the face of nature. The peasant proprietor and the yeoman farmer of the old conditions could not possibly fight against the great economic forces inimical to them which now existed. As they were exceedingly anxious that the House should face the very serious problem which the private property in land had Less Surpluses on other Votes - 458,900 "To provide facilities for the sale of land to occupying tenants; and to extend the system of peasant proprietary in England and Wales," presented accordingly, and read the first time; to be read a second time upon Wednesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 99.] SUPPLY. Considered in Committee. 100" MR. HALDANE (Haddington) said the purpose of this token Vote for £100 was to obtain the authority of the Committee to the expenditure out of the surplus this year of £459,000, which was wanted for two purposes, the relief of certain of the Volunteer corps from financial liability, and the provision of compensation for those who had suffered damage from the Woolwich explosion. Taking first the last item, which was the smaller, the Committee knew that there occurred the other day a most unfortunate explosion at Woolwich whereby much damage was done. The Government were not actually liable for such damage, but they thought it right to provide compensation. They undertook to find a preliminary sum at once, and to make an estimate of the rest. The estimate had resulted in £15,000 required for Woolwich, and £5,000 for other places. The Committee would be in a better position to understand the source from which the larger sum of £439,000 came when it got the Appropriation Account. These sources were at present under the investigation of the Public Accounts Committee and would be included in the Appropriation Accounts. The need arose, no doubt, partly from the reductions in personnel made in the summer. They proposed to apply this sum in transferring to the War Office from the Public Works Loans Commissioners certain debts which were owed to them. Those debts had arisen in this way. Volunteer corp3 when they wanted to get a drillhall borrowed a part of the money required. A careful inquiry was made Motion made, and Question proposed, as to the security, which was two"That a Supplementary sum, not ex- fold-first the hall, and secondly ceeding £100, be granted to His Majesty, the capitation grant which came to to defray the Charge which will come in the corps. On those two assets a mortcourse of payment during the year end-gage was granted by the Public Works ing on the 31st day of March, 1907, for Loans Commissioners. There were 200 Additional Expenditure in respect of the or 300 of these mortgages, which were following Army Services, viz. :more or less paid off. The total not paid (In the Committee.) [Mr. EMMOTT (Oldham) in the Chair.] ARMY (SUPPLEMENTARY) ESTIMATE, 1906-7. off was £439,000. If the units to which the halls belonged came into the new territorial second line it would be only right that they should relieve the corps of the responsibility of the debts. They did not propose to prejudge anything at this moment, as the corps might not come in, in which case they remained as they were. But, if they came in, it would be very inconvenient to put the additional large sum necessary on the Estimates when the time came, when no doubt there might be other things to provide for. Therefore, having a large surplus this year they thought it right to deal with a part of it in this fashion. The Committee might remember that in 1896 and 1897 the capitation grant was forestalled out of the surplus of the preceding year. He did not say that that was a precedent which ought to be extended, but there were occasions under which it seemed legitimate that these funds, representing savings out of Estimates, should be used in that way. The money that had been spent, he might point out, was not money spent in aid of revenue account. They proposed to pay over the money to the Public Works Loans Commissioners and to ask them to stand as trustees of the debts. The debts the would now belong to the War Office, but none the less there was a certain part of the debts for which the State had borrowed money which must be paid off in the ordinary course under this arrangement, exactly as they were being paid off at present. They had reduced the Estimates this year by an annual sum of £28,000, in view of this Estimate going through, that sum representing sinking fund and interest, which the War Office would now pay to themselves as the owners of the debt. That was the sum and substance of the proposal. MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN (Worcestershire, E.) said that with regard to the second part of the Estimate, the contribution in aid of those who suffered by the explosion at Woolwich, he had nothing to say, but that it was eminently a proper charge to ask Parliament to undertake, and that a Supplementary Estimate was the proper machinery. But to treat the whole of the sum involved as a Supplementary Estimate was really almost an abuse of words. It was not a Supplementary Estimate in the ordinary sense; it was a new Vote for an entirely new service, Mr. Haldune. MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said the right hon. Gentleman could not of course produce such an Estimate unless that were the case, but he complained none the less of the absence of the Treasury representatives when an Estimate of this remarkable character was presented. Still more, he thought they ought to be present when he called to mind the constant attacks upon Supplementary Estimates of any kind made by the Party opposite when they were in Opposition During the time he was Financial Secreta y and Chancellor of the Exchequer there was no more constant complaint than that Supplementary Estimates for unnecessarily large sums were presented for services which it was said ought to have been provided for in the ordinary expenditure of the year. Unless he was much mistaken, the Financial Secretary to the War Office was one of the critics. