On Thursday week in the Commons the features of the
first- reading debate were the speeches of Mr. Samuel and Mr. Balfour. Mr. Samuel tore into tatters the statistical web-spinning of Sir John Simon. It was inaccurate to say, as Sir John Simon had done, that the inmates of public institutions had been included in the National Register. On the contrary, they had been expressly excluded. Their numbers had no sort of bearing on Lord Derby's Report. Again, Sir John Simon, in comparing the figure of 840,000 attested unmarried men with the 651,000 unmarried men who had not been attested, had forgotten that the 840,000 included the starred men, and that the 651,000 did not include starred men. This omission had vitiated the whole of his deductions. Mr. Samuel's speech was extraordi- narily able, and was all the more striking as coming from a voluntaryist who had been converted to compulsion by the sheer logic of facts.
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