On Friday week the new contract with the Marconi Com-
pany for the erection of Imperial wireless stations was debated in the House of Commons and approved by a majority of 72 votes (210 against 138). Two members of the Liberal Party, Sir Henry Norman and Sir H. Croydon Marks, spoke strongly against the contract. Sir Henry Norman assumed that there was no urgency so great as to make undesirable a further delay in awaiting the demonstrations of other com- panies. His view was that the State itself ought to erect the stations. There was no reason to employ the Marconi Company as middlemen. He objected to the system of royalties even in its modified form. Among other points he protested emphatically against the Post Office being pledged to the continued use of any particular apparatus or being subject to any penalty for the disuse of any apparatus, whether by means of royalties or otherwise. Sir H. Croydon Marks pointed out that the first contract was recommended as an excellent bargain, and now the same plea was made for the new contract. But the new contract by its very form admitted the justice of nearly all the criticism directed against the first contract. The Marconi Company confessed that they had no patents in the place where they were going to put the largest station. Nevertheless they had originally claimed a ten per cent. royalty on that station. In his own business be would not deal with people who behaved in that way. Next year the main patent—the only one on which the company had fought an action—would come to an end. It might be extended for seven years, but the contract was for twenty-eight years.
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