After an admirable speech from Colonel Page Croft, in which
he told the House how he found a peasant woman in France reading the announcement of the Government policy in a French newspaper, and how she said to him : "That means the beginning of the end ; that means victory," Mr. Snowden very eloquently, and yet quite ineffectively, denounced the Bill, and actually sank so low as to declare that the main reason why Unionists supported the measure was "that it would be a weapon in their hands for enforcing still further the chains of slavery upon the democracy." Mr. Henderson, a man who, we are glad to think, still represents the Labour Party in the Coalition Cabinet, made what was perhaps the greatest speech in a debate which has enormously strengthened the hold of the Government on the House of Commons—not before such strengthening was needed, in the opinion of serious men. Mr. Henderson stated that every issue of this war was implicit in the enactment before the House. Can there, he exclaimed, be any longer a doubt existing in the minds of a single Member that this great Empire is engaged in a war in which our national existence is involved
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