hon. and learned Friends have laid their finger on three points which trade unionists themselves know are their weak spots. That can be seen by the interruptions that came from the Labour benches. Those three points are: the question whether in all cases the subject of the levy is treated fairly, the question of the ballot, and the question of book-keeping. To my mind it is impossible to dissociate one of these questions from the other, and they really all hang together. The whole tradition of our country has been to let Englishmen develop their own associations in their own way, and with that I agree. But there are limits to that.

I spoke some time ago—and I spoke with a purpose—about the recognition of the change in the industrial situation in those works with which I was connected, when for the first time what was done in the way of organizing the coal strike suddenly came and hit thousands of men who had nothing to do with it and had no direct interest in it. As these associations came along and became more powerful, on whichever side they are, there may come a time when not only may they injure their own members-about which probably there would be a good deal of argument-but when they may directly injure the State. It is at that moment that any Government should say that, whatever freedom and latitude in that field may be left to any kind of association in this free country, nothing shall be done that shall injure the State, which is the concern of all of us and far greater than all of us or of our interests.

I have not very much more to say. I have just tried to put, as clearly as I can in a few words, my conviction that we are moving forward rapidly from an old state of industry into a newer, and the question is: What is that newer going to be? No man, of course, can say what form evolution is taking. Of this, however, I am quite sure, that whatever form we may see, possibly within this generation, or at any rate in the time of the next generation, it has got to be a form of pretty close partnership, however that is going to be arrived at; and it will not be a partnership the terms of which will be laid down, at any rate not yet, in Acts of Parliament, or from this party or that. It has got to be a partnership of men who understand their own work, and it is little help that they can get really either from politicians or from intellectuals. There are few men fitted to judge of and to settle and to arrange the problem that distracts the country to-day between employers and employed. There are few men qualified to intervene who have not themselves been right through the mill. I always want to see, at the head of these organizations on both sides, men who have been right through the mill, and who themselves know exactly the points where the shoe pinches, who know exactly what can be conceded and what cannot, and who can make their reasons plain; and I hope that we shall always find such men trying to steer their respective ships side by side, instead of making for head-on collisions.

Having said what I have said about that, what am I to say about the attitude of the party of which I have the honour to be the head? I do not know whether the House will forgive me if I speak for a minute or two on a rather personal note. For two years past in the face of great difficulties, perhaps greater than many were aware of, I have striven to consolidate, and to breathe a living force into, my great party. Friends of mine who have done me the honour to read my speeches during that time have seen pretty clearly, however ill they may have been expressed, the ideals at which I have been aiming. I spoke on that subject again last night at Birmingham, and I shall continue to speak on it as long as I am where I am. We find ourselves, after these two years, in power, in possession of perhaps the greatest majority our party has ever had, and with the general assent of the country. Now how did we get there? It was not by promising to bring this Bill in; it was because, rightly or wrongly, we succeeding in creating an impression throughout the country that we stood

for stable Government and for peace in the country between all classes of the community.

Those were the principles for which we fought; those were the principles on which we won; and our victory was not won entirely by the votes of our own party, splendidly as they fought. I should think that the number of Liberals who voted for us at the last Election ran into six figures, and I should think that we probably polled more Labour votes than were polled on the other side. That being so, what should our course be at the beginning of a new Parliament ? I have not myself the slightest doubt. Last year the Leader of the Labour Party, when he was Prime Minister, suspended what had been settled by the previous Government, and that was further progress for the time being on the scheme of Singapore. He did it on the ground that it was a gesture for peace, and he hoped that it would be taken as such by all the countries in the world. He hoped that a gesture of that kind might play its part in leading to what we all want to see, that is, a reduction in the world's armaments.

་་

I want my party to-day to make a gesture to the country of a similar nature, and to say to them: We have our majority; we believe in the justice of this Bill which has been brought in to-day, but we are going to withdraw our hand, and we are not going to push our political advantage home at a moment like this. Suspicion which has prevented stability in Europe is the one poison that is preventing stability at home, and we offer the country to-day this; We, at any rate, are not going to fire the first shot. We stand for peace. We stand for the removal of suspicion in the country. We want to create an atmosphere, a new atmosphere in a new Parliament for a new age, in which the people can come together. We abandon what we have laid our hands to. We know we may be called cowards for doing it. We know we may be told that we have gone back on our principles. But we believe we know what at this moment the country wants, and we believe it is for us in our strength to do what no other party can do at this moment, and to say that we at any rate stand for peace. I know, I am as confident as I can be of anything, that that will be the feeling of all those who sit behind me, and that they will accept the Amend. ment which I have put down in the spirit in which I have moved it. And I have equal confidence in my fellow-countrymen throughout the whole of Great Britain. Although I know that there are those who work for different ends from most of us in this House, yet there are many in all ranks and all parties who will re-echo my prayer:

THE

NATIONAL REVIEW

No. 507. MAY 1925

EPISODES OF THE MONTH

"WHAT did they expect?" and "Who is responsible?" are questions that irresistibly force themselves upon us as we read the alarming accounts of Europe What did they contained in the speeches of Responsible Expect? Statesmen intimately identified with British post-war policy. These questions repeat themselves when we contemplate the economic plight of England, especially in her industrial districts, which even professional optimists admit to be not in the pink of health. How could it be otherwise considering that from the hour of the Armistice the entire resources of successive British Governments have, with scarcely one lucid interval, been concentrated on producing the precise situation that now confronts us at home and abroad? It would, indeed, be a miracle if the position were different from what it is, but then some persons, especially in the higher walks of public life, are so curiously constituted that they repudiate the whole theory of cause and effect, and are thus enabled to see things as they are not. This frame of mind develops an impenetrable selfcomplacency until the moment of disaster, and then changes into amazement at something happening which they had officially scheduled as unthinkable." Amour propre, however, rapidly pulls "the great, wise, and eminent " together, and in order to save their own reputation for omniscence and infallibility they are speedily found declaring the débâcle to have been "inevitable"-no human foresight could possibly have prevented it. The classic instance of this sublime ignorance before an event staring them in the face, coupled with a subsequent claim to retrospective wisdom, is, needless to say, the pre-war performance of a

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Liberal Government that had been in office and in power for nearly nine years prior to August 1914, but was nevertheless so bewildered when the obvious occurred that not only were Ministers completely surprised by the longprepared German aggression on Belgium and France, but they had the utmost difficulty in making up what they were pleased to call their minds as to whether British intervention or neutrality were called for. The rest is history, and the politicians who conducted England the unready to the edge of the abyss have to settle with their own consciences whether they prefer to be condemned by posterity as the dupes of the enemy or as men who, in their own jargon, had" consciously betrayed a great public trust " by denying the existence of a danger they knew to be impending.

Pre-war

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WE can say nothing harsher of post-war statesmanship than that it resembles pre-war statesmanship. Indeed in several respects it is worse-morally, politically, Post-war and and in its practical effects. Our pre-war Pacifists claimed to have been animated by what their Prime Minister described as an almost morbid love of peace," and no one with any desire to be fair would for a moment contest that Mr. Asquith and his colleagues were inspired-in fact, they were dominated-by a wholehearted devotion to peace. The last thing they wanted was to become involved in war-a subject of which they knew little or nothing. This is not to excuse their Statecraft, which was all the more pitiable because they went out of their way to prevent the people who trusted them from having any inkling of what was impending. Directly the storm burst, Ministers abounded in good resolutions and never-again was the slogan most often heard on the lips of Responsible Statesmen of all Parties, though none had the grace to apologize to the nation they had misled and betrayed and that was now paying with its best blood for their ineptitude. And no sooner had the storm subsided than they set to work to discard all it had taught them and rapidly reverted to type. Like the Bourbons of old they forgot everything they ought to

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remember and only remembered what they should have forgotten. Post-war statesmanship revived every pre-war foible and added thereto several of its own invention. Before the war, war had been deemed "impossible" because inconvenient to Parliamentarians. Once it was over war became a "wash-out," and was once more relegated to the limbo of things no sensible statesman need concern himself with. Europe was, in fact, regarded as a man who having parted with his vermiform appendix could never again suffer appendicitis. As in the claptrap of the day the Great War had been "a war to end war," now that it was over there never could be another. Q.E.D. "Broadminded " statesmanship accordingly laid down that all the belligerents need do was to lick their wounds, to spare each other's feelings, to waive all claims for war costs, to reduce Reparations to a minimum, to let bygones be bygones, and thus live happily ever afterwards in the brotherhood of man under the auspices of the League of Nations.

THIS was an easy programme for a remote, unthreatened, eleventh-hour "Associate" such as U.S.A. to advise, and a possible one for an insular uninvaded Ally, Pro-Germans in such as Great Britain, to consider, but it Downing Street could not appeal to those who had been invaded and occupied, and was not applicable in the case of an enemy who had successfully kept the war abroad, and whose population had not tasted the bitterness of defeat or in any way had brought home to them the fact that they had been beaten in the field, while their psychology is such that any concession by any adversary is invariably interpreted in the Fatherland as weakness. Our public men had abundantly demonstrated their inability to understand the German problem before the war. They regarded the Germans as people like ourselves who happen to talk a different language and to live on the other side of the North Sea. During the war British statesmanship continually made the same mistake and could only be kept up to the mark in their dealings with a ruthless enemy