With consummate skill the Prime Minister managed to get the House out of its hostile mood and to satisfy the majority, at any rate, that the measure was neither provocative nor inopportune, but a necessary precaution against the possibility that "direct action" on the part of extra-Parliamentary bodies might confront the country with the alternatives of starvation or surrender.
Tuesday, October 26th.—In these troublous times the House gladly seizes the smallest occasion for merriment. There was great laughter when Colonel Yate, the politest of men, inadvertently referred to Sir Archibald Williamson as "the right honourable gent," and it broke forth again when, in his anxiety to make no further slip, he addressed him tout court as "the right honourable."
There are some fifty thousand British soldiers in Ireland, costing over a million pounds a month. But Mr. Churchill took the cheery view that after all they had to be somewhere, and would cost nearly as much even in Great Britain.
THE BOLD BAD BARON.
Sir Gordon Hewart. "Merely a framework—quite useless without a rope."
They would cost a good deal more in Mesopotamia, where we have a hundred thousand troops (British and Indian), and the cost is two and a half millions a month. Sir William Joynson-Hicks could not understand why we should spend all this money "merely to hand the country back to the rebels." Mr. Churchill said he had heard nothing about handing the country back to the rebels; from which it may be inferred either that he is not admitted into all the secrets of the Cabinet or that he draws a distinction between "rebels" and "persons who object to British rule."
The Press campaign in favour of a nickel three-halfpenny coin has not succeeded. In Mr. Chamberlain's opinion it would not be a coin of vantage. Among his objections to it may be the extreme probability that the present Administration would promptly be nicknamed (I will not say nickel-named) "the Three-half-penny Government."
Owing to a number of concessions announced by the Home Secretary the Emergency Powers Bill had a fairly smooth passage through Committee. Objections were still raised to making an Emergency Act permanent—it does sound rather like a contradiction in terms—but the Attorney-General skilfully countered them by pointing out that it was only the framework of the machinery, not the regulations, that would be permanent. One can imagine the bold bad baron who set up a gallows to overawe his villeins comforting objectors with the remark that after all it was merely a framework—quite useless without a rope.
