if the calf rearers cannot get food for their calves they will have to kill them?
    Sir R. WINFREY: I think we have got that in view.

    ALLOTMENTS, BEXLEY HEATH.
    Mr. ROWLANDSasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether he is aware that recently at Bexley Heath several allotments which had been cultivated by the holders, and which they had made provision to cultivate again this season, have been sold, and that the land was not sold for building purposes; and if he will take steps to prevent allotment holders being unnecessarily disturbed, as the fact of some compensation being given does not remedy these cases?
    Sir R. WINFREY: The Board have not received information concerning this case, but if the hon. Member will supply particulars inquiry will be made.

    WHEAT.
    Sir R. COOPERasked the President of the Board of Agriculture what was the acreage under wheat in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland respectively in the years 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1917?
    Sir R. WINFREY: The figures are shown in a Table which will be printed in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
    The following is the Table referred to:—

    Acreage of Wheat.

    Year.

    England.

    Scotland.

    Wales.

    Ireland.

    Total.

    1914

    1,770,470

    60,521

    37,028

    36,913

    1,904,932

    1915

    2,121,619

    76,664

    48,651

    86,530

    2,333,354

    1916

    1,862,211

    63,083

    49,997

    76,438

    2,051,729

    1917

    1,854,870

    60,931

    63,615

    124,082

    2,103,498

    POTATOES.
    Sir R. COOPERasked the President of the Board of Agriculture if the average yield of potatoes in England and W ales in 1917, 6 tons per acre, was satisfactory; if he is aware that many growers in various parts of the country produced from 12 to 18 tons per acre; and, if so, what steps he has taken to ensure that all persons growing potatoes this year shall be encouraged to obtain the highest possible yield from the ground that they cultivate?
    Sir R. WINFREY:The average yield of any crop is always far below that attained by the best cultivators upon the more favourable soils, and the difference is greater in the case of potatoes than for most crops. The Board have taken steps through the Food Production Department to secure the distribution of improved seed, to introduce disease-resisting varieties, to increase the supply of fertilisers, and to facilitate and promote spraying, all measures which will assist growers to obtain the maximum yield from the land they cultivate. In view of the food situation, the Board are anxious to secure the planting of potatoes on every possible acre, and are giving every assistance in their power to growers.
    Sir R. COOPER: Is it not the fact that the vast majority of people in this country growing potatoes obtain very unsatisfactory yields, and can his Department not take some steps to instruct the people of this country how they can get very much larger crops by deeper ploughing and a better use of the manures available, in addition to the points raised by the hon. Member?
    Sir R. WINFREY: A number of instructors are going round the country now.

    POULTRY.
    Mr. HARCOURTasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether he proposes to define more precisely the utility poultry stock which is to be rationed?
    Sir R. WINFREY: It is not proposed to ration poultry beyond defining the allowance of certain forms of concentrated feeding stuffs which poultry-keepers can be permitted to purchase.

    FOOD CONTROL COMMITTEES (EXPENDITURE).
    Mr. HIGHAMasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food (1) if he will state which authority is to reimburse food control committees for expenditure which the Minister of Food declares, after the expenditure has been incurred, not to be reasonable or necessary; whether the authority which is liable to have to meet that unreasonable and unnecessary expenditure has any control over the expenditure; (2) what statutory authority the Ministry of Food possesses for the issue of paragraph 1 of Circular No. 11 by which it instructs local authorities to advance public funds to food control committees, such committees being independent bodies over which the local authorities has no control or even right to criticism; (3) if he will so amend Circular No. 11 as to require food control committees to get the consent of the financially responsible authority before incurring expenditure which must be met by the authority?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of FOOD (Mr. Clynes): A food control committee can only incur such expenditure as is authorised either by the Food Controller or by the appointing authority or authorities. The circular to which the hon. Member refers is a memorandum to executive officers based on Clause 20 of the Food Control Committees (Constitution) Order, 1917, which indicates that the appointing authority is to advance such moneys as a food committee may require, subject to repayment by the Food Controller of expenditure which he authorises. The Treasury have approved repayment of all expenses reasonably incurred in the years 1917–1918, provided that such expenses are duly certified by the Divisional Food Commissioners. It is not considered that any modification of the circular memorandum is either necessary or desirable.

    SUGAR.
    Mr. WILESasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food whether his Department is prepared to reconsider its refusal to give permission to the Islington Food Control Committee to issue a sugar card to the Islington committee for entertaining wounded soldiers
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    and sailors, a properly constituted authority registered under the War Charities Act, for sugar up to 1 lb. per week for supplying wounded soldiers and sailors with sugar in their tea when being entertained by the committee?
    Mr. CLYNES: The reply is in the negative Ample supplies of sugar are provided for wounded soldiers through other channels of supply.
    Mr. GILBERTasked if there is any intention of the Ministry of Food to reduce the present rations of sugar; and, if so, what reduction is proposed?
    Mr. CLYNES: I may refer the hon. Member to my answer given yesterday to the hon. Member for Hornsey.
    Mr. G. LAMBERTasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food if he will so amend the Order allocating sugar to fruit growers for jam making so as to include others who are not actually growers but who would be prepared to buy fruit or to gather wild fruit for making into jam, which fruit might otherwise be wasted and a valuable food product be therefore lost?
    Mr. CLYNES: The answer is in the negative. This question has been most carefully considered, but it has been found impossible to devise any watertight scheme which would not lead to a serious misapplication of sugar, or put an undue strain upon the; national stocks.
    Mr. LAMBERT: Can sugar be misapplied by turning it into jam?
    Mr. CLYNES: I did not intend to imply that in the answer I have given.

    TRACTORS FROM AMERICA.
    Sir H. DALZIELasked the Prime Minister whether it is still the intention of the Government that the tractors imported from America by the Government shall remain the property of the Government?
    Sir R. WINFREY: Tractors imported from America for the Food Production Department will continue to be worked under the Department for the present. The question of their ultimate disposal will be considered in due course.
    Sir H. DALZIEL: May we take it as quite clear that it is not the intention of the Department to lease or sell these tractors at the present time?
    Sir R. WINFREY: That is so.

    PRESERVED MILK.
    Captain CARR-GOMMasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food if he can now state whether prices have been fixed by the Ministry for the retail sale of tinned preserved milk?
    Mr. CLYNES: Fixed prices for tinned preserved milk have now been settled, and will be announced at an early date.

    MAXIMUM PRICES (PENALTIES FOR EXCESS).
    Mr. MOLTENOasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food whether his attention has been drawn to the case of Eliza Bancaster, smallholder, Brassington Farm, Ubberley, Stoke-on-Trent, who was fined £60 on four summonses at Hanley for selling small quantities of pork, amounting to 11¼lb, at 1d. per lb. more than the maxi mum price fixed by the Food Controller; whether he is aware that in defence she stated her ignorance of the Order in relation to the maximum selling price of pork and that, on finding she had made a mistake, notified her several customers accordingly; whether the Food Controller's representative pressed for such penalties; and if so, having regard to the nature of the circumstances attending such cases, whether he will consider the advisability of instructing food control committees not to press for heavy penalties?
    Mr. CLYNES: There is no record of any charge against the person named, but there is a report of a conviction against a person of somewhat similar name and address on four summonses for selling pork at a price exceeding the maximum price, in respect of which she was fined £15 and costs in each case. These contraventions were detected by the police and prosecuted in the usual way. It is presumed that the defence mentioned in the question was put in, and that the Bench considered it in estimating the penalties. The Food Control Committee were not concerned in the case.

    BREAD AND FLOUR.
    Mr. GILBERTasked if there is any present intention of the Ministry of Food to ration bread and flour?
    Mr. CLYNES: All necessary preparations are being made for the rationing of bread and flour, should this become necessary. It has not, however, been decided to introduce rationing in respect of these foods, and it is hoped that if great care is
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    exercised and all waste avoided, the introduction of rationing may be avoided or long postponed.

    IRISH FOOD CONTROL COMMITTEE.
    Mr. BYRNEasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food if he will state the powers of the Irish Food Control Committee?
    Mr. CLYNES: The powers and duties of the Irish Food Control Committee are such as are assigned to them by certain orders of the Food Controller. I am sending the hon. Member a copy of the new Food Supply Manual, and he will find these powers set out in detail on pp. 338 to 340 thereof.
    Mr. BYRNE: Have the Food Control Committee power to insist on the wholesale people supplying their customers on the pre-war standard of foodstuffs, such as sugar?
    Mr. CLYNES: That is one of the details my hon. Friend will find set out in the latest statement of the Food Control Committee in Ireland.
    Major NEWMAN: Has the Food Controller full authority over the Irish Food Control Committee, or have they independent powers of their own?
    Mr. CLYNES: They have very large powers which they exercise independently of the Food Controller, but on all matters of high importance of policy their action is subject, of course, to the Food Controller.
    Mr. JOYCE: Will the hon. Gentleman supply other hon. Members with those rules?
    Mr. LOUGH: Will the information be supplied to all Members of the House?
    Mr. CLYNES: That is a point I am prepared to consider, because we are anxious to distribute information as widely as possible.
    Captain SHEEHAN: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the Irish Food Control Committee complain that they have no independent powers of administration whatever, and are hampered in every possible way by the Food Controller here?
    Mr. CLYNES: We have certainly not heard of any such complaint from the Irish Food Control Committee, and our

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    experience shows they do exercise wide authority, without any restraint from the Food Controller.

    COFFEE (PRISONERS OF WAR).
    Sir R. COOPERasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food what are the quantities of tea and coffee in the country at the present time; and whether, in view of the fact that coffee is the national beverage of Germans and Austrians, he will direct that prisoners of war shall be supplied with coffee instead of tea, in order that the latter, which is our own national beverage, may be avail able to the fullest extent for the people of this country?
    Mr. CLYNES: The bonded warehouse stocks on the 28th February were approximately 70,000,000 lbs. of tea and 1,000,000 cwts. of coffee. The importation of coffee has almost entirely ceased, though the home consumption has largely increased. On the other hand, it is intended to maintain the importation of tea at a level sufficient to meet requirements. For these reasons it does not appear desirable to adopt the hon. Member's suggestion.

    CONDEMNED CATTLE.
    Major HUNTasked the number of cattle for which £2,480 was paid out in insurance claims for condemnation on account of seizure for tuberculosis during the month of January at Birkenhead; and the principal districts where the seizures were effected?
    Mr. CLYNES: The number of cattle for which £2,480 was paid out in insurance claims on account of seizure for tuberculosis was seventy-eight. This figure applies to the months of January and February, and not to January alone. The cattle were shipped from Ireland to Birkenhead, and condemned there on arrival.
    Colonel THORNE: What becomes of these cattle when they are condemned? Are thy burnt, or what is done with them?
    Mr. CLYNES: They are disposed of in various ways, but as to how I should require notice of that question.
    Mr. DUNDAS WHITE: Can the hon. Gentleman say why these cattle were not examined before shipment, instead of wasting the tonnage on the carriage of I cattle which are condemned on arrival?
    Mr. CLYNES: I understand the actual condition or symptoms of tuberculosis cannot be discovered until a late stage has been reached.
    Mr. WHITE: Is it a suggestion that they develop the disease during the voyage from Ireland?

    OFFAL CONSIGNMENTS.
    Major HUNTasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food if, during the months of January and February, any offal was consigned from Birkenhead to the firms of Stack and Company, 2, Wentworth. Street, Spitalfields, and Solomon Oslofski, also of Wentworth Street, Spitalfields; who were the firms consigning same; and on what days were the principal consignments made?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. Stephen Walsh): I have been asked to answer this question. I am informed that, of the two firms mentioned, Stack has not received any offal from Birkenhead in the period mentioned. Oslofski has regularly received offal from Horwitz and Abraham, of Birkenhead, for the last thirty years. I am endeavouring to obtain information as to dates on which the principal consignments were received.

    SMITHFIELD MARKET (DISMISSAL OF MEN).
    Major HUNTasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food whether the rationing system at Smithfield has resulted in 500 or 600 men, many of whom have worked for twenty years and more for the same firm, being summarily dismissed, and hardship has been thereby imposed upon a worthy body of men who can only be transferred to other employment with difficulty; and whether he will at once have a registration of these men and draw up a scheme whereby the wholesale association shall be levied to provide for their relief in the same manner that the cotton manufacturers are levied for the relief of the unemployed weavers until sufficient time has elapsed to absorb this surplus labour into useful employment, and that this relief shall apply to all registered men whether trades unionists or otherwise?
    Mr. CLYNES: I regret that, in consequence of the rationing of meat supplies, the volume of business passing through Smithfield Market has been so materially reduced that some of the wholesalers have

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    been obliged to dismiss a certain number of their staff. A Report on the whole question is being prepared by the Wholesale Meat Supply Association, which will be considered by the Food Controller, and all possible measures taken to afford relief.

    RABBITS IN COLD STORAGE.
    Colonel THORNEasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food if his attention has been called to a Chesterfield health authority having condemned as unfit for human food 5,424 rabbits which were placed in cold storage by the Army authorities some weeks ago; if he is aware that the Chesterfield local authority made an application to the Army authorities to have the rabbits taken out and sold to the public before they got in a state of rottenness; if he can give any reason why permission was refused; if any action has been taken against the responsible persons for allowing such food to go bad when there are so many people in Chesterfield who are finding it difficult to get food; and if he will take action in the matter?
    Mr. MACPHERSON: I would refer my hon. Friend to the answer which I gave on this subject on the 7th March to my hon. Friend the Member for the Ecclesall Division of Sheffield, in which I pointed out that the War Office authorities were in no way responsible. I am still in communication with the Ministry of Food, and will let my hon. Friend know the result as soon as possible.

  RIVER BEULT, KENT (DRAINAGE IMPROVEMENT).
  Mr. ROWLANDSasked the President of the Board of Agriculture whether he is aware that the River Beult, in Kent, has not been cleaned out for a, long number of years, and this results in floods which interferes with the cultivation of the land in the parishes through which the river flows; and if he will say what is to be done to get rid of the nuisance and improve the river?
  Sir R. WINFREY: An inspection of the River Beult was made recently by the Board's drainage inspector, whose reports confirm the statements made in the question. The Board have suggested to the Kent Agricultural Executive that a
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  conference of the persons concerned should be called and that, if necessary, the committee should use their powers under the Defence of the Realm Regulations to secure the cleansing of the channel and the improvement of the drainage.

  GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS (OFFICE ACCOMMODATION).
  Sir R. COOPERasked the First Commissioner of Works if he will state how many hotels in Glasgow have been commandeered for the use of Government Departments; will he state which they are; and is he satisfied that each is urgently necessary for the work of the Government?
  The FIRST COMMISSIONER of WORKS (Sir Alfred Mond): The only hotel in Glasgow which has been commandeered by my Department is the Windsor, which is being occupied by the Munitions and Shipyard Labour Supply Departments and the Live Stock Commissioners. I should not have consented to its being commandeered unless I had been satisfied that such action was necessary in the public interest.
  Mr. HOGGE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that it is the only decent hotel in Glasgow?

  NATIONAL INSURANCE ACT.

    CONTRIBUTIONS OF INTERNED PRISONERS.
    Colonel Sir HAMAR GREENWOODasked the Comptroller of the Household, as representing the National Health Insurance Commissioners, if he will state what is the position under the National Insurance Act on returning home of a man who has been interned in an enemy country during the War?
    Sir EDWIN CORNWALL (Comptroller of the Household): Section 13 of the new Insurance Act keeps alive the insurance of a man who has been interned, however long the period of his captivity, and enables the Commissioners to make a substantial reduction in the arrears of contributions accruing in that period. Further, Section 29 places a small but useful sum, arising from unclaimed contributions, at the disposal of the Commissioners, and I propose that some part of this money should be utilised in pay-

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    ing off the whole of the arrears as so reduced. The effect, as my hon. Friend will see, is that a person who has been interned will, immediately on his return home, be entitled to benefit if incapacitated, and will have no contributions to pay until he again returns to work.

  ENEMY AIR RAIDS (PUBLIC SHELTERS).
  Sir H. DALZIELasked the Prime Minister who is the authority responsible for the selection of London air shelters?
  Sir G. CAVE: My right hon. Friend has asked me to reply to this question. The majority of the shelters have been placed at the disposal of the public by the owners or occupiers of the premises. These shelters are inspected by members of the Advisory Committee for Air-raid Shelters to the Commissioner of Police, and upon their recommendation any shelter deemed unsuitable is removed from the list. Much assistance is being given by local authorities.
  Sir H. DALZIEL: Does the right hon. Gentleman not think it advisable to appoint a responsible inspector on behalf of the Home Office, having regard to the fact that some of the air shelters have proved to be absolutely death traps?
  Sir G. CAVE: I am not aware that the right hon. Gentleman's last statement is true. As a matter of fact, this Committee consists entirely of architects, who are giving a great deal of time and attention to the matter.
  Sir H. DALZIEL: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that forty dead bodies were taken out of an authorised air-raid shelter?
  Colonel C. LOWTHER: Can these shelters be made bomb-proof, and would it not be possible to secure for this purpose the services of convalescent wounded architects who have served in the Royal Engineers?
  Sir G. CAVE: The Committee consists of architects, and some of the very best in London.
  Mr. HOGGE: If it is the case that these are approved by architects, will the right
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  hon. Gentleman make a special effort to protect them, in view of the fact that one of the shelters which was supposed to be safe produced the greatest disaster there has been in connection with an air raid?
  Sir G. CAVE: There is a great deal of misunderstanding. The place to which my hon. Friend refers was a very strong building, indeed, on ordinary principles, but there is hardly any building in London which is proof against these enormously heavy bombs.
  Colonel THORNE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that some little time ago there was a meeting of representatives of the county borough of West Ham and by a unanimous vote it was advised that the people should stay at home when air raids are on?
  Sir G. CAVE: I have said so many times in this House, and I entirely agree with what the hon. Member says.
  Colonel LOWTHER: Is it not the fact that there are wounded convalescent architects whose services could be used for this specific purpose?
  Sir G. CAVE: If so, I should be very glad to have any offer of assistance.
  Mr. GILBERT: Can the right hon. Gentleman say who are the members of the Advisory Committee of the Home Office, and is he aware that the London County Council, which is the Building Act Authority for London, has not been consulted as regards any of these air-raid shelters?
  Sir G. CAVE: I am quite sure my hon. Friend is wrong in his last statement. I cannot at the moment recollect the names of the Advisory Committee.
  Sir H. DALZIEL: In view of the statement that people should stay at home, does the right hon. Gentleman propose to-withdraw the notices advising people to go to air shelters which are posted up?
  Sir G. CAVE: There is no notice advising anybody to go to shelters, except persons who are in the streets.

  IRELAND (ASSIZE REPORTS).
  Major NEWMANasked the Prime Minister whether he has received from the county high sheriffs and grand juries of

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  counties in the West and South of Ireland representations as to the continued prevalence of agrarian Bolshevism, raiding for arms, and assaults on isolated members of the forces of the Crown and members of the Royal Irish Constabulary; and has he been able to assure them that the full authority of the executive will be used to restore order?
  The CHIEF SECRETARY for IRELAND (Mr. Duke): My right hon. Friend has received the representations referred to, and has asked me to reply. His Majesty's Government has been well aware of the extent to which crime was occurring in association with the existing state of political unrest and anxiety in Ireland, and before any of these representations were made had taken measures whereby without any intentional interference with political controversy occurrences such as are mentioned in the question would be guarded against, and, if not prevented, would be punished.
  Resolutions such as the hon. and gallant Member mentions must not be accepted in all cases as evidence of local conditions. I observe to-day that the grand jury of county Fermanagh unanimously resolved on Saturday last that the disgraceful state of the country at the present time is entirely due to the neglect of the most elementary obligations of government by the present Irish administration. I observe, however, that the learned and very experienced judge who presided at the assize in Fermanagh is reported to have stated in his charge to the same grand jury that there were two cases for trial, and there was nothing in the returns to suggest that the country was in anything but a satisfactory condition. A decrease of three was noted in the specially reported cases.
  Perhaps I may add that specially reported eases are cases which the police think it necessary to bring to the attention of the executive.
  Major NEWMAN: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the grand jury at Fermanagh referred to the West and South of Ireland?
  Mr. DUKE: I ask the House to beware that these representations come from gentlemen, although they are of the highest respectability, who are drawn entirely from one class of the community.
  Mr. LYNCH: Have the Government considered the effect of using coercive measures simply, without removing the root causes of the unrest?
  Mr. DUKE: Nothing of what is ordinarily called coercion has occurred in Ireland. If it is desired to challenge that assertion, the proper opportunity must be taken to challenge it. But where there was an organised outbreak of crime which threatened to overturn the ordinary administration measures were taken without the interference of anybody who did not desire to break the law, and I am happy to say that they appear likely to have the desired effect.
  Mr. LYNCH: I will raise this question to-day.

  DEFERRED ANNUITIES (WOMEN WORKERS).
  Mr. LOUGHasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether his attention has been called to the great advantage of enabling women who are now earning exceptional wages to provide for their older years by purchasing deferred annuities to commence when they are sixty; whether the National Debt Commissioners, though they have issued a new table of immediate annuities, refuse to issue deferred annuities and thus to encourage this very desirable method of war saving; whether he has considered the advantage of the deferred annuity as against the immediate annuity from the point of view of the State, inasmuch as lives cannot be so effectually selected as against the State when the annuity is not to commence for a considerable period; and whether he will consider the issue through the Post Office of deferred annuities calculated on the 4½per cent. or 5 per cent. tables, the annuity to be paid in weekly instalments in the manner as old age pensions?
  The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Bonar Law): The granting of deferred annuities was discontinued in 1913 because prolonged experience showed that there was little demand for this class of annuity. Somewhat different considerations apply to this question under existing conditions, and I am making further inquiries.

  COMPANY REGISTRATION (ISSUE OF CAPITAL).
  General CROFTasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether restrictions are being placed by the Treasury on the issue of capital for new enterprises formed for the development of manufacturing, shipbuilding, and the general trade of this country; whether licences have been granted for newly-formed companies to commence business by the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies, and subsequently the said companies have been prevented from issuing their capital shares to enable them to do so; and, if so, what steps does he propose to take to remedy the anomalous position?
  Mr. BONAR LAW: The restrictions which it is necessary in the national interest to place on new issues of capital were widely advertised in the Press in January, 1915, and are, I think, well known. The Registrar of Joint Stock Companies is not entitled to refuse to register a company which has not obtained permission to issue capital, but steps are taken to warm applicants for registration of the need for obtaining such permission before any actual issue of shares or debentures is made.

  INHABITED HOUSE DUTY.
  Sir R. COOPERasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether any steps are taken to ascertain if the deduction allowed for repairs in assessing the annual value for Inhabited House Duty is actually spent by the owner; whether tenants have any protection in existing conditions that the cost of repairs will not be transferred to them; and, if it is so transferred, whether they have any method of redress?
  Mr. BONAR LAW: No deduction for repairs is allowed in assessing the annual value for Inhabited House Duty. The statutory allowance of one-sixth of the Income Tax (Schedule A) assessment on house property is made where the landlord undertakes to bear the cost of repairs. Where the tenant bears the cost, the landlord does not, of course, get any deduction.

  INSURANCE POLICIES LAPSED.
  Mr. ANDERSONasked the President of the Board of Trade whether he
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  is aware that some millions of insurance policies, held in the main by working people, have had to be lapsed during the War owing to war conditions; that this lapsing of policies, whilst benefiting the insurance companies, is inflicting real hardship, especially upon poor people; whether he knows that the Prudential Assurance Company alone have lapsed 3,272,000 policies since the outbreak of war; and what action it is proposed to take?
  The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Wardle): I am aware that large numbers of industrial assurance policies have been lapsed during the War. My information does not support the suggestion that the lapsing is due to war conditions, as lapses in the years 1915 and 1916 by the Prudential Assurance Company, for instance, were substantially less both in actual number and in proportion to the number of outstanding policies than in the years immediately preceding the War. The great majority of lapses seem to occur in respect of policies which have been in existence for a short time, when the gain to the company is doubtful and the loss to the policy holder is small The number of policies lapsed by the Prudential Company during the years 1914, 1915, and 1916 is approximately that stated in my hon. Friend's question. Steps were taken by the passing of the Courts (Emergency Powers) Act to prevent the lapsing of small industrial policies on which premiums had been paid for two years before the War without an application to the Court.
  Mr. ANDERSON: Does the hon. Member doubt that the special hardships due to war conditions in many families are responsible for the lapsing of many of these policies, involving the robbery of many poor people; and, in view of that, is not his Department going to take some action to get it put right and get the rights of the working people safeguarded?
  Mr. WARDLE: The hon. Member is utterly mistaken. If he had listened to the answer he would have heard that the lapses are less during the War than before the War; and, further, there is a remedy in regard to the Courts (Emergency Powers) Act which docs protect these people.
  Mr. WHITE: Can the hon. Gentleman state the total amount of premiums paid on these policies which have lapsed?
  Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member must give notice of that.
  Major HUNT: May I ask the hon. Member whether it is the fact that there have been 9,000,000 policies lapsed since the War began, and does he say that is less than for the same period before the War?
  Mr. WARDLE: The question on the Paper deals with one company alone, and in regard to that particular company the lapses are less since the War began than before,
  Mr. CURRIE: May I ask if it is not the case that this company, and one or two others of the same class, so far from ill-treating people of the working classes really went out of their way at the beginning of the War to make some valuable concessions to them?
  Mr. WARDLE: We have made inquiries carefully, and I do not think anyone will doubt that we would be very glad, indeed, to protect the working classes against any exploitation in this matter. Our inquiries show that special facilities have been given during the War in the sense indicated by the hon. Member.
  Major HUNT: Has not the hon. Members had a very considerable number of very hard cases sent him lately, and has he done anything in the matter?
  Mr. WARDLE: I have not had a considerable number of hard cases sent to me.

  RAILWAY FACILITIES (BARRHEAD TO GLASGOW).
  Mr. ANDERSONasked the President of the Board of Trade whether he is aware that the railway company decline to grant such morning railway facilities as will permit the workers travelling from Barrhead to Glasgow to reach their work by 6 a.m.; whether he is aware that repeated requests have been made by the workers and have been refused by the company; whether he knows that these workers are engaged on urgent work in the shipyards, and that this refusal on the part of the railway company is hindering shipbuilding and involves a loss of wages of from 6s. to 8s. per week, since these workers find it impossible to obtain homes near their work; and whether he will cause inquiry to be made, and see what action can be taken?
  Mr. WARDLE: I am making inquiries in this matter, and so soon as these have been completed, I will communicate with the hon. Gentleman.

  MERCHANT TONNAGE (DEVELOPMENT OF OUTPUT).
  General CROFTasked the First- Lord of the Admiralty whether his attention has been called to recent articles in the Press on the subject of the present position in respect to steamer tonnage; and will he say what immediate steps he proposes to take to grant every facility for private enterprise to develop its resources in the extension of existing yards and the laying out of new sites for shipbuilding purposes?
  Dr. MACNAMARA: Yes, Sir! I have read very many of the articles which have recently appeared in the Press on the question of new merchant tonnage output.
  As regards the second part of the question, my hon. and gallant Friend might read—apart from earlier announcements on the matter—the First Lord's speech on introducing Navy Estimates on Tuesday last; and several references of my own on the question of extending facilities for output in the existing yards, which I made on Wednesday and Thursday of last week. I ought to add that I spoke of new schemes sanctioned for the development of private yards and shops up to the 6th February as numbering 136. The number of schemes which have now been sanctioned amounts to 147.

  KILTIMAGH (A MISCHIEVOUS TALE).
  Major NEWMANasked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ire land whether he has received intimation of the alleged holding-up of the town of Kiltimagh, county Galway, on the 1st to the 3rd instant by the volunteers of the Irish Republic, when all entrances and exits were held and passage only allowed by permit issued in the name of the Irish Republic; will he say if what was alleged to have taken place was for the benefit of some cinematograph operator; and, if not, how many of those who seized the town are now in custody?
  Mr. DUKE: On 1st March there was a Sinn Fein procession with torches in the little country town named by the hon. and

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  gallant Member. On the 3rd March about 300 young men from various outlying districts met there and took part in drilling and then dispersed. The two constables who were on duty have duly reported the occurrence. The story which has appeared in some newspapers of the holding-up and occupation of the Irish town of Kiltimagh by Irish Republican volunteers is, so far as the constabulary are aware, mere fiction. Its appearance led to my directing a searching inquiry into the matter, and I am now trying to find out who was the author of this mischievous tale.

  BILL PRESENTED.
    OVERSEAS TRADE DEPARTMENT (SECRETARY)
    BILL,—to make provision for the joint appointment by the Board of Trade and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of a Secretary of the Overseas Trade Department, presented by Sir ALBERT STANLEY; supported by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mr. Balfour; to be read a second time To-morrow, and to be printed. [Bill 9.]
ORDERS OF THE DAY.

  CONSOLIDATED FUND (No. 1) BILL.
  Order for Second Reading read.
  Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Bill be now read a second time.

  CONSOLIDATED FUND (No. 1) BILL.

    INTOXICATING LIQUORS (MANUFACTURE).
    Mr. LEIF JONES: By passing the Second Reading of the Consolidated Fund Bill the House will be granting the largest sum of money ever granted at any one time to any Government for any purpose, and in these circumstances it is legitimate that we should ask whether all the expenditure of the Government is necessary expenditure and whether the best use is being made of the vast sums of money which the House is voting. The House of Commons has for some time past been conscious that there has been a great waste of public money in Government Departments, and they have endeavoured to safeguard themselves with respect to the financial control of the House by appointing a National Expenditure Committee, which has been examining into the expenditure of the Departments. The publication of the Report, which appeared in the Press yesterday, on the work of the Ministry of Munitions will show that it was high time that the House examined into the expenditure of the Government. But it is not my purpose now to examine the past expenditure of Government Departments. I do not doubt that the Government are strengthening their financial methods and that they are doing better in the matter of making good use of the money voted. I think an effort is being made throughout the services to reach a, higher standard, and not before it was time. But, in addition to asking that they shall spend wisely the money granted to them, we are entitled, seeing how great is the pubic expenditure, how great is the necessary expenditure, to ask the Government whether they are in every way cutting off unnecessary expenditure, both by themselves and by the people of this country. Are they in everyway safeguarding the material resources of the people, so that they may stand the increasing strain that is being put upon them by the War? In that connection I want to draw attention to the expenditure of the country upon drink, and the burden entailed upon the
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    nation by allowing the present expenditure upon drink during the War. In raising this subject, may I make an appeal to hon. Members? My views upon this question are very familiar, and a great many may think it quite unnecessary that I should deliver a speech upon them. They may say that they know what I am going to say beforehand, and they have already made up their minds that they can deal fully with any of my arguments, and therefore they need not listen to them. I have seen it urged in the Press that those who support my view are accused of being a group of Members who are taking advantage of the War to further their own view. I was exceedingly sorry to see that the Secretary of the Ministry of Food, in the Debate on the Address, allowed himself to lend colour to that misrepresentation. I will read to the House the hon. Member's words, which, to me, seem to be very unfair, and I think it is unfortunate that he should have allowed himself to fall into them. He said:
    The feeling of many working men is that the extreme teetotal element in this country stands in the same position as the representatives of the brewing and distilling interests, and they have availed themselves of the opportunity afforded by the War to urge their particular point of view.
    The Government are not in the habit of giving their own sentiments, but they put these views into the mouths of the working men of this country.
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of FOOD (Mr. Clynes): My right hon. Friend is quite wrong. If he reads my speech further he will find that I stated that I would not say in that case that the working men were right.
    Mr. JONES: The hon. Gentleman gave currency to the thing by quoting that opinion. I wish to point out the difference between the two positions. By continuing the liquor trade the members of that trade are deriving great profits. What analogy is there between their position and that of a body of people, misguided if you like, who are advocating unpopular opinions from which they can get no personal advantage, and whose only motive can be that they wish to help the nation in a time of stress and burden such as never before has come upon us. What possible personal advantage does any temperance reformer get out of advocating that opinion? My hon. Friend opposite should have been more careful before he allowed himself to fall

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    into saying something which I think should not have fallen from a Minister of the Crown in this House. We teetotalers are often accused of being prejudiced in our views. We have decided views, but the prejudice of a man who drinks alcohol is at least as strong as that of a man who does not. Therefore, I think I am justified in appealing to the House to put on one side preconceived opinions on this matter, and to treat as if they came from an impartial person the figures which I am going to present to the House as succinctly as I can.
    The drink trade as it is carried on now is too heavy a burden for this nation to bear during the War which taxes our resources and energies to the utmost. The figures I give are vital and may be decisive to the issue of the War. Let me take the financial aspect. The drink bill in 1914, by which I mean the amount of money paid by the people of this country for the beer, wines, and spirits which they consume, was £164,000,000. Early in 1915 the present Prime Minister said
    One of the things we cannot afford during the War is a drink bill of £160,000,000.
    And yet in the year 1915 the drink bill was not £160,000,000, but £182,000,000. In 1916 it was £204,000,000, and I am sorry to have to tell the House that according to a figure which has not yet been published, but which will be issued to-morrow, the drink bill for 1917, in spite of all the appeals for economy from the Chancellor of the Exchequer and members of the Government, and after all the Government have done to restrict the sale, the drink bill for 1917 is £250,000,000 at least, and will probably be nearer £270,000,000 if you take into account the diminution of the stores of spirits scattered throughout the country, which we have no proper means of estimating. Along with that the Government are getting less out of it. In 1915 the country derived from taxation upon drink £60,000,000, out of a drink bill of £182,000,000, or 33 per cent. In 1916, with a drink bill of £204,000,000, the taxation derived was only £54,000,000. In 1917, with a drink bill of £259,000,000, the taxation is only £35,000,000, or 13¾ per cent. So that the proportion paid in direct taxation by the trade has dwindled from £60,000,000 in 1915 to £54,000,000 in 1916, and to £35,000,000 in 1917. It is true that these figures have to be corrected by the amount taken in excess profits from the brewery
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    companies and distillers, all of whom have been making very largely increased profits. The Chancellor of the Exchequer knows as well as anybody that the excess profits taxation does not raise anything like the same amount as direct taxation put on before the profits are made, and he knows how excess profits are reduced by extravagant expenditure and the fact that a good deal of this money has been made safe against taxation. Since the War began £750,000,000 has been spent on drink, and out of that sum I do not think that the Government have got £200,000,000 even with excess profits. I hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will give us the figures on the Budget, for he has something to explain in the remission of taxation he made in his Budget of 1917, when he thought it necessary to give £1,000,000 in Licence Duties to the brewers. More than £500,000,000 out of £750,000,000 is dead weight expenditure during the War. Seeing what the call for money is and seeing the demand for saving that is put forward, I say that is too much money for this country to spend upon what is at best a luxury.
    The financial aspect is not at all the strongest aspect of this question. I turn to the question of shipping of the material out of which the drink is made. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was accused in the Debate on Thursday with having made a somewhat gloomy speech to the House. I do not complain that the speech which the Leader of the House made was gloomy; on the contrary. I should like to thank him for his speech, for he did, in much greater measure than the Government had hitherto done, endeavour to tell the truth to the house and the country about the shipping situation and other matters. I am most thankful that to some extent the Government are lifting the veil of secrecy in which they have wrapped so many of their arrangements. The only complaint that I make is that in his talk about shipping and in the Debate about shipping last week the Government were still too optimistic. The country do not yet realise how grave is the situation. I do not know, but I suspect that the Germans are building U-boats quite as fast as the Admiralty are sinking them. He would be a very unwise man who thought that the submarine menace was going to be over come at any early date. Our ships are being sunk weekly in great numbers. The First Lord of the Admiralty tells us that the curves of sinking are going steadily

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    down, but so are the ships every week. The shipbuilding programme is hopelessly in arrear. I am not going back on the Debate of last Thursday or to apportion praise or blame, but the employers, the men, and the Government are involved. The Government state that it is the employers and the men, and the employers and the men state that it is the Government. I do not know whose fault it is, but the result is that the ships are not being built, and we are not getting the output. It is hopelessly in arrear.
    The Government realised this at the end of last year, and, as we were told by the Shipping Controller at a meeting upstairs, they caused to be prepared an indent of the necessary imports. They cut down everything to the absolute essentials for munitions and for the food of the people, and, when they had reached the limit with regard to food and munitions, there was practically nothing left for carrying on all the industries of the country. They secured priority for the importation of necessary foods, and it does seem to me that the imports should have been necessary foods. The Government, as they say, have left out everything unnecessary. They have cut out foreign products and all items that are not regarded as essential foods, and they have left only sixteen classes of essential foods. Yet I find, among those sixteen classes of essential foods, that cereals for brewing are included. I want to know what justification the Government have for using 600,000 tons of our depleted shipping for the purpose of importing cereals for brewing? I want to know whether they have revised their programme and whether they have determined that there shall be no more cereals imported for the brewers use until the bread of the people is safe? I know the figures, though I am not at liberty to give them, but I say that if the House and the country knew the figures as I knew them they would not allow another ton of shipping to be used for the importation of brewers materials until the situation was amended.
    I turn to the food position. The Government had warning with regard to the food position. A committee of the Royal Society sat during 1916 and reported at the end of 1916. In their report they said that the margin of food in this country was a small one, being no more than 5 percent. above what they thought was necessary, and even that small margin at that time, twelve months ago, was so unequally,
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    distributed that some people were below the safety margin. The report stated that if you went below the 5 per cent. margin the health of the workpeople would suffer seriously. They urged various ways of saving food and of using it for the best available purpose, and they showed that the greatest saving was to take the food used for brewing and distilling and use it for direct human consumption. The Government thought that they knew better. They were impressed a little, and they said that they were going to cut down the beer to 10,000,000 barrels. They did not do so. They permitted more to be brewed in the summer because it was hot and more in the winter because it was cold, and in the end the standard barrels numbered 16,000,000, the bulk barrels reaching 21,000,000. The Government were urged, and they did make an effort, to increase the wheat reserve. They did reach a very much larger reserve than we had had before. Where is that reserve now? What does it stand at? I ask the Government again, Are they going to take the country into their confidence? I know the figures, and if the country knew them as I know them—I am not at liberty to give them—they would not allow another quarter of barley to be used for brewing beer until the bread situation was better. During 1917 the Government allowed 600,000 tons of barley and 60,000 tons of sugar to be used. We were asked by the Food Controller to save 180,000,000 4-lb. loaves. The brewers used up the equivalent of 268,000,000 4-lb. loaves, and 240,000 tons of offal. Poultry must be cut down, and men must no longer give barley to pigs. You have punished men for feeding pigs with barley, but you have permitted brewers to use barley for making beer. The amount of grain used in 1916–17 for distilling purposes was 370,000 tons. The estimate for 1917–18 is 270,000 tons. Here I want to put a question that I put a year ago to the Government, and which they have not dealt with for a long time. As far as I can ascertain, there is still in stock a store of 135,000,000 gallons of spirits. Are the Government going to use those spirits for munition purposes? They can use them. They refused to use them before because they said it was amore expensive process, but there is no process so expensive as starving the people. It is time that they turned to this store of spirits and used it for all the War purposes for which it can be used.

