The characteristic note of the speeches for the Labour amendment,
and of Mr. Baldwin's reply to them, was their firm grasp of the necessity of European prosperity for the bare life of this country. It cannot be doubted but that the introduction to the House of a great group of men to whom the word " unemployment " does not signify a perennial and wearisome " problem," but tc whom it means the sudden cutting off of the very neces- saries of life, has given a new reality to economic dis- cussions. Lord Eustace Percy very unfortunately com- pared the attitude of the Labour Party to that of the man in Bunyan who looked ever downward with a muck- rake in his hand. He had his rebuke in the speech which followed, when Mr. Welsh told very simply what he saw when he looked upward at the pageant of Parliament, and when he looked downward at the houses of his fellow miners. The Unionists will not produce reasonableness in Labour Members by accusing them of materialism 327 when they show a desire to save a million or so of their fellow-men from starvation, even though the solutions proposed by Labour may be dangerous nostrums, as we think they frequently are.