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury and the Minister for Education also had frequently insisted upon that view. Those Gentlemen were now in office. During the whole time he was connected with the Treasury there never Supplementary Estimate presented to the House for which there was so little justification as the one for which these purists in finance made themselves responsible the moment they came into office. Why was it? The Secretary of State for War had explained most ingenuously. He happened to have money. He asked Parliament to vote a certain number of men, then he reduced the number Parliament had voted, and having thus secured a considerable saving he said it was more convenient to him and the Chancellor of the Exchequer to spend it now than to have to produce it at the proper time when they knew what they were going to do with it, and when they could explain how it was going to be Was a used. The right hon. Gentleman stated for War said, "We have the money, and it is more convenient to use it than to have to raise it at another time when it might cause us greater difficulty." The right hon. Gentleman had no occasion to raise it now. The real expenditure would only come in later years, and it was contingent on the carrying out of the scheme which had not yet been discussed in its many stages in this House. He stated that the sinking fund for that debt would continue to be paid hereafter as it had been hitherto, but that instead of paying it to the Public Works Loans Commissioners, he would pay it to himself. That being so the right hon. Gentleman could no say that this half million of money went to the redemption of Debt. If it was for the purpose of paying off the Public Works Loan Commissioners, let the Debt be wiped out once and for all. If there was money to pay o the Debt, a sinking fund, continuing over a term of years, was not needed. Let them pay it off and have done with it. that he could hardly explain how he was to MR. HALDANE: Why? MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said that if they had the money available it was surely sounder finance, and more economical to pay off Debt than to keep it running, paying not only to a sinking fund but interest year by year. The right hon. Gentleman could not have it both ways. He could either redeem the Debt, in which case there would be no charge in future years, or he could keep the debt running as he proposed to do. What the right hon. Gentleman was doing was to redeem the Debt so far as MR. HALDANE was understood to the original lenders were concerned, say that it did wipe away Debt. MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said it did not. It was taken away from the redemption of Debt. It was seized by the right hon. Gentleman before it could get into the sinking fund, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a party to the transaction for a purpose which he would shortly explain. What the Chancellor of the Exchequer had refused stalwartly to do for the purpose of giving old-age pensions it was proposed to do for the purpose of relieving the Army Estimates in future years. The Secretary of State and to take it himself in order that he might have an annuity of £27,000 a year in relief of War Office Estimates. That was bad finance. There was no justification for it, especially when the proposal came from right hon. and hon. Gentlemen on the Government Benches, remembering the language they had used when in Opposition and the language used the other day by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The transaction doubly bad because of the form in which it was brought in. The Estimate was in fact for the carrying out of the right hon. Gentleman's new scheme for a MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said he accepted the ruling. It was impossible to discuss the Vote on its merits apart from the financial objection which he had raised. The Secretary of State was to be a sort of half-way house in which this fund was to find repose until it was transferred to a new purpose. Territorial Army, and therefore it raised | involved, and the Secretary of State has the whole question of the scheme of Army told us that it does not involve them. organ sa ion. He did not propose to go into the whole of that scheme, but he wanted to take that opportunity, the earliest he had had, of entering a protest against a very important detail of it. When the Secretary of State for War was explaining the proposal in regard to county associations, to whom, he hoped, these buildings would eventually be transferred, he himself asked what would be the position of the great county boroughs like