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    The estimate of the Government of the amount of wheat from North America to be imported into this country was 7,500,000 tons. Month by month they have made an estimate of the amount that would come. Two months have passed. They did not get their amount in January, and they did not get it in February. They know that they have had to recast their estimate for March, April, and May. I say to them that by 1st June the stores of grain in this country will be at a lower level than they have been in any recent year.
    4.0 P.M.
    The Government which last year was asked to make a store of food for the people and which saw what was coming in view of shipping difficulties, have much to answer for in allowing our stores of wheat and cereals to be used up and at the same time in allowing this further waste to go on in brewing and distilling. I do not know whether they will tell us that the mischief is done, and that the barley is all malted, and therefore it is not much use meddling with it now. I can assure them that malted barley is very good and very nourishing food. It is also an excellent feeding stuff. There would be no difficulty, if they compelled brewers to give up the hoarded barley and the hoarded sugar, in using it for much better purposes. The Government are prosecuting Members of this House for having hoarded stores of food—too much bread and too much sugar. Why should brewers be allowed to hoard large quantities of grain and sugar? We are entitled to an answer to that question. Another point is that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food told us to-day that they had not yet decided about rations of bread. He hoped there might not be bread rations, but he had them in contemplation and all was, ready. Has he taken into account the number of men who, in addition to the bread ration, may drink beer or spirits? The one condition of successful rationing is that we shall all be treated alike. Rich and poor, teetotalers and non-teetotalers, we are entitled to fair and equal treatment when it comes to apportioning the limited quantity of bread stuffs. I am informed that one gallon of beer uses up about 2½lbs. of barley. Therefore, two gallons of beer represents a woman's ration of bread. I am told that two pints a day
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    is a reasonable amount to be consumed by a beer drinker, so that the man who drinks two pints a day consumes what would be his wife's ration of bread. Is he to have to do without any bread ration, or have the Government in the rationing scheme taken into account the amount of bread and foodstuff destroyed in the making of beer?
    Let me refer to another aspect of the question. My figures will stand examination, and I ask hon. Members to examine them. They may not support my deductions, but the figures are there. I take the question of transport by rail, horse and petrol. That is a very serious matter at the present time, as the Government know. The carrying on of the drink trade of this country during 1917 has involved the carrying about the country of 600,000 tons of barley in various forms—much of it handled several times; from 60,000 to 65,000 tons of sugar, 21,000,000 barrels of beer full, and the same number of barrels empty, and all that they require in the way of handling. I have worked these figures out, as Lord Milner worked them out in the House of Lords, in trucks and trainloads. I find that the number of trucks required for 600,000 tons of barley is 85,000, while 60,000 tons of sugar take 12,000 trucks; 21,000,000 barrels of beer occupy 800,000 trucks; indeed, they occupy them twice, first when full, and then when empty, that is twice 800,000 trucks. Then there is 600,000 tons of coal which is used up in brewing and distilling which represents another 60.000 trucks. That gives us a total of 1,757,000 trucks. Taking the figures for brewing, distilling and wine, altogether you have more than 1,800,000 truck loads of material to be carried up and down the country during the year. That represents 45,000 trains of forty trucks each, or 120 trains a day for every day of the week throughout the year; that is to say, the transport by horse, rail or petrol is equivalent to 120 trains running every day throughout the year. That is a very serious burden upon the transport of this country which, as the Government know well, is getting into a most serious condition.
    I turn to the labour dealing with this drink trade. I find that the drink trade employs in the making and distribution of drink 150,000 men. There are not very many of them old men, indeed, most of them are men in the prime of life. There is a reservoir of labour which I recommend to the attention of the Government,

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    because most of these men—I may say practically all of them—might, if brewing, and distilling were stopped, be set free for employment in the different occupations in which the Government now require men immediately. There is another aspect of the labour question. There are not only the men employed in making and distributing the drink; there are the men employed in looking after the results of drinking in this country, which is not at all a small matter. First of all, there is the Control Board itself. You have one of the ablest Departments of the Government engaged in doing nothing else but trying to pre vent the liquor traffic injuring the country during the War. You have an army of people, the police and officials, who have to look after it. There is yet another aspect of the labour question, that is, the effect of the consumption of this liquor upon the efficiency of the consumer. That is a point which the Government had sedulously avoided. The Committee of the Royal Society reported that the alcohol consumed was practically of no benefit to the output of labour in this country. They declared that repeated experience had shown that regiments not supplied with alcohol were in better condition at the end of the day than those to which it had been given. That was the view of the Committee of the Royal Society. The Government took no notice of it. The Control Board, however, I do not know whether in order to investigate that particular point, appointed a committee of doctors to investigate the same subject and, if they could, to make a pronouncement as to the effect of alcohol upon the human frame. I would venture to read to the House some of the conclusions published in this book issued by the Control Board. Incidentally, may I say that I do not see any one representing the Ministry of Munitions here, and I think the Control Board is under that Ministry. I do not know why this excellent book has not been issued to Members of this House as a Parliamentary Paper; at any rate it might be put on the Pink Paper so that Members could ask for it if they desired to do so. It contains the findings of a very able committee of doctors upon this question of the consumption of alcohol. On page 38 they say
    Alcohol is never a stimulant—
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    These are their exact words—
    It is from first to last a narcotic drug which attacks the nervous system, the higher functions first.
    I want to draw the attention of the Government to the effects produced by the consumption of alcohol, because I see in this list not only physical effects but also political effects produced by alcohol. I would ask the House to note how in the political sphere as well as in the physical region alcohol produces its effects. They may be summed up briefly as follows—I am reading the exact words from the book—
    First, uncritical self-satisfaction of the subject with his own performances.
    I need not point the moral of that.
    Secondly, disregard of occurrences and conditions normally evoking caution of act and word.
    Could anything be more characteristic of the attitude of the Government during the past twelve months?
    "Trespass of rules and conventions previously respected; impaired appreciation of the passage of time; loquacity and an argumentative frame of mind."
    Sir GEORGE GREENWOOD: May we have the names of the doctors who so reported?
    Mr. JONES: Yes; I will read the names to the House. The doctors did not report on the political effects, but on the physical effects. The names of the doctors are as follows: Sir George New man, K.C.B., M.D., Professor A. R. Cushney, M.D., F.R.S., H. H. Dale, M.D., F.R.S., M. Greenwood, M.R.C.S.,—my hon. Friend will appreciate him—W. McDougall, M.B., F.R.S., F. W. Mott, M.D., F.R.S., Professor C. S. Sherrington, M.D., F.R.S., and W. C Sullivan, M.D. All of them are gentle men holding important medical or scientific positions in this country. What is the effect upon the workman attributed to drink by these doctors? Their general view is that it tends to destroy in a workman accuracy, caution, tact, discipline, punctuality, discretion
    I ask any employer of labour or any workman to put these scientific findings together and ask what is likely to be the effect of the continued consumption of alcohol upon the output and efficiency of industrial labour? It is because the industrial side of the question is so important that the prohibition movement

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    has assumed such great proportions in the United States of America. I do not think I need labour the case further. It was said in Debate more than a year ago that the case for prohibition during the War was logically irresistible, and certainly the Government have not put for ward any sufficient answer to it. They told us then, and they have told us again to-day, that the British workman must have his beer, and that, if he does not have it, then he will not do his work. I see members of the Labour party present. They might properly resent the imputation that, if it were shown to them to be necessary that they should do without their beer, they would then refuse to work unless they got it. I know, of course, that many workmen appreciate their beer. I do not approach this question only from the point of view of the workman, because I know there are other classes who like their wine and spirits, just as the workman likes his beer. It is not a class question at all. What I am saying about manual work applies with even more force to professional work of various kinds and brain work of all kinds, because alcohol first of all attacks the higher functions of the nervous system. If it is a question between bread and beer, I do not believe that any work man in this country would hesitate. The Government have told us that if it came to be a question between bread and beer, that they would not hesitate. Then I ask them whether the time has not come for them to make up their minds? I suggest to the Government that they have themselves encouraged this labour unrest. I will read a circular which was issued from the Munitions Department in July last. They represented in this House that there was a spontaneous uproar made by the workers because there was not sufficient beer for the country. There was very little. They had a Commission on industrial unrest which, in certain parts of the country, found that there had been complaints, but on the whole found that far other questions were agitating the minds of the workmen than the question of the supply of intoxicants. This is the circular they set out addressed to the heads of controlled firms:
    MINISTRY OF MUNITIONS.
    (Private and Confidential.)
    Dear Sirs,—The Ministry of Munitions have been requested by the Food Controller to ascer-
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    tain whether the increase in the distribution of beer of 20 per cent., which was recently authorised, has satisfied the workers in the factories in this area."
    That invites the answer which no doubt the Government got. If they really wished to ascertain the opinion of the workers of this country, they should not issue leading questions to them. They should put the food situation and the shipping situation before them and ask them, with full knowledge of the facts, to give a vote, one way or the other, whether they will have the beer, which involves risk to the bread, or whether they would rather that their families had the bread and they went without the beer. In a great measure the protest has been an engineered protest. I am going to read a circular which has been issued from a district in the North of England—I do not want to give the name. It was sent out to trade unions, and is signed by the chairman and secretary of a beer, spirit, and wine; trades association:
    "—AND DISTRICT BEER, SPIRIT,
    AND WINE TRADES ASSOCIATION.
    We are instructed to ask you to be good enough to try and get your society to pass the following resolution (in own words) as early as possible and forward to the Food Controller, Palace Chambers, Westminster; the Minister of Munitions, Whitehall; the Prime Minister, Downing Street; the Right Hon. G. N. Barnes, M.P., Westminster; the Eight Hon. Bonar Law, M.P., Westminster; and to the local men of Parliament."
    This is the resolution:
    "The members of this trade union (or friendly society), numbering—members, desire to protest strongly against the continued restrictions on the output of beer as being entirely unnecessary and causing a vast amount of discontent among the workers, whose only desire is to do the very best they can for their country to help to win the War. They hope the Government will accede to the legitimate and moderate wishes of the working classes of this country, and grant, without delay, an adequate supply of beer. If this is done, the action of the Government will be very much appreciated."
    I am very much afraid the Government has interpreted the engineered resolutions of the liquor trade as expressing the genuine opinion of the working men of this country. So far as they have been tested by genuine votes in Scotland in working-class constituencies, the voters have declared that they are in favour of prohibition during the War. They know well the result. If the Government wants to get the genuine opinion of the workers let them give the facts, which they have not done yet. Let them state the posi-

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    tion; let them ask the workers to make a sacrifice in the interests of their country. They have asked greater sacrifices of them than changing their habits for the period of the War. All our habits are changed. All sacrifices have to be asked for. Alone the Government seems to shrink from asking this one sacrifice, which they know would immensely strengthen the forces of this country in many directions.
    The Government is dependent, and we are dependent, more and more in the War upon America and Canada, and the help which they can send us. I wish our Government would lead in the way that some American statesmen are leading. I wish they would bring the same thought and the same utterances to bear upon the War that American statesmen are bringing. The Americans are tackling this question in a very different way from that in which our Government is dealing with it, and they are speaking in a very different way. Mr. Roosevelt, who is not a sentimentalist, who, as far as I know, is no teetotaler, who is certainly keen to win the War, uses this language, which I com mend to the Government:
    "The world is facing a shortage of food. Soon we, in this country, shall face a shortage of food. Therefore let us use all the grain we have for food and not for intoxicants. Now that the War is on let us forbid any grain of corn being used in the manufacture of intoxicating liquors."
    The Americans are sending us their grain. How long do you think they will go on being short of bread in order that we may brew the grain? They are getting very uneasy, and the Government knows it well, so much so that it has tried to prevent America from knowing what is going on in this country. We have had speakers from America in this country. They have written home of the condition of things which they found in regard to drink in this country. Their letters have been censored, and the parts relating to the drink traffic have been struck out in black in order that America might not know how this country is dealing with the problem. It was an idle attempt. The very men who wrote the letters are themselves back in America now, telling the people what they have seen. Instead of blotting out evidence and refusing to face the facts, the Government should deal with them as the Americans are dealing with them.
    I turn to Canada. The women of Canada, who are all voters now, as the
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    women of England are, are petitioning their Government to stop the sending of grain to this country until we cease to use it in manufacturing intoxicants. They are going on two days a week without fire in Canada—two heatless days—because they want the railways free to carry grain to the people of this country. Do you think the Canadians are going with out fire in winter in order that brewing and distilling may go on in this country? They are going short of bread in Canada in order that they may send more grain to this country. Do you think they are going short of bread in order that people here may drink beer made from the grain that they forgo? The Government must face this question as the Governments of America and Canada have faced it, and if they face it they will decide in the same way—the only way. The Government of Canada, said Sir William Hearst, who is no friend of prohibition, or was not before the War, have taken up prohibition in order that they may not follow, as he said, the situation in the Old Land. This is what the Prime Minister of Ontario said:
    "The situation in the Old Land to-day speaks to us in this new land in tones of thunder to avoid the path that land has taken, and to shake off that which hampers progress in peace and may destroy entirely in war."
    That is worthy language, and it is not pleasant language, I should imagine, for the Government of this country. I ask the Government to reconsider this matter. They must be conscious that they are losing ground daily. I will tell them why. Confidence begets confidence. The Government choose to govern without consulting the House or the country. They do not trust the people, and the people do not trust them. The people know that they are being fed on optimistic fictions manufactured for the million of imaginative Propaganda Departments, instead of the facts which they demand. I ask the Government to face the facts, to state the facts to the country, and to ask of the people the sacrifice that the facts demand. The spirit of the nation is high and unbroken and of unwavering determination. If the Government rely upon it, it will not fail them.
    Captain Sir C. BATHURST: Having for some time in the spring of last year, almost every day, parried questions from the Front Government Bench on this

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    subject, I desire to present with the utmost candour to the House what my present views upon it are. I approach the question from an entirely different standpoint from that of the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Leif Jones), and it is only because of the extreme gravity of the breadstuffs position, not only this summer, but even more, so far as one can foresee, next winter, that I find myself in agreement with his conclusions, although not with his premises. Surely the question is not whether the consumption of beer is, from the moral, social, or even a medical point of view, desirable or undesirable. The question we have to face is whether its continued consumption in its present dimensions is or is not fraught with possible peril to this country. I do not hesitate to say that the uneasiness to which the right hon. Gentleman has given expression is by no means now confined to temperance extremists or, as some of us are inclined to regard them, temperance fanatics. It is growing, and will continue to grow unless and until some action is taken by the Government, or, as I should prefer to see, by the working men themselves, to put a stop to some part at any rate of the present large consumption of cereal food in the form of beer and other intoxicants. I have during the last twelve months had a good deal to do with the brewery, and licensing trade, and what ever may be the prejudices in this House against the gentlemen concerned in the trade, I have throughout found them most patriotic, at least as unselfish as any other community of traders in this country and quite prepared, if need be, and at the urgent request of the Government, to forego their trade advantages and their trade profits for the common good. There remains the fact that over 500,000 tons of barley are at present being converted into beer alone, apart from other intoxicants. I may to some extent relieve the apprehension of the right hon. Gentleman with regard to sugar. I can assure him, as Chairman of the Royal Commission on Sugar Supplies, that no sugar which is edible by man is being at present converted into beer. There is a raw crude sugar, which is wholly unfit for human consumption, which is being treated, and in the course of that treatment 40 per cent. of it is being rendered available either for grocers sugar or as golden syrup for human consumption.
    Mr. JONES: Is the right hon. Gentleman right in saying this sugar could not be used for anything except brewing? I understand it could be used for confectionery and so on.
    Sir C. BATHURST: The right hon. Gentleman is under a complete misapprehension upon that point. It is perfectly-true that the raw sugar that used to be used for the purpose of brewing last year was of a kind which could be employed for the purposes to which he refers, but the sugar which is now being converted in this way, invert sugar, which is not sugar at all, which the brewers use, is a raw crude sugar which is wholly unfit for human consumption. However, there remains something like 500,000 tons of barley which at the present time are being converted into intoxicating liquor. It was questioned repeatedly last year as to whether beer is or is not a food. I do not hesitate to say that beer is a food and to some extent avaluable food for those who are employed upon strenuous work, but I cannot agree that the use of barley or other breadstuffs in beer is an economical use of those cereals.
    I am not concerned with the question of the amount of money received either by the State or by those engaged in the trade. What is far more serious is that money nowadays counts for little as compared with the essential materials for carrying on the War, and the most essential of all those materials to-day, there can be no doubt, is a sufficiency of indispensable foods, of which breadstuffs must come first. If there is any doubt on this question as to whether or not the efficiency of our manual labourers employed upon essential war work will be impaired by stopping the consumption of beer altogether, or by drastically restricting it, surely, the right method is to consult organised labour in this country and ask them to have a plebiscite to decide for themselves whether the present consumption of beer is necessary to the efficiency of their work, the output of munitions, and so on, or whether in fact they could further reduce it or abandon it altogether. I do not suggest for a moment that it would be wise or right or discreet for the Government to put their foot down and say that beer must be abandoned or drastically restricted; but I do venture to say—for after all we are in the hands of our working people nowadays for the output of our munitions,

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    for the efficiency of war work and for the fighting of our battles—that the time has come when the Government might reasonably put in the plainest possible way the breadstuffs position to the working people, and ask them to decide, knowing the whole facts, whether beer shall either be abandoned or restricted in favour of larger production and the availability of breadstuffs.
    The breadstuffs position, and I know it, is a serious position. It may become in the course of a few months a perilous position, and if we mean to move in this matter there ought to be no delay. I know that the answer that may be given this afternoon, which has been given before, is that at least half of this barley is converted into malt. I am not quite sure whether I like malt as well as my right hon. Friend (Mr. Leif Jones) as an article of human diet, but, after all, malt is a very valuable food for our farm animals and for our poultry, if not for ourselves. When we hear that the pig population of this country and the poultry population are threatened with extinction; when the pig, of all animals, in this crisis, when we want to multiply meat as fast as we can, is far and away the most valuable, and when we hear that through lack of a very small amount of available cereal food the pig population has to be diminished or it may be impossible to maintain it, there is a very strong argument for letting a part of this barley or malt, as the case may be, go into the stomachs of the pigs, rather than into the form of beer as an additional cereal ration for those who drink that particular beverage. On that point I have never been able to defend the position of those who say that people who drink beer are just as much entitled to have their beer as those who drink non-intoxicants are entitled to have their form of drink. When we come to the time when the Government are contemplating rationing bread, and probably in the course of the next few weeks proposing to ration bread, how can you in equity defend the position of those who are getting an extra ration of cereal food through the medium of beer? It is obviously inequitable, and on that ground alone I believe that if an appeal were made to the working people and the whole facts told to them, they would say, We are having more than our fair ration, to the detriment of our brothers and sisters in this country. Let organised Labour decide this question,
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    when the Government has told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, on the subject.
    There is one warning which I would like to give to the House. I approach this by no means from the point of view of the prejudiced fanatic. I do not hesitate to say that I am not a teetotaler. I wish I were, but I am not. [An Hon. Member: Why? Because I have every reason to believe that I should be able to do even more work than I do at the present time if I were a teetotaler. However that may be, there is another side to this question, and I feel pretty certain that if this question of beer is put to the organised workmen of this country they will ask certain rather difficult questions, and questions which it will be difficult to answer. For instance, they will ask how about horse-racing and the giving of 20 lbs. or mare a day of the best oats or other cereal food to horses in full training for racing purposes?
    An HON. MEMBER: And how about the rich man's cellar?
    Sir C. BATHURST:They will say with far less reason, but with a good deal of natural and legitimate prejudice, What about the rich man's wines? We have got to face these things, and I cannot help thinking that before making this appeal to organised Labour and asking them to decide, the Government would be wise, and would put themselves in a safer and more defensible position, if they were to say that horse-racing henceforward for the remainder of the War should be absolutely stopped, and that some reduction, at any rate an equivalent reduction, should be made in the beverages which the rich man or the wealthier classes are in the habit of consuming. Were they to do so, I believe they could approach the working people of this country with a clean sheet and ask them to determine this liquor question on the facts as they stand to-day, which are very different from what they were a year ago, and see whether their answer would not be such that we should be able to look forward far more comfortably to feeding the nation during the next nine or ten months, and look forward with much greater confidence to the final and effectual winning of this War.
    Mr. CLYNES: The right hon. Gentleman Who opened this Debate did so in a speech of real power, and I want to assure him that, personally, I have a good deal of

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    sympathy with the point of view which he put, and with the main object of his argument. But I think he will see that there is a side of this case which is not demolished by the weightiest temperance platform argument that can be brought against it, and that side of the case springs from a very large body of working-class opinion. It does not find expression through Labour Conferences; it does not find expression at public meetings, but it is opinion which, to some small extent is vocal, and is conveyed in letters and resolutions received in hundreds at the Ministry of Food. I will here refer to the allegation that these protests of working men have been engineered and organised by those interested in the trade. The fact is that the resolution quoted by my right hon. Friend has but recently appeared, and has only been recently used, and is a result, and not a cause, of the discontent to which I have referred in previous Debates, and to which I shall have to refer to-day.
    Mr. JONES: It is issued by the licensed victuallers.
    Mr. CLYNES:I agree as to its source, but it has been only recently issued, and it is a product of the discontent which exists and has not been the cause of that discontent itself. I want to correct the impression which my right hon. Friend has evidently formed from some previous statements which I have made on this subject I want to say that I have never imputed, and never intended to impute, to temperance advocates in this country any motive as to the securing of personal gain from the attitude which they take up or from the course which they have followed in this House. I merely made myself the interpreter of what is known to be a body of opinion in working-class circles, and I expressed in this House the sentiments which I have heard myself from working men, and put them into the terms which have been quoted this afternoon. It will be impossible for me—indeed, it would not be my place—to deal with many of the arguments adduced by the two preceding speakers in regard to the general sins of the Government, as to the drink traffic and other matters having more or less relation to the War. But this I think can be said, that submarines will sink ships whether those ships are full of beer or beef, and my right hon. Friend does not strengthen
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    his case by giving us a picture of our giving opportunities for sinking our ships merely because ships are sailing the seas bringing barley to these shores. I entirely challenge the view that if the Ministry of Food revealed certain facts, which it is alleged we are concealing, that in the country at large there would be consequences which it is assumed the Government would not like. How best can we secure the real and genuine opinion of the masses of the workers of this country? No working-class meeting, I am certain, would be moved by the rather fanciful picture of the labour, moving in I forget how many ways, day by day, to carry the material needed for the purpose of supplying the working man with his beer. In so far as the working man has decided one way or another on this question, he has decided it on grounds chiefly of necessity, and that necessity will not be removed or undermined by such pictures as my right hon. Friend painted. If we are to test the question on the ground of the things we can do without; if it is to be said that we must only do exactly what is essential as an act for the winning of the War, and that we must only use the food, clothing and shelter necessary and absolutely essential, let the House ask itself how many things we should have to do without! If we limit ourselves just to the things which are necessary and beneficial a very much larger sum of money would be available for other purposes than the big amount which is said to be spent in the course of a year upon alcohol in one form or another.
    Employers have given us their testimony as to the consumption of drink and its effect on the efficiency of labour. Hundreds of them have indicated to the Ministry of Food, and some of them gave evidence before the Commission which roamed over the country some months ago, and instead of alleging that inefficiency, neglect of work and loss of time are attributable to the consumption of liquor, they came forward and asked that in the interests of efficiency and in the interests of contentment larger quantities of beer should be provided.
    Mr. JONES: Can we have the names of those employers?
    Mr. DUNCAN MILLAR: Has the hon. Gentleman ever read the White Paper issued by the Government themselves giving the views of employers as to the reduction of output?
    Mr. CLYNES: Certainly. I am going to give the other side of the case as well, but on this particular point of efficiency and contentment the employers have given such evidence as I have stated.
    Sir TUDOR WALTERS: Was there not evidence the other way?
    Mr. CLYNES:The Government are not unmindful of the nature of the case. From the beginning of the War, or at any rate since a few months after it began, the Government has constantly had this problem before it, and has not merely looked it in the face and then turned aside; it has dealt with it when most substantial results, and I had hoped that the right hon. Gentleman in the course of his speech would have acknowledged the very substantial effort which has been made in the direction of obtaining that absolute teetotalism of which I under stand him to be an advocate. Certainly a great deal has been done in the reduction of the quantity of beer produced annually. There is now about one-third only of the quantity formerly supplied and that third is not as strong as in pre-war days. To judge from one's experience here and there the beer is not a quarter as strong as it was before the War, so that both in strength and in quantity there have been very considerable reductions. There are to be further reductions, and I propose to take this opportunity of outlining what more is to be done. The Government has considered this matter because of its immediate relation to the tonnage question and also because of opinions to which we must pay every respect of the most earnest kind—the opinions in America which now supplies so much of our cereal requirements. For these reasons the Government is anxious, while maintaining some reasonable supply of beer for the hard manual worker, to still further meet the views of the other sections of the community. The tonnage, therefore, to be used for brewing materials is to be reduced by further new restrictions which are immediately to be imposed. From 100,000 to 150,000 tons of barley were taken from the brewers and maltsters on 1st March this year, by an Order then issued. A further 200,000 tons per annum will be saved by restricting the standard barrelage or by using substitutes which are more economical of tonnage. As to what particular substitutes are to be used—
    Mr. JONES: Can the hon. Gentleman give me some figures as to the standard barrelage?
    Mr. CLYNES: For the year 1918–19 the brewing materials will be equivalent to 513,000 tons of shipping. At the beginning of the War and for a considerable time after the total was 1,556,000 tons of shipping, so that there is now being effected a saving in tonnage to the extent of 1,000,000 tons. That surely is going a very substantial way towards meeting the views which have been expressed this afternoon. The total brewing materials, I may add, amount to less than 3 percent. of the total solid food supply of the nation. The speech delivered this afternoon might lead many Members of the House, and many people in the country, to conclude that if we were only to stop brewing the whole food position of the future would be saved. My answer to that is that the brewing materials used in providing beer is less than 3 percent. of the total solid food of the nation.
    Sir S. COLLINS: What do you mean by "solid food"?
    Mr. SPEAKER: I hope the hon. Member will be allowed to make his speech with out interruption. There will be plenty of opportunity to reply to him.
    Mr. CLYNES: I was putting the argument that, after all, the quantity of solid food used for brewing forms but a small percentage in relation to the quantity of food used in this country, and, therefore, the saving would not be as immense as depicted in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. I say, therefore, that of that quantity nearly one-third is returned to be used as animal food while at least a half of the remainder may be justly regarded as food to some extent at least by the people who consume beer. I may tell my right hon. Friend that the standard barrelage will be 10,000,000. In view of the complaints which have been mentioned in the course of this discussion, I would like to offer one or two observations. It was in 1917—in the middle of that year—that a great deal of discontent was observed through out the country in engineering shops, in munition works, and in agricultural parts, and it was not any action on the part of the brewers or of the trade in engineering unrest that caused the Government of that time to make some changes and some improvement from the point of view of the beer consumer. It was stated in

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    many authoritative communications sent to us from, agricultural and other sources, by farmers and by the heads of munition works, that discontent prevailed among the men, particularly in canteens that were attached to large establishments which had hitherto been able to secure certain supplies of beer, because those supplies were being greatly reduced, and the men complained that they could not take their mid-day meal without the pint of beer to which they had been accustomed. It was also stated that the harvest was being endangered, and the agricultural interest pressed the view that something should be done which would offer a means of escape from the troubles then pending. Reference has been made to the attitude of the brewers, but I have to say that, ever since the Government assumed control and has had to impose these changes on the brewing interest, the brewers have loyally supported the authorities and have submitted to what ever decrease of barrelage was considered necessary without any complaint. The Ministry of Food has received piles of interesting letters on this subject, and perhaps my right hon. Friend could do worse than spend an hour or two looking through them. I may take one or two samples from this morning's post-bag On the average we get a dozen letters daily on this subject. They are not organised or engineered communications; they are spontaneous statements from plain working men who feel that a drink of beer is one of the essentials of their day Here is a letter from a body of workers in Durham, which says:
    "I am requested to write and see if you can bring any pressure on the Government to try and give us a just share of beer. We are in the lead trade, and we claim that a drop of good beer helps to clean out the lead-dust."
    Mr. JONES: Does the hon. Gentleman assent to that?
    5.0 P.M.
    Mr. CLYNES: It is not a question whether I assent or not. If I say, in reply to this, that, in the national interest, the men ought to make further sacrifices—if I say it is essential for the food of the nation that the manufacture of beer should cease altogether—I have no doubt these men would submit. But think what they are doing now! They begin work earlier, they are labouring longer hours, they are working harder, they are, doing heavier industrial service than ever before; and the real question is, ought we to ask them
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    to submit to further deprivations than the war conditions have imposed upon them? Here is another letter from a working men's club in Leeds:
    "Eighty per cent. of our members work in engineering firms in Leeds on munitions; the remainder are chiefly in the clothing trades making khaki. I can assure you that the absence of a reasonable supply of beer is causing a lot of unrest in our district. We are working from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m., and then are not able to obtain a drink of beer. I may say that our club is the oldest institute in Yorkshire and possesses a fine record, never having been warned during its existence for any offence. … It hurts us, it is disheartening in its effects upon our members, who have been loyal to their King and country during this terrible crisis, to be deprived of a simple thing like this."
    These are the representations which we frequently receive; and, bearing in mind the substantial reductions already made, I do suggest we ought not to unduly press on these large masses, these millions of men who are performing hard, exhaustive work, to make these further sacrifices which the right hon. Gentleman has demanded. Let me add this: As I under stand it, the average percentage of alcohol in beer prior to the War was 4½per cent. Under the existing Regulations, and within the terms of the further restrictions I have announced, this afternoon, it will be brought down to less than 3 per cent. I gathered from a recent manifesto issued by the Strength of Britain Movement that their recommendation was that brewers should brew only light beers containing not more than 2 per cent. of alcohol. If you have from the people of the "Strength of Britain" movement the claim that this production should be made to 2 per cent., and if actually now the Government policy is to bring it down to below 3 per cent., there seems to me to be very little margin of difference between the two extremes. Finally, may I put to the House a view which may not yet have been expressed I We all, I am sure, rejoice in the fact that there is an almost natural growth of opinion in this country towards temperance, and one can find now amongst working men a view taken about drink which was unknown to them some quarter of a century ago. We now know many working men who really would be ashamed to be found drunk whose fathers were not ashamed of it, who perhaps gloried in it. They are coming to look on it, I will not say as a crime but as a misdemeanour nearly as reprehensible as lying or theft. They do not like to be thought of in terms of being

