areas, especially in Belfast, where there have been conflicts in the shipyards arising out of political disturbances between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

MR. DEVLIN said no Catholic would touch the special constabulary with a forty-foot pole. He denounced the shipyard boycott of workmen (one cause of recent trouble) as a pogrom instituted not because the men were murderers, or Sinn Feiners, but because they were Catholics, and because they were "Labour men with progressive ideas and enlightening influence who were luring the ignorant followers of Sir Edward Carson from the darkness of their economic and industrial environment."

The adjournment motion was talked out. SIR HAMAR GREENWOOD made light of the case presented by the Nationalist Members. Since the last debate, "when the House carried by a very large majority a motion in favour of the policy of the Government" (the figures of the reliable majority are a great comfort to hard-pressed Coalition Ministers), these, he said, were the hard and cruel facts" of Irish disturbances:

"Three soldiers killed and eight wounded, eleven Royal Irish Constabulary murdered and twelve wounded, three civilians murdered and three wounded, three sentries fired at, three police barracks destroyed, and two different servants of the Crown fired at or their homes destroyed. The policy of the Government has succeeded, and succeeded rapidly. The total number of outrages has rapidly decreased. The issue is now between the assassins of the Irish Republican Army and the British Government." (House of Commons, October 25th, 1920.)

In the Lords.

In the House of Lords (October 20th) a debate was raised by LORD CREWE, who asked for information as to the "careful enquiries" that the Prime Minister had said at Carnarvon were being made about "reprisals," and also urged an enquiry by a Parliamentary Committee.

LORD CURZON adopted the Government line of discounting the accounts of reprisals in the newspapers, emphasising the tale of outrages that had preceded the reprisals, professing that the Government were pursuing fearlessly and continuously adequate enquiry into all cases, and point-blank refusing any enquiry by a Parliamentary Committee.

IX.-FACTS AND FIGURES,

The Lord Mayor of Cork.

The Lord Mayor of Cork, Mr. Terence McSwiney, M.P., died in Brixton Gaol on October 25th, on the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike. The story of his conviction by a court-martial and of the appeals made in vain to the Government to release him is told in the MAGAZINE for October at page 528.

Outrages Attributed to Sinn Fein.

607

Between January 1st, 1919, and October 18th, 1920, over 5,000 outrages were attributed to Sinn Fein revolutionaries. Lord Curzon gave the following list in the House of Lords on October 20th :—

Courthouses destroyed, 64; Royal Irish Constabulary vacated barracks destroyed, 492; similar barracks damaged, 114; Royal Irish Constabulary occupied barracks destroyed, 21; similar barracks damaged, 48; raids on mails, 741; raids on coastguard stations and lighthouses 40; raids for arms, 2,876; policemen killed, 117; policemen wounded, 185; military killed, 23; military wounded, 71; civilians killed, 32; civilians wounded, 83; private residences of loyal citizens destroyed, 148.

Military Expenditure in Ireland.

"The strength of the military force is about 49,000; and the cost about £1,150,000 a month. It must be understood, however, that practically all the military forces in Ireland are part of the regular standing army of the United Kingdom, and that the cost of keeping them in Ireland is in most respects no greater than that of keeping them elsewhere. Additional expenditure arises chiefly from the cost of mechanical transport and certain additional stores and the employment of additional officers, but these expenses are slight in proportion to the general Army Estimates."—(MR. CHURCHILL, House of Commons, October 26th, 1920.)

X-SIR DONALD MACLEAN.

In a speech at Bonnyrigg, on October 4th, SIR DONALD MACLEAN, speaking on the Irish situation, said:

:

"It was a huge uprising of the vast majority of the people of that country against government by the British people. However much we disliked it, there was not the least use our attempting to minimise that obvious and dangerous fact. As far as his opinion was worth anything, the present Bill which was passing through the House of Commons was of no use. It was a futile attempt to deal with this overmastering problem, and they must make a clean, fresh start. He wanted to make it clear that it was not possible for this country to allow Ireland to become a separate independent Republic. That was his view and deep conviction. But Lord Grey started from that basis, and he said since British views had been uniformly rejected in Ireland let Irishmen themselves tell us how they wanted their country to be governed, leaving out the exception to which he had just referred. With that fundamental position which Lord Grey took up, and starting from that, he thought it was possible in time for a solution to be found. Murder and outrage never brought to a successful conclusion any cause, however good it might be, and Irishmen would do well to remember that in spite of the sympathy and understanding which those who believed in Irish selfgovernment had shown for many years, they were deeply shocked at the murders and outrages that were going on.

