Mr. Maxton had an interested and slightly uneasy audience when
he raised with all his remarkable debating skill in the adjournment on Tuesday the question of the discharge from a branch of the Territorial army in Edinburgh of William Walker, an unemployed man, on the ground that he had taken part in a hunger march. Mr. Hacking denied that he had been discharged on this account but refused to disclose the actual reasons. One sentence in his explanation caused considerable per- turbation : " It is not the practice," Mr. Hacking said, " to take any steps on account of a man's political views, but if a man shows by his actions that he is at variance with the accepted standards of thought, be- haviour and general tone of the Army, he becomes an element of potential discord and consequently his services are better dispensed with." It was thought that to take account of a man's‘" thoughts," apart from being a direct contradiction to Lord Mansfield's famous maxim that no man knows what is in another man's mind, was to open the way to dangerous abuses.
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