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    drunkards or of taking drink to excess, but while I put that view I personally cannot conclude from anything I know of this country, or from anything I can observe in others, that a state of enforced teetotalism in this country during the War would in itself be any contribution towards winning the War. I have heard in this House, when Russia became a vodkaless nation, prophecies of what Russia would then begin to do as a more powerful agent, acting with the Allies, towards winning the War. The policy of the suppression of drink in Russia not only did nothing to strengthen Russia either militarily or morally as one of the Allies, but, indeed, we might reasonably ask whether for one cause or the other the abolition of vodka had not something to do with the growth of the discontent which produced finally the state of revolution in Russia itself. So you have no guarantee, founded either on theory or on practice, that the prohibition of drink in a country during war-time will in itself necessarily be any formidable contribution towards the successful conduct of the War.
    On one other occasion I put a view to this House on this subject which I do not fear to repeat. It is this, that millions of the humbler folk of this country have made very great sacrifices for their country towards winning the War. They are suffering many privations as the result of the War, and they are carrying their full share of sorrow, like so many other sections of the community. But those other sections have some opportunity of escaping from the grim tragedies of the War, and from some of its sorrows. They have better homes than the working classes; they have good clubs; they have tastes which enable them to enjoy life on a somewhat higher plane than the average workman is capable of enjoying. These working men, so far as they have social opportunities, can find them only in the village club or in the town tavern. The town taverns ought to be better than they are; structurally and in other ways they should be very much improved. But there is no guarantee that you are going to improve these places by suppressing them or driving them beneath the surface by force for the time being. The humbler people have their just claims on the consideration of this House, and on this particular article of drink they have had to give way so far that I earnestly ask that they should not during the period of the War be pressed further by those who are
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    advancing this claim this afternoon. I do say that if the point is reached where it becomes a necessity to choose between bread and beer, there will be no hesitation on the part of the Government. But we have not reached that point, and until we have it is not fair or reasonable that the people, whose pleasures and social opportunities are so few, should be forced to make greater sacrifices than they have already made.
    Mr. HARCOURT:I have already spoken in Debate once this Session upon this subject in seconding an Amendment to the Address, a Debate which had, I think, some influence on the Government, though I am not sure that the speech which my hon. Friend (Mr. Clynes) has just delivered represents any great advance in the views laid down by the Government. It would be an impertinence that I should say more than a few words now. Like the hon. and gallant Member for Wiltshire (Sir C. Bathurst), who delivered a very interesting and important speech supporting the view of my right hon. Friend opposite (Mr. Leif Jones), I do not approach this question from the point of view of a total abstainer, or indeed of what I think has been called a temperance fanatic. With regard to an interjection by an hon. Member above the Gangway upon the subject of the rich man's cellar, I think it. would be an obvious corrolary of the view which some of us are pressing upon the Government that the rich man's cellar should certainly suffer in an equal degree. I wish to say that I am not arguing the general merits of temperance, or the merits of morality, or the precepts of Divine Providence. All these things should be argued in their due and proper season, and are not relevant to this Debate. I only say that for this reason: I met a deputation of temperance workers the other day and it impressed me just as much and just as little as many deputations frequently do—because just as we appeared to be reaching the conclusions of commonsense a dissatisfied gentleman got up and said that he thought our movement could never succeed because no one had yet said that he believed in God. I believe in God—and I really do not wish to be profane in this matter—but I do not think this question should be argued, as many excellent people do argue it, as if there were something in the Commandments that the working man should not have a glass of beer. I have no objection to a man getting a glass of beer if the con-

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    ditions of the country permit it, and that is the whole point of the Debate to-day. I am sorry if that contention in any way weakens the case of my right hon. Friend opposite, though I do not think it does, but I do say most emphatically that this is not a blue-ribbon case; it is not an ecclesiastical case; it is not even a medical case; it is a starvation case, or it is nothing at all. That is the only point of view that I am endeavouring to argue.
    It has been said by my hon. Friend speaking for the Government, in what I will admit at once was a perfectly straight forward and sincere speech, that the industrial classes engaged on heavy work have very strong opinions on this subject. It is said that the coal miner wants his glass of beer, and that the harvester wants his glass of beer, because he is hot and thirsty. That argument interests me to a certain extent, because last July and August I was doing a job of work in the East, somewhere in the latitude of Naples, and I can assure my hon. Friend that the men were very hot and very thirsty. I may tell my right hon. Friend opposite—I do not know whether this statement will distress him—that I would certainly have given those men a glass of beer, but there was not a glass of beer to give them. All they got was a tot of rum and at able of quinine by doctor's orders; and they only got the tot of rum by doctor's orders, because it was a very unhealthy, malarious, district. It is somewhat notorious that transport is a little erratic in the Mediterranean. There was no beer because of the transport. There was no butter or margarine; there was no cheese; there was precious little bacon, and one tin of condensed milk among twelve. Therefore, I say by all means ration the civil population at home with what the soldier cannot get when he as abroad, give it to them if you have it to give, and ration according to the character of the employment on which the men are engaged. The point we put to the Government in this Debate is, Have you got it to give them? When you have made your shells can you make your ships? Have you, for instance, the raw material for both? And when you have made your bread, can you make your beer? You know, we do not. We do most emphatically say to the Government, It is your responsibility. If at any time in the next few months your
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    bread runs short, and you have used your grain for beer, you have not only made a lamentable and serious mistake, but you have been guilty of a crime against the nation.
    Mr. HOLT: I should like to say a few words in support of the line just taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Montrose Burghs (Mr. Harcourt). I also am not a teetotaler. I think I may say I am not a teetotaler in any sense of the word, though I am inclined to believe that it would probably be better for all of us if we were teetotalers. I do not think, however, that this particular matter at the present time ought to be argued from the teetotal point of view, I was almost saying from the temperance point of view, at all. It does not seem to me that this is a consideration which should really be before the country. I think that at the moment this is primarily a question of transport and shipping of what we can afford to bring into the country at the present time. The Government, as we know, have cut down in the most drastic manner the imports it is possible to make into the country, and what we have now to consider is whether alcohol, or the materials for making alcohol, should be in the list of prohibited imports. That is the only consideration which is really relevant at the present time, and that I understand was entirely the view of my hon. Friend (Mr. HarCourt). I think the hon. and gallant Member for Wiltshire (Captain Sir C. Bathurst) raised a false point in the matter of sugar, because even if the sugar used for brewing were quite unfit for human consumption, nevertheless if that sugar were not being brought into this country other articles of equal value could be brought instead. I would remind the House that this is not merely a question of shipping. It is also a question of inland transport. One of the difficulties about food has been the internal distribution. You can get it into the port, but you can not get it out of the port up country; and in the same way, if you have to transport large quantities of materials for brewing you are taking up inland transport which might be used to a very much better purpose. I certainly have no wish to deprive any person of his beer. I am very sorry it should be necessary to ask any person to go without that quantity of beer which he can consume without becoming intoxicated, but I do think we should endeavour to ask everybody to consider what the

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    alternative really is. We have had the figures given to us as to the quantity of material used for this purpose. We know that there is a certain amount of difficulty in getting a really full quantity of bread, but we know this, that there is a great and lamentable lack of feeding-stuffs for cattle, pigs, and poultry, and for the whole range of agricultural work. Even supposing we are bringing into this country at the present time enough cereals to enable us to consume as much cereals as we ought in that form, nevertheless what is going in beer, and the tonnage used to enable the manufacture of beer and whisky to go on, is material and tonnage which is being taken away from the agricultural industry. It means that we are to have less beef, bacon, and eggs. All these things are being taken from us in order that this manufacture of beer and whisky should go on.
    Take another important matter. One of the articles which have been cut down is the importation of raw cotton. That is a very serious thing for the financial interests of this country. It may even be a serious matter for beer-drinking gentlemen who are engaged in the cotton trade. If the importation of raw cotton has to be reduced it might be well worth considering whether it is not more in the real interests of the working classes of Lancashire, at any rate, that they should have raw cotton, because if they cannot get wages to pay for the beer there is not much satisfaction in knowing that there is plenty of beer in the country. Those things want very serious consideration. It is said that if you are going to deprive the poor man of his beer you ought equally to deprive the wealthy man of his wine. That is an argument which is quite conclusive if you approach the matter purely from the temperance and teetotal point of view. But it is not necessarily so if you approach the matter from the point of view of transport, because it might quite easily be the case that you could bring wines into the country without using any tonnage whatever. That is not true as regards cereals. The only place from which you can get wine now wthout using tonnage is France, from which large numbers of ships are returning empty. But I feel that if you are going to deal with the manufacture of beer and whisky you want precisely the same thing, even if it is illogical, about wine. You want it for sentimental reasons. As a wine consumer, I am quite ready in that respect to submit to any
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    restrictions which are put upon those consuming beer or spirits, even though I do not think that the same arguments lead to the same conclusion. The proposal that I make to the Government is this: They should say quite plainly that this matter is not approached from the point of view of temperance, but of tonnage, and they should say to the people of this country, You may drink up what exists. We do not wish to deprive anybody of anything that is in existence. There are certain stocks of whisky, beer, and wine—drink them up. But from this day for ward until the end of the War no alcohol shall be imported into this country, and no alcohol shall be manufactured. I believe that that is a sensible way of dealing with the situation, and that we should let it stand until the end of the War. I am quite certain that if you do not do something of that nature, however much you may placate those who wish to drink beer, you will certainly arouse a very angry state of mind among people who do not wish to drink beer, and who find that they are being deprived of the food which is necessary for them in order that others may drink beer.
    Mr. R. McNEILL: I agree that transport is the really important object which we ought to have in view in discussing this matter. I was very much impressed by the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Wiltshire, which I thought was a very important contribution to the subject, but it seems to me that the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken, and still more the hon. Gentleman below the Gangway (Mr. Harcourt) rather overshot the point in discussing the matter of transport, because this is a matter of alternatives, and both hon. Members seemed to me to assume that the only alternatives open were the use of ship ping for bread or beer. But that is not so at all. The hon. Member opposite (Mr. Holt), I agree, throws a glimmering of light on the subject when he introduces the subject of cotton, because he said that it was a question as to whether it might not be more important to have a supply of cotton than beer. Before we can decide that it is necessary to cut off the beer supply we should have to review the whole of the imports at the present time. That has not been done.
    Mr. JONES: The matter has been most carefully gone into, but the results have

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    not been given to the public. They cut everything down, and apart from food, munitions and material, there is a very small amount of tonnage for any of the Ordinary industries of the country.
    Mr. MCNEILL: I quite understand the right hon. Gentleman's point, but we have not had an opportunity of knowing, and therefore it is only a matter of opinion, as to where there is room for any further cutting down of imports. I know that comparatively recently there was a very considerable importation of lemons into this country. The suggestion that we should diminish the supply of lemonade, there might be, at all events, an alternative that some of the working men would prefer, but that would bring us up against another question, which is a very important one, and must be kept in mind, that is, the interests of our Allies. You cannot in a moment cut off the supplies to this country of such commodities without doing great damage to the interests of our Italian Allies. I am not speaking from actual knowledge of present facts, but I do know that it does enter into the consideration that if you were to cut off altogether the importation of wines we should injure the interests of our French Allies.
    These are the matters which you have to consider on the question of alternatives, which only shows that we have not in this House at present got a sufficient review of the whole situation to enable us to judge whether the necessity has arisen, which all hon. Members admit is the guiding principle, to cut off from the working classes of the country the beer which, in many cases, is looked upon by them as very nearly, if not quite, an essential of their daily existence, and, at all events, one of those things which we should not cut away from them without such a necessity as would really leave us no alternative at all. We have not been told that such a case has arisen. My hon. Friend who spoke for the Government intimated very clearly that that desperate moment has not yet arrived, and he spoke with authority which we cannot neglect as to the very serious additional privation which the policy advocated by my right hon. Friend opposite would impose upon the working classes. I do not profess to be thoroughly familiar with the industrial conditions in the North. I have the good fortune to represent an agricultural constituency in the South
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    myself, but I have seen many of these people, and especially during the War it has been my privilege to go to several meetings in the North, and in large munition factories I have seen the sort of toil that the men there are undergoing and the sort of temperature in which they undergo it, and when I am told that it is practically a necessity for those men that in the course of their long hours work they should not drink the ordinary beverage to which they are accustomed it does surprise me, and my sympathies are rather with them, and I certainly refuse to support the views of my hon. Friend opposite, unless and until we have it on the authority of the Government that the necessity has arisen under which, in order to save the whole nation from starvation, we should have to cut off even this degree of luxury from the working classes.
    Mr. DUNCAN MILLAR: The hon. Gentleman has referred to the question of tonnage which we all agree introduces a very important element into the problem that we are discussing. The hon. Member who replied for the Ministry of Food, I do not think took upon himself to deal with the question of tonnage, speaking authoritatively from the point of view of the Ministry of Shipping, or, indeed, as far as I can gather, speaking on behalf of the War Cabinet. We are aware that representations have been made directly to the War Cabinet by the Ministry of Shipping on this question. The facts have been given in the House by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary on different occasions. There is no question whatever that there is at the present moment a very serious shortage of tonnage, and strong representations have been made to the War Cabinet that a great increase of tonnage could be secured by prohibiting the manufacture of beer. The figures given to-day by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, as far as I can understand them, really amount to this, that there are still to be 512,000 tons of shipping allocated for drink purposes, instead of 575,000 tons, which was the figure recently stated by the Ministry of Shipping in answer to a question in this House. If I am correct in that assumption, it really comes to this, that there is only to be a saving in actual tonnage of something like 50,000 or 60.000 tons.
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of SHIPPING (Sir Leo Chiozza Money): I cannot confirm that statement without examination.
    Mr. MILLAR: The figure was given in this House. I do not know whether the Leader of the House will be kind enough to clear up the point, but it seems to be very material. The figure given in the House by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food was that 512,000 tons only would now be occupied for brewing materials, as against 1,556,000 tons of shipping before the War.
    The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Bonar Law): I understood that.
    Mr. MILLAR: We were informed that the continued brewing in this country at the present time involves a loss of 575,000 tons of shipping, and if you deduct 512,000 from the 575,000 there seems to be an actual saving of only 50,000 to 60,000 tons in the proposals of the Government, which appears to me to amount to something a great deal smaller than what we might have been entitled to expect. Then there is the question of the reduction to 10,000,000 standard barrels, which is represented as a substantial reduction at the present moment; but what the House and the country are entitled to ask is, Does this represent anything like the reduction which should now be made when it is remembered that in the early period of 1917 the output was reduced to 10,000,000 barrels, and that it was raised again to 16,000,000 barrels? In other words, we are now only getting back to the figure of 10,000,000 barrels, which was the figure regarded as absolutely necessary at the earlier date. Are we to believe that the (Government are prepared even now to adhere to that figure? The reason given for increasing the number of barrels was precisely the same reason as that which was submitted to the House again to-day as a reason for not coming down further, namely, that you are up against the beer consumers, the industrial classes. I happen to represent a large industrial constituency, and I think that I am entitled to point out to the Leader of the House, who, I know, understands the working classes in Scotland, and, I am quite sure, is prepared to accept an expression of opinion from them, that the workers in Scotland are prepared to make any sacrifice in regard to the consumption of beer, that may be
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    called for in connection with the War. I can speak for my own district in Scotland, where there is evidence of readiness to make such a sacrifice. I may state that plebiscites have been taken in various districts and industrial centres, such as Paisley, Clydebank, Barrhead, Cowden-heath, Alva, Lesmahagow, Govan—centres with large industrial populations, though one or two of the districts may include some different elements—with the result that there was an overwhelming majority in each place in favour of the prohibition of the manufacture of intoxicants during the War. That is true of other industrial centres in Scotland. I submit that the workers should be consulted, and that they should have the opportunity of expressing freely their views in these matters. I would appeal to the right hon. Gentleman that he should not, on every occasion that this matter is brought up in the House, magnify the difficulties which are unjustly advanced in regard to the attitude of the workers, and which I be have are very much exaggerated. On the last occasion he said:
    "We are of opinion that it is dangerous, from the point of view of the working classes of this country, to prevent their getting something to which they are daily accustomed."
    May I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the working classes have made very great sacrifices during the War; they have given up many more important things to which they have been accustomed, and it is a very small matter to ask them to give up what is an admitted luxury? May I remind the right hon. Gentleman also of the statement which the Prime Minister made recently:
    "In all the statistical tables there was one column left out. It was a vital one—the column which showed the capacity of men of all classes, all creeds, and of all nations, for sacrifice in a cause they believed in. This War has taught us that lesson."
    If an appeal were made to the working classes, showing the wastage in food and tonnage that is caused by the brewing of beer, they would be perfectly ready to respond in the most reasonable spirit. One of the Commissions on industrial unrest reported that there was no reason to doubt that all classes would loyally adhere to any reduction of brewing if it was demonstrated to be necessary. We have been informed again and again of the seriousness of the food situation. The Minister of Agriculture quite recently, in a speech delivered to farmers, said:
    "It was not the only pivot of our war activities, but it was the one thing which hung in the

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    balance. We must have food, or we could not make sure of victory. Food therefore had become a munition of war, and the most important of munitions of war."
    I appeal to the right hon. Gentleman to go frankly to the workers of the country in full confidence—as was indeed recognised to-day by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food—that they will be prepared to accept any proposal that is based on grounds of war-time necessity, and that will help us to secure victory
    Mr. ACLAND: I wish to put one point before the right hon. Gentleman, in regard to which, in my position as Chairman of the Small Holdings and Allotments Committee of Agricultural Organisation Societies, I have come across, daily and weekly, what I look upon as an extraordinary development of interest in the allotment movement. All over the country it is taking hold of the industrial population in a very remarkable way. It was estimated some time ago that there were already something like a million allotments in existence, producing a great amount of food, and, with the food shortage before us, the idea is really getting into the minds and hearts of the people, of breeding livestock on their allotments. It is only those who have come in contact with these allotment holders, as I do every day, who know-how deep and how tremendous is their keenness and interest in this movement. These men want to keep rabbits, pigs, and poultry on their allotments, but the Ministers in charge of foodstuffs are able to allot only exceedingly small amounts of cereals or cake-food; but I believe that if the Government were to say boldly to the working classes now so immensely interested in this movement, that they might keep live-stock on their allotments, and that it was proposed to make a further cut in the use of cereals for the brewing of beer and keep it for the use of the allotment holders in feeding their pigs, rabbits, and poultry, there would be a very fine response, and the proposal would be very largely welcomed by working men and miners and others. I do not put this matter before the House from the temperance point of view at all, nor do I say that the Government look at it from that point of view; they believe that they have to secure for the working classes a certain amount of beer. On the other hand, I represent a constituency where the whole
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    body of workers, including a great number of miners, would be willing to pledge themselves to total abstinence to the end of the War. There would be no difficulty there in that district, though there might be difficulty, I understand, in some other places. There is one way of getting over the feeling which does exist in some working-class centres, and that is to say to these men, We think that the food which you can produce for yourselves, by keeping pigs, poultry, and rabbits on your allotments is something far more important than such modicum of food that there may-exist in alcoholic drinks. If the Government were a little bolder they would ask the working classes to consider the question in that sort of way. and I am sure there would be a good response. We may have very serious months ahead of us in the near future, and I do urge the Government to be a little bolder in facing the working classes in regard to this matter. I think that if they adopt the suggestion I have thrown out, it will be found that they would meet with a very real and satisfactory response.
    Mr. ROBINSON: The question which is before us is one of very great importance, and, whatever may be my own view on the subject, I wish to deal with it rather on the grounds of national necessity at the present time. Those of us who are interested in agricultural constituencies have been asking our Constituents to plough up fresh land, and to make the very best use of the land under cultivation, so that more food may be produced. The farmer has been doing what we have asked of him. My calculation is that the land ploughed up this year produces the equivalent, or about the equivalent, of the amount of grain that would be consumed in manufacturing beer. That is rather a strong thing to say, but I think I am correct in what I state. Before the War we raised approximately one-fifth of the grain consumed, and we imported about four-fifths or more; and probably a tenth of the whole of the grain either raised or imported went in the manufacture of beer and spirits. If we had been wise enough at the commencement of the War, or had we been wise enough to foresee the necessity that now exists, we might at that time have appealed to the country to cease the manufacture of beer, and I believe the country at that time would have responded to the appeal, and we could then, automatically, have increased our supply of grain by one-tenth, which

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    would have been available at the present time. Those who have been able to get hold of the Agricultural Journal for the present month must have observed that the use of concentrated foods for the purpose of fattening cattle is to be absolutely stopped. Agriculturists know that this is a, very serious matter. Things have been drifting in that direction for a long time, and it seems that we will have to force upon the market more and more immature stock in a less mature condition, which is a very serious matter. We know from experience that without this food the cattle cannot make flesh in a way that would make them marketable. It is urged that it is absolutely necessary for munition workers and other workers that they should have a certain amount of beer. I have my own views upon that subject, but if it is necessary that a certain amount of beer should be given to some workers, could there not be some reasonable method of rationing whereby those men who must have it shall have it? In the agricultural district which I represent, why should more beer be given to the farmers or farm workers, whose labour is very little harder than that of others? Why should agriculturists and other workers have increased quantities of beer? That is a matter I am unable to understand. It may be that it is really necessary in the case of munition workers, but I think it should be rationed in some way, just as are other foods. We are short at the present time of men, and that matter has already been dealt with, and there is the shortage of ships.
    The suggestion has been made that we should ask the working men on this matter. I intend to go to my own Constituency and to urge this, and perhaps it is one of the difficult districts in South Wales; but I believe, if the question is properly put and submitted to them, that the working men who have risen so splendidly before will rise again to the necessity of a great national emergency. I am not sure that it is not the duty of this House to set the example, and I hope another opportunity will be given to it to follow for the time being the example of those in the highest places in the land. Let us set an example to the working men, and exclude all drink for the time being, as an hon. Friend who said he was not a teetotaler expressed his willingness to do. Then we can go to the country with a much better case to the working men. I do not know whether many Members of
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    this House have seen an extract from a speech of Mr. Hoover, the Food Controller of the United States, in which he said that for the duration of the War every bushel of barley is needed for food, and there is not a bushel to spare for beer, and that the argument advanced by the brewers that they are using grain which is unfit for food production is not true, and that the food value of high-grain barley is very similar to that of wheat. That is a very important statement. We know that in the United States, as in Canada, there has been a great outcry that we are not making the best use of foodstuffs in this country. Mention has been made of certain letters to the other side from gentlemen who came over and were speaking from this point of view in this country, and which were censored when they wrote back. I have reason to believe that certain items of news dealing with the elections that took place in Canada have been also censored. Some of the speeches which were censored dealt with the question of young Canadians coming over here from dry States into the temptation offered in districts where drink is sold. I say no more about that, and after all it is only one side of the question. I would make an appeal to the Government to make one more effort and to give the working classes an opportunity of speaking their minds on this subject, and if the case is properly put, and if this House sets a proper example, I believe that the working men are sound and will loyally follow any lead that is given to them.
    Mr. CLYNES: With the permission of the House, I intervene to make a correction of figures given in reply to an interjection from my right hon. Friend (Mr. L. Jones). I stated that the standard barrelage was 10,000,000. I spoke from memory at the moment, and I should like to take this opportunity to give the House the complete and accurate figures. The authorised standard barrelage is 10,720,000. To that there must be added, as extra for the Army and Navy, 750,000 barrels, and, further, an addition for munition areas as extra supplies of 1,120,000 barrels; so that the total authorised standard barrelage amounts to 12,590,000 barrels.
    Mr. JONES: May I ask whether that figure is going to be adhered to, because twelve months ago the Government announced that the total barrelage would be 10,000,000, while the actual barrelage was over 16,000,000?
    Mr. CLYNES: Although what my hon. Friend states is quite correct as regards twelve months ago, at a later period there had to be an addition. The reasons for that have been made plain in the course of the discussion this afternoon.
    Mr. JONES: Will that be repeated this year?
    Admiral of the Fleet Sir HEDWORTH MEUX: I am not going to follow the arguments put forward by the last speaker, but I think it must be very evident to the working classes of this country that we are not really a very suitable body to discuss what they should drink. We here are sedentary workers, and it is perfectly well known that sedentary workers are not men who usually drink beer, or can digest it. I do not know if the right hon. Gentleman, whose speech I had not the pleasure of hearing, has much experience of hard manual labour?
    Mr. JONES: No.
    Sir H. MEUX: I think it is very hard on the working classes of this country, who work sometimes for twelve hours a day in furnace works and collieries and are accustomed to have their beer, and mean to have it. [An HON. MEMBER: What about corn?] I am not talking about corn. I think the House would have been more impressed by the arguments advanced if the hon. Members had not been known to have been for many years fanatical teetotalers, who are now by hook or by crook trying to turn this country into a teetotal country—that as to say, they are trying to make it adopt one of the tenets of the Turkish religion. I go so far as to say that anybody who tries to compulsorily force this nation into prohibition is denying the truth of the Christian religion. [A laugh.] Any hon. Members who laugh at that show their ignorance of the New Testament, and of what was most distinctly stated by the Founder of our religion. I forget the exact words, but I dare say the teetotalers know them. In those days days there was a great deal more drunkenness than there is now. About a generation before the commencement of the Christian Era, the Governor of the East was, I think, Mark Anthony, who was notorious as a free liver and a drunkard, and. if my classical recollection be right, he once wrote a treatise on the advantage of drink.
    I should like to say a few words about what are called "dry" States. Has any
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    hon. Member taken the trouble to consider why those States go dry? Is it because they are too sober or too drunken? Of course, it is because they are not sober. That is the only reason why a State goes what they call "dry"—because the majority of the inhabitants are not fit to be entrusted with a reasonable amount of drink. Would any man dare to go down to any constituency in England, and tell the people there that they are not fit to be trusted with a certain amount of drink, and that they are drunkards? We are the soberest nation in the world. Who ever sees a drunken man in this country? Walk about, and go about. I dare say there may be a drunkard seen, but I have never come across the man. Where are these drunkards? Why do you want to deprive the people of legitimate drink? An hon. Member from Scotland says that in his district the people would be only too pleased to give up beer. But beer is not the national beverage there; everybody knows it is whisky. It is a very, very bad thing for people to drink too much whisky, and I am quite prepared to support the Government in restricting spirits. All the curse of drunkenness comes from spirit drinking. I speak not from personal experience, I am thankful to say, but it has been my duty in the Navy to be on courts-martial and to order courts-martial, and there was not one single exception to this rule, and I pointed it out to the Admiralty many years ago that, whenever there was a case of drunkenness it was invariably caused by spirits. No man is ever a drunkard on beer. He may get a little tipsy sometimes, but what does it matter if he does? Probably it makes him more good-natured. Take this House of 600 Members, and how many of them are teetotalers? A most contemptible minority in a numerical sense.
    Mr. JONES: That is what the Germans said of the British Army.
    Sir H. MEUX: I think most of the intellects in this House are not on the side of the teetotalers. I remember, in British Columbia, a very well-known legal gentleman, the Chief Justice, who did more good in that country, perhaps, than any other man has ever done, pointed out to me what is undoubtedly true, that a man who cannot stand a certain amount of liquor without becoming intoxicated is obviously a very inferior creature. The man whose

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    views on drink, I respect more than any other — and we sometimes read about him and meet him—is the reformed drunkard. I do not know whether we have any in this House. I do not think we have. The right hon. Gentleman spoke about a most iniquitous publication, an infamous book which goes by the name of the "Strength of Britain." What a name! The "Strength of Britain" means the people who only drink water.
    Mr. CHANCELLOR: Oh, no!
    6.0 P.M.
    Sir H. MEUX: I beg your pardon—lemonade. We have all heard of in vino veritas, which means I suppose that when you have had a good dinner you are inclined to speak the truth. It is nearly fifty years ago since I used a Latin dictionary, but I cannot help saying to water drinkers, in aqua dolus. I dare, say a Latin scholar here will tell us what dolus means. To talk seriously, there is not a single beer-drinker or beer producer who, if the necessity arises, is not prepared, for the good of his country and to win this War, to abolish brewing altogether, but until that necessity arises, the Government are only pandering to a really weak section of the community in listening to their views.
    Mr. CHANCELLOR: I do not intend to follow the lion, find gallant Admiral in his incursions into theological and classical realms. I fear I could not follow there with any great success. But I want to put one or two questions to the Minister. I am sorry I was not present to hear the earlier part of his speech, but when. I came in he was just saying that the amount of food which is used for the purpose of brewing represented about 3 per cent. of the total food supplies of the country, and I understood him to say that that involved 500,000 of tonnage during the year. Can we spare it? I think that is a very serious statement to make. It does not certainly agree with the statements which the Prime Minister has made, and especially the statement repeated over and over again in the "National Food Journal" by Sir Arthur Yapp, and which some of us have had to repeat in, or not in, his presence on public platforms in the country, when appealing to people not to use unnecessary things, so as to save necessary food supplies. Will the hon. Gentleman, therefore, explain how it is that the medical officers in charge
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    of our hospitals have lately received instructions to put patients who are in those hospitals on the lower scale of dietary which I have in my hand? I have here a scale of quantities sufficient to feed 100 patients for one day. There are two scales—.Scale A and Scale B—and I am told by an officer who holds a very high position in the medical service that quite recently they have had instructions from headquarters to cut down the scale in as many cases as possible to the lower scale. Our food position must be extremely critical, surely, if that has become necessary, and I should like the hon. Gentleman to tell us if it is a fact that the shortage of food is so great that men who have come back from the front, and are in our hospitals, are not now to have the food which, under normal conditions, would be regarded as necessary for them?
    The hon. Gentleman also said that the determination to go on with the use of foodstuffs for beer was due partly to the belief as to its necessity on the part of those who use it. Its necessity has been demonstrated not to be in existence by one after another of the Committees which have been set up by the Government themselves. They have said that alcoholic drink is not only not a necessity, but that its use is physiologically unsound. That its use is not necessary is shown by the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers engaged in the most strenuous toil in this country personally abstain, and the late Jonathan Samuel, who was a Member of this House, declared in this House that ho had worked in front of a forge furnace for eleven years without having tasted any intoxicating liquor whatever. Moreover, America has driven intoxicants out of her factories on industrial grounds, because it was found necessary to get the fullest output from their factories, and the original cutting down of supplies of drink in our munition areas was largely due to the fact that the consumption of alcohol was interfering with output. The hon. Member said that the requests for further supplies were on no account due to any suggestion on the part of those interested in the production of beer. In this connection I should like to quote this paragraph from the Manchester Evening News of Thursday, 7th March of this year:
    "At Hyde Brewster Sessions the Chief Constable called attention to a circular which had been issued to the local trade unions and other bodies by a brewery company and by the Hyde and District Beer, Wine and Spirit Association,

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    asking the unions to pass resolutions and forward to the Food Controller and certain Ministers, 'declaring that the members of the trades unions or the friendly societies desired to protest strongly against the restrictions on the output of beer as being entirely unnecessary, and causing a vast amount of discontent among the workers, whose only desire was to do their best for the country and to help to win the War. It hoped the Government would accede to the moderate wishes of the working classes and grant them an adequate supply of beer.'
    The Chairman of the Bench said it was a grave matter, and that it was not even done openly, but secretly, in the interest of drink sellers. The attempt was made to impress on the Government the view that there was much unrest due to the shortage of beer, which was a slander on working men.
    The Justices asked the Chief Constable to convey their opinion of the circular to the Government and the Liquor Control Board."
    Does the hon. Gentleman suggest that none of these requests for further supplies of beer come as a result of suggestions made by the trade? If so, I think he will do well to inquire into this, for I think he will find that a good many suggestions come from that source. When the restrictions were first put into operation in London, there was an attempt to work up a trade union agitation against them. The attempt fizzled out, as attempts in all parts of the country have fizzled out. Trade union after trade union dissociated itself entirely from the attempts to remove those restrictions, and except for these two letters which he has produced, and the letters which were produced by the representative of the Munitions Department last year—a few letters produced here, and said to be typical of a large number—we have had absolutely no evidence of any unrest having arisen in consequence of the restriction in the supply of beer. On the contrary, we have abundance of evidence that, if asked, the workers of this country are quite willing, during the War and during demobilisation, to do without their accustomed drink. May I remind the hon. Gentleman that eight Commissions went throughout the country and made particular inquiry into this point, and that seven of them reported that the shortage in the supply of drink was not a material factor in the unrest? The only one that reported in a contrary sense was the one which examined conditions in the West Midlands. The West Midlands are a centre of the brewing industry, and one can understand, in view of the kind of quotation I made Just now, how easy it would be to get people to complain.
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    The position, I believe, is very serious indeed. We are not allowed here to have the facts with regard to tonnage losses. We have to rely on statements made in foreign Parliaments. Last May, in the French Chamber of Deputies, a statement was made that during four months ended April of last year 2,150,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping had gone to the bottom as a result of the submarine campaign. The Public, of New York, stated, on 4th January, 1918:
    "The loss of Allied and neutral shipping from German submarines since 25th February, 1917, the beginning of the unrestricted warfare, has amounted to 1,264 ships with a tonnage of 6.371,000 tons."
    The constant reduction of tonnage is going on. There is a constant shortage in the supply not only of foodstuffs for our people, but of material for our manufacturers. Manufacturers who do not happen to be fortunate enough to hold Government contracts, and are unable to produce priority certificates, are being ruined by the hundred throughout the country. The position is extremely difficult, and the use of tonnage for the importation of any material which is not really necessary, which at the best is a luxury, is. a crime against the country. It is inviting the very danger which we are asking people to avoid by care in the consumption of food, and is greatly increasing the hardship from which our people are suffering. I quite agree that many of the workers think that beer is necessary. Scientifically it has been proved that it is not, and experimentally it has been proved on the railways and in the factories in America that it is not, and now throughout the whole population of Canada it has been proved that, not only is beer not necessary, but its absence contributes to the well-Wing of the community and the increased output of material. It is perfectly useless to speak of those who desire the discontinuance of the supply of beer as teetotal fanatics. You cannot indict a whole nation like Canada, and I think, perhaps, our Canadian friends will not feel complimented by the references made to them by the hon. and gallant Gentleman. The evidence is overwhelming that the workers themselves, if appealed to, would consent for the time being to do without the drink to which they have been accustomed. Plebiscites have been taken in a number of towns along the Clyde Bank, an area, where unrest has been perhaps more frequent than in any industrial

