Government regarded it as too sweeping, but would push on the Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill.

66

Inside the House of Commons the position of the Ministry had not on the whole been weakened during the first six weeks of the session. Outside, however, difficulties were multiplying. The Prime Minister had been taken ill with influenza on February 15; his illness continued, and early in March was generally understood to be increasingly serious; and this naturally added an element of uncertainty to the prospects of the Government. The attacks on the Licensing Bill were multiplying, at public meetings, in the daily papers, and in mural literature; and much stress was laid, not only on the insecurity of property generally which was alleged to be likely to result from its confiscatory" provisions, but on the financial effect on insurance companies and banks, who were known to have invested largely in the better classes of brewery stocks. Great stress was laid on this point at a meeting of brewery debenture holders at Cannon Street on March 19, which was addressed by Lord Rothschild, Lord Avebury, the Earl of Halsbury, and other eminent persons. Other attacks, however, were sometimes so extravagant as to defeat their own object, especially the threats of retaliation on the Church for the action of some of the Clergy and Bishops. In Surrey and elsewhere there were threats that subscriptions would be withdrawn from Church charities; a brewing firm found itself unable to subscribe as usual to a school treat; a private gentleman publicly announced his refusal to contribute to the endowment of a missionary bishopric. The Central Council of the Church of England Temperance Society on March 17 had supported the measure, reserving the possibility of the extension of a timelimit, and demanding stricter regulation of clubs; but from the Episcopate downwards, clerical opinion was divided, the Bishops of Manchester, Chichester, and Lichfield and Canon Knox-Little declaring against the Bill. A serious labour dispute, or group of disputes, in the shipbuilding trade on the North-East coast, though not involving political considerations, was a potential element of difficulty, and had not been settled by the conciliatory suggestions of the Board of Trade. The Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill, introduced on February 20, had alarmed the railway and manufacturing interests, whose fears were expressed by an influential deputation to the Home Secretary on March 26, representing the consumers of 70,000,000 tons yearly; and were propagated in the constituencies by a Coal Consumers' League.

Inside the House another ground of attack was found by Mr. Lyttelton, when the Consolidated Fund Bill came up for third reading on March 23, in the sanction on December 31, 1907, of the renewal of the Chinese Labour Ordinance in the previous August. He referred to the speeches of Mr. Churchhill and Mr. Asquith on the Address in 1906 (ANNUAL REGIS

TER, 1906, pp. 24, 25, 200) and of various supporters of the Government; and charged the latter with having gone behind Parliament, broken their pledges, and sanctioned the revival of the conditions they had denounced. Mr. Churchill, in reply, admitted that there had been some exaggeration in the language used about Chinese labour, but declared that the Transvaal Government had made noble efforts to get rid of it; by the end of the year not more than 10,000 Chinese would be in the country, and by the end of 1907 none. The ordinance sanctioned was to aid in the ending of Chinese labour. He carefully contrasted the position of the African and the Chinaman in the mines; and declared that the death rate among the former, 18 per 1,000 in 1903, was but 32 per 1,000 in 1908. Mr. Bonar Law contended that Mr. Churchill had evaded the charge made. Mr. Asquith had promised that the Government would prevent any attempt by the Transvaal Government to keep the Chinese under conditions like those of the Unionist Government's ordinance, and had not done so. The Chancellor of the Exchequer warmly repudiated this charge, and declared that the system could not be ended at once; slavery in the West Indies had been "liquidated" by a system of apprenticeship; his pledge was that the Government would veto any attempt to retain Chinese labour under servile conditions as part of the institutions of the Transvaal, and so they would. Mr. Balfour contended that there had been fresh labour legislation on the old lines, and urged the Government to produce the correspondence; but the attack was repudiated by those advanced Liberals who had said most against Chinese labour, and no division was taken.

