and these saw to it that the strike menace should be carried out, little as this was desired by those who launched it. The negotiations which had been adjourned on the night of Saturday, May 1, were resumed on the Sunday evening. They proceeded amicably, and at one point bade fair to be successful. Mr. Baldwin ignored the strike threat and presented a formula which the Trade Union delegates considered promising. While, however, they were discussing it among themselves in another room, the Premier, after consultation with some of his colleagues, completely changed his attitude. About 11.30 P.M. he transmitted to the delegates a letter stating that it had come to his knowledge that strike notices had been sent out and that certain overt acts of insubordination had already been committed, and informing them that negotiations could not be resumed until the strike notices were unconditionally withdrawn. When the delegates came soon after to his room to expostulate, they found that he had already retired, and that they could not see him any more that night. The act of insubordination " to which the Premier referred turned out to be the refusal of some compositors of the Daily Mail to set up in type certain sentences which they considered insulting to the workers obviously a wholly inadequate excuse for breaking off negotiations. 66 Up to this point Parliament had not directly concerned itself with the coal dispute. Since resuming its sittings after the Easter recess, it had been occupied chiefly with the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Economy Bill and the Budget. The Committee stage of the Economy Bill was resumed immediately after Parliament reassembled, on April 13. The first item to be debated was the proposal to transfer 1,100,000l. from the Navy, Army, and Air Insurance Force to the Exchequer. Member after member from the Opposition benches, with great indignation, denounced this step as "robbery," and the Government was challenged to find a single private Conservative member who would speak in favour of it. But, as Mr. Churchill said of his followers in a subsequent debate on the Bill, "their deeds spoke louder than their words," and whatever may have been their opinion on the merits of the proposal, they gave the Government its usual majority. The other proposals, especially the one to reduce the Government contribution to health insurance, gave rise to protracted debates which more than once were continued through the whole of the night. The tone and manner of Mr. N. Chamberlain, who conducted this stage on behalf of the Government, gave great offence to the Labour members, to whom he seemed unnecessarily dictatorial and insulting, and their exasperation reached a climax when, in the early hours of April 15, he interrupted a speech of Mr. Wheatley to move the closure. In order to show their indignation thirteen Labour members adopted a novel method of obstruction. At 5.40 A.M. Mr. Thomas moved to report progress, and a division was taken. Having gone into the division lobby, these members refused to pass the tellers, who were thus unable to announce the result of the division. By this device the House was reduced to inaction for a considerable time. At length the Chairman of Committees, Mr. Hope, called in the Speaker, and Mr. Chamberlain moved the suspension of the obstructing members amid great tumult on the part of the Labour Party. The suspension was carried by 163 votes to 76, and the debate was then continued after an interruption of nearly two hours, and went on till nine o'clock in the morning. When the debate was resumed later in the day, protests were immediately made by certain Labour members, but without avail, against Mr. Hope's occupying the Chair. As the debate proceeded, Labour members repeatedly found occasion to charge the Chairman with unfairness, and at length, after one rather violent application of the closure, Mr. Thomas informed him that he intended, in due course, to ask the House to censure his " partial and biased conduct." Throughout the debate the Liberal and Labour Parties showed unusually close co-operation in opposition, and moved innumerable amendments, but all their efforts. to modify the Bill were overborne by the solid, if silent, phalanx of the Government's supporters. 66 In moving the third reading of the Economy Bill on April 22, Sir Kingsley Wood, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Health, after having heard all the Opposition's objections to the health insurance proposals, repeated the Government's justification, that the approved societies were flourishing and would suffer no harm from the reductions in the Government's contribution. Mr. Lloyd George made another vehement attack on the Bill which greatly delighted the Labour Party as well as his own followers, prophesying that the Government would regret what it was doing when it came to take the verdict of the constituencies. Mr. Churchill answered in a defiant tone. He maintained that in the light of the majority report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance the Government had a perfect right to act as it had done, and, with scant regard for the feelings of his own followers, pointed out triumphantly that it was spending several millions a year more on education and the social services than its predecessor. Conservative members again loyally supported the Government, and the third reading was carried by 326 votes to 138. On the day previous to this debate, the House of Commons had considered Mr. Thurtle's "hardy annual" proposal to abolish the death penalty in the Army for cowardice and desertion, brought forward as an amendment to the annual Army and Air Force Bill. The proposal, after a spirited debate, was rejected by almost the same numbers as in the previous year-269 against 123. Other proposals made in the debate on the same Bill were one from the Labour benches, that the military should not be used in connexion with trade disputes, and one from the Conservative side that rigorous measures should be taken to suppress revolutionary propaganda in Great Britain. The former was rejected by 283 votes to 103; the latter, with which the Home Secretary declared himself in sympathy, so far as the Communist Party was concerned, was "talked out." About this time two Bills dealing with important social problems were introduced by private members, and were adopted with some qualification by the Government as part of its legislative programme. One was a Bill for checking abuses on the part of money-lenders, to which the House of Commons gave a second reading on April 23. A somewhat different Bill with a similar title and purpose had just been passed by the House of Lords. It had been prepared and moved by Lord Carson, who, as he had explained, had been led to take up the matter by the fact that a relative of his own had got into trouble with moneylenders and had come to him for assistance. The Bill now introduced in the House of Commons by Major Glyn was not identical with that of Lord Carson, but contained a number of changes suggested by a committee of members of Parliament presided over by Lord Darling to which it had been submitted for consideration. In its new form it provided that a money-lender must obtain a licence after having first obtained a certificate. The annual fee for a licence