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    area throughout the country. In Paisley 11,182 people voted for immediate prohibition of all kinds of intoxicants, including spirits to which they are accustomed, and 1,178 voted against it— one in eleven.
    Sir CHARLES HENRY: How many did not vote at all?
    Mr. CHANCELLOR: I do not know; I am only referring to those who voted.
    Sir C. HENRY: Can you give the population of Paisley?
    Mr. CHANCELLOR: I have not got it here. In Clydebank 8,207 voted for prohibition, and 1,861 against it. In other areas the proportion was even greater. Take, for instance, Alva, where 1,332 voted for and forty-seven against, and Lesmahagow, where 1,076 voted for and thirty-two against. These were not teetotalers. It was merely a distribution of votes from house to house. Those who took the trouble to record their votes for or against are the numbers I have given. That is not all. In a previous Debate I asked the hon. Member whether the Independent Labour Party represented in any sense the workers of the country. If they do not represent the workers, they represent nobody else. The Independent Labour Party, in their congress last May, had a resolution dealing with the food question. To that resolution an addendum was moved demanding immediate prohibition of drink in the interests of the food supply, and that addendum was carried to the official resolution of the party, and only seven voted against it. That is not all. The workers have had conferences on this question again and again since it has become urgent. There was a meeting of the War Emergency Committee, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, last May, attended by 600 delegates from branches of trades unions, co-operative societies, trades councils, Labour representation committees, and Independent Labour Party branches, to consider the food problem. There again, an addendum to the official resolution dealing with the food question was moved asking for immediate prohibition. It was carried without dissent, every delegate being a working man, and every representative a representative of a working-man's organisation. The same thing took place at a conference of the Cumberland Miners' Association, in Cumberland, about the same period of the
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    year. These conferences of delegates representing working-men's organisations axe surely some indication of what is in the minds of the workers. It is perfectly easy—on the suggestion of interested parties, who are making money at a rate never dreamt of before, and who make even prohibitive limitations inure to their own benefit—to get individual men or sections of men here and there to demand that they shall have a further supply of this commodity, because they regard it as necessary. Have the Government, however, ever made any attempt to suggest to these men that substitutes may be found, which would be equally advantageous to them to use in their industry, and by means of which they could slake their thirst and maintain their strength very much better? Has any appeal been made to them by the Government on the ground that food supply is short, and is getting shorter; or are they to be given to understand that we can afford to use a 3 per cent. margin on our food supply for what is recognised by scientific authorities now as a wasteful purpose.
    It has been extremely difficult for some of us who have been talking about food enonomy during all these months. We have tried to abstain from referring to this aspect of the matter, because we have been asked by the Government to refrain from referring to it. I really think, however, that if the Government were in earnest, and were less concerned with certain interests, that work underground in the way described by this magistrate in the "Manchester Evening News" the other day, and if they were more concerned for the welfare of the country as a whole, and for the women and children, who are losing their health through forming food queues which would not have been necessary if these materials had been available for food; if they realised the truth of the Prime Minister's statements, time after time, that drink was not helping, but was really hindering the output of our munitions factories, and that without it employment would be more regular, our output would be greater and our chances of beating the foe would be greater; if the Government would seriously face this problem, and make their appeal to the working classes, I believe the response would surprise them. I think they would find that, instead of creating anxiety, they would make them far more contented.
    Mr. CLYNES: The hon. member for Haggerston has pressed the question of motives. I must say it is the fact that ho one of the articles of food which are used for the manufacture of beer was a cause of food queues. My hon. Friend has challenged my previous statement with regard to Labour's opinion. The Independent Labour Party to which he has referred is numerically a small body, having a political, and not an industrial, basis. What I said is still true, that there has never been any national Labour conference representing organised labour in its industrial aspect which has passed any resolution in favour of prohibition.
    Mr. CHANCELLOR: I am quite willing to admit that is the fact. I can only refer to the conferences which have been held, and I cannot to those which have not. Does not the hon. Gentleman remember that, apart from these labour conferences, the late Government, in 1916, had presented to them a petition on the same ground, signed by over two millions of persons, collected from every class of society, not total abstainers, but simple signatures collected from house to house' I think the evidence is overwhelming that the people —the workers of the country—on the whole, with certain almost negligible exceptions, are prepared to make any necessary sacrifice, and that if they were asked to make this sacrifice they would willingly do so. If the Government were really in earnest, and if they really meant to win this War, they would eliminate all causes which prevent our winning the War; and if they wanted to accelerate the victory, they really would, for the time being, put a stop to the use of food supplies for the production of beer. In so doing, they would gain a great amount of confidence.
    I wish to turn for a moment to another point. I have in my hand an American newspaper, from which I want to read a paragraph:
    "No one in this country begrudges a single kernel of wheat or barley or of any grain that goes to feed our Allies, but every true American patriot must resent sending grain to brewers overseas who make this grain 'into liquor to debauch not only their own people but tempt our own boys who, by edict of the Federal Government, cannot procure any liquor on this side of the Atlantic, while in uniform.
    The time has come when this Government should make diplomatic representations to France and England to bring pressure to bear upon the booze-makers and sellers of those countries to respect the manifest wish of Uncle Sam with reference to the sale or gift of liquors to soldiers.
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    By all odds the time is hero when not one kernel of grain should go overseas for the manufacture of booze."
    That is the opinion of many organs of opinion in the United States; and we are really making difficult the co-operation of our own Dominion of Canada and of the United States, by creating in their mind the feeling that they are being called upon to sacrifice necessary foodstuffs, and to cut down their rations, in order that the surplus may come to this country for the manufacture of beer, and for the supply of beer to our people here. That is a thing which they are absolutely prohibiting in their own country. They are prohibiting the use of any foodstuffs whatever in its manufacture, and here we are allowing it. Last year after we cut down the supply to 10,000,000 barrels a year, on the ground of need, we increased it, on the flimsiest evidence as to the need of it during the hot weather, because of the hot weather, Then, during the cold weather, for what cause I cannot tell, we continued the increase until March. Whether it is going on during the whole year I do not know. I understand the hon. Member says that it has only been increased from 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 barrels, but is it really worth while going on with it, in view of the increasing difficulties of tonnage which are far more serious than we are allowed to know; in view of the great shortage of food supplies, and of the peril to the nation, which at least could be mitigated, if ever so little, by the saving of this 3 per cent. of foodstuffs, which is now going in this manufacture, and which could be utilised for food?

    SHIPBUILDING.
    Mr. MACKINDER: We have had a very interesting Debate on a very important subject. I think every Member knows, from his morning's post, that this is a subject which interests certain classes, at any rate in this country with an interest that is not new. I think the country at large will be very much comforted by certain figures which were given by the Under-Secretary to the Food Department. But my object in rising now is not to continue the discussion of this matter. I see that the Financial Secretary to the Admiralty is in his place, and I want to take the opportunity of bringing before the House a. matter of at least equal importance and, as it seems to me, of great urgency. The House will remember that about a week ago the First Lord of the

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    Admiralty made a very grave statement here in regard to shipbuilding. In the course of this statement he used two sentences which are deeply resented in the shipbuilding parts of the country. I venture to call to the mind of the House the exact wording of these sentences:
    "The men in the yards are not working as if the life of the country depended upon their exertions. Employers also are not perhaps doing all that can be done to increase output."
    In view of the circumstances of the nation at this moment; in view of the circumstances of the whole Allied cause; in view of the significance of any utterance of the First Lord of the Admiralty of this country, words such as these can only be described as of the greatest gravity. They amount, taking the two sentences together, to the arraignment before the country for unpatriotic conduct of a whole industry—masters and men. As I have the honour to sit for one of the divisions of Glasgow certain of my friends came to me—I have no doubt they have also been to my colleagues in the representation of the city—and suggested that, in view of the situation thus laid bare my duty and my place was not at Westminster but among my Constituents and upon the Clyde. I do not shirk any patriotic duty which I can see my way to perform with any efficiency, but before going to my Constituents and before seeking to put before them the immense importance of the work upon which the whole region of the Clyde is, directly or indirectly, engaged, it seemed to me necessary to inquire a little as to what there was to be said in defence. Because it is no use talking down to these men—these people who have been arraigned are very intelligent men and, on the whole, with very insignificant exceptions, are as patriotic men as any who are to be found in the country. They are very intelligent men. Shipbuilding on the Clyde is famous the world over. You are dealing, then, with very successful and very efficient business men—managers and controllers—and with such a magnificent industry it goes without saying that you are concerned also with artisans of the highest skill and the greatest experience. More than that, the district to which I refer is well served by independent newspapers of a patriotic character. The situation of the Allied cause and of the country is fully, morning and evening, put before these people in detail, in vividness the like of which is not excelled in any
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    other portion of the country. Therefore, I was asked by my friends to go and speak to people whose whole antecedents show that they are intelligent and energetic and whose opportunities to-day are not those of some remote agricultural or rural part of the country, but the opportunities of a focus of journalistic enterprise and independence.
    When I came to inquire as to what the position was, I found that there was a very serious opinion and temper which would have to be met by anyone who went there to speak of the nation's needs. It is a matter commonly admitted in Glasgow itself that the present position in the shipbuilding yards is unsatisfactory. It is held that the conditions under which the work is being done are themselves unsatisfactory. It will be admitted that the Government has its difficulties, and none know this better than those who have to deal with a complicated industry what the difficulties are at the present moment. It is felt that the Government have made mistakes and there has been considerable patience exhibited under those mistakes, but that patience becomes exhausted when the Government, as one of the parties to this tri-partnership, blames the other two parties. I am not a technical expert, and I am not going to discuss plans or patterns in detail. This would not be the right place to do it, and I should not be the right man, and, moreover, it would not be in the national interest. It seems to me to be necessary that we should have it stated here that there is an opinion held by very competent people in regard to the mistakes made by the Government that temper has been roused by the blame which has been attributed to the shipyards. We have to come to an understanding on this matter before we can put the past behind us and leave this attribution of blame to history, and before we can proceed to write off the past, and do our very utmost to save the country and the Alliance from the catastrophe which threatens us.
    I feel the responsibility. I have not spoken often during the War, and certainly I have never nagged at the Government, and in what I have to say now I have come to say it face to face with the right hon. Gentleman, and I hope it will not be taken in any spirit of hostility. My sole object is to voice the very real feelings upon the Clyde, make them understood here, and get the Government to face them, because this is a matter of temper and psychology and the good will

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    of men and not a technical matter. I want to be fair. I know there are intrinsic difficulties which the best Government on earth could not avoid. In the first place, the Clyde has suffered from the beginning of the War under the continuing possibility that there might be serious fighting in the North Sea, and that at any moment very heavy repairs might have to be executed there. Notoriously in the early part of the War the Admiralty had to maintain a certain amount of readiness and a good deal of waiting on the part of capable people who could not easily be occupied in the meantime. We have to bear that in mind, because idleness and waiting is not the most conducive attitude to prepare men for strenuous work. There is another difficulty with regard to the blame. I do not want to go into any details, but both masters and workers had constantly before them half-finished ships in the earlier part of the War lying upon the slips month after month, with nothing being done to them, and those men knew well that sister ships launched earlier were doing good war service upon the ocean on behalf of the nation. Naturally the men, not knowing all the difficulties which the Government have to face and keep secret, asked where was the hurry if these ships could be so left. I understand the difficulty. I understand it was necessary to work elsewhere, but at the same time I want the House to appreciate that what has happened in the case of the men on the Clyde is due to an accumulation of circumstances, and the earlier of those circumstances were of the nature I have described.
    We come now to the burning question being discussed almost in every home in Glasgow and in the districts in the neighbourhood of the Clyde, and that is the question of standard ships. A considerable number of masters regard the standard ship as a blunder. I do not say that the Government did not seek skilled advice when they decided to adopt the policy of the standard ships, but if the information which I have from experts and experienced and weighty people is correct, then, at any rate, the whole profession of shipbuilding was not sufficiently consulted. Certain plans and drawings were imposed upon the yards. The machinery in the yards differs; some yards could work large things and some had only machinery suitable for working small things. This was discovered after the
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    designs for the standard ships had been distributed, with the result that the plans had to be modified. In other words, so far the ships ceased to be standard, or, at any rate, you had to work up your standard into a greater number of standards suitable to the different shipyards, and to such an extent has that variation of the original standard plans had to be carried to suit the: well-known conditions in that portion of the trade concerned with the building of tramp steamers that many of the builders are of opinion that you would have obtained much speedier results if you had borne in mind that to a large extent tramp shipbuilding was standardised in the different yards before. That is a very different industry from the building of vast passenger and mail steamers. Tramp shipbuilding is carried out with certain plans, specifications, and patterns, which are the property, for current purposes, of the different yards, and the opinion urged upon me is that as the thing has worked out, and as you have ultimately had to multiply the patterns of your standard ships, you would have done better had you gone to those yards and said, We are going to give you orders and repeat orders; go ahead as fast as you can, using your own plans, patterns, guages, and specifications, the same as you have worked them out by the experience of many years. That would have been economy as it seems to anyone who merely listens to the workmen, because, notoriously in repetition work, the thought goes into the original specifications, and once you have those the remainder is easy.
    The Government imposed on those yards with all their experience designs and plans to which they were unaccustomed. That was enough to make the masters a little impatient, but it is worse than that. Alterations after the order has been given is a very serious matter, because it affects not only the masters, but the men. I am told that on the Clyde, in the case of ship after ship, after commencing work the design has been altered, and there is one case which is now going the round of discussion in Glasgow, to the effect that four vessels were ordered at the same time in the same yard, of the same dimensions, and they were completed, owing to alterations, as four quite different ships. That is the result of your standards when altered to suit subsequent designs. In fact, there is a statement that the standard ships are designed after having been constructed. That affects the men, because

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    they are very intelligent workers, and when a squad of workers have worked on the steel construction and rivetted it into plates, and then that same squad is ordered to pull the whole work down again in the course of a few days or a week, you cannot expect any very great confidence in those who are supposed to be guiding this industry when the men are asked to work at the utmost possible racing speed owing to the exigencies of the War.
    The matter is most serious from the psychological point of view. It is very serious that there should be such a waste of time in alterations. What you want is that the masters, in comradeship with the men, should say, "Come, all together! Let us do our utmost for the nation." The master says to the men, "I have to order you to pull down what you put up yesterday." The men complain that this is stupid, because they are asked to work overtime day and night, and they say, "Why should we do this simply in order to make work for to-morrow?" The master shrugs his shoulders and says, ''It is not my fault; we are serving under superior orders. The all-powerful people up in London have sent these orders, and our men have simply to go forward with them. The masters are servants just as much as the men, and that is not the way to get enthusiasm and confidence in the work of shipbuilding. We all know the state of an Army when it doubts the genius and the insight of its general. Notoriously disillusionment declines into demoralisation. It took a little time for that indecision to have its effects propagated right down. They have now been propagated down. It has taken months, but at last you have worked your industry into such a state of mind that they have no confidence in you. What will be the good of my going down to my friends and Constituents and urging upon them those grave facts which were put before us by the Leader of the douse in moving the Vote of Credit if they turn round to me and say, "We read that in the newspapers and we hear that from you, but we cannot believe that the thing is so urgent as you say. Look what has happened! Yesterday we were hurrying forward, and to-day we have been pulling down what we built yesterday."
    The same indecision is also affecting the wage question. I heard an hon. Member say just now that he believed that the Government could get far greater results if they would reveal the facts frankly to
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    the working classes of this country. I believe, if you did not always give in to every injudicious demand in regard to variations of wages and conditions, that you would establish a condition of discipline and of good will and of happiness in the country greater than you have at the present time. You are not asking, remember, for a sudden, short, urgent effort. You are asking for a prolonged effort. We used to talk of this as a short war, but it has become a long war. You are asking men to go on month after month and year after year toiling and building—we hope, before many weeks are over, as fast as the U-boats can destroy. It is the task of Sisyphus. You cannot expect men to work day and night, Sunday and week-day, through whole years. Yet you provide for it. You give extra pay—I do not know what it amounts to, perhaps 50 per cent. —for overtime, and you give perhaps 100 per cent. for work on Sundays. It is simply inhuman not to wish to work overtime and to work on Sundays. If you provide pay on those scales for overtime and for Sunday work, you will certainly have overtime and work on Sundays if it can possibly be arranged. I am not going to attribute any shirking to the men in the remaining portions of the week paid on the ordinary scale, but I say that during those times they will not have the power of producing that which they would have been able to produce if you had worked them only ordinary time. Therefore, I say that your indecision in coming down definitely and saying that wages shall be on a certain scale, that they shall bear a certain ratio to the cost of living, and that there shall be no advances because of other conditions, and your indecision in allowing a state of circumstances to arise which positively tempts men to work under conditions in which they do not produce their best, is a source of demoralisation. I have put the case in general terms. I have, as I have said, heard many details, but I have not felt that it was necessary to put the details, which are technical, to this House. It would be unwise to make detailed statements in regard to so vital a matter. My object to-day in speaking thus has been to lay bare, if I can, not the faults of the Government, but the state of feeling, the state of opinion, and the state of temper which you have got to tackle as a human fact. There is no good in simply blaming the masters and men, arraigning them before the nation, before the Allies, and

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    before the whole world. You only induce deep resentment when you yourselves are in part, at any rate, to blame.
    I, for one, am perfectly ready to carry the message put so powerfully last week both by the Leader of the House and by the First Lord of the Admiralty—the message of the nation's need—but before I go to my Constituents and my friends in the North I want to hear no more Departmental defence. We have reached a crisis now when it is insufficient to justify a Department or to put up a technical defence. We want you to take stronger ground than that. We do not care if you admit that there have been mistakes in the past. We want you to take the broad situation and to say that these errors, which accumulating have produced this unfortunate situation, are going to be remedied and to be remedied in a generous and broad spirit. Then, and then only, shall I feel with my friends that we stand on a firm platform and that we can go and say to our men, "You know generally the situation, but you are busy and have not time to read about it in detail. We have come to impress upon you that this really is the crisis of the War and that in your hands and in your industry rests the crisis of crises. Whatever mistakes have been made in the past, you may be perfectly certain that the Admiralty is the first to admit them and is not taking up any of the ordinary Parliamentary defensive positions, but is going to treat you as comrades in the great work and as a human organisation." I have spoken broadly and I have spoken strongly. I am bearing witness to what I know. I have not spoken often in this House and least of all have I attacked the Government. I am not attacking the Government now. I am trying to induce them to understand the very natural circumstances that have arisen on the Clyde and to understand also that they must cure those circumstances, not by blaming the whole industry, but by admitting that they or their officials have made mistakes—the greatest general is the general who makes the fewest mistakes—and that they are going to work with the industry. We started this War with the officials in our Government Departments suspecting the industries with which they had to contract. Under peace conditions it is perfectly possible that suspicion is often a right spirit of caution, but when you came to this War the only possible thing to do was to find
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    out who were the very biggest people connected with your essential industries and to throw yourselves bodily into their hands. That is the spirit which this great industry expects at the present time. That is the spirit which this great industry feels that it has not had up to now. If, as the result of what happened last week, we can now start afresh, I only hope that it is not too late and that we may have effected something which will, at any rate, render the future easier.
    7.0 P.M.
    Sir WALTER RUNCIMAN: It is the first time that I have risen to speak in this House. I know nothing at all about academics, but I do know something about shipbuilding, and I know how to navigate a ship. I know when I get a good ship and when I get a bad one. I think the statement made the other day by the First Lord of the Admiralty about shipbuilders and their men was grossly incorrect and uncalled-for. It has been very properly resented both by the men and the masters. I know about shipbuilding, because I have been at it all my life, and I am connected with it now. The information that I have is that the output has been delayed on account of beardless novices and apprentices coming down to teach men who have-been accustomed to build for many years. I have built with three distinct firms, and before the War each of those firms was turning out of its yards two vessels a fort night. I challenge anyone in this House or outside it to say that the Yankees can do any better than that. Another yard that I was accustomed to deal with turned out one vessel every three weeks. They had no trouble with their men, or, if they had, it was very natural and human, and they got over it without any Government interference. Wherever the Government comes in there is sure to be trouble both with the men and with the masters. The great fault lies over there (pointing to the Treasury Bench). They have sent men down to teach other men who were practical, and who were geniuses at their work. These men will not stand it, but they are afraid to speak openly about it. Only the other day a builder said to me. The work that we are having to do now would have been greatly accelerated had it not been for the planning and replanning." I have myself built over 100 vessels on the North-East Coast, and I never was more than a quarter of an hour in making the contract. It takes the Government six months to make up their minds what they

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    really do want. If they had carried on the process that was in vogue before the War commenced, and if they had not taken away the best men from the yards, they would have had these vessels turned out just as quickly as they were turned out before the War. The Government is open to the grave indictment of having created the greatest peril with which we are confronted to-day. They would not allow the shipbuilders to have the men to finish the vessels that were in course of construction. Everybody had to go to the War. I am here to state that we wanted men as soldiers, but we wanted men to build the ships to provide the soldiers with the materials with which to fight and to carry their stores, and so on. I am quite sure that this thing will not be remedied until you sweep the decks of all that rubbish (pointing to the Treasury Bench). Some of them I would not carry as ballast. The Government must drop this experimental dodge. They ought not to select men, because they imagine that they can talk well and in a theoretical way. You have to judge of a man by results. If a man comes into my office and begins to talk to me, well, he had better slip downstairs. I do not waste much time over him. The fact of the matter is there has been too much time wasted over theories, new inventions, and things of that sort. When they begin building these freaks —these standardised boats—they actually put bronze propellers in them when they were starving for metal. After months had passed, they all at once realised that they would have to continue on the old plan of putting in iron or steel propellers. That is a most disgraceful state of things. The Government imagine that if they have a high class shipbuilder at the head of a Department to create vessels which I myself am accustomed to build, that he is the best possible man. That is a great error. You want to appoint a man who is accustomed to dealing with that particular article, and who knows all about it. I am drawing a contrast between the liner man and the man who knows the ordinary cargo boat. The liner man knows nothing at all about that speciality but we know all about his speciality. We can do his job; he cannot do ours, and the sooner it is put a stop to the better. We are confronted with one of the gravest problems—it is not a problem at all if you tackle it properly—or rather it
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    is a great peril with which we are confronted. If you do not tackle it you will find that we shall be in a terrible mesa directly. You should throw the yards open to the masters and men and let them carry on their work as they did before the War, and then you will find that the results will be all that you require.
    Mr. ROCH: The hon. Gentleman who initiated the Debate on this subject was justified in saying that he was calling, attention to one of the most serious questions with which we are confronted at the moment. I hope that the representatives, of the Government and of the Admiralty will not feel, if any criticisms are made of the policy or of what they have done-in the past, that those criticisms will be-offered from any ill-intentioned motive. If we have criticisms to make, this is the place to make them, where they can be answered and dealt with in a proper and satisfactory way. It is possible, in looking at shipbuilding, now that some further light and figures are common property and knowledge, to take a more or less comprehensive survey of the results that have been achieved for some twelve months. When we look at the gravity of the position with which we are faced, when we realise what is now common property, that the net result of the last year is that our tonnage is down by one-fifth or 20 per cent. of our total amount, even allowing for new construction—when we look at that fact, which is now public property, we are entitled to have the fullest explanation from the Government as to whether they have done everything that is possible to remedy the serious position with which we are now confronted. On a previous occasion, I ventured to call the attention of the Admiralty to what I regard as the crucial point of shipbuilding. I am glad to-know that I have been fortified by the eloquence of the hon. Baronet the Member for Hartlepool (Sir W. Runciman), who, in more vigorous language than I shall use, put his finger on the real spot.
    I asked the representative of the Admiralty only a few days ago whether he was satisfied that things were right, right at the very top? It is not unfair to ask that question, for the Admiralty in their speeches have not been slow to lay the blame on other people. They have blamed quite impartially both the masters and the men. In saying a few words

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    about the results, the point I wish to emphasise is that there is something still to be done at the top. We have had changes, we have had the control of shipbuilding taken away from the Shipping Controller and we have had it given to the Admiralty, we have had Committees and various people appointed. I will endeavour to show to the right hon. Gentleman that the effect of all this chopping and changing, judged by results, has been that there has been a breakdown in the organisation at the top. When this new organisation was put forward we were given various estimates of what was going to be achieved. Those estimates were given by the Prime Minister and Lord Curzon. I am not going to make a controversial or debating point at all, but it is within everybody's knowledge that estimates were given by these leading members of the War Cabinet showing that we were going to turn out at the rate of from two million to three million tons a year. Those estimates were not made on the authority of those Gentlemen; they were given, I suppose, after survey and after figures and on memoranda supplied to them by the people responsible as to what they could achieve. The estimates which have been made by the Prime Minister and by Lord Curzon have absolutely broken down when you look at the actual figures. The second point I would emphasise is that we were told by the First Lord himself that there was no lack of material in the shipyards. Given the fact that there was no lack of material in the shipyards, we are entitled to ask very carefully and closely what has been the organisation and what have been the results which that organisation has achieved? Let us look at the results which have been achieved. The organisation of the Admiralty designed the standard ship
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the ADMIRALTY (Dr. Macnamara): No!
    Mr. ROCH: Well, whoever did it—no one knows who did—at any rate, the standard ship was designed. The whole case for the standard ship was that the design of a ship was going to be framed which would enable ships to be turned out quicker than the old design upon which the shipbuilders were in the habit of constructing ships. Now we are able to look at that, tested by the cold logic
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    of results. If you take the last thirteen months, you will find that orders for 345 standard ships were given and only seventeen were delivered in the thirteen months. That requires some explanation which has not been given. If you look at the matter in the terms of tonnage, you will find that the standard ships in thirteen months amount to only 86,000 tons, with a carrying capacity of 130,000 tons. If you take February, you will find, acording to Sir John Ellerman's statement, that only five standard ships of a very small tonnage have been delivered at all. These are ships for which the Government have a special responsibility. Theirs was the policy of initiating the standard ship. They forced them on people who were 10th to build them and who criticised them. I may remind the right hon. Gentleman that one of the strongest critics, whom I regret that illness alone keeps from making some forcible remarks this evening—I refer to my hon. Friend the Member for the West Toxteth Division (Mr. Houston) —derided the standard ships when they were initiated, and unfortunately, like Cassandra's, his prophecies have turned out to be only too true. The evil of these standard ships is that the Government have sought to force on the shipbuilders their own pet design. The result of that has been that in many cases they have forced shipbuilders not to go on with the ships they were then building, in order to make way for the standard ships. I will give the right hon. Gentleman a case in point. This was a ship which is being built for an hon. Member of this House— the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Holt).
    Dr. MACNAMARA: Is it a cargo ship?
    Mr. ROCH: It is, I understand, a cargo carrier of over 10,000 tons, which in May of last year was half built. It has been put upon one side in favour of a standard ship, and is not completed yet. The effect of that is that this ship with its large tonnage has not been completed, and the slip, which might have been used if the ship had been got out of the way, has really been at a standstill because of the policy that has been adopted. If you compare the standard ship with the other ship, you will find there a condemnation of the policy, because what ray of light there is on shipbuilding is found only if you look at the results the Government designs show compared with those of shipbuilders who were left free. If you

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    take the last thirteen months, you will find that, exclusive of standard ships, over 1,000,000 tons, with a carrying capacity of 1,500,000 tons, were built by private shipbuilders. That shows the results where the shipbuilders were left to designs which were well known to them, which, I may remind the right hon. Gentleman, were more or less standardised already after the experience of years of time and skill. Indeed, I would quote to him a speech which he must have read, which was made by so great an authority and so big a shipbuilder as Sir John Ellerman, who said, quite explicitly and with the approval of a large number of shipowners and shipbuilders who were present at the meeting:
    "Had the private owners been allowed to build, he had no hesitation in saying that the output of new boats would have been very much greater than it was to-day."
    I have made a general statement of the policy which the Government was pursuing, and the results they have achieved. I should like to ask my right hon. Friend once more, is he quite satisfied that his organisation right at the top has not broken down, judged by the only test by which you can judge an organisation—namely, the results it has produced? Having criticised, I hope not too strongly, and certainly not in ill-humour, the right hon. Gentleman and the Admiralty, I think he is entitled to say, Well, what ought we to do? I will very shortly, in a general way, make suggestions to him as to what he should do. One does not like to suggest more Committees or more Ministers, but first and foremost I would suggest that when creating a Ministry some practical shipbuilding expert should be put at the head of shipping construction generally—a man who will enjoy the confidence of shipbuilders—with years of practical experience and skill behind him. The second suggestion I would make is to leave this industry alone as far as possible. Give it a minimum of Government interference. I can assure the right hon. Gentleman, while we all admit that the War has turned industry upside down, in every industry men are feeling that when the blighting hand of the Government is upon them all their best efforts will be destroyed. So I would say to the right hon. Gentleman, having appointed the really right man, give him his head. Tell him what he wants to do, which is, I suppose, to get the greatest maximum possible of shipbuilding; tell him to go to
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    the Clyde, to go to the shipbuilders, to go to the men, let them make their own arrangements, as they have done for years-and years in the industry to which they have given the best years of their life; and I would say to him, in Heaven's name,, in taking up this reorganisation, do not take another hotel in London! The right place for these masters of industry dealing with shipbuilding is not a hotel in London. It is in the centre where the work is being carried out. We have practical experience of this. The woollen industry was centralised here in London. I admit they got one or two very good men, but it was centralised in a public building in London. Result, failure! If the right hon. Gentleman will inquire of the Reconstruction Minister he will find that once this wool control was taken away from London and put in the more healthy atmosphere of Bradford, and places where textiles are made, and people were carrying on their ordinary vocations, the muddle which was made over wool was put right by that simple remedy of leaving the people who had experience of it to work their own industry in their own way. The same thing is being done in cotton—not in a hotel in London, but done by the people skilled in the cotton industry making their own arrangements with the men, carrying on their own industry in their own way and giving the Government the best results they could possibly look for.
    There is one other point. Is the right hon. Gentleman satisfied that in the urgency of the present position he is get-ting the men for the shipyards? He was tackled here by an bon. Member who asked him, how many are you getting of the 20,000 men you have been promised. You are not getting many. Is there obstruction from the Army? If not, why are you not getting the men? After all, important as the Army is, the communications of the Army are now vitally threatened, and have to be protected by the ships which are turned out, and great though the service of 20,000 men in the Army will be in the months that lay before us, the service of 20,000 skilled men in the shipyards working their best is greater than anything they can do in the Army. Those are the points I want to put before the right hon. Gentleman. I have tried to put them as clearly and as fairly as I can, and I hope he will give-a full explanation of what the Admiralty is doing and has done.
    Commander BELLAIRS: My hon. Friend (Sir W. Runciman) said it never took him more than a quarter of an hour to make and sign a contract for all the numerous ships which he has built. I can only regret that he took so long to fulfil his contract with this House in making his first speech, for it was plain direct hitting, which the House likes. A very strong indictment indeed has been brought by the three hon. Members who have spoken against the Admiralty in reference to this question of shipbuilding. I can only regret exceedingly that it has to be brought against the Admiralty, for why the Admiralty should ever have undertaken this avalanche of merchant shipbuilding which is contemplated I have never been able to understand. It has hindered the conduct of the War. It is not merely merchant shipping which has been hindered. Naval shipbuilding itself has been hindered, and of that the House knows nothing, because nothing has been told it. It would be, of course, impossible for me to refer to the particular ships and valuable ships which have been delayed by the fact that the Admiralty has undertaken this work. I deeply regret it, and if the proposal of my hon. Friend (Mr. Roch) is adopted, I hope merchant shipbuilding will march right out of the building of the Admiralty and be carried out on the spot, as he suggests. Of course, it would be impossible to appoint the ordinary shipbuilder who controls merchant shipbuilding to control Admiralty shipbuilding too, because they are two totally distinct branches.
    I must apologise for intervening on another subject, but I am helpless in the matter. I sacrificed my right to speak on the Report stage yesterday in reference to the question of the promotion of captains to the rank of rear-admiral, which has hitherto been governed entirely by seniority, and concerning which the First Lord drew attention to the break that he has made in the case of Commodore Tyrrwhitt. I attach great importance to this question, and I have for years fought to get this system of promotion by seniority altered. It is not a question of promotion by merit versus promotion by seniority, but a question whether you could not run the two systems together and choose officers who have proved that they are thoroughly deserving of promotion side by side with the numbers of officers who are promoted by
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    seniority. We have now 32,000 officers in the Navy. By no possibility can more than a hundred of them reach flag rank during this War, unless it is unduly prolonged. There are 324 captains in the Navy, and it takes 11½ years to get from the bottom of the captains' list on to the rear admirals' list. That means that any captain of five or six years seniority, however great may be his abilities, however distinguished ho may have proved himself in this War, can never reach flag rank during this War. The Admiralty does not apply that doctrine to the commanders' list or the lieutenants' list. There you have promotion entirely by selection. I find that in promoting from commanders to captains last summer the Admiralty dived down to number 345 on the list. In promotions from lieutenants to commander the Admiralty dived down to the man who was number 527 on the list. Yet you have this system of forming up in a queue in regard to captains, except in this single case of Commodore Tyrrwhitt, to whom the new Board of Admiralty, which I hope is a reforming Board, has given the promotion he so thoroughly deserves, and which would not have been obtained otherwise until 1920.
    The First Lord said that there had been a preponderance of opinion hitherto in favour of promotion by direct seniority from the captains' list. That is not strictly correct. If you go to the senior officers of the Navy, doubtless you get an opinion in favour of promotion by selection. But the great body of officers in the Navy are junior officers. There are only 102 men on the admirals' list. They are wedded to the system by long habit and long custom—so wedded to it that there is an expression in the Navy among junior officers that the trade union of senior officers in the Navy is the strongest in the word. Anyhow, it must be fairly strong in having succeeded, ever since the year 1786, in keeping this system of promotion by seniority going—a system which has not been claimed, I believe, by any trade union in the world. When I come to look abroad I find that General Pétain, the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, was a colonel at the beginning of the War. I find that we have something like half a dozen men who were colonels at the beginning of the War who are now lieutenant-generals, commanding armies greater than Wellington ever commanded. I find no parallel whatever to that in the Navy. I

