Parliament's Week

The Lords & Commons:

P: Adjourned until Oct. 29. Since the Prime Minister and Mrs. Baldwin will vacation in France, taking the waters of Aix-les-Bains as usual, Mr. Baldwin seemed to have decided last week against a general election in this Jubilee Year, was expected to go to the country next

Spring, though not compelled by statute to do so until the Autumn of 1936.

The Lords:

P: Received the King's assent in traditional Norman French "Le Roy le veult!" ("The King so wills!") to the bill giving India a new federal form and Constitution, this act being the longest ever passed by Parliament (TIME, Dec. 3 et seq.).

During hot debate in both Houses, such foes of the act as Winston Churchill charged that His Majesty's Government put "disgraceful pressure" upon India's princes, "amounting to blackmail in some cases," to force their agreement. Nevertheless the bill was steamrollered through by bland Secretary for India Sir Samuel Hoare, just before his promotion to be Foreign Secretary (TIME, June 17).

Sir Samuel, Viscount Willingdon the present Viceroy of India, and onetime Viceroy Lord Irwin (now Viscount Halifax) are supposed to feel that they will go down in history as "India's Abraham Lincolns," super-emancipators who have laid a basis for setting 350,000,000 Indians free under the new Constitution some generations hence.

Indians while admitting that in the provinces natives will at once have somewhat greater freedom, denounce the Constitution as "Sheer sham!" because all vital powers are reserved to the Viceroy, thus permitting Britain to keep India hog-tied indefinitely.

The Commons:

P: Thundered "Shame! Shame!" as Conservative M. P.'s charged that in Manchester a school inspector had reproved 12-year-old Maud Mason for "old fashioned imperialism" when she wrote on the occasion of His Majesty's Silver Jubilee: "England is only a small country but it is better than any other country because it has a good King and Queen to reign over it."

As loyal M. P.'s flayed the Manchester school inspector, London's sensation-sheets made a heroine of Moppet Maud, who was rushed to the House of Commons and popped into the visitors' gallery to hear aristocratic Major Oliver Stanley, President of the Board of Education, report on her case.

Said Moppet Maud: "I feel funny sitting here."

Said Major Stanley, son of the Earl of Derby: "The inspector did not, as one of my honorable friends has suggested, 'publicly rebuke a little child's pure and holy love of its country,' but suggested in a private conversation with the teacher that the child's essay perhaps indicated a patriotism more fervent than considered. The inspector demonstrated his own practical patriotism during the World War by serving four years in the British Army."

P: Were merely bored as Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare rambled into an unconsidered speech on Ethiopia which infuriated Italian Premier Benito Mussolini and made impossible any achievement at Geneva last week by British Minister for League of Nations Affairs Captain Anthony Eden.

Sir Samuel, with or without malice toward Mr. Eden, accepted on behalf of His Majesty's Government a suggestion thrown out in debate by Liberal Leader Sir Herbert Samuel that Britain and France join in guaranteeing Italian territory against aggression by Ethiopia. This cynical suggestion, and Sir Herbert frankly admitted his cynicism, was taken up by Sir Samuel as a means of calling Il Duce's bluff that Italy is proceeding in ''self-defense" against Ethiopia instead of in pure aggression. After calling Sir Herbert's suggestion "most interesting" and promising to transmit it to Geneva, Sir Samuel added, with what seemed to Italians mealy-mouthed British hypocrisy: "We are dealing with the question as realists, but not as cynical realists, rather as sympathetic realists who know that if great moral issues are treated rashly and clumsily we may, with the best intentions, with the most honorable motives, plunge the world into a great catastrophe."

P: Sat bolt upright in surprise when War Office Secretary Douglas Hacking announced that His Majesty's Government are abandoning the U. S.-invented Lewis automatic rifle in favor of the "superior" Czechoslovak-invented Bren submachine gun. This will be made in Britain under a patent agreement as with the Lewis gun. For heavier work the Army will continue to use standard British machine guns turned out by Vickers.

P: Learned from the Exchequer that King George has unobtrusively accepted restoration of the -L-50,000 ($250,000) yearly pay cut he took voluntarily in 1931. Since regular civil servants have had their pay cuts restored, His Majesty "sees no reason" why Queen Mary and himself should not go back on their old basis of -L-470,000 per year ($2,350,000).

P: Heard in silence a curt rebuff administered by Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to the Leader of the Labor Party, "Old George" Lansbury, who proposed, "His Majesty's Government, in conjunction with the Government of the United States, should revive the World Economic Conference and arrange to distribute the World's economic resources so that countries like Italy, Japan and Germany, whose needs for expansion are generally admitted, could get what they need without aggression."

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