These last are to be found work in the building trades, with, it is hoped, the assistance of the trade unions, but, if that hope is disappointed, then without it. The country requires half-a-million houses built. "Here are men who could assist," said the Prime Minister, "and we propose that they should be allowed to assist."
Over a prospect already sufficiently bleak there broods the shadow of the coal-strike. Sir Robert Horne, in presenting the case for the Government, was admirably clear but, perhaps naturally, a little cold. Only when the new lighting arrangement had flooded the House with artificial sunshine did the Minister warm up a little and hint that a way of peace might yet be found.
I wonder if it was by accident or artifice that Mr. Brace began his plea for the miners with the admission that they had only dropped the demand for the reduction of fourteen shillings and twopence in the price of domestic coal when they discovered that "the money was not there." Anyhow the laughter that ensued served to put Members into a good temper and to cause them to lend a friendly ear to his suggestion that the two shillings advance, though in his view only "dust in the balance," should be "temporarily" conceded, pending the establishment of a tribunal which should permanently settle the conditions of the mining industry. The increase of output which everyone desired would then be brought about.
Most of the speakers who followed seemed to think that Mr. Brace had sown the seed of a settlement. It was left to the Prime Minister, who evidently did not relish the task, to awaken the House from its beautiful dream. He pointed out that to accept the proposal would be to give the miners what they had originally claimed, without any guarantee that the greater output would be forthcoming. If it were not forthcoming and the two shillings were taken away, what would happen? "A strike," cried someone. "Precisely," said Mr. Lloyd George; only it would have been provoked by the Government instead of by the miners. He was not prepared to do business on those lines.
And so the debate came to an end rather than a conclusion.
Wednesday, October 20th.—The Peers plunged into the morasses of the Irish Question. Lord Crewe asked for an official inquiry into the alleged "reprisals" and particularly instanced the attacks upon the creameries. Rather than that Ireland should be "pacified" by such methods as these he would see her engaged in civil war, "fairly conducted on both sides." From these words it may be gathered that his lordship’s knowledge of civil war is happily not extensive.
Furnished with a voluminous brief from the Irish Office, Lord Curzon made a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord Crewe had demanded. It would only substitute "a competition in perjury" for the present "competition in murder"—a somewhat infelicitous phrase by which, as he subsequently explained, he did not mean to imply, as Lord Parmoor suggested, that police and rebels were engaged in a murderous rivalry.
Simultaneously the House of Commons was engaged upon an identically similar debate. Mr. Arthur Henderson was as lugubrious as Lord Crewe in presenting the indictment and distinctly less adroit in selecting his facts. His theory was that the Government had provoked the Sinn Fein outrages by its treatment of the people. Why, women had been prevented from taking their eggs to market!
Sir Hamar Greenwood spoke from the same brief as Lord Curzon, but threw far more passion and vigour into its recital. There had been some reprisals, he admitted, but they were as nothing compared to the horrors that had provoked them; and he protested against the notion that "the heroes of yesterday"—the R.I.C. is mainly recruited from ex-service men—had turned into murderers. As for the creameries, he had never seen a tittle of evidence that they had been destroyed by servants of the Crown, and he warned the House not to believe the stories put out by the propaganda bureau of the Irish Republican Army. He was still a convinced Home Ruler—an Ulster hot-gospeller had accused him of being a Sinn Feiner with a Papist wife!—but the first thing to do was to break the reign of terror and end the rule of the assassin. That they were doing, and there was no case for Mr. Henderson’s "insulting resolution."
The Opposition for the moment seemed stunned by the Chief Secretary’s sledge-hammer speech. No one rose from the Front Bench and Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy had to overcome his modesty and step into the breach. Later on, Lord Robert Cecil, on the strength of information supplied by an American journalist, supported the demand for an inquiry. So did Mr. Asquith, on the ground that it would be in the interests of the Government of Ireland itself; but this argument was obviously weakened by Mr. Bonar Law’s reminder that in 1913 and 1914 Mr. Asquith himself had deprecated inquiries in somewhat similar circumstances. The Government had a very good division, 346 to 79; but there were many abstentions.