The brief Easter holiday was fortunately favoured by fine weather, and there was a large exodus of pleasure-seekers from the great towns; but the usual conferences of workers in various employments served mainly to exhibit the variety of the prevalent unrest. The Independent Labour party, in conference at Bradford, passed by 233 to 78 a resolution declaring Cabinet rule inimical to good government, and demanding that, in order to break it up, the Labour party should be asked to vote only in accordance with the principles for which that party stood. A report on the relations of the Liberal and Labour parties had previously been subjected to a "frank and friendly" discussion in private, but much dissatisfaction was exhibited in the debate on the resolution above given at the alleged subservience of the party to Socialism. The conference also passed a resolution in favour of uniting with the Fabian Society and the British Socialist party, originally the Social Democratic Federation; but it declined to allow its candidates to call themselves "Labour and Socialist," for fear that adherents of the moderate section would stand as "Liberal-Labour" or "Progressive Labour" candidates. The party funds were very low, and there were various indications that many working-men had lost interest in political means of reform. The speakers at the preliminary meetings, especially Mr. Snowden and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, were greatly interrupted by militant suffragists. At the Elementary Teachers' Conference a resolution favouring women's suffrage was declared outside the scope of the union, and a subsequent attempt to annul this decision was defeated amid disorder. At Conferences of postal employees, a number of grievances were ventilated.
Some of the grievances of the Civil Service were dealt with in the Report, published April 14, of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (A.R., 1912, Chron., March 14; Chairman, Lord Macdonnell). It was a strong body, containing prominent members of Parliament, leading University tutors, and women and others with special knowledge; and it issued a Majority Report, signed by the Chairman and fifteen Commissioners, and a Minority Report, signed by three, but qualifying rather than diverging widely from the views of the majority. The Commission had still to examine the Foreign Office, the Diplomatic Service, and the legal departments. Briefly, the majority recommended that, as to patronage, when an appointment was made from outside the Service, the reasons for it and the history of the candidate should be given; the general control of the Service should be exercised by a new special department within the Treasury; the existing five classes should be replaced by three, the First Division being called "Administrative" and recruited as before; the method of appointment should be harmonised with the national system of education; transfer between different departments should be permitted, so as to facilitate promotion; and there were a number of recommendations with regard to women, including equal pay with men where the work and efficiency were really equal, and compulsory retirement on marriage. The Commission discountenanced political action by Civil Servants, and recommended a special inquiry into the subject of the political disabilities by persons of experience in industrial conciliation and arbitration.
The House of Commons reassembled on Easter Tuesday, April 14, and devoted the week mainly to practical legislation. The East African Protectorate (Loans) Bill passed through Committee without amendment, after some unsuccessful opposition to its details, chiefly on the part of Independent Liberals. The Criminal Justice Administration Bill was read a second time (April 15), amid general approval, and was referred to a Standing Committee. The Home Secretary explained that its object was to reduce the number of commitments to prison by allowing not less than seven days for the payment of a fine of less than 40s., the fine to include all Court fees; to recognise societies for the supply of probation officers, and to hand them money provided by Parliament towards their expenses; to amplify the Borstal system; and to introduce other smaller changes. The Dogs Bill, exempting dogs from vivisection, was read a second time on April 17. A protest against it signed by eminent scientific authorities had been published; but Sir F. Banbury (U., City of London), who moved the second reading, justified it on the ground that the dog was the special friend of man; and he reminded the Ministerialists that, when the house of their Chief Whip was burnt, the alarm was given and the lives of the inmates saved by the barking of a dog. The Bill was opposed by representatives of Cambridge, London, and Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities (Mr. Rawlinson, Sir P. Magnus, and Sir Henry Craik) in the interest of physiological research. The only substitute for a dog for certain purposes, it was said, was a monkey, and its price was prohibitive. Without inoculation of dogs, Sir H. Craik stated, the existing great knowledge of tropical diseases could not have been reached, nor could Carrel have conducted his experiments on heart surgery. Dr. Chapple (L., Stirlingshire) added that operations as carried on in Great Britain were painless, and hydrophobia had been abolished by experiments on dogs, not by the muzzling order. The Under-Secretary for the Home Department suggested, as a compromise, that the use of dogs should not be permitted unless it could be shown that no other animal was available. The Bill was passed, after closure, by 122 to 80, and was sent to a Standing Committee; but its opponents destroyed it, first by refusing to make a quorum, and afterwards by extensive amendments; and it was dropped on June 30.
Two other debates of the week deserve brief notice. On April 15 Mr. Leach (L., Yorks, W.R., Colne Valley) moved a resolution that in future no member should, unless by leave, speak in the House for more than fifteen minutes, or in Committee for more than twenty. Ministers, ex-Ministers, and movers of Bills and resolutions to be excepted. Sir A. Verney (L., Bucks, N.) moved an amendment that members should signify to the Chair the time they would take, and should be reminded when they exceeded it. It was generally admitted to be desirable that more members should speak, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, in a sympathetic speech, recommended that the subject should be left to the Committee on Procedure. Sir P. Banbury (U.), opposing the motion, talked it out.
