The Eight Hours Bill was discussed in the House of
Commons on Monday and Tuesday, and received its Second Reading at the end of the debate on Tuesday. The debate of Tuesday was particularly rowdy. The Labour members are falling into a disastrous and most undemocratic. habit of refusing to listen to opinions which they do not like. They ignore, even if they remember, the very meaning of the word Parliament. The Prime Minister himself always used to be listened to with attention and respect, but on Tuesday the Labour mem- bers on the back benches tried to make play with pre- posterous accusations that because Mr. Baldwin has money in the firm which bears his name, he is " interested in coal" and—a more remarkably outrageous charge— that he had sent for the Chairman of the Coal Commission and told him what to put into the Report. With dignity hut also with intense feeling Mr. Baldwin pointed out that he had no connexion whatever with the direction of Baldwins Ltd., but that he had regarded it as a matter of honour and duty to keep his money in British industry and not to put it safely into Government securities (where nobody would have known anything about it) or to send it abroad. The course he had taken had made him a much poorer man. For the last five years he had received nothing from his firm.
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