In the House of Commons on Friday week the second
reading of the Unemployed Workmen Bill was rejected by a majority of 149 (265 to 116). The significance of the division- list is not confined to the large number of Liberals who abstained from voting, 136 in all. Besides 25 members of the Labour Party, 17 Nationalists, and 2 Unionists (Sir Arthur Bignold and Mr. Watson Rutherford), no fewer than 74 Ministerialists voted against the Government. These, however, were by no means all extremists; indeed, they included so many regu. lation Liberals—Members who on ordinary occasions accord the Government their unhesitating support--that one is almost tempted to regard their vote on this question as a tactical concession to the Socialists which, as the. Bill was sure to be rejected, could not involve the Government in any disastrous consequences, and would at the same time secure them against reprisals in their constituencies. Mr. Whiteley, the Chief Liberal Whip, speaking at Pudsey on the following day, acquitted the great majority of these dissentient Liberals of any such motives, but he vigorously attacked a small section for running with the Liberal hare and hunting with the Socialist hounds. Such men, he said, " though wedded to Liberalism, felt that they were entitled to philander and flirt with certain elements of Socialism in order better to secure their position with their constituents. If the country began to think that the Liberal Party was saturated, or even tainted, with Socialism, there would be a split in the party of the most deplorable. kind, and they would lose the vast bulk of that moderate opinion which had been the
backbone of Liberalism for fifty years. Evidence of this was accumulating every day at the Chief Whip's Office."
