In 1907, I introduced a short Bill which simply amended the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1857 in two particulars, first by giving the wife the same rights as the husband, and secondly by providing that two years' desertion should be a ground for divorce. We had a new and overwhelmingly Liberal House of Commons, and Sir Robert Reid, now Lord Loreburn, was Lord Chancellor, and I might have supposed that he would approve of the law of Divorce as it existed in his own country. Not a bit of it. He was as smug as any of them and practically repeated Lord Halsbury's incorrect arguments. On this occasion I should have got a dozen or twenty to vote with me, but when it was seen that the Government Whips were being put on against me, they weakened, but I did actually get two to vote with me, so that we at least got a division. This was a triumph, and has by now developed into the large majority that supported Lord Buckmaster's Bill in all its stages.

A measure for which I was never at any time responsible which aroused somewhat similar feelings of respectable cowardice was the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, for which, like King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, I voted on every occasion when it came up until at last it became law. I remember Lord James of Hereford making a very good speech on this occasion in which he said it was time that this country blest with the results of the great Reformation should no longer go back to the opinions of the early bishops and learned men of narrow views for rules as to what is right and wrong for the social life of to-day. He said that there could be no law in this matter but the law of Parliament. Even then our timid legislators could not bring themselves to agree to the necessary corollary and legalize marriage with a deceased husband's brother. The man might have a second pick, but not the woman, and even now when they have given it they have thought it necessary to disguise it under another name and call it "The Deceased Brother's Wife Bill."

Perhaps the most exciting time the House of Lords has had was in connexion with the Parliament Act. I both spoke and voted for the Lloyd George Budget which its author has since repudiated. I need not recount the history which is now so well known, how the Lords threw it out, how there were two appeals to the electors, and a threat of several hundred new peers, and how the Parliament Act resulted from their obstinacy, and entirely deprived them of financial power whilst slightly clipping their wings in respect to other measures. In the excited and heated debates on this question noble Lords for the first time in my experience began to say what they

really thought and to say it in plain and straightforward language. It was no longer a question of one course or another with a few stately speeches on each side; it was a passionate fight for their own interests and their own importance, and the tone and character of the speeches entirely changed accordingly. Since that time the House of Lords has never seemed to me the dead-alive assembly that I used to think it, but to be much more like an assembly of real people discussing real things that matter. We have hardly ever since had those prolonged and solemn allocutions from which we used to suffer, but practically every one now says what he has to say in a direct and simple manner and with a much closer approximation than before to his real feelings on the subject. This has naturally made it a much more interesting assembly.

I have tried at various times, generally ineffectually, to get the House to remedy or mitigate what seem to me to be scandals, and among other questions I have always been keen on prison reform. When preventive detention was introduced I was entirely in favour of it, but urged very strongly that those so detained should no longer be treated as criminals but detained in reasonably comfortable and human surroundings. I got a little support of a very cautious character from Lord Alverstone, then Lord Chief Justice, but none from anyone else.

On another occasion I called attention to the ridiculous anachronism which allows an escaping convict to be shot dead and thereby gives the warder a right to inflict upon him far greater punishment than the judge himself could give. I pointed out that however necessary this provision might have been one hundred years ago, it was now practically impossible for a convict to remain at liberty for more than a few days before his detection and recapture, and that as the excuse of necessity did not exist, this barbarous survival ought to be abolished. Not one single member of their Lordships' House supported me.

In 1911, a Bill called the Movable Dwellings Bill was introduced by Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, who represented the County Councils' Association in the House. It was in effect a Bill to deal with gipsies in a very drastic and irritating manner, and as I have always had a sneaking sympathy for gipsies, I opposed it in the form in which it was presented and succeeded in getting it referred to a select committee of which I was a member. The Committee was presided over by Lord Salisbury, and after hearing a good deal of evidence he drew up a draft report which met my objections. In connexion with this

draft report a rather amusing thing happened. I showed it to a Local Government Board official in order to learn his view upon it, and after reading it he returned it with the observation that as he expected, it was rather a Socialist report. He was surprised and disconcerted to find that it was the report of Lord Salisbury and not mine. I rather think the Bill never got any further.