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    cannot help thinking it is wrong. I find that nearly all soldiers are in favour of the system of promoton by merit. Lord Roberts was in favour of it. The Army Committee of 1906 reported strongly in favour of it. They said:
    "We believe the principle of the selection of the best man to be now so firmly established in the Army that there will be no tendency to go back on it."
    When I go to the American Navy I find that in the past the two greatest American admirals, Farragut and Dewey, were in favour of it. Admiral Sims was promoted through two grades by selection. When I go back to the past history of our own Navy our great admirals were all in favour of it—Anson, Howe, Hood, Hawke, and St. Vincent—and the two best of our modern admirals, to whom I should like to call my hon. and gallant Friend's (Sir H. Meux) attention if he were present, Sir T. Byam Martin and Sir Geoffrey Hornby, were in favour of promotion by selection. We have precedents in the past. In 1747, 1770, and 1789 we resorted to promotion by selection, and the Admiralty have always had power—it was not necessary, as the First Lord said, to say they never recommended the Sovereign that he should on occasion exercise the prerogative which he has always had—but they have power by the Order in Council of 1855 to select whom they like, to promote whom they like, and give him acting rank, only they never exercise that power.
    Why I bring this matter particularly before the House of Commons is this: When Lord Howe had on three occasions to defend his promotion by selection in 1787 in the House of Commons he got increasing majorities each time, and he used this argument on one occasion. He said:
    "The protection of the House of Commons was what officers always looked up to and what contributed essentially to preserve a spirit of emulation among them."
    You cannot get a spirit of emulation among the captains of the Navy if they feel that whatever they do, however great are the services they may render to this country, their promotion will only be automatic and they will have no chance, if they have only six or seven years' seniority, in hoisting their flag in this War, or, if the War lasts another year, men who have ten years' seniority will have no chance of hoisting their flag. The system of promotion by selection is the one that gave us Vernon. He was promoted from captain to vice-admiral. It gave us Anson, who went over sixty-six heads. It
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    is the one that gave us Hawke. At the age of thirty-two he was promoted to rear-admiral, or the same age at which this Parliament confided the organisation of the Parliamentary Armies to Fairfax. The system which gave us those men, the system which exists in the British Army, in all foreign armies, all foreign navies, the system which the Germans brought in as a matter of necessity after their defeats at the Battle of Jena and elsewhere, is one which the Admiralty would be wise to apply, not in one case only, but in a good many cases where they find merit.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: The First Lord desires me to say that he is extremely sorry not to have been present to-day, but his work is very arduous and he is engaged at the present moment on urgent Departmental work which makes it impossible for him to be here. Perhaps my hon. Friends will accept my endeavour to represent him. I would like to deal with the last point first and that is the promotion of captains to acting flag rank. The First Lord himself dealt with that fully in his speech last Tuesday in introducing the Navy Estimates and as my hon. and gallant Friend (Commander Bellairs) knows, or perhaps I may tell him, the matter has been considered very carefully by the Board on the Report of a Committee of the Board and a policy has been adopted to meet war needs in the very best way, and to meet them in such a way as to put out of the question the possibility of the exercise of personal influence or patronage coming into play in determining these appointments. My hon. and gallant Friend may rest quite fully assured that that policy will be carried out in a way which I know he would recommend himself, judging from conversations I have had with him. He will, therefore, excuse me if, having said that, I turn to the very grave problem which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for the Camlachie Division (Mr. Mackinder), whom I thank for having raised it.
    I thank all my hon. Friends who have taken part in this Debate for the generally helpful character of their speeches. I fully realise that those speeches are meant to help. They are really a practical contribution to the advice which we are giving to everybody else, to all concerned, directly or indirectly, to pull together on the rope. As I said last Thursday, the more this subject is ventilated in this House and in the country, the quicker we shall get new tonnage

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    —new tonnage which will balance the merchant losses of the day and enable us thereafter to make good the balance of the losses of the past. I reminded the House last Thursday of the simple salient facts of the case as between the merchant tonnage and the unrestricted use of the submarine by the enemy, and I hope I may be forgiven for repeating these simple salient facts, because they are necessary to lead up to the comment I desire to make on several matters of great importance raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Camlachie. I said (1) that we know that the sinking of enemy submarines steadily increases. (2) We know that the means of dealing with the submarine grows steadily. (3) We know that new merchant construction has steadily increased, though I admitted, as I had to do regretfully, that it has not so steadily increased recently. (4) We know, and I explained, that careful and far-seeing plans have been made for further considerable increases in output of new tonnage, particularly by America and ourselves, not forgetting the Dominion of Canada. I explained further—and this is the only assumption that has to be made —that if the enemy submarine activities remain pretty constant at their present level, then, given goodwill and hearty co-operation on the part of all concerned—and that is what my hon. Friend is appealing for—we have before us a date at which the new construction of the day will balance the merchant losses of the day, and with the same continued co-operation and goodwill we shall thereafter be in a position to make good the losses of the past. I am sorry to repeat these facts, but they really are essential, I think, to a clear understanding of the problem. That date can be hastened or retarded, obviously. Retardation also obviously involves the gravest possible danger. It involves the lengthening out, the dangerous lengthening out, of the periods of short supply and struggle. On the other hand, it can be hastened if everybody concerned, Admiralty official, shipbuilder, yard manager, and operative, will throw themselves into the work with good British doggedness and determination.
    We have made mistakes, of course; but do not let it be said that we are seeking, or that we wish in any way to pass on our mistakes to the shoulders either of the employers or the employed. That is no good. That will not help us, and
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    we do not desire to do that. That really might be used by a certain small section, of the existence of which my hon. Friend is familiar, as retarding rather than assisting the very thing he desires. We do not desire to charge the mistakes we are making to the workers. Not at all. My hon. Friend (Sir W. Runciman), an a lusty maiden speech, which we all listened to with the greatest possible pleasure, said, Sweep the deck Well, sweep it, so long as you get new tonnage. That is what we have got to get, and must get. Let me say this warning word. My hon. Friend the Member for Pembrokeshire (Mr. Roch), whose two speeches on this matter have been of the greatest assistance, said, Had you not better take this thing right away from the Admiralty, and start afresh. I do appeal to the House not to entertain that idea. You cannot put this into the melting pot once more. You want immediate tonnage, and you are not going to get immediate tonnage by the grave dislocation and grave delay which would inevitably be caused if that advice were followed. If I thought that it was wise advice and that it would give us tonnage, by all means I would recommend it. I do not suggest that the Admiralty organisation at the top is perfect, not at all, but the very drastic proposition of starting afresh with new Ministers or a new Department charged solely with the output of new merchant tonnage would involve a change which, in view of the fact that we want immediate new tonnage, would mean great delay.
    My hon. Friend who introduced the subject with nothing but patriotic purpose called my attention to certain questions which I recognise have been largely based upon comment by a special correspondent in the Glasgow Herald It is an article by a special correspondent in the Glasgow Herald of yesterday. I have read that article with considerable interest. Of course, anything that appears in the "Glasgow Herald," conducted as it is with great skill and great knowledge in the midst of a great shipbuilding centre, is worthy of careful attention, and if I make a quotation or two from that special correspondent's article in my reply the hon. Member will realise that I am endeavouring to answer his speech and to give a message to the Clyde, which I know he is anxious, for patriotic purposes, should be given. But before I come to that I would like to make

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    another general observation, an observation which emerges in my mind from the public discussion in this House and out side in the Press, which has most properly arisen on this tonnage problem within the last few days, as a consequence mainly of the disappointing failures in regard to the January output. I observe that there is pretty general agreement in all quarters that one reason—in some quarters it is given as the reason—for the failure is the defectiveness of Admiralty organisation at the top. I hope that in this matter I shall not make what is generally spoken of as an official reply. I am far less concerned with defending Admiralty organisation than I am to get tonnage. But I know enough of the several phases of this very complex problem of shipbuilding to feel entitled to say a word of warning. It may very well be that we have not got the last word in perfect organisation on the Admiralty shipbuilding side. The Department is not twelve months old. We have already made changes called for by day-to-day experience of the working of the problem. I will mention those in a moment. If there are still defects, they must be dealt with promptly and without respect for persons. The problem is far too vital to the British Empire to allow us to be satisfied with second best for the sake of somebody's feedings. Therefore, if the machinery needs improving, let it be improved, and improved at once. But if you make the machinery at the top as perfect as the most severe critic would wish—you may adjust it in such a way that it may satisfy the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Sir W. Runciman) —let the House and the country be under no delusion; you will not get the tonnage unless at the other end, in the yard and elsewhere, everybody pulls on the rope for all he is worth.
    The case is not fully stated by a criticism of the machinery at the top, and the House and the country will make a fatal error if they think that they are going to put this thing straight by making all the modifications that may be necessary in the machinery at the top. It may be necessary to do that, and, if it is necessary, let it be done promptly; but I do say that all concerned, whoever he may be, Admiralty official, employer, yard manager, inspector, or operative, we must all out all along the line. The employers and the employed in the shipyards and in the engine shops have got to realise that even after three and a half years of
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    long, wearisome, sustained toil and endeavour—and nobody knows how wearisome it is if he has not loyally and faithfully tried to do his duty these three and a half years—it is a fact that everybody must be all out for the production of ships, just as everybody were all out for shells in 1915. It was shells then, and it is ships now—that is all. If we are to realise the forecast for January to March this year, March will have to give us an output a good deal more than twice the output of February. That is clearly understood.
    Mr. HERBERT SAMUEL: Can you give me the figures?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I have not the precise figures, but they were a great deal better in February than in January. They were almost double, I believe, but they were still below the forecast. If we are to realise the forecast for January-March we shall have to turn out in March an output more than twice that of February.
    An HON. MEMBER: When was the forecast made?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I think at the end of last year or at the beginning of this year.
    Commander BELLAIRS: The Prime Minister stated that the November and December returns were lower than they would have been because thirty-four ships had been converted into oilers.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I have already explained to the House that the last quarter (October—December) gave us a surplus notwithstanding the defection, if I may so call it, of December. In January, after making the widest allowance for bad weather—and it was exceptionally bad—and for holidays, the result was very disappointing. February was better, nearly double January, but it was still below the forecast, and if we are to realise the January-March forecast we shall have to turn out in March twice the output of February, plus the excess we had in hand from the last quarter, October—December, 1917. I was at Trafalgar Square last Friday and I watched with deep interest what went on there. I have just come back from Camberwell where there has been a similar function with a tank, and I can only say that if the enthusiasm which is being put into the tank campaign, if the same splendid emulation, determination, patriotic competition and whole-hearted rivalry which has marked the tank cam-

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    paign is aroused in our shipyards we shall get the tonnage we require. I have no doubt about that. I want to call attention to the article to which reference has been made and which deals with the question of reorganisation. I have already dealt with this matter to some extent. As a matter of fact, readjustments and rearrangements have been at work for some time. Certain changes have already been adopted by the Board as the result of the day-to-day experience of the Controller, and I want to ask this Committee not to believe that these changes are the work of ignorant amateurs who know nothing about shipbuilding. For instance, Mr. James Lithgow was, until recently, responsible for the production of hulls only; he has been commissioned to deal exclusively with merchant shipbuilding in private yards with both hulls and engines. Mr. Lithgow is not an ignorant amateur, but he is the senior partner of Messrs. Russell, shipbuilders, of Port Glasgow, a firm which has specialised in cargo shipbuilding for something like thirty or forty years.
    Mr. PRINGLE: How long has he been on this job?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: The Department was formed something like a year ago. I do not know whether he came to it at the outset, but, at any rate, he has been some time in the Department dealing with hulls only, and, of course, it is only recently that his powers have been extended.
    Mr. MACKINDER: Has he been doing it longer than since the 15th February last?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: It is only recently that he has been given the whole supervision of hulls and machinery.
    Mr. MACKINDER: Is it since the 15th February last?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: Yes, it may be, but he has been in the Department dealing with the hulls only of merchant ships a great deal longer. In pursuance of the same intention of making use of expert experience, the Department of Ship Repairers and Construction of Auxiliary Vessels for the Navy has been transferred from the superintendence of General Collard to that of Sir Thomas Bell. I need not tell the House that he is managing director of John Brown and Co., shipbuilders on the Clyde. General Collard
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    has been given general powers to devote himself exclusively to the development of our national shipyards, the national shipyards intended, as I have said, to supplement the output which we shall get from private yards even when they are extended by the schemes we have in progress of realisation. General Collard will be called upon to devote himself to the development of national shipyards and further to emergency work required to extend the existing private yards and engine shops. It has been pointed out in the various criticisms that the First Lord, the Controller, and the Deputy-Controller of Auxiliary Shipbuilding have no experience of shipbuilding, and although that may be literally true it must be considered in association with the fact that the Controller is himself a shipowner and has been associated for many years with the Orient Line.
    Mr. ROCH: He has had nothing to do with the ships.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: And my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool, who knows all about these things, is also not a shipbuilder.
    Mr. PRINGLE: He has been.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: He is not to-day. What I want to point out is, however, that the First Lord, the Controller, and the Deputy-Controller of Auxiliary Shipbuilding are advised by a Shipbuilding Council that is composed of a number of leading men in this country, and, although the names of the members of that Council were published as far back as November last, I think it quite well to repeat them to-day. They include:

    Mr. W. S. Abell, chief surveyor of Lloyd's.

    Mr. J. Brown, managing director, Messrs. Scott's Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Greenock.

    Sir George Carter, managing director, Messrs. Cammel, Laird and Company.

    Mr. F. N. Henderson, Messrs. D. and W. Henderson, shipbuilders, Glasgow.

    Mr. W. Summers Hunter, managing director, North-Eastern Marine Engineering Company, Wallsend-on-Tyne.

    Mr. James Marr, Messrs. J. L. Thompson and Company, shipbuilders, Sunder-land.

    Mr. A. C. Ross, director, Messrs. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company.

    Mr. H. B. Rowell, chairman, Messrs. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company.

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    These gentlemen have not executive powers; they constitute an Advisory Board. Their duty is to give the best advice in their power to the Controller at his request, or even on the suggestion of one of their own number. We are also fortunate in having in the direct service of this Department a number of shipbuilding and engineering experts of great experience and very high standing. I have already mentioned Mr. Lithgow and Sir Thomas Bell, and to their names I may add the following:

    Major Maurice Denny, partner, Messrs. Denny Brothers, Dumbarton.

    Mr. G. S. F. Edwards, director, Messrs. Smith's Dock Company,

    Mr. H. M. Grayson, Messrs. H. and C. Grayson.

    Major J. W. Hamilton, chairman, Messrs. W. Hamilton and Co.

    Mr. Noel Peck, director, Messrs. Barclay Curie and Co.; director, Messrs. Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson; ex-vice-president, Shipbuilding Employers' Federation; ex-chairman, Clyde Shipbuilders' Association.

    Mr. A. W. Sampson, late director, Messrs. Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Co.

    Therefore, I do not think that the idea that the Department is conducted by a lot of well-meaning, but ignorant amateurs can be considered to be well founded, in view of the composition of this Committee.
    Mr. SAMUEL: Do they meet often?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I cannot charge my memory with the particular dates of their meeting, but if the right hon. Gentleman wishes the information, and will put down a question, I will obtain it.
    Mr. LAMBERT: I desire to ask my right hon. Friend, before he leaves this subject, with reference to the position of Lord Pirrie. I understand there has been a conference between masters and men at the Admiralty, and I should like to be informed what has been the result of the deliberations with Lord Pirrie?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I know that Lord Pirrie has been in consultation with the First Lord, and if the right hon. Gentleman will put a question down I will give him what information I can. I should prefer he would take that course rather than that I should answer in a- general
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    sort of way. Now I come to what has been called the standard ship blunder. The standard ship was an honest endeavour to hasten output by the simple process of standardisation of parts. It was not, once more I must point out, the ill-informed project of amateurs. It was worked out, I am advised, after consultation with leading and representative shipbuilders and marine engineers—the Merchant Shipbuilding Advisory Committee to the Shipping Controller.
    Mr. PRINGLE: Did they approve it?
    8.0 P.M.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I cannot say that they disapproved it. I should not care to answer that question right off, but the object was to expedite the production of shipping by simplification and standardisation. The standard ships have been pulled about. It is not because people are fickle in their minds, and are anxious for change for change's sake. I do not think so for one minute. As experience grew, complaints arose from the shipbuilders that they were being called upon unnecesarily to adapt their capabilities to the ship rather than to adapt the ship to their capabilities. That is what it came to. In order to meet that we desired to give the necessary elasticity and adaptability, and it was, therefore, found desirable to introduce variations, in order to get the thing off anything in the nature of a procrustean bed. You may say this ought to have been foreseen. I do not make any complaint of that. I only know that if wisdom after the event is to be the criterion of sagacity, then one result of this War will be that Solomon will have a great many rivals.
    Mr. ROCH: Is it not a fact that a great many of the shipbuilders, when these designs were given to them, protested that they would take longer to build the ship than would the already' standardised vessels they were ready and able to build?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I do not like to say. It is no good bandying this about, and if I cannot answer it is because the matter was then in the hands of the Shipping Controller. I do not give that as an excuse, because it looks like passing it on to someone else, and I do not like doing that, but it was not in our hands, I think. In order to meet that situation, variations were introduced in type and altera-

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    tions in plan. That is the fact, but I do dissent from the proposition that it was merely a matter of fickle change of mind and instability of purpose on the part of someone or other in the Controller's Department. That would really not be fair. There were other things. It is true we had to turn some of them into oilers. That again altered and delayed these ships. We lost oilers, we lost them unexpectedly, and we found it necessary owing to the exigencies of the War, to turn some of these into oilers. There was another thing. The experience of the submarine campaign—and this, of course, could not have been foreseen—brought home to us the necessity for certain changes that had to be made. That meant delay. I do not propose to tell the House what they were, but that fact again delayed these ships. I should like to make one reference to my hon. Friend's speech, namely, to the point of the men getting 50 per cent. more money for overtime, 100 per cent. on Sundays, and the extreme unwisdom of expecting men to give you good output all the time if they are working seven days on end continuously. I cordially agree with that, and I am going to support what I say by a quotation which I will make in a minute. As regards overtime, of course my hon. Friend does not suggest that a man having done a full week's, or a full day's, work in the daytime should not get overtime?
    Mr. MACKINDER: My suggestion is that you should not tempi them.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I quite agree; but I am afraid there are great difficulties in that. It never has been, so far as I know, a feature of the shipyard organisation that persons should be paid overtime only after full day time—and my right hon. Friend who presides over the Committee on National Expenditure called attention to that, particularly in his second Report: I know we have had many conferences with my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnard Castle (Mr. Henderson), my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee (Mr. Wilkie), and with Mr. John Hill, the representative of the Boilermakers' Society, in an endeavour to secure it—until a full week's pay-time has been put in—and we have been constantly dealing with that problem. As regards Sunday work, where in some oases, indeed, in most cases I rather fancy, double time is paid, just let me point this out. We were so impressed by the aspect of the matter put
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    by my hon. Friend, the absurdity of expecting a man to keep on the stretch continually, that on the 13th April, 1915, we sent to the superintendents of our own Royal Dockyards a letter in which the following occurred. I propose to read it:
    "I am to acquaint you that My Lords, having given this question —
    that is, the question of Sunday labour,
    "their careful consideration, desire that the employment of workmen in His Majesty's dockyards and naval establishments on Sundays shall be restricted as much as possible. Employment on Sundays should accordingly only be resorted to for particular services, and to a specified extent on each occasion, as may be approved by the Superintendent in order to comply with urgent requirements. The ordering of Sunday work will, it is anticipated, usually be confined to cases in which certain work has to be completed within a limited number of hours or days and hours (rather than in a number of weeks or months), or in which particular jobs on which the progress is precisely in proportion to the time continuously worked on them (that is, machine work jobs) are urgently required. I am to add that arrangements, such as has been made at Portsmouth Dockyard, whereby every employé (and horse) is given twenty-four hours off duty during a week, should be adopted to the fullest extent; those who are required to work on Sundays being given another day off in lieu."
    That was on the 13th April, 1915, and on the same date we sent to the private yards doing work under contract for us a letter which I will also quote:
    "I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to acquaint you that they have had under consideration the effect of Sunday labour on the output of naval shipbuilding and engineering work. Recent experience appears to show that over a long period more work will be done without Sunday labour than with it, and they have therefore decided that Sunday labour is to be discontinued forthwith on Admiralty shipbuilding and engineering work, except in cases of urgent fleet repairs or of concentration of labour upon vessels specially selected by the Admiralty for utmost acceleration, and in those cases Admiralty authority should be obtained. It is not desired, however, to exclude the possibility of work beginning with the night shift on Sunday night if that be desired in the general interest of proper organisation."
    All I can say is—and I have every reason to remember these documents, because I remember going into the matter prior to the 13th April, 1915—that we did not let the grass grow under our feet, but issued these two documents, one to the superintendents of Royal Dockyards, and the other to the managers of private yards so far back as the 13th April, 1915. I find myself on this point in complete agreement with my hon. Friend—namely, that it is impossible to expect maximum output from a man continuously on the

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    stretch all the time. I have dealt, I hope faithfully, with the several points that have been raised, and it only remains for me again to thank hon. Members for the helpful speeches they have made, and to agree that all this ventilation must contribute to the end we have before us—namely, to secure the maximum output from every man and woman concerned in this work.
    Mr. H. SAMUEL: The subject to which the House has been addressing itself during the last hour or so is, perhaps, in the present state of public affairs, the most important of any that can engage its consideration, and the aspect of the House at this moment does not, I feel sure, in any way represent the depth of feeling with respect to it either among hon. Members or among the public outside. We have had several useful and practical speeches, and although it would, perhaps, be invidious to single out any one of them, I may be allowed, possibly, to make special reference to the speech of my hon. Friend behind me (Sir W. Runciman) who addressed the House for the first time in a speech full of useful knowledge and of practical information. Hitherto my hon. Friend has been content with having given to the House of Commons one of its ablest speakers, and has thought it was legitimate for him to keep silence himself. I am happy that on this occasion he has broken that silence, and I am sure we hope he will intervene frequently in our Debates in the future. I have followed with great care the speech of my right hon. Friend who has just sat down (Dr. Macnamara), a speech which was comprehensive, and which was delivered with his accustomed ability, but when I come to see what it amounts to, to glean from it what is in fact to be done, and what is now being done, he will forgive me if I say that the ultimate product is somewhat more. He tells us that if the German submarines do not increase their activity, if the shipbuilders and their men pull together and show energy and zeal, then the spirit of dogged British determination will pull us through. That is very satisfying so far as it goes, but it does not carry us very much further. He tells us also that, if occasion should arise, the Admiralty would make changes in the organisers of shipbuilding regardless of personal considerations.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: And have already made them.
    Mr. SAMUEL: I understood the right hon. Gentleman to say also that they would do so in the future. I do not think they have done so recently. Further, he told us that certainly they do not wish to shift their responsibility on to the shipbuilders and their employés, but that they recognise that they have made mistakes. Of course, we have made mistakes, he said, with that engaging frankness, giving the soft answer which turneth away wrath. Humility of spirit is a very attractive thing, but it is not the same as successful results, and an apology is not a justification. What the House wants is more ships, and we wish to be assured that the measures are now being taken which will give us the more ships. What are alleged to be the causes of the decline, the most disappointing decline, in the output of ships? Although the right hon. Gentleman who has just spoken said that the Department did not wish to lay the blame on the shipyards, the First Lord in his speech the other day gave, I think, as the only cause on which he could put his finger of the recent disappointing decline of shipbuilding the unrest among the men.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: What I said was that I did not wish to put any shortcomings of ours upon anybody else.
    Mr. SAMUEL: The First Lord in his previous speech in dealing with the causes of the decline of shipbuilding pointed to no other, if my memory serves me right, than the unrest among the men and the slackness in the shipyards. How much unrest among the men there is I am not in a position to say, but my hon. Friend who opened this Debate declared that so far as the Clyde was concerned the men were full of patriotic zeal, with the exception of a small minority, and that they had done and could be relied on to do their duty. With respect to the district with which I am well acquainted, the Teeside, part of which I have the honour to represent, I have inquired ever since the War frequently from the leading employers of labour there as to the attitude of the men, and whether they are satisfied as to the way in which the work was being done. I do not think on any occasion have I received are unsatisfactory reply. I, again, within the last few days, put the question to some of them, and received the same assurance that the men are working well, although there is still a certain amount of avoidable

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    absenteeism. Is there enough labour? The right hon. Gentleman was asked by one of the previous speakers to say whether the supply of labour was really adequate. The First Lord of the Admiralty told us the other day that it was. We should be glad to be reassured a little further on that point. It was announced a little while ago that 20,000 men were to be released from the Army to work in the shipyards. Have they been released? The rig-it hon. Gentleman says not yet, but that announcement was made some weeks ago. Can he give us any indication as to how many have been returned?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: I can. I said in reply to my right hon. Friend that we hoped to get 1,000 a week during the latter part of February and onwards, and I said last week that up to, I think, the close of February the number we got was roughly about 800.
    Mr. SAMUEL: How many weeks is that going on?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: Speaking from memory, I cannot say offhand, but I gave the facts in reply to a question put by my right hon. Friend.
    Mr. SAMUEL: During February, I gather, this has been going on at the rate of 800 a week, and if this has been going on for three or four weeks all that has been brought into the shipyards would be from 2,000 to 3,000 men.
    Mr. LAMBERT: Not so many.
    Mr. SAMUEL: I understood from the right hon. Gentleman that it had been going on at the rate of 800 a week.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: On the 16th of January, in reply to the Member for Tottenham, I said that we hoped to get 1,000a week during the last two weeks in February and onwards, and I gave the figures. I think there were by that time about 800. It must not be supposed that there were 800 a week at that time, but 800 in all were got back from the Army.
    Mr. SAMUEL: There is an extraordinary disproportion between 800 on the one hand and 20,000 on the other. The Government declare that an increase in the amount of shipbuiuding is a vital and immediate necessity, and have secured the assent of the War Office to the release of
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    20,000 skilled workers from the Army for the purpose. A few weeks later, when a question is asked as to how many of these 20,000 are working in the shipyards, the number was under 800; and on the question, how many more were to come, it is said they hope in the future to get 1,000 a week. Even if they get 1,000 a week, it would take twenty weeks, or almost five months, before they get their number. But these prognostications are almost invariably disappointing in their result, and I think that the right hon. Gentleman and his Department ought to press the War Office for a far more rapid transfer of men to the shipyards than has so far been possible. Then with respect to Sunday labour, the waste of energy by the men working seven days a week, and the waste of money by their working six days a week, one of which is Sunday, for which they get double pay, with the consequence that they do six days' work and receive seven days' pay, which involves a very heavy charge on the taxpayer, my right hon. Friend was asked to give an assurance with respect to that, and the only reply he gave was to mention that in the naval dockyards, where ships of war are being constructed, as long ago as April, 1915, instructions were issued by the Admiralty that Sunday labour was to cease.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: There are similar ones for private yards.
    Mr. SAMUEL: Yes, for naval work; but does that apply to yards which have been since brought in and have since been engaged on private shipbuilding?
    Dr. MACNAMARA: Under the Admiralty—certainly it ought to.
    Mr. SAMUEL: My right hon. Friend supports the principle. Our complaint is that these complaints are not followed by action. The principle is accepted, but no result occurs. My right hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, who has recently been making inquiries into this matter, states that though as long ago as April, 1915, the Admiralty issued certain instructions, this Sunday labour is still going on to-day. If that is so, I venture, with all friendliness, to suggest to my right hon. Friend that he ought to tell the House of Commons, "It is quite true that we still have Sunday labour, and that men are receiving seven days' pay for six days' work—"
    Dr. MACNAMARA: That is so.
    Mr. SAMUEL: From the speech of the right hon. Gentleman one would not have gathered it—"and it is quite true that they are sometimes exhausted by overwork, but the Admiralty will stop it. An order will be issued at once that this shall cease, and the principle which we admit is the right one shall be carried into effect." It is not enough to say, "We accept it," when we find month after month going by and the same practice which is condemned on the floor of the House continued on the Clyde and the other shipbuilding rivers. I would suggest to my right hon. Friend that there is great difficulty in stopping Sunday labour and Sunday pay, unless it is done simultaneously over the whole area of the industry, because it is, not unnaturally, very popular with the men, and if one shipyard tried to stop it the men Would flock into the other yards where the practice was continued, and therefore if it is done at all it should be done by a general Admiralty Order. Next we come to the standard ship. That is a matter for experts. But we gather from the right hon. Gentleman that the standardising of ships did in fact cause delay, and that the de-standardising, which has since followed, has caused more delay. Therefore, you have got a double delay owing to what appears to have been a very unfortunate experiment. If it was anticipated that there would be serious initial delay in order to secure more rapidity of output, it was for experts to say whether the initial delay was worth while in order to secure greater rapidity later on. But it appears from what the right hon. Gentleman has told us to-day that the result has been far from satisfactory, and that the outcome of the experiment in standard ships—I do not know whether he used it as a quotation or was expressng his own view—was to be regarded as a blunder.
    Dr. MACNAMARA: It was a quotation.
    Mr. SAMUEL: I will not saddle the right hon. Gentleman with the use of that term. One of the main causes of the trouble in which we now find ourselves is one which he cannot remedy, and to attempt to undo which would make matters worse. It is the constant transfer of this whole question from one Department to another and one Minister to another.
    Dr. MACNAMARAindicated assent.
    Mr. SAMUEL: My right hon. Friend is quite right in resisting the attempt to
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    secure yet another transfer of the whole of this vast business. Within a period of sixteen months no fewer than four different Ministers have been entrusted with the business of supervising the mercantile marine shipbuilding of this country. In the first place, my right hon. Friend the late President of the Board of Trade gave it his most close attention up to the time when he resigned office with the Government of which he was a member, and it was not merely transferred from him, but it was transferred from his Department to the Department of the newly created Ministry of Shipping. Hardly had it been in their hands for four or five months when the Government transferred it to the Admiralty, at that time under the presidency of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Trinity College, Dublin. As soon as he had secured a grasp of the subject he left that Department and the work was transferred to a fourth Minister, the present First Lord of the Admiralty, who now has it in charge. What else could be expected with this continual transfer of a question full of complexities, with innumerable ramifications touching a score of different interests, from one Minister to another, but disappointing results in the actual output? Lastly, there is an allegation made by the shipowners themselves that too much State control has been the main contributing cause to the failure of shipping. We have innumerable controllers, committees, co-ordinators, but what we lack in ships is absolutely in strict ratio, and the more control, the less construction. I should have been very glad to hear from the right hon. Gentleman that they now propose to give greater latitude to the shipbuilding yards in the management of affairs, which they very thoroughly understand—an understanding which has enabled them to raise this country to the premier position in shipbuilding of the whole world. A little less regulation, a little less endeavour to procure uniformity, trusting the shipbuilders themselves to conduct their trade in their own way, I think would be likely to result in more satisfactory achievements. Unquestionably, there is deep disquiet in this country at the failure of this the greatest shipbuilding country in the world, in our moment of supreme need, in producing the utmost output of ships for our own service and for the service of our Allies, and I think the Government should assure the

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    House that there will be a complete review of the whole organisation. I hope they will be able to give us a definite assurance that matters in the immediate future will be put on a much better footing, or else invite the House itself to introduce a Parliamentary inquiry into the whole subject, with the view of making proposals for the better administration of the most vital part of our national services.

