to expand and to develop and for a time we made very large profits.

Unfortunately, however, under Maclaren's guidance we expanded and developed much too rapidly, and undertook to expend about £300,000 in acquiring and developing wolfram mines in Burma, and a similar sum in equipping and developing a wolfram mining property in Queensland. This was financed on borrowed money, and when the armistice came and the price of tungsten fell to one-half and then fell further to one-quarter of the war figures, we were at once in difficulties. These difficulties might perhaps have been surmounted, but no opportunity was given us, as the bank withdrew its support and put in a receiver, whereupon, of course, the whole inflated edifice crumbled like a house of cards.

During all this period of some ten years I was attending many Board Meetings every week, working very hard, and giving careful attention to my duties as a director and putting in a great deal of conscientious work for my various companies.

I

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE HOUSE OF LORDS

HAVE now sat in the House of Lords for 35 years. I took my

seat in 1887 when I was 22, and it marks the remarkable age

of that wonderful old man when I say that Lord Halsbury was then on the Woolsack. I ought of course to have taken it the year before, but with characteristic blunderingness my guardians had lost my Patent of Peerage, and it took a year to find out whether the bank, the solicitor or the great uncle had it. They never did find my grandfather's robes, so that I was put to the expense of buying these myself.

When I entered the House, Salisbury was in office and Kimberley was our leader. I had been much interested in the House of Commons, but I was not able to get up the same interest for the Lords where debate is apt to be monopolized by the front benches. I did, however, find it very entertaining to watch the Markis, as Punch used to call Lord Salisbury, standing at the table and nonchalantly dropping out his sentiments with startling candour.

In the course of the next ten years, however, I did a certain amount of work on committees and considered a number of very uninteresting water and gas bills. There was one Joint Select Committee in the 'nineties of great interest because the whole question of electric traction which was just coming in was referred to it for the purpose of settling standard clauses. The promoters of electric traction said that they must be allowed to use an uninsulated earth return, and that unless they could, electric traction would never be a practical commercial proposition. Their opponents, who were numerous and powerful, drew the most lurid pictures of what would happen if these large currents of electricity were let loose to run about the streets. The water companies said that their pipes would be eaten through by corrosion and the water would escape. The gas company said the same would happen to them and that the escaping gas would be set on fire. The railway companies said that the whole of their electrical signalling apparatus would be upset and

that all their trains would run into one another in consequence. The Post Office said that it would be impossible to work the telegraph or telephones any longer. Here was a pretty fight with big interests on both sides, and a fight of great importance, for to forbid the trolley system already working successfully in America would throw the development of electric traction back about 20 years. The committee consisted of five Lords and five Commons with Lord Cross as our chairman: he, as might have been anticipated, being a reactionary. The progressive band consisted of myself in the Lords, Sir John Brunner, Lord Balcarres, Bernard Molloy and another in the Commons.

I remember the North-Western Railway piteously putting forward the enormous sum it would cost them if they had to use insulated metallic returns for their signals, and my venturing to ask their witness whether after all this enormous sum would only represent a quarter of one per cent. on their capital. It may be imagined that with an old and experienced chairman like Lord Cross against us we had a hard fight in the Committee, but by dint of fighting and arguing we just carried our point, the numbers being six to four on most of the important divisions. We settled the standard clauses under which the industry has worked to this day and made electric traction a practicable thing.

I was also very much interested in the Royal Commission on London water, of which Lord Llandaff was chairman, although in those days my interest was not that of a member of the Commission but that of the Progressive party of the L.C.C. with their scheme for bringing water from Wales. The Commission, of course, reported as was expected in favour of the Thames as a source of supply and the scheme of Staines Reservoirs under which we are now working. The whole business of the London water in the last 30 years is a most unfortunate history: whenever there was whenever there was a Progressive majority on the L.C.C. there was a Tory majority in the House of Commons, and when there was a Liberal Government in power in Parliament, the L.C.C. was ruled by the Moderates. The Progressive scheme was always perfectly simple; it was to buy out the water companies at a fair valuation and give London a decent and unified supply of water under the L.C.C. from a reservoir to be established in the Welsh Hills. The opponents of this policy were, of course, the various water companies with their vested interests, and they were finally strong enough to get a Tory Government to put through a Bill for the acquisition of the water companies on their own