LIBERALISM

OR

COALITION?

NOTES AND FIGURES.

MR. LLOYD GEORGE once again professed his loyalty to Liberalism by attending the annual meeting of the Welsh National Liberal Council, of which he has long been the President, at Llandudno, on October 8th. He addressed the delegates present as "Welsh Fellow Liberals," and thanked them for the confidence they had extended to him—a confidence, he said, that "meant strong support in the greatest trials that any man was ever put through. He touched upon the .differences within the Liberal Party concerning himself:

I regret from the bottom of my heart that I was not fortunate enough to secure the same confidence from all Liberals. I viewed that suspicion with a bewildered pain; let me own it. I never could understand, I could only feel it had nothing to do with Liberalism. It was not only in the election of 1918. When I was engaged with all my energies in directing the war, having no thought for anything else I had the same suspicion from the same quarters, with the same bitterness, the same unreason. I regret it."

Having said so much, he entered on a long defence of the Coalition, on lines that are now familiar. The next day MR. LLOYD GEORGE addressed his "Welsh Fellow Liberals on the question of Ireland, and about that speech, summarised on another page, the Times said (October 11th): "On Friday he spoke as a professed Liberal to fellow Liberals. On Saturday he shed his Liberal disguise and stood forth as the apologist for lawless reprisals by the armed forces of the Crown, against the lawlessness of a murder gang. This attitude seems to us the sheer negation of Liberalism.”

The Coalition apologists frequently pretend that there is no difference in policy or principle between Liberalism and the Coalition. It always was an idle pretence, and MR. LLOYD GEORGE's speech at Carnarvon makes it no longer available. MR. ASQUITH, at Ayr, pointed out quite definitely how utterly irreconcilable the Coalition policy in Ireland is with anything that can be called Liberalism. Referring to Mr. Lloyd George's speech, he said :

"If there were, or if there are, any among you who still cling to the belief that the policy of the Coalition Government is animated by the spirit or by the ideals of Liberalism, then the temper and the substance of these authoritative pronouncements of its head, on a crucial question of high policy, ought finally to dissipate for ever such a fantastic and dangerous delusion."

The Welsh National Liberal Council, which Mr. Lloyd George addressed at Llandudno, was not quite so unanimous about the virtues of the Coalition as the organisers of the meeting had probably hoped for. Mr. Lloyd George is President of the Council, but while his speech was an oratorical defence and justfication of Coalitions, it was significant that the resolution called for no verdict or signal of confidence in the Coalition, but only in Mr. Lloyd George.

Nevertheless, the Coalition did not escape criticism, for among those on the platform was Mr. Llewelyn Williams, K.C., an ardent champion of Independent Liberalism, who roundly charged the Government with having contravened Liberal principles. He cited four specific cases the re-endowment of the Church in Wales, the abolition of land value taxes, the Anti-Dumping Bill, and Ireland. How much further this criticism would have gone if the delegates had been free from voucher restrictions it is impossible to say. One of them, Mr. Thomas Waterhouse, of Holywell, tells a curious story of the means taken to ensure that in the election of the Executive Committee only the right men (from a Coalition standpoint) should be chosen :

"Each county or district association was taken in alphabetical order, and the name of the present representative announced by the Secretary. In most cases the sitting member was re-elected, but where a vacancy had occurred, or the sitting member had failed to put in any attendances, the delegates were allowed to propose other names; but whenever names were proposed which were not personally known to the officials on the platform the proposer was asked by the Chairman whether the nominee was a supporter of the President, the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George. every case where this point was in doubt the name was immediately dropped in favour of another nominee whose loyalty to the person of the President was beyond dispute.