    Reconstruction (Ireland).
    Captain SHEEHAN:I do not propose to follow previous speakers into the Ministerial affairs which have been touched upon, for I desire to call the attention of the House to what I regard as a vital matter and a paramount matter for Ireland and Irish interests. I have been away a little over three years from the activities of this House and have had very little acquaintance with public affairs in Ireland. On my return here one question which interested me was that of national reconstruction after the War, in so far as it applies to my own country. I have made inquiries into what is being done, and I ascertained that a great deal was being done for Great Britain. I wished to ascertain to what extent similar projects were being brought forward with regard to Ireland, and as to conditions there, after the War. In the first place, I see that several millions sterling have been appropriated for the purpose of rehousing in England, Scotland and Wales. I have put several questions to the Chief Secretary for Ireland as to what was being done in reference to this matter in Ireland, and I regret to say that although my questions were plain and pertinent, and, as I conceived, fairly to the purpose, I was unable to obtain any direct answer from the right hon. Gentleman as to what was actually being done. I could not get a straight answer to a straight question. I immediately got the impression that the real reason was that nothing whatever had been undertaken, and that only then, possibly, the question was being brought to his notice, for the first time. That impression was deepened in my mind by the proceedings of the Irish Convention, which for the first time dealt with the housing question. We all know the Chief Secretary to be a very clear-headed man, but when it came to giving a straightforward answer to a straightforward question in regard to matters of reconstruction, he appeared to me to be suffering from some
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    form of mental obfuscation. But he brought all his admirable legal training to bear in evading the point at issue. It is not because he lacks any interest in Ireland, because I know, from my own experience of the right hon. Gentleman, that he has been both thorough and earnest in forwarding Irish interests and in his desire to do justice to the country since he became Chief Secretary.
    But when he failed, as undoubtedly he did, to know where we stood in regard to the housing question, I turned my attention direct to the Minister of Reconstruction (Dr. Addison) and tried to get what I could from him. On Tuesday, the 5th March, I put a series of questions to him, and I regret to say that exactly as I failed with the Chief Secretary so did I fail with the Minister of Reconstruction. I was particularly interested to know from him something about the recently-appointed Advisory Council. I saw that there were only two representatives of Ireland on that body, who did not in the remotest degree represent Irish labour interests. The reply I received from the. Minister of Reconstruction was to the effect that it would not be possible, without making the Council unduly large, to include representatives of every interest, but he said that in the event of any question affecting Irish labour it would be referred to the Council as being one about which it would be absolutely necessary to obtain the views of Irish representatives of labour. There is not a single question which comes before the Advisory Council which would not affect Irish labour. Labour is directly, concerned in every question of development and of industrial benefit which can be proposed or suggested. I further asked what was being actually done in Ireland, and whether the Minister would consider the advisability of setting up a definitely Irish reconstruction council, thoroughly representative of all Irish interests. The reply of the right hon. Gentleman was that he would consult his right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary, but that his own view was that most of the objects which I had in my mind would be better accomplished through a strong and representative Advisory Council which was recently set up, and which contains members from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Before I sit down I think I shall satisfy Members that nothing of the sort has been done in connection with Irish interests. I asked how many Departments

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    and Committees have been assisting the Minister of Reconstruction in his duty, and upon how many of these was there special representation of Irish interests? I also asked whether inquiries were being conducted in Ireland as to what should be done in national reconstruction in that country after the War? That was a plain and definite question, on which I wanted information that would settle many anxious minds in Ireland, but the only reply was to refer me to a Command Paper of which the number was not correctly given. I will deal with that question of the Command Paper very shortly. I raised a number of other questions, amongst them that of housing, and on that the reply of the Minister of Reconstruction was:
    "I am in consultation with my colleagues on the subject of the general policy of housing throughout the United Kingdom, but have not considered specific schemes which would be dealt with by the several Departments con- concerned."—
    That raises the whole issue—
    "No special schemes have been considered."
    From that I assume that no special schemes have been put forward, or, if they have, I want to know their nature and how far they may be applicable to the needs of Ireland, because, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, what might be suitable for England might not be at all satisfactory or meet the conditions which exists in Irish cities and towns. Furthermore, the right hon. Gentleman said that he was not in a position to make a general statement in reply to the question of what proposed work they were going to carry out in Ireland and what special industries it was proposed to foster and develop. Therefore, in reply to my various questions, I did not receive a definite answer of any sort or kind, and I am obliged to raise the question now. I gave notice to the Minister of Reconstruction of my intention to do so. He is not here, but I hope that the Chief Secretary will be able to give me some enlightenment, and to allay some of the doubts which exist amongst large bodies of people in Ireland that nothing is being done in reference to this question of national reconstruction in our country after the War. In a letter from a distinguished gentleman in Ireland who has a very keen interest in these matters, he states to me:
    "I am perfectly clear that nothing at all is being done in this matter in connection with Ireland, and it seems almost useless to get the Government to act in regard to it."
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    The gentleman who wrote that is one of the most eminent men in the country, whose knowledge of these matters is second to none, and who is anxious for the scientific development of the industrial position of the country. I intend to press this question, until I get a satisfactory statement, and until I get something done. I conceive that if the question is allowed merely to be dealt with by the fifteen Committees or Commissions which exist on this side and which are concerned with British and Imperial interests, that nothing will be done for Ireland. I come to some of these Committees. There is Trade Development, which deals purely with the matter from the British point of view and has no Irish member upon it. There is no mention of Ireland, so far as I can make out, except so far as Ireland may be used not for benefiting itself, but for advantaging British trade and prospects. There is a Committee on Trade Relations after the War, in which Ireland may be considered to be interested, but there is no Irish representative. There is the Goal and Power Committee, with no Irish representative. The right hon. Gentleman knows there is a special Committee dealing with the development of electrical power and its economical use, and he is aware that in Ireland we have huge volumes of water going to waste and which could be converted into many useful channels and provide industries which would afford considerable employment to our people. We have the Labour and Employment Committee, and that is a matter surely in which Ireland is directly interested. There will be many of our Irish workers demobilised after the War. At the present time there are no industries in Ireland, and nothing is being done to provide suitable employment for these men. There is nothing they can go back to in the way of industries, and possibly to many of the occupations which they had before the War, owing to the developments which have taken place, unfortunately, in the country since the War; they will not be as welcome back as they might have been in happier circumstances. I feel, a great many of these men having come forward in response to my own recruiting appeals, that I owe them, in a special sense, the duty of seeing that they are not left helpless after the War and that they are absorbed back into civil employment when peace comes.
    There is the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, a question which directly

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    appeals to Ireland. So far as the Irish aspect of it is concerned, it should be handled by an Irish Reconstruction Council, but to think that any of these vital matters dealing with Irish affairs will be considered here in England by Committees or Commissions which have the huge interests of this country to look after, and to tell me that we will get any good out of them, I simply do not believe it. Then there is the Dentistry and Dental Surgery Committees, about which some professional men have written to me, and on which there is no Irish representative although the question is of the utmost urgency in Ireland. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman does not take the view that because a change in government in Ireland is at least suggested, and because the Irish Convention has been sitting, that these issues, of tremendous and vital national importance to Ireland, can be shelved. I do not take that view. You do not neglect to get extra war taxation out of Ireland to the extent of £11,000,000 or £12,000,000 per year, and the least we may expect is to get a fair share of it back for development purposes. We have not got it back so far as war material and employment is concerned, and that is a legitimate source of grievance in the country. There is plenty of labour in Ireland which could have been utilised in many directions for war purposes and for the purpose of providing many of the materials and sinews of war and which were absolutely left untouched and untapped and not utilised, with the most disastrous results in the way of giving incentives to agitation in the country. What is going to be done, for instance, as to reafforestation, and how much money is going to be spent on it, and how much is to be spent on housing? I must say I was amazed to find, when I came back a little while ago, that during the War, instead of providing additional allotments for labourers in Ireland under the Labourers Acts, you have suspended that completely since 1915. I thought that was highly injudicious. I know there is considerable complaint about it in various parts of the country. I have received numerous letters myself from labourers who have only got half an acre of land—and, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, from constant tillage that half-acre becomes exhausted—and who have been trying to get, under the
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    Defence of the Realm Regulations worked by the Department of Agriculture, additional land, and have been unable to get the supplies for their family needs.
    Nothing is being done to develop the harbours of Ireland. I think, if something had been done to utilise the splendid harbours on the West Coast of Ireland, and so shorten the passage of ships during this War, many of the losses that have taken place on the North and South Coasts of Ireland would have been avoided, and much of the tonnage which has been torpedoed would have been saved for the nation. In education, with which everything is bound up in Ireland—its future, its hopes—unless something is done to speed it up, we shall be absolutely left behind in the race for progress. Nothing has been done. England recognises its own needs under the new Education Bill. Nothing is done. to co-ordinate education in Ireland, to make it suitable to the needs of the nation, and to give to our youths, who are inferior to none in the world in intelligence and in intellect, the opportunity of making the most out of their natural equipment in that respect. Representations were made to the right hon. Gentleman about the cultivation of sugar-beet as an industry in Ireland during the War which might be supported by the Government, but nothing has been done.
    Whilst I raise these several issues, I would have the right hon. Gentleman understand that it is most on the question of rehousing that I would base my most earnest appeal to him. All through my life I have regarded the question of housing in the towns and country of Ireland as the object which I myself would pursue to the utmost of my ability. I did something to get cottages for labourers in the rural areas. Immediately before the War I conducted a personal investigation into all the slums of the City of Cork. I visited people in their homes there, and I published the facts of what I found. It would touch the heart of anybody to see the appalling conditions that were there. He would have a heart of stone who could see without feeling the way in which human creatures, having the image of God, have to bring up their little ones who, by the Gospel of Christ, are committed to our care—to bring them up under conditions which are a degradation and a disgrace to our boasted and vaunted civilisation. You could devote no money, no matter how great, to any better purpose than the purpose of finding better

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    homes for the mothers and the children of the workers who have to live in the slums of our cities and towns. I feel that if this opportunity is lost to us in Ireland of making our claim to the equivalent portion of the millions which are undoubtedly about to be spent in England a great chance will be lost. The Minister of Reconstruction was able to tell me outside the House that there are several splendid schemes in progress, and practically perfected, in this country, but he was not able to tell me that anything was being done for Ireland. And so I make an earnest and an urgent plea here to-night that you do tackle this problem in a serious manner. Now there is a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. It has, I understand, money to spend in paving the way to reconstruction. It has spent a great deal of that money here in England already. I am given to understand that a little bit has gone to Ireland also.
    The CHIEF SECRETARY for IRELAND (Mr. Duke): It is in its preliminary stages.
    Captain SHEEHAN: But they have the money to spend in paving the way. I am speaking with perfect knowledge in this matter, because I have made careful inquiries into every statement I am making. The right hon. Gentleman knows that neglect in Ireland is the root of many present-day evils. Today neglect would be a positive danger. You are paying in bitterness and blood and bad-feeling for neglect and muddle-headedness in the past. You are suffering because no heed was paid to the remonstrances of Ireland. I know the reproaches that sometimes are levelled at Irishmen because they have not given in this War a greater contribution, but the other point of view is not taken into account, that you are expecting them to keep faith when in many matters faith has not been kept with them in the past. There is only one way, in my opinion, in which you can seriously tackle this question of national reconstruction, and that is by setting up an Irish Reconstruction Council acting in Irish interests and making inquiries on the spot as to how national development can take place. If we are to trust to various bodies set up in England I feel that nothing will be done, and, therefore, I make the most earnest plea in my power to the right hon. Gentleman to-night to use his in-
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    fluence, and to press as strongly as he can, to have an Irish Council set up which will deal with Irish affairs in an Irish spirit.
    Mr. DUKE: I am glad the hon. and gallant Member has raised this question. If I thought it would advance the interests of Ireland, and I were under no obligation of Cabinet secrecy, there are many matters which I could disclose which would carry him a long way towards understanding designs which at present are in a progressive stage towards completion, but the prospect of which it would not be proper that I should spoil by disclosing completely proposals which have not been finally decided. But I sympathise entirely with the spirit in which the hon. and gallant Member has raised this question. He has been so good as to recognise that, so far as I have had it in my power, I have desired to promote the well-being of the country under the exceptionally difficult circumstances of the War, and to satisfy Irish Members that their separate interests were being regarded. I will take the matters to which the hon. and gallant Member has referred seriatim. First of all, there is his proposition that Ireland in these matters must have separate and Irish treatment. I accept it absolutely. It would be wasteful and incongruous, and a hindrance to both countries, that you should stereotype some proposal here, and, because it is good for England, assume it would be good for Ireland. My hon. and gallant Friend may feel quite sure of this, that when practical effect comes to be given to large schemes which necessarily arise in the process of reconstruction, so far as I am concerned, and so far as those with whom I am acting in the Government are concerned, that principle which he has enunciated will be absolutely recognised. Then my hon. and gallant Friend said it would not be proper to leave this question, and to take no account of Irish requirements, because you expect and hope that there may be a settlement of the great question of Irish autonomy. I share many of the wishes and aspirations of my hon. and gallant Friend on that subject. My view of the business of Governments is that you would not be justified, because you expect a general change in the form of administration in Ireland, or because you desire it, in postponing material alterations which

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    ought to be taking place at the present time, owing to the possibility of a change, and making that change the excuse for inaction. There is no such intention. In every scheme, and among those varied schemes which necessarily occupy the time of the Minister of Re-construction and of his Department, the Irish Office and the Irish Department have been kept in touch with everything that has been considered. Their views have been ascertained, and the services of the experts whose opinions they have been able to command have been communicated from day to day. The needs of Ireland have been considered as a separate matter, and the principle which has been acted upon has been the principle that when we come to the time for action, then, in Ireland, there must be in every one of these matters action corresponding, so far as the events in Ireland admit of it, to whatever action is generally thought to be appropriate. I hope that will be satisfactory in a general way. There has been no neglect of the interests of Ireland in accepting responsibility. I should be greatly to blame if in these times, when we all of us bear so many burdens, I was aware of large measures, recuperative measures, measures of defence, which we hope to have in operation after the War in the United Kingdom, and if I neglected any effort to secure that Ireland should share pari passu in whatever advantages were to be derived from an effective policy of reconstruction, and that she should, at the same time, share in these advantages in a way in which those who are familiar with the affairs of Ireland thought best. Generally, I am sure that is the principle on which my Friend would desire that we should proceed.
    9.0 P.M.
    I want to say something with regard to some individual matters to which my hon. and gallant Friend referred. He spoke of one matter which will some day arise, and I pray that it may not be very distant, when the men who have been fighting our battles at the front will come back, and will know what we are able to do for them at home. There are possibilities with regard to that most attractive thing in Irish life, the soil of Ireland, as to which I hope it will be found, before the occasion arises, that
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    the gallant Irishman who has gone out and not only faced the foreign foe, but has incurred some odium amongst very short-sighted people at home, will find his recognition in the fact that he has a claim on the State for the soil of the country.
    Captain SHEEHAN: He fought for it!
    Mr. DUKE: He fought for it. My hon. and gallant Friend referred to those who have gone out on his invitation and, at any rate, in this House, it is due to them that we should express our gratitude for the services they have rendered. I am thankful that there is in Ireland another spirit, besides that recalcitrant and hostile spirit, which does recognise their services, and admire their gallantry; and I hope it will not be found, when they come back, that we shall fail in the obligation under which we lie to them in the matter. The hon. and gallant Gentleman referred to the question of labourers' plots. Those who come back after a considerable absence say that the face of Ireland has been transformed by the enormous advance there has been. Those who have had charge of Irish affairs may say this to Irishmen: "Your agriculture was paralysed by a system under which the old balance between tillage and pasture had disappeared, and such vast areas of your fat lands were under pasture which showed that the country was not doing its best in the production of food." One who has been familiar with the face of Ireland for years tells me that he passed through districts where there had been nothing but green fields, and he saw vast areas of that now ploughed. I trust that although that is the result of the War, it will be a blessing in this country, and my view is, and I trust it will be the view of any man responsible for administration in Ireland—I am sure it will be satisfactory to the Irish people generally—that this change into tillage which has begun to overtake pasture, and the balance of agriculture which has been begun to be restored, will be continued until it is complete.
    Then there is the great allied question of afforestation. That is a subject which is reaching a stage at which I hope it will not be long before some definite course may be capable of being declared. At a time when you are engrossed in making war, when all the apparatus for carrying on the arts of peace is lacking

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    to you, it is a very difficult thing. We have been deforesting, and cannot take up at the moment a systematic work of afforestation, but I tell the hon. and gallant Gentleman that that is a business upon which the Ministry of Reconstruction is actively engaged, and that the Chief Secretary's office and the very capable officers of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, who. always have that matter under their care, are being consulted step by step with regard to all the action under consideration. There has been no neglect of the interests of Ireland in that sense. I have had varied consultations with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Reconstruction and his officials, and with various skilled people in Ireland who have great familiarity with the farms of Ireland, on the possibilities of the work of afforestation, and that is not a subject which is in any way lost sight of, or in which there is any kind of danger that Ireland will suffer by neglect comparatively with Great Britain. As to harbours and electricity works, and matters of that kind, I will say this. All the harbours of Ireland have been visited by a Commission which took into consideration whether, during the War, advantage could be taken of great natural resources for the purpose of completing our preparations for defence and our security at home. A Commission made a visit to a series of these harbours, and we had a succession of reports by the harbour engineers. The conclusions arrived at were the result of a very close examination of the common needs of those islands, and the possibility of work to be done there. My hon. Friend must not suppose that the care of the Government for the harbours of Ireland which is shown in harbour works and public expenditure in all quarters of Ireland has in any way been relaxed. The Board of Works has been active, and if any action can be taken during the War it will be taken. What is more relevant now is the case of the smaller harbours in particular, and these will admit of a decision at the right time. Reference was made to the Commission on Industrial Research, and regret was expressed that its work had been greatly extended. May I point out that the work which has been done is preliminary, and many inquiries on the subject have been conducted in Ireland on this question.
    Captain SHEEHAN: There is no Irish representative on that Commission.
    Mr. DUKE: On the Sub-committees I think there are, and especially the Committee which is dealing with the question of fuel.
    Captain SHEEHAN: The right hon. Gentleman has picked upon the only one.
    Mr. DUKE: The interests of Ireland have not been neglected in this respect, but it must be remembered that industrial and scientific research is a very wide subject, and it deals with the possible utilisation of electric power from those broad waterways in Ireland with which we are so familiar. Then there is the question of fuel and what can be done by utilising the peat deposits. When you put an alloy into the turf bog without having made quite sure of all the interests involved, you might as well put your hand into the finest hornet's nest you could conceive. The personal interests of the people of the countryside are necessarily involved in the turf rights, and how you are going to reconcile those rights when you are dealing with a vast amount of raw material for industry is a question which will require a good deal more consideration than it has received in some quarters up to the present time. Allusions have been made to the mineral resources of Ireland and to the smallness of the deposits of coal. Research has already discovered mineral deposits which were previously unknown, and steps have been taken to resume mining operations in mineral areas where wealth has been produced in past times. We have just completed one railway for the service of an Irish colliery, and others have been authorised. In another quarter of the country my right hon. Friend and I are hoping to be able to find some means of ascertaining—I hope affirmatively—whether or not there are at present beneath the soil mineral resources to an extent and value which has not hitherto been supposed to exist. I will not say anything more upon that point, because I might bring out quite a tribe of claimants. It is not proper to expend public money merely that personal interests may benefit. If we are able to take the steps which we have in view, we hope to take care that they are steps for the benefit of the community at large and for the immediate benefit of the people in Ireland.
    With regard to the city of Dublin and the city of Cork, where I know from personal observation that my hon. and gallant Friend has done yeoman service in

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    dealing with this question of housing, I must admit that there is a state of things existing in the places which have been mentioned, and some of the smaller towns, which would move the heart of a miser. There are worse slums in some of the little country towns in Ireland than I could have supposed to exist. With regard to the city of Dublin, which has so much in its character to command attention, you cannot live in Dublin without realising that at the root of a great part of the trouble are the conditions of housing which have supervened upon the common life of the community, and out of which there arises a state of things which the people of Dublin, without the help of the State, cannot ameliorate or bring to a satisfactory conclusion. I secured the consent some time ago of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to carry out certain housing schemes in Dublin on the part of the corporation, but they are a mere bagatelle compared with what is required, but they show a readiness and a desire to deal with these matters as occasions arose.
    One of the most capable of all the inspectors of the Local Government Board has been engaged in the investigation of the state of housing in Dublin. Shortly we shall have all the material for dealing fully and finally with this question with regard to the provincial towns, large and small. The facts in regard to several towns have been ascertained, and the Departments concerned have made Reports as to the kind of work that is necessary. My hon. and gallant Friend asks how much are you going to do? On a question where you want millions of expenditure, I would like to remind the hon. Member that it is not the surest way of getting the money to press the matter when you have a war expenditure of six millions pounds or seven millions pounds per day. Plans will be ready, and the method of affording public aid where public aid is required will not only be complete but sufficient, and when the time comes the public resources can be devoted to the fighting of the sources of trouble and evil at home instead of the enemy abroad. I am happy to think that it is the intention of His Majesty's Government, and so far as I am concerned it is certainly my firm resolution, that Irishmen shall participate to the full extent to which their country is entitled in whatever schemes of expenditure are finally resolved upon, and that
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    Irishmen shall decide within Ireland how the money which is provided ought to be spent.
    Mr. McKEAN: I should have liked to reply here and now to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, but as other hon. Members who intended to speak have agreed not to do so for certain reasons I have agreed also. I was not aware that this subject was to be raised. The Chief Secretary knows that I feel very strongly about it, and he is aware that I spent half an hour in his room suggesting to him the idea of a Reconstruction Commission for Ireland. My scheme was a really serious one, and not a make-belief like this reconstruction scheme, so far as it applies to Ireland. I thrashed the whole subject out, and then I got up and said that there was no use my remaining there any longer. Having regard to the fact that I raised this question with him in his room more than six weeks ago, I want to have an opportunity at the earliest possible date of replying to the speech that he has just delivered, and I want to know if he will be present here on Thursday, when I propose to make my reply?
    Mr. DUKE: I am never quite sure of my movements as between London and Dublin, but, presuming that I am here, I shall be happy to be at the service of the hon. Member.
    Mr. McKEAN: Any day will suit me as long as I have an opportunity.
    Mr. DUKE: I do not dispose of the time of the House.
    Mr. McKEAN: I know; but the right hon. Gentleman disposes more or less of his own time, and I want to give him notice that I shall reply to him on Thursday, or as soon afterwards as is possible.
    Question put, and agreed to.
    Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House for to-morrow (Wednesday).

  MARRIAGE HOURS (IRELAND) BILL.
  Read a second time.
  Resolved, That this House will immediately resolve itself into the Committee on the Bill. —[Mr. A. Samuels.]
  Bill accordingly considered in Committee, and reported, without Amendment; read the third time, and passed.
  The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.
  Whereupon Mr. Deputy-Speaker, pursuant to the Order of the House of the 13th February, proposed the Question, "That this House do now adjourn."
  Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD: Perhaps the House will allow me one minute to deal with a matter which arises out of the report of a speech that I made in this House and which appears in the OFFICIAL REPORT of 27th February. I am there reported to have stated—
  "He (that is Mr. Litvinoff) was once approached by a firm of publishers, Messrs. Williams and Norgate, and was persuaded to call himself Harrison Litvinoff, but he was never known as Mr. Harrison.— [OFFICIAL REPORT, 27th February, 1918, col. 1481, Vol. 103.]
  The sentence as it stands is rather a loose one, and is capable of two meanings, one of which I had no intention of implying, namely, that haying been approached by this firm of publishers, the firm asked Mr. Litvinoff to change his name. I never
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  had that in my mind. I knew the facts, as they were reported to me, and what I meant to convey to this House was that owing to his connection with this firm he was persuaded to change his name. I find, unfortunately, that, as reported, the other meaning can also attach to the words, and the firm have approached me on the subject. I may say, before I received the firm's letter, that I had actually made a correction in the OFFICIAL REPORT, and it was in the post. Mr. Speaker informed me, however, that, as the matter had been sent to the newspaper, he thought it better, instead of making the correction in the OFFICIAL REPORT, that I should explain it here, and I have done so. All that I intended to convey was that owing to his connection with this publishing firm he was advised by certain friends to change his name. That is what I intended to say, and I hope that record will now make my meaning perfectly clear.
  Question put, and agreed to.
  Adjourned accordingly at Twenty-two minutes past Nine o'clock.

WAR.
  GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA.
  GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA.
FOOD SUPPLIES.
  MEAT.
  MEAT.
  ARMY DRIPPING.
  ARMY DRIPPING.
  BACON.
  BACON.
  POTATOES.
  POTATOES.
  SIR W. R. THOMSON.
  SIR W. R. THOMSON.
MILITARY SERVICE.
  MEDICAL EXAMINATION.
  MEDICAL EXAMINATION.
  CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS.
  CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS.
  ARMY ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT (OFFICERS)
  ARMY ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT (OFFICERS)
  COMMERCIAL ATTACHES.
  COMMERCIAL ATTACHES.
  COMMERCIAL DEPARTMENT, EGYPT.
  COMMERCIAL DEPARTMENT, EGYPT.
  SUB-POST OFFICES CLOSED, COUNTY CAVAN.
  SUB-POST OFFICES CLOSED, COUNTY CAVAN.
  Old Age Pensions.
  Old Age Pensions.
  Anti-Semitic Publications.
  Anti-Semitic Publications.
  Education (Scotland)
  Education (Scotland)
  Irish National Foresters Insurance Society.
  Irish National Foresters Insurance Society.

INCREASE OF RENT, &c. (AMENDMENT) BILL. [H.L.]
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD FINLAY): My Lords, I beg to present a Bill to restrict the meaning of the expression "landlord" in subsection (3) of Section 1 of the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, 1915, and to ask your Lordships to read it a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read 1a; and to be printed.

DEPUTY LIEUTENANTS BILL. [H.L.]
LORD HYLTON: My Lords, on behalf of the Earl of DERBY, I ask leave to introduce a Bill to amend the law with respect to the qualifications of Deputy Lieutenants, and move that it be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.—(Lord Hylton.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

SOLICITORS (QUALIFICATION OF WOMEN) BILL. [H.L.]
House in Committee (according to Order): Bill reported without amendment.

THE SITUATION IN IRELAND.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY rose to move to resolve—
"That as the present situation in Ireland has become a danger to the Empire and a menace to the successful prosecution of the war and to the security of life and property, it is incumbent on His Majesty's Government to enforce the law in that country."
The noble Marquess said: My Lords, in rising to call your Lordships' attention to the condition of Ireland, I do not think I shall be considered to be going beyond my duty in reminding you of the heavy cloud which rests at this moment over Irish political life in the death of Mr. Redmond.
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I have never belonged to the number of Mr. Redmond's political friends, but should like to be allowed to do justice not only to his courtesy and eloquence but to the public spirit and the real patriotism which I believe characterised him. Our duty, however, is not with the dead but with the living, and we have to consider the condition of Ireland as it presents itself to-day.
Several of my friends have impressed upon me that the moment which I have selected to bring this matter to the notice of your Lordships is inopportune. They say that it is at once too soon and too late—too soon because the Irish Convention is still, I believe, in being; and too late because the Government have already awakened to the condition of lawlessness in Ireland and are at last beginning to enforce the law. I do not think that any stimulus which your Lordships' House may give to the Government in the matter of the enforcement of the law in Ireland will be out of place. Looking at the past record of the Government in Ireland, I am sure they require a little of that stimulus. The second criticism is really an answer to the first. One of the reasons why I may with propriety bring this subject under your Lordships' notice notwithstanding the fact that the Convention is still sitting is that the whole idea of keeping law and order out of sight during the sittings of the Convention has now by the force of circumstances been abandoned by the Government. I can do no harm, therefore, to the Convention by pointing out what is the condition of law and order in Ireland.
I have had a great mass of material, as your Lordships may well believe, sent to me in connection with this debate; and in order to enter upon the subject I will read one short extract from a private letter which has reached me from an eminent lawyer in Dublin which sums up the situation as an Irishman sees it—
"All law is set at defiance, and if anything was required to prove the danger of establishing any form of self-government in Ireland it is to be found in the treason which has been and is prevalent in Ireland in connection with the war and in the anarchy which has now reached a point which is intolerable in any civilised country."
He finishes with this sentence—
"It is much worse than the public is permitted to know."
I do not intend to detain your Lordships very long; but I hope before I sit down

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to make good to some extent that deficiency, and to let your Lordships know, and the public know if my words go further than this House, what is the real state of things in Ireland.
This is not, I am sorry to say, the first time that this subject has been debated in your Lordships' House, nor the first time that I have ventured to take part in a debate upon it here. As recently as November 15 last there was a debate in this House, and we then had the advantage of two speeches from the Treasury Bench—one from my noble friend who now sits gore as Leader of the House, and one from the noble Lord the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The noble Earl said, speaking of Mr. de Valera's speeches—
"They are not dangerous to public order, and the extreme Sinn Fein Party is in a minority that becomes smaller instead of larger from day to day."
He added—
"There is no general prevalence of crime in Ireland. There is no policy of violence in the proceedings of the Sinn Fein party."
I wonder whether my noble friend reflects with satisfaction upon those assurances which he gave your Lordships in November of last year.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: Yes, I absolutely adhere to them—at that date.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: No one has disputed my noble friend's courage. He adheres to them. I turn to the speech of the Lord Lieutenant. He said quite frankly, "Ireland is orderly." I remember speaking of a particular occasion when there was danger, or said to be danger, of a rising again in Ireland. The Lord Lieutenant said, "Not a dog barked." "We cannot and will not tolerate drilling," added the noble Lord. I shall try to show to your Lordships that, whatever was true then, none of those things said either by my noble friend opposite or by the Lord Lieutenant are true to-day. I dare say my noble friend will say that things have changed for the worse. If so, the responsibility lies upon him and his colleagues for allowing them to go worse.
But let us see what the state of things really is. There is now crime of every kind—and crime which is gradually getting worse, or was until within the last fortnight, worse in extent, worse in type:
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disorder of all sorts, and drilling; raiding for arms, cattle driving, illegal entry upon other people's land to plough it, seizure of property in broad daylight in the streets of Dublin; firing into dwellings, throwing bombs into dwellings, murder. Those are the crimes against private rights and private property. And then there are the crimes against the country; insults to the National Anthem; the victimisation of soldiers, because they are soldiers of the King; the preparation of maps and drawings against a new rising, for the purpose, of destroying bridges; defiance of magistrates in Open Court, and demonstrations in favour of an Irish Republic.
Your Lordships may say, It is all very well for you to say these things, but what evidence have you of them? Let me read one short extract to show the sort of things which an ordinary observer in Ireland has been seeing lately. This is a. letter from an Englishman who is now resident in Ireland for the time being, and it will show the general attitude of mind—
"Some three weeks ago I was going down to a certain place for the week-end. The train was full of Sinn Feiners coming from South Armagh and returning to Clare—all fine young men, many in volunteer uniform, awl many with rebel flags. They fired revolvers out of the windows as we left Dublin and waved their flags, and at every station they shouted 'Up the rebels.' Uniforms, flags, and revolvers are all forbidden, but the police did not interfere."
That is the sort of thing which is to be seen. I do not know how far I ought to trouble your Lordships with instances of the kind of crime. There is an immense sameness about them. There are quantities of them in all parts of Ireland—no, not in all parts; I should not have said that—but in a great many parts of Ireland. I will read one or two instances. Here is an example—
"George Sheehan, aged seventy, living near Nenagh, on refusing to give up his soldier son's rifle, was held by one of an armed raiding party, while another fired three shots at him, inflicting fatal injuries."
That, I think, was in the county of Tipperary. Again—
"A score of armed men with blackened faces raided the house of Mr. O'Connell Ffrench at Rockwood, near Galway. Mr. Ffrench was covered with a revolver while the house was searched for arms. A similar raid was made the same night on Rocklawn House, the residence of Mr. E. S. French, who was told by the raiders that they wanted arms for the next rising."
I could multiply these cases to any extent—raids for arms and invasion of private rights in all directions.

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So bitter is the feeling against England that it is extended to England's Allies. I want to call special attention to this, because I think that a good deal of the policy of His Majesty's Government, or want of policy, is really to be attributed to a regard—for which I wish to give every kind of consideration—for public opinion in America. This is how the Sinn Feiners treat America—
"About fifteen men of the United States Fleet were returning to their ship when a gang of youths bearing Sinn Fein flags, began to hoot and jeer them, giving cheers for the Germans, the Turks, and the Bulgars. No notice was taken by the sailors until showers of stones were hurled at them. Then, a number having been struck, they about-turned and charged their assailants, who outnumbered them by at least four to one."
So that positively the hospitality of His Majesty's Dominions is violated by these gentlemen in order to insult and throw stones at our American Allies. In the same way in Galway the Stars and Stripes flag was seized and torn to shreds as a demonstration by these men against America.
These are very serious matters—serious matters condemned, I am certain, by all right-feeling men, not only in England but in Ireland as well, and condemned notably by Prelates of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Galway, the Bishop of Kildare, and the Bishop of Elphin. All of them have quite recently stated that these crimes are not only crimes against the law of man but crimes against the law of God. And most of all has the state of Ireland been revealed and condemned by impartial authorities which I can with confidence quote to your Lordships or to any audience—namely, by the judicial authorities themselves in Ireland. Before I state them, I should like to give to the House some idea of the extent of these disorders. Some may think that there is a plague-spot—namely, Clare—and that as martial law has been proclaimed in Clare, that is all that need be done. Oh, no; the Government have neglected things so long that matters have spread far beyond Clare.
I will give a list of the counties in Ireland in which crimes of more or less severity in connection with this agitation have taken place. They are Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Cork, Kerry, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Ross-common, Leitrim, County of Dublin, Kildare, Wexford, Westmeath, Tyrone, Donegal. It is very widespread. I admit that
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in many of these counties there is as yet but a slight outbreak of this disorder. The worst counties, according to my information, are Limerick, Tipperary, Kerry, Galway, and Clare. But the thing is general; and unless the Government show the stiffest of backs it will become even more general. They have allowed things to go so far that it may be difficult to restore order without a great deal of trouble.
Let us see what the Judges have to say about it. The Lord Chief Justice, at Wicklow Assizes, spoke of the lawlessness at present existing in many parts of Ireland; and the Grand Jury said—
"We, the Grand Jury of Wicklow, feel it, to be our imperative duty to call public attention to, the condition of lawlessness and anarchy at present prevailing in many parts of Ireland."
That is pretty severe; and this is the country which the Lord Lieutenant said three months ago was orderly.
I turn now from Wicklow to Tipperary. Your Lordships will remember that the Lord Lieutenant said, "We will not tolerate drilling." That was not, as my noble friend suggested just now, a reference merely to the moment when he was speaking; it was an announcement of the policy of the Irish Government. This is what Mr. Matheson, the Assize Commissioner, says of Tipperary—
"These young men stay at home imitating His Majesty's Army, drilling openly in large numbers—"
I wish the Lord Lieutenant were hare—
"and at any hour they think fit. A bugle call is sounded in various places, and a few minutes afterwards a body of fifty, one hundred, or more men gather together. Their principal employment at present is searching for arms and taking them either by force or by terror. They also organise and carry on cattle drives, and have become so audacious that they actually advertise these raids, trusting to the fact probably that there will not be enough police in the district to prevent them. … I am informed that the thing has become so widespread, and is done so openly, that everybody is practically afraid of them."
This is not a politician or an agitator speaking; this is a Judge speaking from the Bench in the execution of his office, and warning the public and the country what is the real state of things. The learned Judge went on to say—
"They terrorise their own parents. They terrorise shopkeepers, and they try to intimidate and in many cases successfully, the police—where there is only a handful of police against a. large body."

