the officials of the Miners' Federation met the Minister of
Labour and the Secretary for Mines in London. The miners had specially asked for this meeting and Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland had come hurriedly from Scotland and Colonel Lane Fox from Yorkshire. Unhappily the meeting resulted in nothing. The surprise of the meeting was that Mr. Churchill was present and took control of the proceed- ings. The miners renewed the hopeless demand for a subsidy which, as was to be expected, Mr. Churchill steadily and imphatically refused. But to be quite fair we ought to say that apparently the miners were thinking as much of a loan -as of .a subsidy. Mr. Churchill assumed from the beginning that the two things were indistin- guishable and treated them as such. To us it seems that a reasonable distinction may be made.
