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number of people like to take their sport in the form of destroying something; the vast majority (including the speaker) prefer cultivation to destruction. Some like blood; others prefer bloom * [our italics]. The former is considered a more high-class taste ; but so few of us can afford to belong to that exalted order-they must be content with such humble pleasures as flower gardens and vegetable patches and fruit bushes can afford them." This division of the community can scarcely be agreeable to the speaker's colleagues, some of whom may conceivably prefer bloom to blood, but we can hardly imagine the Prime Minister sitting at home on a vegetable patch, watching his flowers and his fruit; rather do we think of him like his Chancellor of the Exchequer "scorching" through the country in a motor-car to the total destruction of all bloom within several miles of his wild career or roaming over spacious golf links, where flowers and fruit and vegetables have been ruthlessly extirpated in order that " statesmen " may ineffectually endeavour to deposit gutta-percha balls in tin holes. The Lord Chancellor as a Scotsman presumably pursues a similar avocation, which involves the sacrifice of the peasant to the caddy and is entirely incompatible with the development of Small Holdings. Of the pastimes of Messrs. McKenna, Haldane, Birrell, Burns, Runciman, &c., we know nothing; they may conceivably prefer Bloom to Blood, but equally distinguished Members of the Cabinet, if we may believe the public prints, undoubtedly prefer Blood to Bloom.

Blood v.
Bloom

THUS a few weeks ago, in spite of the protests of the Westminster Gazette at the absence of the Home Secretary from England, it was announced that Mr. Churchill would take his holiday in quest of blood in the Near East, where he was expected to slaughter unoffending quail, unseasonable snipe, or other equally harmless creatures, while only the other day it was announced in every newspaper that the same Minister had gone to Scotland on the invitation of some baronet or knight, for the single purpose of killing the mild and defenceless stag. But then Mr. Churchill, as the grandson of a duke, may have inherited corrupt traditions. There are, however, others equally bloodthirsty. There lies beside us as we write a

This priceless phrase is taken from the Daily News report so that there may be no suggestion of misrepresentation.

[graphic][merged small]

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LEWIS HARCOURT, M. P., SHOOTING AT

STANTON HARCOURT-ONE OF HIS PLACES IN OXFORDSHIRE

cherished possession, in the shape of a copy of the Daily Graphic (September 30, 1910) devoting half a page to "A Government Shooting Party." In one inset no less a person than "The Rt. Hon. Lewis Harcourt, First Commissioner of Works" is depicted changing guns in order that he may be able to kill even more birds than he could with one gun, though it might have been supposed that a professed democrat like Mr. Harcourt, whose watchword is "One man one vote," would have acted on the equally democratic principle of "One man one gun." Unfortunately the lust for blood was so strong upon him that according to the Daily Graphic he was assisted in changing guns by some menial, thus violating the following canon laid down by Mr. Lloyd George at the City Temple. "It is a common but shallow fallacy that inasmuch as these rich find employment for and pay good wages to those who personally minister to their comfort, to that extent they are rendering a service to the community. Quite the reverse. They are withdrawing a large number of capable men and women from useful and productive work." But returning to our picture, not only is Mr. Lewis Harcourt in his quest for blood withdrawing a capable man from useful and productive work-indeed we may be sure that countless unseen dependents, besides those in the foreground, were equally withdrawn from "useful and productive work" in the interests of this great shoot-but the Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, in another part of the field, also accompanied by another man with another gun, was endeavouring to kill as many partridges as he could. In order to prove that we are not romancing.we have acquired the permission of our contemporary the Sphere to reproduce one of the photographs of this same "Government Shooting Party" from its issue of October 8, which we have ventured to entitle in the "immortal words" of Mr. Lloyd George, "Blood v. Bloom."

Mr. Amery

MUCH astonishment was caused by the leading article in the Times (October 18) buttering up the "Blood v. Bloom" speech which was described as "marked by sincerity, by a moderation of tone which Mr. Lloyd George too rarely displays and by a more philosophic handling of grave social questions than we can remember him to have previously achieved." Happily, Mr. L. S. Amery

to the

Rescue

66

was at hand with an annihilating letter (Times, October 20), vividly recalling his historic performance in pulverising the famous and fatuous manifesto of the fourteen simple-minded Professors of free imports at the outset of the fiscal controversy. Mr. Amery expressed his amazement at the encomium pronounced by the Times upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer's performance, which consisted of so many columns" of shallow, mischievous and dreary claptrap," and he wondered " by what extraordinary spell the speaker can have persuaded you of his sincerity, his moderation, or his philosophy." His "sincere analysis of social waste" and his statesmanlike remedies which that analysis was intended to suggest" were undoubtedly "in our Welsh Statesman philosopher's profoundest vein." Land by the square mile was, in his happy phrase, thrown away in profligate extravagance upon stags and pheasants and partridges, while doled out with miserly greed by the foot for the habitations of men, women, and children. Of all the economic and social causes responsible for urban congestion which have put land out of cultivation and given it over to pheasant coverts, Mr. Lloyd George says nothing and apparently knows nothing, nor has he any remedy to propound. Nor has he any remedy to suggest for the grave and regrettable fact that out of three hundred million pounds that pass annually at death, about a half belongs to less than two thousand persons, while five-sixths of the four hundred and twenty thousand persons who die every year leave no property behind them. And as Mr. Amery points out, if confiscatory taxation be resorted to as a remedy with the result of driving capital over sea, it is the three hundred and fifty thousand who die annually without leaving fixed property who will be the first to suffer and not the two thousand. Another item of social waste, according to our new philosopher economist, are the idle rich and their retainers, who total two million people, though it is a mystery how that figure has been arrived at. According to the census of 1901, there were under two million domestic servants and retainers, including the servants in innumerable modest and hard-working families with one servant, the servants in lodging houses and hotels, as well as those of the more prosperous professional and commercial classes. It is doubtful whether at the outside one-twentieth of these domestics can be described as servants of the "idle rich" and

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