Parliament's Week

The Lords:

P: Approvingly received from popular Labor Lord Ponsonby, once a page to Queen Victoria, a bill to legalize euthanasia, or "mercy murder" as the penny press describes ending the life of an incurable invalid (TIME, Nov. 18, 1935 et seq.). In cases of this sort, British juries have lately been acquitting the killers with such regularity that the Euthanasia Bill is only to give legal form to an already functioning new principle of justice. Zealots of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society strongly back Ponsonby and thus far the only potent force arrayed against him is the Catholic Church.

If passed, the Ponsonby bill will permit any sane adult resident of England & Wales suffering from "an illness involving severe pain of an incurable and fatal character," to apply to the Minister of Health for permission to have his doctor overdrug him. Originally this law was proposed by the late Lord Moynihan, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. Up to this week the Attorney General had not acted to force the London Daily Mail to disclose the name of "a kindly-faced, elderly family doctor" who confessed in the Mail of Nov. 7, 1935 that he had mercy-murdered five people without waiting for the law to be enacted. Added this family doctor, "My conscience has never pricked me."

The Commons:

P: Cheered the first woman in history to move the Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne, popular Conservative Miss Florence Horsbrugh, M.P. She was required to wear "a uniform complete with sword, or full evening dress" and complied with an evening gown of dignified brown. During Miss Horsbrugh's discharge of her perfunctory duty, House of Commons lobbies buzzed with the comment of M.P.'s that King Edward, fortnight ago delivered his Speech from the Throne with a "pronounced American accent." So anxious were gossips to attribute this to the King's association with Mrs. Simpson that they even objected to His Majesty's having pronounced route to rhyme with trout (instead of with root as most Britons rhyme it). As a matter of fact, His Late Majesty also rhymed route with trout and His Majesty picked this up from his father, not Mrs. Simpson.

P: Raised welcoming cheers from all sides of the House, when handsome young Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden arose daisy-fresh for the new session after his attack of chicken pox (TIME, Sept. 14). In the Foreign Office's keynote speech for the present session, