Department calculated to be necessary. Eventually the resolution was carried by 241 to 119.

Meantime, however, the extremer Churchmen, some professed educationists, and the Roman Catholics, had vigorously agitated against the Bill, and next day (Dec. 3) at the Representative Church Council there was a revolt of the clergy and laity against the Bishops. The Primate still hoped for a compromise, and urged the Council to accept a settlement on the basis of the "right of entry." However, a resolution declaring inability to accept the terms embodied in the Bill was moved by Sir Alfred Cripps, K.C., and seconded by the Bishop of Beverley, and an amendment moved by the Bishop of Salisbury, recognising the Bill as an advance towards a reasonable settlement, was rejected by 187 to 116-the Bishop of Southwark speaking in its favour, and the Bishops of Manchester and Birmingham, Lord Hugh Cecil, Dean Wace, and Viscount Halifax against it. The resolution was then put, and received 189 votes against 99, but was declared lost, "the Houses being divided." In fact only three Bishops out of twenty-one supported it; and an amendment appealing for a postponement of the Bill till after Christmas, submitted by the Bishop of London, was shelved by the "previous question."

The Committee proceedings were postponed on that evening, and on Saturday morning, December 5, further correspondence was published between the Primate and Mr. Runciman which sealed the fate of the Bill. The Primate in his letter still hoped and pressed for a compromise, but asked for delay till further figures could be obtained; Mr. Runciman replied that the Government had always intended that the number of the contracted-out schools should be as small as possible, and had thought the Archbishop agreed with them; but that the meeting of the Representative Church Council had altered the whole situation, since even its most moderate members had insisted on increased demands. The Government therefore were forced to conclude that the Primate had been unable to obtain adhesion to the terms of the proposed settlement. The correspondence eventually closed with hopes of a settlement in the future.

He

Accordingly, the Bill was withdrawn, regretfully, by Mr. Asquith on December 7, in view of the action of the Church Council, which precluded treating it as an agreed Bill. eloquently commended the efforts both of Mr. Runciman and of the Primate, and described the failure as the heaviest disappointment of his public life. Mr. Balfour condemned Ministers for proceeding without making sure either on the agreement of the Churches or on the financial questions, and at the diplomatic errors which had led to a waste of Parliamentary time.

The Settlement Committee, however (p. 227), which had received adhesions from eminent men of all stations and callings, held a public meeting at Caxton Hall on December 9 to consider the situation and to establish itself on a permanent basis. The

Earl of Cromer, who presided, deprecated a secular system, but feared that the country would drift towards it in despair, and paid a cordial tribute to the efforts of the Primate and Mr. Runciman. Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, M.P., Sir Edward Clarke, the Rev. J. H. Shakespeare, a leading Nonconformist minister, and the Dean of Lincoln, spoke to the resolutions proposed; and a Committee representing many shades of Church and Nonconformist opinion was appointed to collect information and report to the general body. Provision was also made for the formation of local committees. The National Society also appointed a sub-committee with similar functions. It had previously laid down the principle that all forms of religious teaching are equal before the State, and reasserted its claim for parental rights.

The hopes of some advanced Liberals, however, were raised in another direction by the victory of the cause of women's suffrage, championed by Mr. Lloyd-George, over the misguided efforts of its most militant supporters. At the Albert Hall on December 5 the Chancellor of the Exchequer addressed a meeting held under the auspices of the Women's Liberal Association to advocate women's suffrage. For two hours he was persistently interrupted, chiefly by women, some of whom had chained themselves to their seats, while one defended herself ineffectively with a dog-whip. They were successively ejected with regrettable but excusable violence; and he was able to say that they were ruining their cause, to repeat the Ministerial promise (p. 110) and to express his own strong support of women's suffrage. The Government, he said, were divided on it, and therefore could not themselves incorporate it in their Franchise Bill.

In the midst of the Education crisis (December 3) had appeared the lengthy Report of the Select Committee on the reform of the House of Lords which had been the outcome of the debate on Lord Newton's Bill (ANNUAL REGISTER, 1907, p. 114). They proposed to distinguish between Peers and "Lords of Parlia ment" or Members of the House of Lords; and recommended that, except in the case of a Peer of the Blood Royal, a peerage should not entitle to a seat in that House. The hereditary Peers, including those of Scotland and Ireland, should be entitled to elect 200 representatives to sit in that House for each Parliament, the election being conducted by a form of cumulative voting. The Archbishops should hold seats as of right, the Bishops should elect eight representatives. The Committee would gladly see representatives of the other great Churches in the House, but could formulate no recommendation. Official representatives of the great self-governing Colonies might be introduced into the House without the danger of involving the Colonies in British party politics; as to the representation of India, they could formulate no specific recommendation, but thought its interests would be secured by the presence of exViceroys and other qualified persons in the House. Besides

the elective Peers, any Peer should be entitled to sit in the House who had been a Cabinet Minister, Viceroy of India, Governor-General of Canada or Australia, High Commissioner for South Africa, or Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or who had held any of certain Colonial Governorships or high offices or had been Lieutenant-General or Vice-Admiral on the active list, or had sat for a certain period in the Commons. This recommendation would add about 130 Peers to the House. The Crown should be empowered to summon four life Peers annually, the total not to exceed forty. The Lords of Appeal in Ordinary would still be Lords of Parliament. This would give a House of somewhat less than 400, as against an existing number of considerably over 600. Among many other interesting items the Report stated that proposals had been discussed to admit elected representatives from County Councils and Municipal Corporations, whether Peers or not, but that the Committee, being almost equally divided, made no recommendation.

These suggestions threw no light on the actual situation. The Ministry had still a large unfulfilled programme before it; but many of its supporters felt that the policy of "filling up the cup" before appealing to the electorate would again bring disaster. Great interest, therefore, attached to the speech to be made by Mr. Asquith at the complimentary dinner given him at the National Liberal Club on Friday, December 11, by some 200 Liberal members of Parliament, in appreciation of his conduct of the Licensing Bill. An address sent him earlier on that day reminded him that Mr. Gladstone in his last speech in the House (March 1, 1894) had insisted on the need of a solution of the conflict between the Houses; and it begged the Government to "translate Gladstone's words into action at the earliest possible moment." Two hundred and twenty-three members had signed this memorial; twenty-five had preferred a form replacing the last five words by a promise of "unswerving aid in the prosecution of the work." In response to the toast of his health, proposed by the Chairman, Mr. John Ellis, Mr. Asquith, after summarising the achievements of the Ministry, remarked that they were then met to celebrate a failure possessing a pregnant meaning. The Licensing Bill had been fully considered by the country and the House, and accepted by unbroken and unexampled majorities; yet before its provisions had been explained to the House of Lords its fate was sealed by a private gathering summoned by the Opposition leader at his own house. This was closure by caucus; the second reading debate was a farce; the weight of argument and authority was in favour of the Bill, but a majority, mostly of unknown individuals, was whipped up to secure the most powerful and pernicious of vested interests. After contrasting the treatment given by the House of Lords to the Liberal and the Unionist Education and Licensing Bills, he said that the decision as to which Bills should pass was at the caprice of an

Q

assembly which in one session had passed the Trade Disputes Bill and rejected the Plural Voting Bill. He invited the Liberal party to treat the Lords' veto as the dominant issue in politics. [Prolonged cheering.] But to advise the King to dissolve would admit the right of the Lords to dictate the occasion and time of a dissolution, a claim historically untenable and practically absurd, which would spend the whole life of a Liberal Government in a series of general elections. As to the work of next session, he received advice daily, and deputations three days a week, each demanding preference for some special measure. If asked what the King's Speech would contain, he could only give a negative answer; but a colourless programme would be a confession of Liberal humiliation and impotence. Their first need was simplification of issues and concentration of purpose. Finance must absorb much of the session; the task before the Chancellor of the Exchequer was exceptionally severe; the Budget would stand at the very centre of their work, and would again raise the question whether the funds needed for social reform were to be provided by Free Trade finance, or the "impoverishing fallacies of Protection." He concluded by again emphasising the need for a constitutional change exhibited by the rejection of the Licensing Bill.