Mr. Bonar Law had made much of this charge in a speech delivered during the election contest at Peckham; and the victory of the Unionist, Mr. H. C. Gooch, on March 24, seemed at first to be a serious blow to the Government. A Liberal majority of 2,339 at the general election had now become a Unionist majority of 2,494. A number of independent organisations, among them the Sporting League, the Coal Consumers' League, and the Tariff Reform League, gave their assistance to the Unionist candidate, who was, oddly enough, both a total abstainer himself and the brother of a Liberal member of the House; the licensed victuallers were equally active in his support; and these outside helpers were not technically his agents, so that corrupt practices were facilitated. Money was poured into the constituency, there were almost as many canvassers as electors, and posters and pictorial appeals had never been so numerous. On their own account, the militant women suffragists had actively opposed the Liberal candidate. The borough, just before the declaration of the poll, was like a huge fair; crowds had poured in from all parts of London and the scenes which followed recalled those of "Mafeking night" in 1900. Calmly considered, the victory was not so significant as it

seemed, for the late member had been the first Liberal representative of the borough, which had preferred him to Sir Frederick Banbury partly because the latter had opposed the tramway over Westminster Bridge. The excesses of the liquor interests, which the Morning Post reprobated, stiffened the Liberal and temperance interests in their support of the Bill against the power of the trade. This position was emphasised by Mr. Lloyd-George at a crowded meeting held by the United Kingdom Alliance at Queen's Hall on March 26. The drink traffic, he said, was a national evil, and the election showed the progress of the demoralisation. He ridiculed the appeals to public compassion for widows and orphans who were said to hold brewery stock, pointing out that 50,000,000l. of its inflated value was gone before the Bill was introduced; eulogised the attitude of the Primate, and made it clear that the Government had staked their existence on the Bill. There was much interruption from women suffragists as well as from sympathisers with the trade.

Though Peckham was claimed as a Tariff Reform victory, the early success of that cause continued to be jeopardised by the excessive zeal of the "Confederates " (p. 3), who were stated by Lord Hugh Cecil in The Times of March 19 to be opposing the re-election of twenty-five sitting Unionist members whose fiscal views did not satisfy them. This statement was borne out by reports from Norwood, Hitchin, Nottingham and East Marylebone. In the division last-named Lord Robert Cecil protected himself by a pledge that, if elected, he would resign and take the opinion of his constituents on any Ministerial measure of Tariff Reform. The Associated Chambers of Commerce at its annual meeting on March 17 carried a resolution favouring Tariff Reform and Colonial Preference by forty chambers to thirty, with thirty-one neutral. The Free-Traders, meanwhile, were active; and Lord Cromer, speaking at Manchester on March 24, illustrated the dangers of retaliation and tariff war, and argued that a protective policy would increase rather than diminish unemployment. This last position was combated on the same evening in the House of Commons, where Mr. Goulding (Worcester) moved a resolution recommending Tariff Reform as a remedy for unemployment. He laid stress on the greater prevalence of the latter evil in England than in Germany, and cited cases in which it was due to foreign competition. Mr. Fletcher (Hampstead) seconded the resolution. Mr. Lloyd-George had only a few minutes to reply; he was able to mention that 45,000 men were out of work in Berlin and 34 per cent. of the workmen of New York, but his speech was interrupted by a tumultuous demonstration on the news of the Peckham election, and the debate stood adjourned. On March 31, however, the controversy was renewed on a resolution moved by Mr. Mond (Chester) condemning the proposal to "broaden the basis of taxation" by imposing small duties on a variety of

[MARCH articles. The mover declared that indirect taxation was unsound and its results were illusory; and dwelt on the inconveniences and cost of the proposed system. Mr. Hills (Durham) put the Tariff Reformers' case ably, declaring that "broadening" meant taxation according to ability to pay; Mr. Harold Cox (Preston) insisted that this result could only be secured by the income tax, which it would be a great moral gain to extend downwards. The debate, however, derived its chief interest from a speech by Mr. Balfour, who, after making various dialectical points, and scouting the idea of an extended income tax, urged that India and Egypt got their revenue from small duties on imports, and declared that we could not meet our engagements out of existing taxation. The only possible sources of increase were Customs duties, which he advocated on financial grounds alone, but which he should doubly welcome if they led to those arrangements with the Colonies to which he personally looked forward as a source of strength to the Empire. Mr. Runciman, Secretary to the Board of Trade, who had only six minutes to wind up the debate, pointed out that Mr. Balfour was now committed to a general tariff (which the Opposition leader, however, disputed), to Colonial preference, and to taxes on food. The Liberal party viewed his plunge with the utmost satisfaction. After repeating the objections to a general tariff, Mr. Runciman contrasted the financial position of England and Germany; and the resolution was carried by 280 to 91.

