The crisis in the Cabinet has followed the course fore-
shadowed in the leading article on the situation in our last issue. On Thursday week an official statement was made shortly after the close of the meeting of the Cabinet to the effect that Ministers had come to an agreement upon the pro- posals which they would submit to Parliament on the subject of recruiting at a secret Session in each House on the following Tuesday. Later on a second official statement was issued announcing that the settlement arrived at, while meeting the demands of the military situation, satisfied all sections of opinion represented in the Government, and explaining that "the sole reason for the secret Session was that Parliament might be informed confidentially of the main facts and figures on which the decision of the Cabinet was based, and of which publication must be obviously undesirable." With the deductions from and comments on these statements which have appeared in the Press we need not now concern ourselves beyond the tolerably obvious inference that in resorting to the device of a secret Session the Government were moved by a desire to convince the Labour Party of the necessity of new measures for recruiting, and that they preferred to take Parliament as a whole into their confidence rather than disclose the facts to the Labour Party alone.
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