We hoped for enlightenment, but a certain obscurity remains, as
we shall explain. The British Gazette, on Friday, May 7th, published an article " by a Cabinet Minister " in which it was stated that in the House of Commons debate on Wednesday, May 5th, Mr. Thomas had tried to lead people to believe that the disputing parties were within an ace of a final settlement at i i o'clock on Sunday night (May 2nd), and that but for the Govern- ment taking offence at the stopping of the Daily Mail the whole misery of a general strike could have been avoided. This suggestion, wrote the Cabinet Minister, " is quite untrue." We turn to the report of the House of Com- mons debate here referred to, which is printed in the same issue of the British Gazette that contains the article by a Cabinet Minister. There we read Mr. Baldwin reported as follows : " I was in a position of grave anxiety, negotiating under a threat. I doubted the wisdom of it, but I ran the risk in face of the gravity of the situation. It was while the T.U.C. were seeing the miners, and while I and my colleagues were explaining to the Cabinet, that we learnt that the first active move in the general strike was being actually made by trying to suppress the Press. [This, of course, refers to the Daily Mail incident.] We felt that in those circumstances the whole situation was completely changed." That seems to be a contradiction of the Cabinet Minister's statement. The last thing we want to do is to repeat criticisms of events which have ceased to have any urgent significance, but we must at least say that an official organ should provide statements of fact that are beyond dispute. We are still left with the feeling that the Prime Minister would have reached a settlement with the T.U.C. negotiators if a few hours more had been available. Those negotiators themselves confessedly did not want a strike. At the last moment it was as though the magic hand of the Prime Minister had been replaced by another.
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