' * - * • There - has been a further
fall in -Mr. -MacDonald's stock. His intervention on Friday morning in the matter of the allowances to the unemployed following on the demonstra- tions in Sheffield was really a lamentable performance. He admitted that he knew nothing about it until he opened -his newspapers that morning and that "he had been 'trying to get in touch with the Department concerned all the morning." Members murmured to one another that presumably there was a telephone service between Downing Street and the Ministry of Labour, and that at the worst the District Messenger service might have -been requisitioned. It must be quite unprecedented for a "four days' debate to take place on the major Bill of a. whole Parliament without a speech from the Prime Minister. But Mr. MacDonald was not even there when Mr. Baldwin made the concluding speech on the India Bill to a House that was so full that even the side galleries were packed.
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