The controversy between the Liberals and the Lords had meanwhile been somewhat mitigated by the second reading of the Land Values (Scotland) Bill on Thursday, March 27, after two days' debate. Lord Herschell, who was in charge of the Bill, described it as simply a necessary preliminary to rating reform. He gave figures indicating that the expense would be slight, and that the Exchequer might contribute. Viscount Ridley moved the rejection of the Bill, and Viscount St. Aldwyn, after an exhaustive examination, condemned it, as did other Peers, as coming from sources tainted by the doctrines of land nationalisation. The Lord Chancellor, however, repudiated such imputations, declaring that under the present system overcrowding was inevitable, and that the Bill was preliminary to possible palliatives. Lord Balfour of Burleigh desired to get the Bill into Committee for closer examination, and that course was adopted on the advice of the Marquess of Lansdowne, who said that the measure had been introduced in a spirit different from and more conciliatory than that of the previous year.

The death of the Duke of Devonshire on March 24 from pneumonia at Cannes, after some months' illness, was a serious loss to the Free-Trade Unionists, and to English public life generally. In the House of Lords, which adjourned as a mark of respect, eloquent tributes were paid by the Marquess of Ripon, the Marquess of Lansdowne, and the Earl of Rosebery to his

integrity, his patriotism, his fearlessness, sincerity and cool judgment. The Earl of Rosebery characterised him as "one of the great reserve forces of the country," a man who spoke with exceptional "previous anguish and misery at the time," but whose speeches were read as those of no other private person, for their close argument and reasoning power.

In the Commons Mr. Asquith described the Duke as having won the highest confidence of all sections of public opinion by a life of single-minded devotion to duty, and referred to his inflexible courage and his tranquil indifference to praise or blame. Mr. Balfour spoke of him as the most persuasive speaker he had known, because he never attempted to conceal the strength of the case against him, and in speaking revealed the mental processes which had led him to his conclusion.

The Army (Annual) Bill passed its final stages in the Commons on March 25, without any such conflicts as had sometimes arisen on it in former years; and, as a prelude to the coming Home Rule debate, a resolution condemning the cost of administration of Ireland was moved next day by Mr. Kettle (Tyrone, S.). After emphasizing the old grievance of the overtaxation of Ireland, he complained that repressive agencies were overstaffed and overpaid, while developing agencies were starved. The remedy, of course, he found in Home Rule. His views were endorsed by Mr. T. W. Russell, Vice-President of the Board of Agriculture and Technical Education, and on the whole by Mr. Birrell, who said that Ireland, like a poor man with rich relatives, suffered from association with wealthy England. He defended the Administration, however, from the charges of extravagance, and declared that it was free from any trace of corruption. Cattle-driving had necessitated the increase of the police force. Mr. Wyndham argued that Unionist policy would save money on the police which would be available for development; and, in view of the coming resolution on Home Rule, no division was taken.

This resolution, which had relieved the debate on the address of an amendment, had been postponed when Mr. Birrell was seized with influenza; and it subsequently became known that, but for the postponement, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman would have risen from his sick-bed to support it, at the risk of his life. It was moved by Mr. John Redmond on Monday, March 30, in a crowded House. It denounced the existing system of Irish government as inefficient, costly, and universally unpopular in Ireland; demanded reform as vital to Ireland and beneficial to Great Britain, and asserted that the solution lay in giving to the Irish people the full executive and legislative control of all purely Irish affairs. The situation, Mr. Redmond said, required clearing up; there was a large majority of Liberals and Home Rulers, but many of them, and the present Ministry collectively (though not the Prime Minister), were pledged not to deal with the question during the existing