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Lastly we come to the county of Clare. This is what the Judge said at the recent Spring Assizes—
"He had to point out that the state of Clare was as serious as ever it had been in the history of that old county."
When one thinks of the history of Ireland, and of the days, which many of us remember, of the Land League, and of the No Rent Manifesto, and of the fact that here we have a Judge saying that he never remembers it being so bad in Clare, it can be seen what the present state of affairs is in that county. The learned Judge proceeded to say—
"He who ran might read. The authorities had thought it right to put Clare under military government, and that in all civilised countries was the last resort. Last year the specially reported cases in the county amounted to fourteen, and that year they amounted to sixty-five. These had mostly occurred in the last month or six weeks. They included offences of all kinds—cattle driving, raids for arms, ploughing up poor people's land, firing into houses, and intimidation of all kinds. Even these statistics, serious as they are, do not really represent what is going on around you. At the present time there is a wide-spread lawlessness and intimidation in county Clare, and open disregard for all law, contempt for all authority, fear on the part of quiet, well-conditioned people, and a cynical activity on the part of wrongdoers. Now, gentlemen, that is a challenge not merely to the laws under which we live, to the condition of government under which we live, but a challenge to all government; and whether it is this Government which still exists, or whether a Government of another sort comes into existence in the near future, what is going on in this country is equally a challenge as it is to the present rulers of this country."
Your Lordships will note the significance of that speech. The learned Judge says, and with truth, that it is not a question of disorder and of disaffection against the present Government; it is the complete disintegration of society which is inimical to all government—and that is what His Majesty's Government have brought upon Ireland. The Grand Jury were a little more outspoken even than the Judge. They said—
"We feel compelled to record our indignation et the state of lawlessness, intimidation, and outrage which has been allowed to grow up in this county in practically the short period which has elapsed since the Summer Assizes. We recall with pride the widespread order which prevailed in the earlier stages of the present war. We believe that this feeling still exists among our community generally, and that the disgraceful state of our county at present is entirely due to the notorious neglect of the most elementary obligations of government by the present Irish Administration."
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That is what the Grand Jury of the county of Clare felt it incumbent upon them to assert in the exercise of their duty.
I have tried not to detain your Lordships over that part of my subject, and I think I have said enough to convince every impartial man that when my friend who wrote to me said that the state of things was much worse than the public were permitted to know, he was speaking well within the mark. I will say that there is no Englishman outside official circles who, until the facts were forced before him during this last fortnight, had any notion of the state of complete anarchy which exists in so many parts of Ireland. What is the reason for it? The Grand jury of Clare say that the reason is the misgovernment of time present Irish Administration. It is due to one circumstance, and to one circumstance only. It is due to administrative feebleness. You cannot have a better example than the history of hunger-striking in Ireland. Your Lordships will remember that one unfortunate man who was imprisoned in connection with the Rebellion hunger-struck; and, although he was released, his death was attributed to what he had undergone. Thenceforward His Majesty's Government in Ireland seemed to have entirely lost their nerve in this respect, and they allowed man after man not only to hunger strike, but to hunger-strike successfully. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, speaking here on November 15 of the death of the poor man Ashe, to whom I have referred, said "Hunger striking is attended with risks to the strongest constitution." That may be so in some parts of the world, but not in Ireland. No risk at all attaches to it now, or until recently, and notwithstanding these brave words of the Lord Lieutenant, it was after this statement in your Lordships' House that he and the Chief Secretary allowed men on hunger-strike to be released. Could anything be more hopelessly inept than such conduct?
Finally, Mr. Duke gathered a little courage, and wrote to the Lord Mayor of Cork a letter in which he announced that all this sort of thing had got to come to an end on February 23—"that the Government have determined that in the circumstances now existing physical disability due to wilful and systematic refusal of food ought not to be regarded as a ground for such discharge." He was speaking with reference to three men then in prison in Cork Gaol named Hickey, Cronan, and Macarthy.

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Will it be believed that after that brave letter—within two or three days—the men were released because of hunger-strike? Can your Lordships be surprised at the state of Ireland when it is under such, administration as I have described? I need not say that I do not blame my noble friend the Leader of the House directly. I do not venture to do such a thing. I know that he is not immediately responsible for the Government of Ireland, except as a member of the Cabinet; but I think he must have a feeling—may I call it of mortification?—that he should be put into such a position of having told you three months ago that the extreme Sinn Fein Party was in a minority and becoming smaller instead of larger every day and that there was no violence in the policy of the Sinn Fein Party, and then to be presented with the picture which I have ventured to draw for your Lordships. Then my noble friend said that in what is going on in Ireland your Lordships will find that recourse is always had, where it can be had, to police remedies, to the arrest of the leaders, their prosecution, their trial, and their imprisonment. That is what he stated was going on in Ireland. I ask him now, across the floor of your Lordships' House, What leader has he brought to justice? What leader has he tried? What leader has he imprisoned?
My Lords, it is notorious that the Government have been afraid to touch any of the leaders; and so the announcement of policy of the Lord Lieutenant that they would not tolerate drilling, and the announcement of policy of the Leader of the House that they would try and imprison the leaders, have ended in a state of things which has been so graphically described by the Judges in their charges and by the Grand Jury of the County of Clare, who attribute the whole thing to the maladministration and weakness of the Irish Government. My Lords, I hope that the Government have wakened to a better mind. Why is it that they made this mistake? It was in order to produce what they thought was a suitable atmosphere for the deliberations of the Convention. That was the reason. It was announced by the Lord Lieutenant. The attitude of the Executive was determined by the existence of the Convention, and they really thought that it was a better atmossphere in which the Convention should sit—the kind of atmosphere I have described—than a condition of order and good
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government. I believe there could have been no greater enemy of the Convention than the statesman who advised such a policy. It does not matter what Government you have in Ireland, whether the present Government, or a Home Rule Government—or indeed separation. Order must be maintained, and anybody who advises the contrary is really an enemy of all forms of government. The Government have turned over a new leaf. They have proclaimed what is practically martial law in the County of Clare, and no doubt in the course of this evening the Government will tell us what their intentions are. I hope they will be able to satisfy your Lordships. Certainly I shall not be hard myself to satisfy, and if they should be able to tell us that all is being done which can reasonably be expected to restore order in Ireland, I should not ask your Lordships to divide against them.
My Lords, I want the Government to realise that the condition of things which they have allowed to grow up in Ireland is not only a disgrace and very serious from the point of view of the inhabitants of Ireland, but is really inconsistent with a proper appreciation of what is due in carrying on the great war in which we are engaged. It is not merely the large number of troops which have to be retained in Ireland, but it is the reputation which our country and our Government ought to have among the Allies and in the eyes of the world. What a picture it is that the protagonists in this great war cannot even keep decent order in Ireland. What a source of weakness it is that they should allow what was originally undoubtedly a minority, and a small minority probably, in Ireland, to so dominate the country, or these large parts of the country, that seditious cries in favour of our enemies and against our own country are allowed to go unchecked, and that, it may be, even worse attempts are being permitted to seduce our people from their allegiance. The thing is altogether inconsistent with the due administration of the country during the war. The Irish character many of us know and admire, but it is very impressionable, and very impressionable to success; and when Irishmen see the success of these extreme gentlemen, is it surprising that they are willing to receive all the seduction of German intrigue in that country, and that so before our very eyes we should watch not only disorder but the

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gradual winning of our fellow-countrymen in Ireland from their allegiance?
I wish I could impress upon the Government the gross impoliey of favouring—I will not say favouring, because they do not favour, but of permitting disorder. Sometimes one has been tempted to think that all these prophecies of evil which are made from time to time in Parliament are exaggerated, and that you can allow feebleness of administration to go on and nothing very much happens. But no one who has seen what has happened in Russia can think this any longer. I do not mean to say that the fate of Russia is possible in Ireland, but the same causes, the same Bolshevism, which have destroyed Russia will in a measure destroy Ireland. You have no right to defy the lessons of history and experience, and to allow such things to take place. I do not know what the Government think of this dreadful fiasco, or what bearing it has upon their plans—if they have any plans—for the future government of Ireland; but I know this, that the future government of Ireland, whatever it is, must be founded upon the supremacy of the law, must be founded upon the supremacy of Imperial security, must be founded upon the supremacy of the good faith of this country towards the law-abiding subjects of His Majesty in Ireland. On no other foundation would any future Government of Ireland, whatever its description, be safe. I urge the Government to exercise that strength which is entrusted to them—that strength to see that law and order are maintained. It has been said that force is no remedy, and, no doubt, force is no remedy against injustice and against maladministration; but force is a remedy against disorder. Indeed, the essential foundation of all government is strength. I beg to move.
Moved to resolve, That as the present situation in Ireland has become a danger to the Empire and a menace to the successful prosecution of the war and to the security of life and property, it is incumbent on His Majesty's Government to enforce the law in that country.—(The Marquess of Salisbury.)
THE EARL OF MEATH: My Lords, as an Irishman who loves his country deeply it is a matter of humiliation and of sadness me to have listened to the important speech which has been made by my noble friend—of sadness, because I must agree
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with almost every word he has spoken with regard to the condition of Ireland. The Irish question has been with us for many, many years, and there is no one who feels more humiliated than I do to think that with all the efforts and all the desire that have been lavished on Ireland for at all events the last fifty years the country should still be in such a condition of disorder as it is at this moment. I should like to make one little excuse for the county to which I belong, and which was mentioned by my noble friend the county of Wicklow. If I understand aright, the Grand Jury were not speaking so much of the county of Wicklow—
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: Hear, hear.
THE EARL OF MEATH: As of the condition of Ireland, and I am thankful to say that the county of Wicklow, during all the agitations which have existed, has been the county in which the most fair judgments were recognised as being given in trials for sedition or for crimes of outrage. So much so that it has been the custom for many years for the authorities to send cases for trial at Wicklow, when they were not certain that either in the north or the south justice would be done. But, my Lords, is it not a terribly sad thing to think that we have practically made no progress during the last fifty years in acquiring the love and affection of the Irish people? I myself am old enough to remember two risings when armed men marched down. During my father's lifetime a thousand men marched down in one of the risings, and we have had fighting all round my own place even in peaceable Wicklow.
When I have travelled all over the Empire, as I have, it has always been a sorrow to me to recognise that there were elements of disloyalty to the Empire in Canada, in America, in Australia. I have met my own countrymen out there who have been bitter against the old land. We have had long conversations, and I have had to recognise and acknowledge that there was a good deal of justice sometimes in what they said. That has not made me feel the less sad. Is there no hope for Ireland? Can nothing be done? I am perfectly at one with my noble friend in urging the Government, as I always have done, to insist upon the law being kept, but I am sorry to say that my experience has been like that of many

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others. I have always received the most friendly reception whenever I have seen an Irish Secretary or Lord Lieutenant, but it has always ended in the same thing—the law has not been enforced.
To my mind it is most extraordinary that we have not had long before this far greater risings, far greater discontent, in Ireland than we have had. Why? Because there has always been weakness, as long as I can remember. I remember as long ago as the days of Mr. Forster, when a squire in the south of Ireland came up to him at the commencement of the Land League and said, "Mr. Forster, if you will give me permission, I will prevent this agitation from increasing. It has begun in my own neighbourhood." Mr. Forster said, "What would you do?" The squire replied, "I would do what my grandfather did." On being asked what his grandfather did, he said, "What my grandfather did in former days was to organise a body of police out of his own tenantry, and to issue a proclamation that no man was to be out of his house after eight o'clock in the evening or he would be interned in the cellars of his country house. It put down the whole thing." Mr. Forster said, "You will be in the cellars of the gaol in Dublin if you do anything of the sort." The squire replied, "Very well, Mr. Forster, the Land League will have to go on." It did go on. That was an extreme case.
But this is not an extreme case that my noble friend is speaking about. We are in the middle of the most gigantic terror and peril the Empire has ever been. The word "terror" I will withdraw, but we are in the midst of the most gigantic peril the Empire has ever been in. We are at war with the Central Powers of Europe, and it is imperative that we should not have, close to our own centre of Government, a population which is in active hostility against all our Allies and ourselves. The sad part of the present position, so far as I can see it, is that whereas formerly there was never any idea of complete separation, there is now. Up to the present it has been a constitutional agitation from O'Connell upwards. Now it is quite different. The agitation is for absolute independence. You may ask how this has occurred?; why have the Irish suddenly developed this notion of independence, guaranteed by European Powers, which is what they want?
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I hold in my hand a pamphlet which has been distributed throughout the whole of Ireland. I got it only on loan for an hour to read. The pamphlet is a collection of papers, written at different periods between 1911 and 1915, and from internal evidence it is absolutely certain that the papers have been written by a German in connection, no doubt, with Irish rebels. In order to make one believe that it conies from America it is marked "5 cents," but it really is written by a German and probably printed in some back slum in Dublin. It is Germany who has put into the heads of the Irish that their policy was not to try and get constitutional reform in the shape of Home Rule, but to go to The Tribunal at The Hague and get a European guarantee. In these pamphlets Germany writes to the Irish and says, in effect—If you will assist us Germany will assist you; we want to get hold of Bearhaven, and if we get hold Bearhaven we will give you every assistance and we will assist you to go before the Tribunal at The Hague and get Separation acknowledged by Europe. That is to my mind the dangerous part of the present agitation. It appears to me to be an impossibility; there is no settlement of the difficulty at all. Unless the British Empire is prepared to give up its position altogether and grant these things, we cannot permit Ireland to become a separate Republic or even a kingdom. There is no doubt whatever that if they were separated the first thing they would do, if Germany was not already there, would be to invite her, or anybody else who was hostile to England. You know well that when we were fighting the Madhi it was the Madhi who was the great man. His pictures were everywhere. Therefore I say they are asking for an impossibility. That is the serious part of this trouble. We cannot grant it, and it puts on one side, to my mind, all idea of Home Rule as conceived by Mr. Gladstone and others since those days.
I will not argue the question as to whether or not the majority are Sinn Feiners, but you must acknowledge that it is a moot question as to which is in the majority. There are quite sufficient Sinn Feiners at all events to claim that they have half the votes. How possibly can you have any Home Rule which has against it half the votes of Ireland? Therefore we are in a terrible dilemma, as it appears to me. I think it is of great importance that we should realise what the Sinn Feiners are

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endeavouring to do, and what their programme is. This a matter which is closely connected with the preservation of order, because we must know what their ideas and their feelings are. As far as my information goes, there are three things which they desire. One is the complete independence of Ireland, under a European guarantee. Mr. de Valera has stated that he himself favours a Republic, but that if, on the other hand, Ireland desired a Monarchy, he would not object. He has also definitely stated that if Ulster does not fall in with his views she will have to be coerced by the rest of Ireland. That is the second point. The third point is that if some arrangement is come to over their heads, by which Home Rule or any other arrangement is made, they will refuse British taxation. He says, "You have refused the rents of the landlords and you will find it just as easy to refuse to pay taxes." It is a most serious position if you are going to have half Ireland definitely refusing to pay taxes if the British Empire has the least financial hold over Ireland. That, we may say, is the programme of the Sinn Feiners as represented by Mr. de Valera.
It may be of interest to your Lordships for me to give you the dates, and a few short quotations, to show that this programme was drawn out, not yesterday, but as long ago as 1911. In these pamphlets which I hold, the German writer in 1911 said—
"Ireland can only be restored to the current of European life, from which she has so long been purposely withheld, by the act of Europe."
I wish the Government to realise that. As long ago as 1911 the Germans were teaching the Irish that it was only through the act of Europe that they really could get independence. "Ireland," says the writer, "is necessary to Europe, is essential to Europe." In 1912, still before the war, the writer said—
"The German gateway is a free Atlantic. It can only be kept open by a free Ireland. The key to the freedom of European navigation lies at Bearhaven and not at Dover."
From other information that I have, I know that is what the Germans are aiming at. It is to get hold of Bearhaven, and no doubt they would like to get other ports also. They say that if they could get hold of Bearhaven—and the noble and gallant Lord behind me (Lord Beresford) will be able to correct me if I am wrong—they would be able to close the Channel and
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prevent all shipping from coming in except, round by Scotland. In 1912, again, this German writer said—
"One of the conditions of peace—"
peace, if you please, he writes as if they were at war with England; and he intended it to be so—
"and for this reason the most important condition of peace that victorious Germany must impose upon her defeated antagonist—"
Victorious Germany! And there was no idea of war at that time!—
"is is that Ireland shall be separated and promoted into an independent European State under international guarantee."
In 1913, in a different pamphlet, he said—
"The task of freeing Ireland, and of restoring that exiled laud to the current of European life again is One worthy of the greatness and strength of the German Kaiser and his people—"
Could anything be more plain than that?—
"The day the first German comrade—"
that is to catch the Republican—
"lands in Ireland, the day the first German warship—"
We were at peace, remember!—
"is seen proudly breasting the waves of the Irish Sea with the flag of Ireland at the fore, that day many Irishmen must die, but they shall die in the sure peace of God that Ireland may live."
The same year, 1913, he said—
"The Irishman's place is to prepare for the coming of the German."
The German writer recognises that perhaps they might find the Irish question a difficult one, and he goes on to say—
"The Irishman's place is to see that, when a victorious Germany severs Ireland from her hereditary exploiter, the difficulties of settlement shall be resolutely faced by a people determined to justify the freedom conferred on them."
The Germans are afraid apparently that Ireland might turn even upon them. I am not going to weary your Lordships with further quotations. I think that I have quoted quite sufficient to show where the idea came from, and that it has taken root.
What is the present political situation of Ireland? That, after all, is what we are at this moment discussing. We are debating the question of maintaining the law properly. Here I am in a great difficulty because we do not know—at all events I do not know—what has happened to the Convention. Has the Convention failed or has it not? I hear rumours to the effect that the Convention has failed.

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That may not be so; I should like to know. I do not suppose that I shall he told, but a great deal depends upon it, because, as my noble friend stated and as everybody knows quite well, the real reason why His Majesty's Government have allowed this disorder to gain the strength which it at present has is because they were so anxious to find a proper atmosphere for this Convention to work out its problems. I have the greatest possible sympathy with His Majesty's Government. I think that they were placed in a most difficult position, but the difficulty was because they were so anxious about the Convention. I hope that the Convention has either succeeded or is going to die, for it is the Convention which prevents order being kept in Ireland. Heaven knows, nobody in this House would desire more than I do that the Convention should succeed. Personally I avoided as much as possible going near to it, or having anything to say to it, because I felt perfectly certain that it would fail. But if it succeeds I shall thank God for it, and for anything that would bring peace to my unhappy country and unite it to the Empire.
Let us realise what is the actual position of Ireland at present. May I assume that the Convention has practically failed? Ulster then refuses to be coerced into joining the rest of Ireland. I for one cannot blame Ulster when we see what is happening in the rest of Ireland, and when we know what is the state of Ireland at this moment. On the other hand, we have Sinn Fein refusing any settlement short of absolute independence. After the quotations which I have given to your Lordships that will not be denied, unless Mr. de Valera has changed his programme within a very few days. Sinn Fein, therefore, if it obtains the power will endeavour to coerce Ulster. Any scheme of Home Rule passed by Parliament cannot, therefore, in my view, possibly bring peace to Ireland. Under any circumstances it must bring a sword, for if Sinn Fein obtains the power and endeavours to coerce Ulster a new Irish difficulty will arise. The only difference will be that Sinn Fein will have taken the place of Britain, and the Protestant and Unionist population will have become the rebels to the Irish Parliament. There will be continual intrigue, rebellion and disorder.
If Sinn Fein does not get independence what will be the result? It will constitute
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a continual danger to any Home Rule or British Government which may be formed. It does not matter which it is, if Sinn Fein does not obtain independence it will constitute a danger, and a permanent danger, to Great Britain and the British Empire. How are you to get out of that difficulty? German political penetration will keep alive racial hatred, and efforts will be made by Germany to obtain control of Bearhaven Harbour, and perhaps other places as naval bases for the control of the Channel and the Atlantic. The British Empire in my opinion could never, except under complete naval and military defeat, run these and other vital risks, and therefore the demands of Sinn Fein are inadmissible.
Let us look matters quite calmly in the face and not be afraid of speaking out. There are not many I believe—I say this although I have always been a Unionist—who consider that under present circumstances it is possible to continue to govern Ireland permanently under the Act of Union of 1801. If it had been possible, as the father of my noble friend once said, to govern Ireland for thirty years firmly it might have been practicable to continue under the Act of Union, but our democratic Governments, our complete and constant changes—and we are going to have in the future far more democratic governments than we have had in the past—made it impossible to do so, and therefore there can be no idea of going on with the old programme of Union with England in the old sense. If Ireland can no longer be governed as in the past, since 1801, if Home Rule cannot be obtained for the whole of Ireland, or if the terms of the Sinn Feiners cannot be realised—all of which things I think I have given you good reasons to believe cannot be—is there then no hope for the political future of my unhappy country? I think there is yet hope, but it is not upon the lines of the past.
With all humility I believe that, there is only one hope and only one solution, and that is Federal Home Rule. The only solution to my mind which would benefit Nationalist. Ireland and Ulster, and also place the British Isles on a proper, logical, and equal political plane with the rest of the Empire is a system of Federal Home. Rule for Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, like that existing in more or less similar forms in Canada, South Africa, and

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Australia. It would not be necessary to legislate at present for more than Ireland. Later on the needs of Scotland, Wales, and England could be considered. I need not enter into those. But at present local Home Rule Parliaments, subject to the Imperial British Parliament, should, in my opinion be established in the four Provinces of Ireland—Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and Ulster, the seats of local government being respectively in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Galway, and Belfast. Now, all those cities and provinces represent separate agricultural and economic interests, and have historic pasts since the days when there were provincial Kings. The most interesting period of Irish history, and the time of its greatest glories in art and literature and religion are intimately connected with provincial government. By getting these four provinces and giving them separate local Parliaments under the British Parliament, as at present established, you would get different interests represented. The interest, for instance, of Connaught is not the same as that of Leinster, the interest of Leinster is not the same as that of Munster, the interest of Munster is not the same as that of Ulster. You would get Ireland divided up, but always at the same time, it would be con-seated with the British Isles through the representation in Parliament, as it is now. And also, looked at from an Imperial point of view, we should get what we never got before—the whole political situation running on a logical, equal political plane. Now that is the future. For the present, if I were asked what I should do, I should say to His Majesty's Government, Preserve order. That is the first and one thing, during the time of war at all events. And, later on, let us see if something could not be done to establish some kind of Federal Home Rule.
LORD SYDENHAM: My Lords, excluding certain outbreaks in the East, there have only been two serious rebellions in the Empire since the beginning of the war—in South Africa in 1914, and in Ireland in 1916. Those two rebellions have many points in common, and both were largely due to German agency. But, as regards the after-results, they offer a very striking contrast. The strong action of General Botha crushed the conspiracy in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and ever since then order and law have prevailed in South Africa. On the other
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hand, the Inquiry which was held into the Irish rebellion showed that it was the result of great neglect and great apathy on the part of the Government. That Report was one of the most painful and humiliating documents, I believe, ever laid before Parliament. Ireland, from being a peaceful and a very prosperous country, was allowed to lapse into dangerous disorder, which culminated, as we all know, in the rising at Dublin. There could not be the slightest doubt as to the cause, or as to the responsibility for that rebellion. The lesson was one which everybody could learn, but, as we see, that lesson has been ignored. Mr. Duke succeeded Mr. Birrell, an Amurath to an Amurath, but everything went on just as before until very recently, when martial law has been proclaimed in the county of Clare.
The Motion of the noble Marquess declares that the present situation in Ireland has become a danger to the Empire, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that that statement is absolutely correct. It is on that point that I want to say a few words. Ever since the outbreak of war there has been a large section of the Irish people which has done all in its power to hamper our action, and to assist the actions of the enemy. Troops, as the noble Marquess said, have been locked up in Ireland when they were much wanted elsewhere, as the noble and gallant Field Marshal (Lord French) knows very well. The contribution of Ireland to the national armies has not been anywhere near its proper and due proportion. While men have been taken over here from very useful business, and many quite small businesses have been broken up, you have tens of thousands of young men in Ireland doing nothing whatever, though their own fellow-countrymen have served most gallantly in every theatre of the war.
Government after the rebellion in Ireland lost the great chance of applying compulsion, when I believe it would have been accepted, and since that time the Sinn Fein conspiracy has gained in strength because it is claimed to be a protection to the young men against conscription. German submarines have been regularly fed on the Irish Coast, and part of that coast has now to be regarded by our Navy as if it was practically enemy's territory. Ireland has suffered from no shortage of food, and yet we have Sinn Feiners endeavouring by force to prevent the supplies

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of food coming over to this country, just at our time of greatest need. Over parts of Ireland, as the noble Marquess has pointed out, and large parts, the law has ceased to run, and outrages seem to be becoming more and more frequent. Men have been permitted to arm themselves, to drill themselves, and to march about with flags of a revolutionary character, and in many cases carrying arms. Violent speeches have been made inciting young men to rebellion, and I do not think in any one case has the speaker been arrested.
It has been said that the state of affairs in Ireland and its lawless condition are viewed in America as a proof either of our incompetence or of our unwillingness to do justice to Ireland at a time when we profess to be waging war for the liberties of other peoples. Not long ago, in a long telegram from the Washington correspondent of one of the London newspapers, it was stated that if we did not relieve the situation in Ireland very quickly American enthusiasm and energy in the cause of this war would cool down. I do not believe that there is a word of truth in that statement. Americans now understand perfectly what the tremendous menace of Germany is to the liberties of Europe, and to their own future. They realise, as President Wilson has so clearly said, that everything that they most prize is at stake in this war. And more than that, some Americans are now beginning to learn for the first time the truth about Ireland, and to distrust all those lies, backed by German money, which have been disseminated broadcast through their country for political purposes. Many Americans still live who fought in the Civil War for the Union, and they know perfectly well that we can never grant more than State rights to Ireland, and that we must sternly refuse the demands of the Sinn Feiners. If a movement for independence were started in New Jersey State or in Oregon, it would very soon be put down, by force of arms, if necessary, and Americans will perfectly well understand our action if in the long run we have to take that course.
It is very difficult for us, and especially for Englishmen, to analyse the nature of the forces which have been in operation in Ireland, to the most serious detriment of our prosecution of this war. But some few things are certain. Ireland has now no grievance against this country. But every member of the Empire has a grievance
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against Ireland. We have done all that we could to meet the wishes of Ireland by the most liberal system of land laws that has ever been projected for the Empire, and we are now trying to do our best to get Irishmen to agree to some form of government which we can accept. We have gone so far as to allow Ireland to dominate and to demoralise our politics for many years, to our grave disadvantage. That cannot be denied. But in spite of this, in late years we have absolutely failed to uphold the law, and the natural result has been to encourage the disaffection of which we have heard this evening.
Weak government is always unpopular, and it always loses its natural allies. That is happening in India as well as in Ireland, and the two situations have very much in common. The loyal elements both in India and in Ireland are being alienated slowly, and they are being taught that a stronger power than government exists among them. Nobody likes being intimidated, and in Ireland, as in India, intimidation is the chief weapon of the disloyalists. I make a strong appeal to the Government to state plainly that the object of the Sinn Feiners—an independent Republic of Ireland—is one which can never be attained ; and that anybody who has those objects and proclaims them is in a legal conspiracy. Beyond that we want, as has been forcibly urged by the noble Marquess, that the law shall be rigidly and firmly enforced. I am sure that we all realise the immense difficulties with which government is faced in the South and in the West; but I am certain that if determination is shown the Government will find supporters, either open or secret, in many unexpected quarters. Whatever happens to the Convention, that is surely the only safe course; and the idea, which has been exploded to-night, that leniency to law breakers creates a favourable atmosphere to the settlement of the Convention is to my mind an utterly false and untenable theory. The present situation in Ireland, as I have said, is very largely due to German influence which is directed there, as it has been directed here, to establish a revolution of the Bolshevist type. It may be impossible wholly to eradicate that influence—I fear it is; but so long as the law is openly defied it will find ever increasing means of hampering our prosecution of the war, and thus it will add to the difficulties and dangers by

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which the Empire is now encompassed I trust, therefore, that the Government will view this question not only from the Irish or from our point of view, but from the point of view of the Empire.
LORD BERESFORD LORD BERESFORD rose to speak—
THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON): My Lords, I am very sorry to stand between the House and an Irishman who has so great a right to speak for his country as the noble and gallant Lord, but perhaps he will favour the House with his opinions—I dare say in criticism of mine—after I have spoken.
I should like, in beginning, to say a word in endorsement of the very appropriate remarks which fell from the noble Marquess who opened this debate with regard to the death of Mr. John Redmond. Mr. Redmond was a great public figure; he was a true and courageous patriot, an honourable opponent, and a loyal friend. His life was devoted with absolute singleness of purpose to the interests of his country, and his death is a great loss to her in the hour of her destiny.
The noble Earl who spoke second this evening, Lord Meath, will, I hope, excuse me if I do not follow him into the political and constitutional aspects of the Irish problem which he placed before us with so much clearness. It is a subject of great and commanding interest on which we are always glad to hear his views, but it did not seem to me that they were in all respects directly relevant to the subject under discussion this evening. I might almost make the same remark with regard to an observation that fell from Lord Sydenham. He asked me, on behalf of the Government—apparently unconscious that I have done it, before—to repeat our assurance that in no circumstances can this Government, or, I believe, any Government in this country, regard with any favour a political programme which contemplates the ultimate independence of Ireland. That goes without saying; and I only repeat it this evening in response to the definite question of the noble Lord, because had I not done SO he might have thought I had evaded the issue.
This debate is really one concerned with law and order. The administration of law and order by His Majesty's Government, in Ireland has been directly and powerfully
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challenged by the noble Marquess, and I am here to state the case for the Chief Secretary of Ireland and for the Government of which I am a member. I recall that on the last occasion when we had an Irish debate the noble Marquess, Lord Lansdowne (who is sitting on my right), said that he regarded it as an outrage that I should be called here, in the strain of a great war, to make long speeches about order in Ireland. I do not shelter myself behind that plea this evening; though I own that, in the midst of the many labours which are entailed upon one at this time, to plunge into the details and intricacies of Irish administration, and to endeavour to equip oneself at all points for the kind of discussion that may be raised in this House—very likely by noble Lords much better qualified to speak on Irish matters than I can be myself—does involve no small strain.
But though I do not complain on my own behalf, I do utter a note of complaint on behalf of the Minister, the Chief Secretary, for whom I am speaking this evening. We are frequently told that the first duty, and indeed almost the sole duty, of that Minister is to be at his post in Ireland. Mr. Duke has been at Dublin during the last fortnight in what I may truthfully say has been one of the most anxious periods of recent Irish history. He has lived laborious days and spent sleepless nights in combating an organised conspiracy against law and order in that country. The whole burden has fallen upon him; although I must state—and nobody would endorse my remark more readily than he—that he has had throughout the full and unqualified support of His Majesty's Government, and that no powers for which he has asked, or that could have been given to him, have at any stage of recent Irish history been denied to him in any degree whatsoever. But, my Lords, I was compelled to summon him here to give me the information which would qualify me to speak on his behalf, interrupting a task which he was most reluctant to leave. If, therefore, an injury has been inflicted upon anybody, it is not upon me but upon him. And although I do not question for a moment the right of the noble Marquess to challenge His Majesty's Government and to raise a debate on a matter so important as this, I think that noble Lords are sometimes a little forgetful of the strain that a question so easily, and perhaps so legitimately, put

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upon the Paper may impose either upon the officials who are discharging a heavy responsibility, or upon those who, in their absence, have to speak on their behalf.
The earlier parts of the speech of the noble Marquess were devoted to reminding your Lordships' House of what passed here in the discussion on Ireland on November 15 last—a discussion which was inaugurated by the noble Viscount, Lord Chaplin. That debate, as he told us, turned largely on the question of the speeches that were being made in Ireland by the Sinn Fein leaders, the meetings and processions, route marches and illegal wearing of uniform, the drilling of young men, and other manifestations of disorder. Those were anxious and disturbing symptoms, and they represented the disloyal and revolutionary propaganda of the extreme Sinn Fein Party in Ireland. The noble Marquess seemed to be much dissatisfied with the explanation given on that occasion by the Lord Lieutenant, who happened to be in London, and by myself. I do not think that we minimised the gravity of the situation. On the contrary, I think we endeavoured to expose to the House its real proportions—its real as against its imagined proportions—and for my own part, looking back at what I then said, I do not feel any of the mortification which the noble Marquess thought must be in my mind at the present moment.
I remember pointing out that while there is a dangerous and irreconcilable party in Ireland, I maintained, and I believe it to be true, that they are a minority of the Sinn Fein Party. I also said, which I still believe to be true, that the great majority of the Sinn Fein Party are a political Party agitating for a political object—namely (I admit it) separation from England—but not agitating, as the noble Marquess seemed to imply, for rebellion. Now, my Lords, as a political programme that is, and was, an immoral and reprehensible programme, and it was and remains our bounden duty to deal with it by every means in our power; but it was not at that time—and I still persist in the statement—associated with any active or definite crime. In those circumstances I pointed out that the policy of the Government was one of firmness without provocation. I said that the test of the action of the Executive ought to be at each stage whether the proceedings of the malcontents were likely to be injurious to the public safety; and I stated that our
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object in Ireland was to detach public opinion from the extremists and to rally it to the cause of law and order. I remember pointing out that there were certain omens of an encouraging character in that respect, and quoting the opinions and attitude both of the Roman Catholic clergy and of the farmers in Ireland. That, I think, is a fairly correct summary of what took place in that debate.
Now I will take the historical narrative of what has passed since then, because I think by telling your Lordships the unvarnished tale in chronological order of what has happened in Ireland you will be better able to form a correct idea of the situation than from any summary or rhetorical declamation. During the months of December and January—the debate took place in November—there was not much alteration in the situation in Ireland. On the one side you had the Sinn Feiners in their speeches going up to the line, sometimes just overstepping it, but as a rule stopping just short. There were assemblies and drilling, as a rule without arms, in defiance of the police, and usually taking place in carefully selected areas where the police had not the number sufficient to enable them to act. I am coming a little later to a further exposition of that point. From the military point of view these proceedings could be regarded with absolute contempt, but they were, I allow, an element in the atmosphere of lawlessness in Ireland which we could not ignore. Then there were the nocturnal raids for arms, to which the noble Marquess has alluded, very often perpetrated on innocent persons.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: So far as I know, always perpetrated on innocent persons.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: I hope always. I think there is a tendency to exaggerate these instances. Sometimes they were carried out for the mere purpose of terrorism; at other times for the capture of weapons, although the amount of arms which passed in that way into the possession of the agitators was extremely small. It is true, as the noble Marquess reminded your Lordships, that on one occasion the proceedings were attended with loss of life. There was an old pensioner named Sheehan who lost his life while defending a rifle belonging to his son, a soldier home from the war.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: There were two murders, I think.
EARL CURZON or KEDLESTON: I may inform the House of what the noble Marquess did not mention—namely, that three men are awaiting trial for that crime. The usual inflammatory speeches were made. They were not quite of the original bouquet of the speeches of Mr. de Valera of six months ago, but I am willing to admit that they were of an effervescing and unwholesome vintage, if you like to use that expression. These speeches were not ostensibly directed to preaching rebellion or contempt of the law, but they were no doubt intended to produce that result.
Then there was the question of hunger strikes in prison, which under the practice that then prevailed could always be pursued to the point at which the prisoner waslet loose sooner than that his life should be endangered, and which no doubt the noble Marquess was justified in saying tended to reduce imprisonment to a farce. On the other hind, the Government, by arrests—there have been far more than the noble Marquess has any idea of—by prosecutions, by police action without the military (because at that stage the Government were anxious to keep the military out of it, for reasons that I will presently come to) exerted itself to the hest in the maintenance of law and order. Now I want your Lordships for one moment to realise, as I am sure you do, the difficulties that attend the successful treatment of the kind of sporadic, lawlessness in Ireland of which I have been speaking. It is all so different from what prevails in this country. Here in England we have the general sympathy of the community with law and order and with the attempts of the Executive to enforce it. In Ireland it is very different. There it is useless to prosecute before many of the local Benches or the Assize Courts, or the Quarter Sessions, because where the conviction depends upon the verdict of a jury you are likely to fail in your object. There are many cases of actual crime in which political feeling has been responsible for the rescue of the offender from conviction. Thus, my Lords, in Ireland the dice are always loaded against the Government instead of being on the side of the Government. Every possible attempt is made to hamper and defeat the conduct of the Executive at every turn, and, partly by instinct and partly by deliberation, large sections of the community are banded
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together to render the task of the Government, so relatively easy and simple in this country, one almost of impracticability across the water.
This state of things, with certain fluctuations, lasted through the winter months. All the while public opinion in Ireland was setting in favour of the Government and against this form of campaign. I think that on the last occasion I referred to the attitude of the Bishops. The Roman Catholic Bishops is Ireland, from the Cardinal downwards, with scarcely an exception, have assisted the Government to save Ireland, not merely from criminal acts, but from the horrors of civil war. They have been resolute on the side of law and order, and I cannot exaggerate the stress which I lay upon that point. The same, I think, may be said of all respectable elements in Irish society. The majority of the people in Ireland are keen and instinctive politicians. Nearly all of them, as we know, are orators, and every one of them, in some guise or another, is a politician, and no doubt the hearts of the people, or of a great majority of the people, are set in some form or another upon political changes—changes in the direction of self-government in Ireland. That is their object and their programme, for the people of Ireland no more than those of the other parts of the United Kingdom, broadly speaking, want violence; and when once you can show them that you as a Government are not dealing with political agitation but with crime, they will support the Executive, because it is the only defence of the society to which they themselves belong.
Now it would have been possible, had the Chief Secretary adopted in Ireland the kind of policy which was urged upon us by Lord Chaplin and others in the debate in November, by a combined police and military display, to stamp out this kind of disorder. My Lords, it is always easy to shoot. A rifle goes off very readily, and it is apt to take human life, and when in this kind of disorder human life is taken you are never quite certain what will follow, and you are never quite sure that the display of armed force—which it is easy to advocate, which only an order on paper is required to put into operation—may not inflame and accelerate, instead of stifling, the conflagration that is in view. Such was the condition of affairs in Ireland to the end of January.