Meanwhile the Government had been striving to wind up the business of the session. The Prevention of Crime Bill (p. 133), which had gone to a Standing Committee, had been considered on Report on November 24, when an effort had been made by Mr. Atherley-Jones and Mr. Belloc to get rid of the indeterminate detention of habitual criminals. When the debate was resumed on December 7, the Home Secretary announced that, in substitution for the indeterminate sentence, he would propose that the court might order the detention of a prisoner for not less than five years or more than ten, power being also reserved to the Home Secretary to shorten the sentence. This concession was strongly supported by Mr. Lyttelton; other members, however-mostly Liberal-were not satisfied, and Mr. Pickersgill (Bethnal Green, S. W.), pointing out that as the Bill stood, three years' penal servitude must precede the detention, and that the operation of the measure was not confined to dangerous or hardened criminals, moved that penal servitude should not be a condition precedent to the detention. Mr. Gladstone, however, emphasised the difficulties of mixing freshly-convicted prisoners with those undergoing reformative treatment, and cited Colonial precedents; and eventually the amendment was rejected by 164 to 95. The Home Secretary's amendments were agreed to and the Bill was read a third time without a division, but after an earnest protest from Mr. Belloc against putting into practice the speculations of a certain school of criminologists, and increasing the sufferings of prisoners by adding the element of anxiety. The Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords without a division on December

10, the Primate cordially welcoming it as a hopeful experiment and, after some further Ministerial amendment, it became law.

The Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill, which had been amended in the Standing Committee, had been discussed on Report on December 9, 10 and 11, and had aroused much opposition, not among Unionists alone. On a destructive amendment, moved by Viscount Castlereagh (Maidstone), Mr. Balfour predicted a great rise in the price of coal, and asked the Labour members whether the miners would acquiesce in a reduction of wages, whether where they now worked six and a half hours they would work eight, and whether they realised the impending restriction on their freedom. The Home Secretary promised further amendments, and apprehended no great rise in price and no great decrease in accidents; Mr. Keir Hardie contended that the Bill would increase both safety and output, and the amendment was rejected by 267 to 94. Next day unavailing attempts were made to modify the Bill, by limiting the eight hours to actual working time, by excluding intervals of rest, and by making the time forty-eight hours per week (so as to admit of a week-end holiday); and Mr. Ridsdale (Brighton) moved an amendment permitting contracting-out, which was eventually rejected by 232 to 55 after a long discussion. On the day following there were also long debates, chiefly as to the length of the period during which the windings should not be counted in the eight hours. Originally five years, the Standing Committee had made it three, and the Home Secretary, on December 9, had announced his intention to make it five again. Mr. Beck (Wisbech, Cambs) now moved an amendment which would have left the decision to a future Parliament, and it was argued that the inclusion of the windings would cause their speed to be dangerously increased, and that the treatment of the matter by the Government must disturb the industry. Mr. Samuel, however, explained that during the five years arrangements obviating danger could be made in the winding machinery, and the amendment was rejected by 207 to 50. A proposal by Mr. Russell Rea (Gloucester) to reach the eight-hour day by three stages instead of two as proposed by the Government was resisted by Ministers and also by Mr. Balfour and rejected; and the exclusion of the two windings for five years instead of three was carried by 240 to 47. A Government amendment was also inserted, giving mineowners in Northumberland and Durham six months in which to adjust their undertakings to the new conditions. A number of other amendments were discussed, and the Bill occupied the House for nearly ten hours. It was read a third time on December 14. Meetings of protest had been held on that day by the Coal Consumers' League and the London Chamber of Commerce, at which alarming predictions were made as to its effects on the railways, the price of gas, and manufacture. Mr. Gladstone, Home Secretary, in moving the second reading, remarked that