Next day, in Committee of Supply, there was a debate on housing conditions in Ireland. Mr. Clancy (N., Dublin Co.), who began it, pointed out that over 20,000 families in Dublin lived in one-room tenements, breeding-places of tuberculosis; but of 5,500 houses only seventy-three were owned by members of the Corporation, the owners of the rest were frequently poor, and could not pay for repairs or demolition. The Corporation had housed 2.5 per cent. of the population. Unionist members contrasted the conditions in Dublin with those in Belfast, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland showed that the evil was largely the result of overcrowding and low wages, but could not promise State aid. Nothing could be worse, he said, than an attempt to combine Manchester principles with little patches of philanthropic Socialism. True, they had built labourers' cottages, but that was a corollary of Land Purchase. The people did not choose to be moved to the suburbs. Eventually the resolution was talked out.
The second reading of the Established Church (Wales) Bill was debated on April 20 and 21 in a rather small House. The rejection was moved by Lord B. Cecil (U., Herts, Hitchin). The attack on the Church, he maintained, had been lifeless; now that individualist theories of the State had decayed, what was wanted was more Establishment—the national recognition of religion; and personally, he would gladly see extended to Nonconformist bodies all the privileges, if they were privileges, possessed by the Church of England. Voluntaryism—the theory that a Church ought to depend on the day-to-day contributions of its members—was absolutely dead; at any rate, the Nonconformist bodies were all seeking endowments. After contesting the stock Liberal arguments for Welsh Disestablishment, he said that, apart from the thirty-one Welsh members, the evidence was that the majority of the Welsh people was adverse. Besides petitions, meetings, and addresses, there was the petition of over 103,000 Nonconformists, many of them Liberals, against the Disendowment clauses of the Bill. People had been deterred from signing it by the threat that they would lose their old-age pensions. The Church, as a whole, would not suffer, but some of the curates would, and the Nonconformists would rue their work.
The motion was seconded by Mr. Hoare (U., Chelsea) and opposed by the Attorney-General, who ridiculed the idea that Wales was adverse; and read a letter from a Welsh rector stating the writer's conviction that the majority of the Welsh clergy were in favour of the Disestablishment clauses, and that, if the leaders of the Church party would accept the Government's offer of commuting life interests, the loss would readily be made up by Church people, and the result would be a message of peace to Wales and a blessing to the Church as a spiritual institution. The Nonconformist petition had been worked up in rural places by Conservative landlords and agents, and many of the signatories (though in this he did not impute blame to the organisers) had signed to protect themselves and their homes. Speaking as "half a Welshman," whose youth had been spent amid the tradition of Welsh Nonconformity, he said that the movement for Disestablishment was bound up with Welsh nationalism. The case for Disendowment depended, not on the historical origin of tithe, but on the difference between the mediæval and the modern Church, and no scheme had ever been more fair and moderate.
Later Sir Alfred Mond (L., Swansea Town) stated that at Newport, Mon., the Nonconformist petition was organised by four vicars, a curate, a Tory agent, and a Tory councillor; and that harrowing tales were told about churchyards being ploughed up.
In the debate next day Mr. Balfour eloquently appealed to the Welsh people to be more concerned with the great things they shared with the English people than with the relatively small things they held by a separate tenure. Granted that the Church had deservedly lost much of her earlier position, why should she be disestablished and disendowed? If Disestablishment meant dismemberment, why were the Welsh members to settle it alone? What good would Disestablishment do? On the central question of the Bill, Disendowment, weight should be given, not to Welsh sentiment, but to sound principles of jurisprudence, relating to corporate property, and these the Bill violated. The United States Supreme Court had decided that in Virginia Disestablishment did not involve Disendowment. The Parliament Act was passed to carry Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment; it now seemed that these reforms were to be carried to justify the Act. The country was turning against them. There was something grandiose about the Irish policy of the Government, but the Welsh Bill was thoroughly mean.
The Prime Minister asked on what grounds Mr. Balfour asserted that the country had changed its opinion. No question had had such a hold on the Welsh mind for the best part of two generations. Deference and concession, in matters of local concern, to strong local sentiment were among the first conditions of vivifying and sustaining Imperial strength. To the vast majority of the Welsh people the Welsh Church was not a national institution, but four dioceses in the Province of Canterbury. The Nonconformist deputation (p. [28]) were all in favour of Disestablishment, and were very vague as to the Disendowment effected by the Bill. Against Establishment he cited the case of the United States. The Bill dealt with ancient endowments, given to the Church for charitable and educational, as well as for religious, reasons; it had a precedent in the Irish Church Act, carried by one of the greatest and most devout Churchmen of the time, and both parties had impartially used the released endowments for the most secular purposes conceivable. What was to prevent the continued community of action of the four dioceses with the Church of England? The Welsh Nonconformist farmer would gain the sense of religious equality which he and his forefathers for two centuries had looked upon as essential to the completion and quickening of their national life.