Birmingham, and the right hon. Gentleman was good enough to state that it was his intention to unite those county boroughs with the counties and put them under the county associations. He begged the right hon. Gentleman to reconsider that. He begged him to do so in the interest of his scheme. He ventured to say that in the case of Birmingham *THE CHAIRMAN: I have explained to the right hon. Gentleman that even admitting all that he has said, it would not raise the question of the constitution of the county associations. MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said he was placed in a great difficulty by the ruling. He was of course bound to accept it. It brought him into the position of saying that he could see no reason at all for the Vote. The Vote apparently was brought before the Committee in a form which made it impossible to discuss the object for which the money was to be applied. *THE CHAIRMAN: I think I should remind the right hon. Gentleman that he can discuss the purpose for which the Vote is asked. The time to discuss the county associations will be, of course, on the Bill. This is not the right occasion for that. MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN said he supposed that under this Vote the right hon. Gentleman would become mortgagee of the drill hall at Birmingham. What he said of that property would also apply to similar properties in other great county boroughs. He wished to know what the right hon. Gentleman was going to do with these halls after he became mortgagee. He thought the right hon. Gentleman would be well advised to consider the appointment of a special association for the borough itself as distinct from the county association. He thought that in doing so he would find the corporations not at all unsympathetic, as was shown by the fact that the Birmingham City Council lately voted £23,000 for the provision of a rifle range. He believed that the right hon. Gentleman would find better results if he 833 used that Corporation feeling which was | Irish Rifles. That corps had their headquite distinct from that of the county. on SIR HOWARD VINCENT (Sheffield, Central) said that at first sight this sum of £439,000 appeared to be all right, but when they came to look into it closely he saw no advantage whatever in it to the Volunteer corps. The explanatory Memorandum which accompanied the Estimate said that the payment of interest on those loans was in no way affected by the change. The arrangement only affected eighty or ninety corps who had borrowed this £439,000 from the Public the Works Loans Commissioners security of their freehold drill halls and the Capitation Grant. He did not wish to be offensive, but he thought that this was an enormous bribe to the Volunteers to accept the Territorial Army proposal. The right hon. Gentleman must not imagine that he was conferring the slightest good on the Volunteer corps in taking over this debt. For his part, if he had to borrow money he would rather owe it to the Public Works Loans Commissioners than to the War Office. The object of the War Office was to acquire the freeholds and leaseholds of the property of the Volunteer corps; but he believed that would be highly disadvantageous to the corps themselves. It was perfectly true that the Volunteer corps would not be a penny the worse. The Financial Secretary to the War Office in introducing the Vote said that no corps would be compelled to accept a transfer of their debt to the War Office against their will. If the right hon. Gentleman had come forward with a Supplementary Estimate for £439,000 to take over those debts and pay off the money-to make an absolute gift to the Volunteer corps-that would have been a great boon, although it would have been hard on those regiments which had been well administered, and had found the money to pay off their indebtedness instead of owing it to the Public Works Loans Commissioners. MR. ASHLEY (Lancashire, Blackpool) said he wished to put a question to the right hon. Gentleman, the answer to which, he thought, would clear up the difficulty he had in understanding this Vote. He took the case of the London quarters near Charing Cross, in which MR. HALDANE: Absolutely and It is a transfer substantially the same. for the moment. SIR F. BANBURY (City of London) said he did not wish to discuss the question whether the Volunteers would gain or lose by this proceeding. There was no one who had more insisted on the observance of the old Sinking Fund Act than the Financial Secretary to the War Office; but the proposal of the right hon. Gentleman was to render null and void that Act which provided that all unexpended balances should go to the reduction of Debt. If that almost immemorial practice were to be departed from it would open the door to all sorts of abuses, including the one which had arisen at the present moment. now 6th March and the financial year ended on 31st March. He gathered that the right hon. Gentleman had not so far infringed on the principles of finance as to spend this money. If that were so, why did not the right hon. Gentleman wait until he brought in his Army Estimates and put on them this additional amount which was to be spent in the year to come? It was The reason was that it would swell the Army Estimates; it would prevent the right hon. Gentleman saying: I have reduced the Army Estimates; 66 |