would be 15l. The Bill prohibited the distribution of money-lenders' circulars unless the would-be borrower first made application for the information contained in them, and advertisements were to be illegal except a short statement in a newspaper which must include the money-lender's real name. The Bill aimed chiefly at checking the malpractices of two classes of money-lenders-the so-called West End sharks, and the slum lenders who charged a penny on a shilling weekly interest to the very poor. The Home Secretary stated that the Government supported the general provisions of the Bill; the Home Office had, in fact, assisted in framing it. He was glad that a clause originally contained in the Bill empowering the Post Office to open letters had been dropped, as he was strongly opposed to any extension of the power of dealing with private correspondence. The Government, he said, regarded this as a measure that had long been needed, and would do its utmost to assist its passage into law. The other Bill, called the Judicial Proceedings Bill, had for its object to regulate the publication of reports of judicial proceedings in such manner as to prevent injury to public morals." The Bill was particularly aimed at reports of divorce proceedings, as given in a certain class of newspapers, especially the Sunday Press. The evil had been pointed out as far back as 1912 by the Divorce Commission, but since then the Press had failed to reform itself, and the mover of the Bill, Major Kindersley, thought that the time had come to strengthen the law on the lines suggested by the Royal Commission. He accordingly proposed that the publication of all details of divorce and similar proceedings beyond a bare minimum of information should be made illegal. The Home Secretary stated that he had been in touch with the Newspaper Proprietors' Association on the subject, and that body was of opinion that there was no half-way house between reporting cases as at present and having them taken in camera. If that view was correct, the position was serious, as the Government could not think of allowing cases to be tried in camera, as was done in other countries, publicity being an essential safeguard for liberty. The Government, however, was not bound to follow the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, and he therefore recommended the House to support the Bill, and promised to find time for its further stages. In the division only three members voted against the second reading. On April 26 Mr. Churchill introduced his second Budget in a clear and business-like speech which, unlike that of the previous year, kept closely to the subject in hand, without any digressions or excursuses. Reviewing the results of the year just closed, he pointed out that the Customs and Excise returns showed the consuming power of the people to be increasing faster than the population, but not very rapidly nor to such an extent as might have been expected in view of the generally improved conditions. The most marked increase had been in sugar; owing to the large reduction in the sugar tax effected by Mr. Snowden and exceptionally cheap world prices, the consumption of that commodity had last year for the first time been larger than before the war. Home-grown sugar had played its part in this expansion; it had cost the Exchequer 2,750,000l. in subsidy and a loss of revenue of over 500,000l., but it was expected to produce next year over 130,000 tons. It would seem, remarked the Chancellor, that the immense sums paid by the National Exchequer in social services for the mass of the people had tended to average the effect of good and bad times so far as Customs and Excise revenue was concerned, and they had to look forward to much fewer fluctuations in that revenue than in the past. The Inland Revenue returns also showed the country to be richer that day than twelve months before. Important sections of the trade of the country were in an extremely prosperous condition, and very large profits had been made in rubber and other important commodities. The basic industries, those which employed the largest number of workpeople, were still in a very depressed condition, but on the whole the dark patches in the picture were less prominent this year than last. At this point Mr. Churchill warned his hearers that the Revenue returns were not so satisfactory as appeared on the surface. They might, it was true, expect reparation payments (which this year amounted to over 10,000,000l.) and payment of war debts to swell the revenue in future years also, but certain special receipts which had played a large part in their finance would henceforth undergo heavy diminution. He had to count this year on this head alone on 11,000,000l. less than was yielded in the previous year; and this was not counterbalanced by any automatic growth in the yield of income tax. Expenditure, on the other hand, tended to expand automatically as the result of commitments already entered into. There would this year be an increase of this character of some 19,000,000l., of which the chief items were 5,750,000l. for the new old-age pensions; 1,250,000l. additional for the original old-age pensions; 3,250,000l. for the new cruiser programme; 1,100,000l. for increased education grants; 750,000l. increase in health and housing grants; nearly 1,000,0007. for increased cost of the beet-sugar subsidy; 500,000l. for Empire marketing; 370,000l. for steel houses; and 300,000l. for war graves. Yet by means of reductions in the national administrative services of 7,000,000l., and by reduction of the floating debt, he hoped to compress the whole of this 19,000,000l. of additional expenditure into the total of last year. This result, he thought, justified the time and labour which had been spent on the economy campaign, but it was obvious that further continuous effort was needed, and he was authorised by the Prime Minister to say that the Cabinet Committee on Economy would pursue its work unceasingly, and inculcate upon all branches of the public services the extreme necessity of saving money in every possible way. With this object in view, also, the estimates of the three fighting services would be considered jointly. Nor did the Government intend to renew the Trade Facilities Act, having reached the conclusion that it had exhausted its usefulness. Mr. Churchill paused at this point to consider the effect on the revenue and the country's trade of the three most contentious provisions of the previous year's Budget-the restoration of the gold standard, the silk duties, and the reimposed McKenna duties. The first of these measures, he held, had produced many solid advantages. The dollar exchange had returned to parity, which meant a great saving on their purchases from the United States and on their war debt to that country. The Bank rate had not risen and there had been no sensational exodus of gold, while the cost of living had declined seven points. Above all, as a result of reckoning in gold, they now stood on a basis of reality. The silk tax had been productive without reducing the profits of the manufacturers or raising the price to the consumer, though he admitted that perhaps the Government had intercepted a reduction which otherwise would have reached the consumer. Similarly with the reimposed McKenna duties: they had produced |