terms by a new body created ad hoc and called the Metropolitan Water Board. The people of London were robbed and exploited, but they thoroughly deserved it for their apathy, and they are now being punished by paying more instead of less for their water supply. After I had been about ten years in the Lords I had had some experience of public speaking and plucked up the courage to address their Lordships occasionally. But it is a very alarming assembly for a beginner to address, because they are so polite and so uninterested and frequently so few in numbers. It is only in time that one learns that they really are attentive and that if one has anything to say worth saying it will at any rate be listened to. I can hardly say that in the case of the kind of things I had to say they were generally likely to be agreed with, but it was something to realize that I was not beating the empty air as one might well appear to be.

If I did not speak I could at any rate vote and I took part in the historic division on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill in 1893, when 400 voted on one side and only 40 on the other. If only that or some similar Bill had then been passed into law what trouble and misery might not have been saved in Ireland.

66

My first considerable speech was made after their Lordships had sent me to prison, when having come out of prison I flung down the gauntlet to their prejudices and convictions. It was on the second reading of my Divorce Bill on the 1st May, 1902, and I spoke for an hour and twenty minutes. Halsbury was still Lord Chancellor, and when I had finished he danced with rage, denouncing the measure as an insult to any Christian assembly and even went the length of moving That this Bill be rejected," a motion which was smugly agreed to. I still think the Bill contained far the best divorce reform possible in a much better and simpler form than Lord Buckmaster's, although this includes most of the important reforms, while the last clause of my Bill providing for legitimatio per subsequens matrimonium is now before the House in the Guardianship of Infants Bill. I was not deterred and in the next year, 1903, I introduced a similar Bill with two or three of the most contentious clauses left out. This Bill was also snuffed out without discussion, although on that occasion Lord Halsbury did not venture to move that it be rejected. I had definitely challenged his conduct in the previous year in my opening remarks which I quote: "My Lords, when I last had the honour of submitting to your Lordships' House a Bill containing somewhat similar provisions to the Bill which is now before you, I commended

it to your attention in a speech which I endeavoured to make reasonable, temperate, logical, and respectful to this House. Some comments which reached me after that occasion might have led me to suppose that I had succeeded in that endeavour were it not for the remarkable observations which fell on that occasion from the noble and learned Earl on the Woolsack. The usual Motion that the Bill be read a second time that day six months appeared upon the Order Paper, fathered, as might have been expected, by the noble lord who represents the High Church Party in the Protestant Church, and who endorses the sacramental view of marriage. But that noble Lord and his amendment were contemptuously brushed aside by the Lord Chancellor, who, in a state of apparent fury, fell upon the remarks I had ventured to make to the House and declared more than once that both my Bill and the observations with which I had endeavoured to support it were an insult to your Lordships. He then proceeded with the courage of a large majority behind him, to move that the Bill be rejected, a Motion which, so far as I am able to ascertain, has been unknown in the recent history of this House. But that is not perhaps to be wondered at from a member of a Government which has revived several archaic and rusty weapons of the Constitution. Every one in this House must recognize the conspicuous talent and ability which has raised the noble and learned Earl to the high position he to-day occupies, but many, especially on this side of the House, also regret that he should not yet have acquired that courtesy in debate which we are wont to expect from other noble Lords more imbued with the traditions of this assembly. It has not hitherto been held to be an insult to the House to propose in a reasonable manner, and to support by argument, a measure for the amendment of the law where such may seem desirable. But I must not for a moment appear to wish to alienate the sympathies of the noble and learned Earl on the Woolsack on this occasion, for I hope I may claim him with some confidence as a supporter. In that very small fraction of his observations which dealt with the merits of my proposals, the noble and learned Earl called attention to a clause in my Bill permitting a divorce after one year's separation on the joint petition of the parties. That clause is not in the Bill now before your Lordships, and as it was the only one to which the noble and learned Earl specifically objected I hope that to-day I shall not be mistaken in looking for his support."

In the meantime I was running a Divorce Reform Society and we were holding public meetings and getting the matter discussed.