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Then we come to a marked change in the situation. The revolutionary party in Ireland at about that time discovered, sharpened, and employed a new weapon in their campaign against the Government. They conceived the idea of associating their general propaganda of disorder with an appeal to the ineradicable instinct of landhunger which still remains unsatisfied in the Irish bosom. They once again summoned the evil spirit of agrarian discontent in Ireland, which is always ready to come up from the vasty deep when it is called, and which half a century of agrarian legislation has not sufficed to exorcise. The agrarian situation in Ireland is one with which many of your Lordships are intimately familiar, and which is very easy, almost in a sentence, to explain to those who are not. In the greater part of Ireland the action of the successive Land Acts and of the Congested Districts Boards has converted the Irish peasantry to the cause of order and to a large extent has wiped out the old agrarian discontent. But there are two great exceptions. The first is the case of the undistributed, or, as they are sometimes called, the untenanted lands, where there are no occupying tenants but which are held on freehold tenure by their owners. Some of these are the best grazing lands in Ireland. Around them are other lands, often mountain tracts, where the small-holders who have been enfranchised by the different Land Acts look down with ill-concealed envy upon the richer pastures owned by others which can never be theirs. That is one case. Then there is the second category of cases—the lands where the distribution proceeding under the Land Acts was summarily arrested by the stoppage of expenditure due to conditions of war. You can readily see in these circumstances what a field there was for violent and seditious propaganda, what an appeal to the deep-seated cupidity in the nature of man.
My Lords, there was another phenomenon that at this moment showed itself upon the scene. The Government, impelled by national needs arising out of the war, were preaching in this country, and equally across St. George's Channel, the gospel of tillage, and they pointed out the economic and patriotic advantage and duty of cultivation over grazing. The Sinn Fein leaders were not slow to see and to seize the opportunity this presented to them. They invented the phantom of an impend-
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ing Irish famine to be caused by the export of produce from the Irish ports. They became sudden and interested converts to this gospel of tillage, and they made it an excuse for flaunting the banner of an Irish Republic. You will agree with me that this was both an insidious and an immoral plan. It was a flagrant violation of the elementary principles upon which civilised society exists, and it was a direct challenge to the Government which could not be ignored.
The noble Marquess alluded to some of the principally affected areas. Those which have been given to me as the worst were Clare, Rosscommon, East Galway, North Tipperary, and parts of Sligo. In these parts of Ireland we read in the newspapers in the latter part of January and in February accounts of the cattle-drives organised under the plea of clearing the ground for tillage. We read of armed bands descending on the grazing farms in the name of the Irish Republic, marking them out for tillage, distributing the lands among their adherents, letting them out at a nominal rent, and in some cases making an actual pretence of tillage with ploughs. In some of these cases the owners were terrorised into acquiescence, in some cases there was a feeble show of resistance, but in the majority of cases the people were helpless. This was a new policy. We were no longer confronted with political agitation: we had to deal with a criminal conspiracy, attempting to subvert what I described as "the elementary conditions of civilised society."
I said just now that the Bishops had shown themselves on the side of law and order, and I should like to quote one very significant statement which was made by Bishop Foley, the Bishop of Kildare. He issued a strong warning to his clergy and people regarding this commandeering of land, appealing to them to keep clear of this kind of conduct; and—criticising a statement which appeared in a newspaper that "the commandeering of land was merely a forcible way of explaining that the people were willing to use the land if they were allowed"—he pointed out that "commandeering of land was also a very forcible way of proving that in order to make use of property which did not belong to them, some people were prepared grossly to violate the Seventh Commandment, while others had no hestitation about publicly defending their conduct as quite

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in harmony with the Law of God." He proceeded—
"It is enough to sicken any right-minded man to find that men in whom selfishness is ingrained am allowed to bamboozle the public by parading the poor as the justification of conduct which is beyond doubt a violation of the Seventh Commandment."
The Bishop says he "appeals to all who had any responsibility in the Sinn Fein movement to make it plain to all those who are trying to foment disorder and rowdyism that they have no sympathy whatever with such conduct, and that they have nothing but condemnation for it."
I have spoken firstly of what was passing, and secondly of the attitude towards what was passing that was taken up by responsible and authoritative people in Ireland. I now come to the conduct of the Government and the policy of the Chief Secretary. I have already, I think, explained his motives. I have said that he might have intervened at an earlier stage, not merely by proclamation and processes of law, but by the association of the military with the police. I have said that at an earlier stage he would have failed had he undertaken that task, because he would have been thought in Ireland to have been striking at a political rather than at a criminal organisation. He held his hand until the case was so clear, until the offence was so gross, that he could, with the certainty of having public opinion behind him, use the whole forces of the Crown to suppress these criminal acts. I have here, but I think I need hardly read it, one of the Sinn Fein proclamations, which was posted in the neighbourhood called Ballaghaderreen, and which sufficiently indicates the nature of the outrage that was attempted on society. But your Lordships are already convinced of that, you do not want me to demonstrate it, and while I am willing to hand the document to any noble Lord who wishes to read it, I do not think I need it in order to establish my case as to the nature and character of the crime with which, at this stage, we were called upon to deal.
Let me again ask your Lordships' consideration for one moment while I point out to you some of the difficulties even of this new situation which the noble Marquess in his remarks appeared to me to ignore. This new policy was threatened in several areas: some disaffected, others the reverse. It was apt to break out in regions of vast
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extent, sparsely populated, with only small and scattered bodies of the Irish Constabulary—enough for the ordinary maintenance of law and order (and there has never been a time when there was less ordinary crime in Ireland) but insufficient to deal with this novel kind of emergency. The noble Marquess talked as if there was something ridiculous and ignominious in the situation which was frequently arising, where we read of an assembly, drilling, or something of that sort, taking place with which the Irish police were unable instanter to cope. I wonder whether he has any idea of the task which confronts the Royal Irish Constabulary in that country.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: I say that the police would have no difficulty in dealing with the situation if they were properly supported by the Government.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: It is not a question of support; it is a question of numbers. Let me state my case. I have here a county with a population of 100,000 covering 1,000 square miles and the strength of the police force is 220. I have another area of 7,500 square miles, and the strength of the Irish Constabulary is 2,100. The total strength of the Royal Irish Constabulary for a country inhabited by 4,500,000 people is 9,000 men. See what happens. The noble Marquess says that it is a question of the Government supporting the police. It is nothing of the sort. Let us take an area where the police are scattered in isolated barracks or small posts, by no means lacking in support, and ready to do their duty. Stories are spread through the area of an intended cattle-drive or a ploughing raid. The police do not know—it is carefully concealed from them—where the blow is going to fall or where they ought to concentrate. Next day you read in the newspapers that 300 men with ploughs have entered upon certain lands in the name of the Irish Republic, have marked out the land, very likely have put a plough into the ground, and then, because these men were not stopped by the police, who may be miles away, or if they were on the spot were in numbers wholly insufficient to cope with such a case, we are at once told in certain organs of public opinion what an impotent Government, what a feeble Chief Secretary, what a miraculous way of preserving law and order in Ireland! You must face the concrete facts of the situa-

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tion; and while I do not shrink from any kind of suggestion, insinuation, or attack you make on the Government, at least be just to those representatives of law and order who are trying to the best of their ability—I am speaking of the police—
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: I never said a word against the police.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: I know. The noble Marquess says, Why do not the Government stop these things?
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: Why do not the Government support the police?
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: Supporting the police does not convert ten men into twenty, or twenty men into 200; and I am trying, with all respect, to place before your Lordships certain aspects of the case which I think ought to he known to you before you arrive at a judgment in the matter. This was the state of affairs in the middle and latter part of February when the Chief Secretary came to the Cabinet and consulted us as to the way in which to deal with the situation. He pointed out that this was no longer a political agitation, that it was not merely a conspiracy to seize the land, but that it was a violent attempt to subvert order and to commit crime. I said at an earlier stage that there was no demand for powers which had at any time been refused to the Chief Secretary, who has had every power that he desired or that it was possible to give to him in that stage, and on this occasion he received our sanction to further steps which he proposed to take. He returned to Ireland, and there, in consultation with the General Officer in Command, he took immediate action.
I am dealing more particularly with the case of Clare. The noble Marquess had a general idea that Clare was in military hands, but he asked for more detailed information as to what has been proceeding there. On the return of the Chief Secretary to Dublin military reinforcements were despatched to the disturbed areas, with instructions when riots took place to disperse the assemblages, to arrest the ringleaders, and to strike at any form of organised revolt. Clare was placed under a military commander with instructions to exercise all the powers open to him under the Defence of the Realm Regulations. He was empowered to restrict all transit either of
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men or animals without permit, to prohibit assemblies and in some cases fairs—though this would only be done with reluctance, because of the inconvenience and loss caused to the farming section of the community—to close public houses, to occupy telegraph and telephone stations, to censor the post, to disperse law-breakers and effect arrests, to seize the ploughs and any other instruments of agrarian aggression. My Lords, I regard these acts from some points of view as a painful necessity, because undoubtedly they were a source of inconvenience and I dare say also of loss to some law-abiding elements of the population, but they had to be carried out. They were effectually carried out. The prisoners who were arrested were brought to trial. They received their sentences. They were sent to prison or held to bail.
In the course of the operations which I have been describing, the troops in County Clare behaved with most commendable restraint and self-control. The police acted not only with the courage which they always show, but also with great prudence. There was perfect co-operation between the military and the police force. The people generally adopted an attitude of strong friendly support to the line taken by the Executive, and the Catholic clergy at their altars and in their newspapers exerted their influence in every way to prevent collision and to impose restraint. I quoted just now a passage from an utterance from Bishop Foley, of Kildare, but I have here, if your Lordships will allow me to read it, a short statement which fell from another Bishop, Bishop Fogarty, of Killaloe, in Clare, who has been widely known for his sympathies with extreme Nationalism in Ireland. Bishop Fogarty stated in an interview with an Irish paper his opinion to the following effect—
"Sinn Fein has set its face—"
He is speaking of the better side of the Sinn Fein—
"against the abuse of cattle driving, and I join my voice with theirs and hope the people, no matter how provocative the elements surrounding them, will now steady themselves, and in all their actions keep like true Irishmen within the limits of what is just, fair, and equitable according to the law of God, for crimes and excesses of any kind are both non-Catholic and unpatriotic. I am glad to say the people have already done so, and done it because they feel it is the right and correct thing to do. There was one mad week in which the momentum of their rage carried them over the line of prudence and justice, but that is now all over, and though communities are never safe from individual criminals I think we can

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always trust the body of the people to do what is right and just in the end, though they may be led astray for the moment. Raids for arms are indeed an odious and most detestable form of crime, though not peculiar to Clare, but wherever it exists it is a hateful and heinous crime against which every one should set a stern face. There have been as far as I have learned four of these raids in Clare, and that is four too many. It is altogether an intolerable thing to go into any man's house and hold a revolver at his head while his house is being searched for arms or anything else. Raids for arms will soon be followed by raids for money. Both Sinn Fein and volunteers are deadly opposed to these suspicious raids, which they know well are deadly injurious to their patriotic movement."
LORD BERESFORD: Was that issued before or after martial law?
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: The date of this is in the early part of March. But martial law has not been proclaimed, I may say in passing, in County Clare. The county is under military control, but there is no martial law.
LORD BERESFORD: I meant that.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: This paper is dated March 11, and the sentiments which I read just now from Bishop Foley emanated from him in the middle of February, a fortnight at least before the incidents to which I am referring took place. I hope that the noble Lord does not make the suggestion that the Bishop has, by the prompt exercise of authority on the part of the Government, been suddenly converted to law and order.
LORD BERESFORD: I made no suggestion.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: That was rather the implication, though the noble Lord did not intend it. I have hero any number of statements, proclamations, and utterances made in Lenten addresses by the Bishops, proceeding continuously through the month of February, all in exactly the same sense. I am quoting them not in the least in justification of anything that the Government has done, but solely to support the point which I endeavoured to make three months ago in. your Lordships' House and which I have tried to make again to-night, that the Government have been steadily rallying to their side all the influences of strength and all opinion in Ireland of real value, and it is a considerable element in the hopes that
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we entertain of this policy that the Catholic Church and its most powerful speakers are now unanimously upon our side.
Now you will ask as to the results. The noble Marquess quoted with some gusto a letter from an anonymous correspondent in Dublin to the effect that all Ireland—I do not know what right he had to speak for all Ireland—was in a state of lawless disorder, the law was set at defiance, and so on. I happen to have been reading this morning the official reports which reached London only last night. They tell a very different, tale. This is what I read in them—
"The results of this effective action have so far been salutary and successful. Cattle-driving has ceased in the county of Clare. The seizure of land is being prevented. The police effect the necessary arrests without difficulty. Many of those arrested enter readily into bail for their good behaviour. Illegal dulling stilt continues in isolated districts—"
I am afraid it must, owing to the reasons I have before mentioned—
"but is being got in hand."
I see seated there [the Cross Benches] the noble and gallant Field-Marshal Lord French. As Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces he was recently engaged upon a tour of inspection in Ireland, where he went round the disturbed areas with the General Officer Commanding in Ireland, Sir Bryan Mahon. I have seen the reports of his tour, which were generally to the effect that the strong action that has been taken was having good consequences everywhere.
It is too much to expect that a period of commotion like that which I have described can be swiftly or suddenly succeeded by a period of content. The pot that has been simmering so long and has boiled over does not settle down at once. I dare say it may be true that many of the offenders were staggered by the suddenness of the blow, and that their attitude is one of surly acquiescence in the inevitable. That may be. But when the noble Marquess asks us, in the terms of his Motion, to say that "it is incumbent on His Majesty's Government to enforce the law in that country"—that is, Ireland—I think I have shown him that that is what we have been doing and are successfully doing at the present moment. How long it may be necessary to keep the military in these disturbed areas I cannot say. It is too early to ask me to give an opinion upon that point. But this I do

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say. They will be maintained so long as it is necessary to show that the Government are both determined and able to enforce the law in Ireland, as in other parts of the United Kingdom.
I must, before I conclude, allude in a few sentences to one other aspect of the question to which pointed attention was called by the noble Marquess, and in regard to which it is necessary to explain and defend the policy of the Government, and that is the question of prison treatment and hunger strikes. Here, again, I think it only fair that your Lordships should remember that there is a psychological difference between Ireland and this country. Here the country generally supports the Executive in the administration of the law and in respect of imprisonment for criminal offences, and forcible feeding in this country is acquiesced in as a necessary though detestable duty in certain cases of prison administration, although, as your Lordships know, if life is in danger there exists statutory power in this country, under an Act passed in 1913, for the relief of the prisoner whose life is in jeopardy. Now, in Ireland sentiment is entirely in the other direction. There has always been the strongest possible sentiment in Ireland against forcible feeding of political prisoners, and it was greatly aggravated, as the noble Lord rightly pointed out, by the unfortunate death of Thomas Ashe in Dublin. After that event forcible feeding was not proceeded with in the case of political prisoners, and then the hunger strikes began to take its place. The Government were left with the sole resource of imprisonment, followed by temporary release if the life of the prisoner was imperilled from the hunger strike. It is clear that if every prisoner had recourse to a hunger strike the prisons would presently either be converted into hospitals or would find themselves empty; and so far had the contagion of the hunger strike proceeded, that it was resorted to in the Irish prisons by persons convicted of such different offences as these:—burglary, failing to make their contributions under the National Insurance Act, perjury, in a case of abortion, cattle-driving, violent assaults, and even a number of cases of men charged with murder.
In these absolutely intolerable circumstances the Chief Secretary—and the Cabinet supported him—determined no longer to permit this calculated evasion of
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the law. It was decided that, while political prisoners should be treated, as they have been treated for long past, in a different category from ordinary criminal offenders, receiving the benefit of what are called the Churchill Rules, no release should be permitted in any circumstances for hunger-strikers. I have tried to get the facts of the case—at Cork, I believe—to which the noble Marquess referred. I think there must be some mistake, because in going through the list of the hunger-strikers who were released—which I have here—I could not find the names of any men who were released in those conditions from Cork. I am sorry not to be able to give a more complete answer to the noble Marquess at the present moment. Every person who is committed is now informed that while he will not be forcibly fed, he will not be released by hunger-striking. He must take the consequences of his own conduct, however serious they may be. And I have to report to your Lordships that on Saturday last, there being quite a number of these hunger-strikers in prison in different parts of Ireland, Sinn Fein issued orders that the hunger-strike should cease. They sought to cover their retreat by the pretence that there had been negotiations with the Government, or that a new set of Rules had been issued. There had been no negotiations with the Government, and there had been no new Rules. The Government had only been acting in accordance with the Regulations which have been in existence and have been known since the autumn of last year, and which provide for certain alleviations in the case of political prioners in respect of dress, diet, and society. These Rules are well known; they are posted in every cell. So long as a political prisoner conforms to the prison Regulations he gets the advantage of those Rules. If he resorts to the hunger strike he does so at the peril of his own life. We say to him, You shall not be forcibly fed; but we also say to him, You shall not be released.
I have stated honestly to the House what have been the measures that have been adopted by His Majesty's Government in this anxious time. I do not see in them any justification for the censure that the noble Marquess has passed either upon the Chief Secretary or upon the Government. The general gist of his argument was that there had been a weak and almost criminal abdication of power on the part of the Government. I think I have given, at any

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rate I have attempted to give, the answer. Just as President Wilson in the United States of America waited, though subject to great and what appeal ed to us reasonabl criticism, in declaring war until he could be assured of the general and convinced support of the American people, so the Chief Secretary in Ireland has waited and held his hand until he felt convinced that all the better elements of the community could be rallied to his side. Had pursued a coercive policy at an earlier stage while the agitation with which he was dealing could still be made to wear a political aspect, he would have arrayed the whole of Nationalist opinion in Ireland against him. some of which, at any rate, is apt to regard Sinn Fein as only an extreme form of the political feeling which they entertain themselves. But the moment that Sinn Fein in its manifestations was converted into a criminal conspiracy, we struck; and I think we struck with success. I do not say that the policy that has been adopted is one of heroism—I desire to make no such claim for it. But I do think that it has been a policy of sanity and of common sense.
I very much deprecate the character of the attacks that have been made upon the Chief Secretary. They are, I think, most unfair. The Chief Secretary is a man who has laboured not only with diligence but with unexampled patience, with extreme sincerity, and with a devot d love for the country which he is at present administering. His conduct and his policy do not, of course, satisfy everybody. If he acts with vigour he is charged, perhaps, in another place across the way—at any rate, he is charged here or there—with brutal severity. If he is slow to act, up jumps the noble Marquess and accuses him of "culpable inertia." or whatever was the phrase that he employed this evening. This I do say, that when the history of this time is written the record of Mr. Duke will be that of a true and faithful servant of Ireland. He has laboured unceasingly for her welfare; he has never lost heart in the darkest moments of despair; and to pass a Motion which is really one of censure and of condemnation upon him—I do not think the noble Marquess will push it to that point—would be in my judgment an act of the grossest injustice.
I have not said one word this evening, and I do not propose to do so, about the Convention. One noble Lord—I think it was Lord Meath—called my attention
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to the matter, and wanted to know whether in my opinion the Convention had failed or was going to fail. My Lords, I know no more than the noble Earl does about the matter; and, if I did, I would not say a word in this House. No word ought to be spoken at this moment that will run the slightest chance of wrecking the prospects—by no means beclouded or dim—that may still exist of finding salvation in the proceedings of that assembly. This only I will say, not about what is passing in the Convention but of the whole situation out of which the Convention has sprung, that His Majesty's Government are bent if they possibly can on Ending a real solution to this Irish problem. I agree with the noble Marquess in one thing—namely, that disorder and crime are the worst possible impediments to any such solution, and that the Convention was not likely to succeed if they were left to go unarrested. They have already to some extent been successfully stamped out; and I trust that all the anxieties, the labours, the troubles, of the past few months will not be sacrificed, that we may still hope for some fruitful result from this collaboration of so many minds all bent sincerely on doing something good for that unhappy country, and that it may still be possible for us, whatever our political prepossessions, to foresee the dawn of a. brighter day.
THE EARL OF SELBORNE: My Lords, I fully expected that my noble friend would make a chivalrous defence of the Irish Administration, and he has done so. The consequence is that he leaves on record some very remarkable expressions of opinion as coming from him; and I hope he will not be surprised when I tell him that what he said does not carry conviction to our minds. It is not difficult to make the kind of speech which my noble friend has made if you ignore all through—as he has ignored—the history of Ireland during the last two years; and, I might say further, the history of Ireland during the whole period in which he and I have been in public life.
The noble Earl began with something not unlike a complaint that we should bring forward this question at this time. I say without hesitation that we on this Bench have exercised the greatest possible restraint in respect of our criticism of the Government of Ireland. In our judgment, as was said last November, the Government of Ireland has been incomprehensible and

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disastrous. From week to week we have held our tongues; and I offer no apology to my noble friend for this debate, even if it has brought the Chief Secretary over from Dublin or taken him for some hours from the work in connection with the war in which he is daily engaged. We would not have done our duty if we had held our tongues any longer in the face of the situation, as we see it, in Ireland to-day. What is the story? You cannot judge of the adequacy of my noble friend's defence unless you remember the story. Ireland was handed over to the Liberal Government in 1906 in complete tranquillity and prosperity. In 1916 a rebellion broke out in Dublin. That rebellion was proved, by a Commission appointed by a Government of which both my noble friend and I were members, to be entirely due to the incompetence—the astonishing incompetence—of the Irish Government. That took place two years ago. In what has Mr. Duke's government of Ireland differed from Mr. Birrell's?
VISCOUNT CHAPLIN: It is worse.
THE EARL OF SELBORNE: The difference is that it has been a weaker and a less courageous Government than Mr. Birrell's. I could not have believed that, with the example of Mr. Birrell before him, if I had been told two years ago that the story of the two years which have since elapsed under Mr. Duke's administration would be what it is. I should have regarded that as the wildest flight of imagination.
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: Mr. Duke has been in office only fifteen months.
THE EARL OF SELBORNE: The Irish Rebellion took place at Easter, 1916. Who was in office then?
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON: I mean in this Administration.
THE EARL OF SELBORNE: But he was in office in the previous Administration. I am not dividing Mr. Duke's tenure of office into two periods; I am looking at it as it has existed ever since he succeeded Mr. Birrell. "By their fruits ye shall know them." That is more true of Governments than it is of any other human institution. Mr. Birrell set out to govern Ireland in accordance with the opinion of the Nationalists. He produced a rebellion. Mr. Duke set out to create an atmosphere
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in which conciliation should prevail in Ireland. The only atmosphere which he has created is one which benefits Germany. There is no other interest, Irish or British or European, that benefits by the atmosphere which Mr. Duke has created except Germany, who is our mortal foe. The atmosphere which Mr. Duke tried to create could only be fatal to the Convention. If the Convention survives, as I most sincerely trust it will, it will be in spite of Mr. Duke's endeavours to create an atmosphere and not because of the atmosphere which he has created.
The noble Earl said that we tended to exaggerate the real state of affairs in Ireland and he laid stress upon the difficulty of dealing with sporadic crime. He said that it was almost impracticable and had been almost impracticable, and again and again he told us that the policy of the Government had been to show moderate opinions in Ireland—moderate Nationalist opinion and especially the Roman Catholic hierarchy—that they were not attacking political opinion but crime. In the early part of his speech the noble Earl himself had shown how opinion and crime are in this conspiracy inseparably intermixed. You cannot attack crime without attacking opinion, and you cannot attack opinion without attacking crime, because, as he has shown us, the whole object of this organisation which produces the crime is the independence of Ireland—the separation of Ireland from the Empire, and of course he told us—Lord Sydenham was wrong—that not only has my noble friend and the Prime Minister never hesitated on this subject but they have said again and again that in no circumstances whatever can Ireland be allowed to claim or assert her independence, and that that was a conspiracy which their Government or any other Government was bound at all times to resist. To take these searches for arms, this agrarian outbreak is only a part of that conspiracy. They are only manifestations of the same nature; and therefore I do not admit that in this case my noble friend can separate the attitude of Sinn Fein into criminal and political aspects. The Irish are under no delusion about that. They know perfectly well that the Government are bound to oppose Sinn Fein in its separatist aspect, and they cannot possibly imagine that because the Government have only intervened now in the matter of agrarian outrages they are therefore neutral in regard to the ultimate aims of Sinn Fein.

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My noble friend kept excusing the Irish Government, and indeed praising it, and I think that is where his words will seem a strange record in years to come. He not only excused but he praised the forbearance of Mr. Duke during this interim period while, as he put it, the true criminal character of Sinn Fein was becoming manifest to all the Irish people. Then, he said, the Government intervened and complete success followed their intervention. That is the whole of our case against the Government. Of course, complete success followed the intervention, and the same complete success would have followed, in our opinion, at any day or week or month when the Government took the same action. That has been the whole history of Ireland. Look back to the administrations of Lord Spencer, of Mr. Balfour and of Mr. Long. Every single time that the Government has confronted crime and disorder in Ireland crime and disorder have disappeared. The Irish are the worst people in the world to run away from, and the only reason why Sinn Fein is increasing is that Mr. Duke has been consistently engaged in running away from it. If he had confronted it six months ago, as we implored him to do, and as he has done this month, the whole of this terrible and humiliating history of the past six months would have been unwritten. I do not think the intervention has been too late. I think it has been just in time, so far as I can form a judgment.
The history of the hunger striking was told to us by my noble friend. I could scarcely believe my ears as I heard him tell the story. For months and months, under the threat of hunger strike, law and other has been paralysed in Ireland; but the very first moment that the Chief Secretary put his foot down Sinn Fein issued a proclamation saying the hunger strike was off. That is the very thing we have been complaining about Mr. Duke all these months, and while I sincerely admire the chivalry of my noble friend the Leader of the House in standing up for his colleague, I say it deliberately that the state of Ireland to-day is not due to German intrigue or to Sinn Fein but to the incompetence of Mr. Duke.
THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE: My Lords, I will detain the House for only a few moments, for I think that almost everything that requires to be stated has been said on one side or the other. I
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desire to express myself in entire agreement with what Lord Selborne said a few minutes ago as to the need for this debate. I think noble Lords who take an interest in Irish affairs have shown very great forbearance in allowing nearly four months to elapse without any reference to a subject about which we all of us feel most extreme anxiety.
With regard to the interesting and eloquent speech of the noble Earl who leads the House, I am bound to say that although at some points it did not seem to be entirely satisfactory, I welcomed it because I think it showed a much graver recognition of the seriousness of the Irish problem than the speeches which were delivered here in November by himself and by the Lord Lieutenant. To many of us those speeches, and particularly the speech of the Lord Lieutenant, seemed profoundly disappointing. I remember that the Lord Lieutenant bade us be of good hope for the future of the country, and. he told us distinctly, speaking as head of the Irish Executive, that he did not believe there was any menace to life and property at that time. Well, my Lords, since those words were spoken things have gone rapidly from bad to worse.
The noble Marquess who moved gave your Lordships a catalogue of some of the episodes which have been taking place in Ireland during the Last few weeks. I will not repeat the different items in the catalogue, but it included high-handed acts of interference with the cultivation of land, it included cattle-driving, it included at least one case in which there had been loss of life, and it drew a picture—confirmed by the words of the Lord Chief Justice—a profoundly alarming picture, of the condition not only of one or two dangerous spots but of a great part of the whole country. To my mind not the least disquieting circumstance was the manner in which these people who defied the law proclaimed their sympathy with our enemies, and even went to the length of insulting the friendly and nearly related lower which is now our ally in this great struggle. I remember that last autumn the Prime Minister gave a distinct assurance that His Majesty's Government would deal energetically with any steps which might be regarded as implying organisation for rebellion. My Lords, I say that the circumstances in Ireland during the last few weeks have been circumstances of rebellion—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear.
THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE: Rebellion in its most insidious and dangerous shape—insidious because this has been a determined and elaborate attempt to bring the law of the country into disrepute, and what is most to be regretted is that it has been to a great extent a successful attempt to bring the law into disrepute. I have never been one of those who have taken too seriously what you might describe as exhibitions of bravado on the part of the disorderly elements in Ireland. They may be ascribed, if you like, to what I think the noble Earl called the "effervescence" of the Irish character, and I quite recognise that it would have been impossible for the Irish Executive to deal with every case of misconduct, no matter where it arose or when, in all parts of Ireland. The Constabulary are not sufficiently numerous for the purpose, and if it had once come to be known that by any little exhibition of disloyalty in some remote place the presence of a force of Constabulary on the spot would be secured there would have been no end to it, and there would have been a deliberate attempt to overtax the resources of that very long-suffering and valuable force.
But although I can well understand that there should have been hesitation to deal with every sporadic outbreak, no matter how insignificant, I have never been able to understand how the Irish Executive found it consistent with their duty not to deal with the leaders of this movement. The leaders were perfectly well known. Their language attempted no kind of concealment of their intention and policy, and it always seemed to me that it was rather at the leaders than at the humbler followers that the Irish Executive should have endeavoured to strike.
The noble Earl described to us at some length the further steps which His Majesty's Government are going to take. So far as one is able to follow his description, they seem to be vigorous and appropriate to the occasion. I think the House must have heard with special satisfaction that the question of hunger-strikes was going to be dealt with. I have never been able to understand why it was not dealt with long ago. Whatever remedy is available to-day was surely available weeks or months ago, and before this epidemic of hunger-striking had spread from these
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political criminals to other criminals of all sorts of descriptions. Therefore I am rather inclined to agree with my noble friend Lord Selborne when he said that he was not quite convinced by the chivalrous plea put forward by the noble Earl on behalf of the Chief Secretary—a plea in which it was suggested that the Chief Secretary had adopted a wise and prudent course in holding his hand during this long period of time, a period of time during which (to borrow an expression of the noble Earl) "the pot" was certainly allowed to "boil over."
I was glad to hear from the noble Earl that the Irish Government were now sanguine of rallying to their assistance what he called moderate opinion in Ireland, and that some progress had been achieved in that direction. There is a great amount of moderate opinion in Ireland which is ready to be railied, and which will rally, to the Government, but it will only do so if it is convinced that the Government are in earnest. Opinion of that kind in Ireland is of a very timid description, and you will find all over the country numbers of people who are heartily disgusted with the whole of this Sinn Fein business and would declare themselves against it if they had not at the back of their minds a feeling that they would be left in the lurch should they take a vigorous line against it.
I am also glad that we are no longer told that nothing more can be done because the Convention is still sitting. The argument that it was necessary to avoid any measures that might be regarded as provocative in order to obtain quiet weather for the Convention has always seemed to me a most unconvincing and futile argument. Unless we are very much misinformed, one of the great difficulties which the Convention has had to encounter has been the difficulty of convincing public opinion in the province of Ulster that it might safely accept radical changes in the system of Government. But, my Lords, the suspicion and alarm of the Ulster people are easily explained. They can see—they can anticipate from what has been happening—what would happen if a large measure of Home Rule were given to Ireland, and if the control of the country were at the same time to pass into the hands of these Sinn Fein organisers. The best way of bringing about a successful issue for the

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Convention surely was to maintain law and order while it was sitting.
I will say only one word more, and that is to support what has already been said by one or two of your Lordships to the effect that we should bear in mind that all these happenings in Ireland cannot be regarded as the protests of an Mused or oppressed people. There is no country, I venture to say no civilised country in the world, in which the population has had more done for it, or been treated with greater leniency and consideration. I hope, for the sake of the well-disposed people in Ireland, that His Majesty's Government will pursue energetically the measures which have been indicated to us by the noble Earl, and that they will see to it that this poisonous leaven is not allowed to infect a larger number of people than it has already reached. I venture to support, what the noble Earl has said in regard to this part of the case, and also to express my entire concurrence with a phrase which fell from Lord Sydenham, who told the House that in Ireland, as well as in other countries, "weak Government is always unpopular."
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, after the assurance which the noble Earl the Leader of the House has given to
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your Lordships and to the country of the Government's determination to enforce the law not only in Clare but I hope wherever the law is disturbed in Ireland, I shall not ask your Lordships to divide on the Motion. I would only like to add one word. In the remarks which I ventured to inflict on your Lordships' House this afternoon I was very careful not to deal with the question of the future government of Ireland, but I should not like it to be supposed that, for my part, I am disposed for a moment to abandon the proper claims of Ulster, or the necessity, in any future settlement of Ireland, to safeguard the security of the Empire as a whole. I ask leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

CONSOLIDATION BILLS.
Message from the Commons to acquaint this House that they have appointed a Committee of five Members to join with the Committee appointed by this House (as mentioned in their Lordships' Message of the 5th instant) to consider and report on Consolidation Bills.
House adjourned at twenty-five minutes past seven o'clock.