Of course, I also attacked the motor taxes in the House although it is impossible to do anything effective in the Lords on questions of taxation. We were, however, able to discuss the constitution of the Road Board which was set up and the principles on which they should act, and there have been numerous other motor matters with which I have dealt there.

I also frequently spoke on various woman questions which arose from time to time, and I called particular attention to the iniquitous stretching of the law by which the magistrates gave suffragettes sentences of three months or six months imprisonment in default of finding sureties, when the maximum direct sentence they could have inflicted was three days. The provision under which they acted was one intended to mitigate and not to increase the penalties upon prisoners. On another occasion I called attention to a schoolmaster who was imprisoned because he would not pay his wife's incometax, and rather took the wind out of the Government's sails by asking them not why they had kept him in, but why they had let him out since he had not yet paid the tax. I also frightened their Lordships by pointing out that under this peculiar provision of the law an impecunious peer who had married an American heiress might be kept in prison for ever if his wife chose not to pay her tax. At last this ridiculous law has been modified.

During the War I had a good deal to say about the emergency legislation and the excesses of the Government, and in particular the extreme brutality with which conscientious objectors were treated, in spite of the fact that Parliament had recognized their existence as a class. On this latter subject I was always well supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury and sometimes by Lord Salisbury. On one occasion I caught the Government napping and had a little triumph. I had called attention to some gross brutalities, and I had moved: "That in the opinion of this House it is undesirable to subject military prisoners to punishments not authorized by law." I regret to say that it was a Liberal Government that was responsible, and Lord Buckmaster was on the Woolsack. No amendment was moved and the resolution was put and it was then

discovered that it was so drawn that it was obviously impossible for anyone to vote against it, and it therefore had to be declared carried.

I am not going to say anything about the reform of the House of Lords, but I am going to say one or two words in its favour. On all questions which do not involve land or the Church or strong party feeling, it is an admirable revising body. The 150 or 200 peers who attend regularly constitute about as competent and fair minded an assembly on most questions as could be got together in this country, but unfortunately, on questions which arouse party passion, we can always be swamped by some 300 backwoodsmen, who never attend the House, and are completely ignorant of current politics. It is difficult to see how this state of things can be allowed to continue without some such provision as the Parliament Act to get over the difficulty; on the other hand, any revision of its constitution which increases its technical powers is almost certain to lead to acute friction in a few years. To my mind the ideal would be a House with the 200 peers who now attend fairly regularly with powers of revision only. In that case I believe that the moral weight of the decisions would prove as effective as the technical possession of power and without the same danger of causing friction.

CHAPTER XXXIV

SCIENCE

SI think I have sufficiently indicated already, my interest in science was always very great. I do not think either my father or my mother was particularly interested in it and it was not till after their deaths that I started reading really scientific books. I was, of course, very much stimulated by the Juvenile Lectures at the Royal Institution and I have already mentioned the early lessons in frictional electricity that my uncle Rollo gave me.

I think it must have been somewhere about the age of thirteen or fourteen that I acquired my laboratory at Pembroke Lodge in one of the disused rooms. My first interests were electrical: I had a pair of toy telegraph instruments before I left Cheam and it cannot be more than about a year after that that I rigged up a wire from the house to the stable at Pembroke Lodge with two single needle instruments at each end, and taught or tried to teach the coachman's wife to take messages. Later I acquired (I think most of these good things came to me from the generosity of my grandmother Stanley) a pair of Morse sounders with two Morse keys and I remember that at my uncle's house at Hindhead my proficiency was such that Bertie's German governess Fraülein Bühler and I were able to converse with it there at the rate of 20 words a minute and without having to stop between each word for an acknowledgment.

Chemistry I think I must have almost entirely taught myself from a text-book called " Harcourt and Madan " and a more elementary one of my father's, although of course we did have science lectures of a sort both at Cheam and at Winchester. My interest was also stimulated by the experiments which my cousin St. George Lane-Fox was making in 1878 in order to solve what was then called "The Problem of the Sub-division of the Electric Light." What this meant in plain English was that the unit of light possible at that time was a 1,000 c.p. or 2,000 c.p. arc lamp and it was desired to find some reasonably smaller unit for domestic lighting. The chemical problem was the discovery of a refractory