In

The Chairman, it is stated, said in conversation that he had acted as the mouthpiece of the Executive, and under their instructions. The method of election is certainly the most curious of which we have heard for obtaining a body representative of Liberalism.

At Ayr the Coalition organisers were unable to pack either the meetings or the programme of the Scottish Liberal Federation meetings. Nevertheless they tried to win approval for the Coalition, and moved a vote of confidence in the Government. It was rejected by 150 votes to 31.

During the month the Liberal case as against the Coalition case has been vigorously placed before many gatherings of Liberals in all parts of the country. Mr. Asquith, Sir Donald Maclean, the joint Liberal Whips, Mr. Thorne and Mr. Hogge, and others of their colleagues in and out of Parliament, including Captain Wedgwood Benn, Sir John Simon, Mr. Runciman, have undertaken much platform work, and have found everywhere a rising tide of Liberalism sweeping over all the areas that were Coalitionist a couple of years ago. MR. ASQUITH, at Ayr, took up Mr. Lloyd George's sneer at "little party allotments, well fenced with barbed wire, where we grew our political programmes for the market.' He resented this" perverse and degraded" conception of politics:

"Can you conceive of a more grotesquely perverse and degraded conception of politics than that when we were fighting for Free Trade, the greatest controversial struggle of our time; when we were fighting for old age pensions, and, let me add, for the taxation of land values, for the great historic Budget of 1909, when we largely convulsed the kingdom, fought the House of Lords, fighting as we believed and certainly were

told a great issue of national importance-are we to be told now, and are we to believe on the authority of one of the great actors and manipulators of the whole business, that we were simply growing a political programme for the market? It was a gross perversion of the truth."

Mr. Asquith pleaded urgently for a return to the honest, straightforward, open ground of party controversy. All the greatest political thinkers of our race, he said, admitted the imperfections, very possibly the drawbacks, of our party system, but they found in it on the whole the best expedient that the genius of our race has devised for the ordered progress of a free people.

LIBERAL

HESITATION ABOUT
DOMINION
HOME RULE.

The fact that MR. ASQUITH's plan for Dominion Home Rule differed from the solution suggested by Lord Grey, and that Sir Donald Maclean hesitated about the proposal to give Ireland a free hand in the naval matters, was seized upon with glee by Unionist and ultra-Coalitionist critics. "Ha! ha!" they cried, in effect, "here is a pretty split in the Liberal camp." They became gleeful too quickly. Mr. Asquith promptly disposed of any idea of a genuine difference of opinion becoming the basis of a split of the character hoped for. In his speech at Ayr, Mr. Asquith specifically referred to the differences between himself and his two distinguished friends. Concerning Lord Grey, he said:

"Let me say here, in view of the attempts which are made to invent or to magnify differences between us, that Lord Grey and I are in perfect sympathy in regard to the whole line and spirit of the policy which we think ought to be pursued, and I do not think he will differ from me when I say that when we come to thresh out its details we should find there was something like pretty complete accord between us." And when he was discussing the naval item in his plan, he took into account "the doubts of many friends and political associates of mine, for whose opinion I have great respect. Here he mentioned by name Sir Donald Maclean :·-

"I see on the platform to-night my friend Sir Donald Maclean. There are no two people in politics-I say this after long experience who have ever worked together under conditions of exceptional difficulty of the most testing and trying character in more complete accord, in more perfect sympathy, and, I will add, with more undiminished affection and respect than Sir Donald Maclean and myself. The enemy is not going to sow any tares in that field. No one in or out of the House can forget the magnificent services Sir Donald Maclean rendered when, alone or almost alone, he upheld the Liberal banner. We are not going to try the plan of excommunicating each other from the Liberal Church."

Our friends the enemy are welcome to all the Coalition capital they can make out of this matter. For ourselves we find the frank acknowledgement of the differences rare and refreshing fruit in days when it is rather the fashion to smother up differences of opinion in order artificially to prolong the life of the Coalition.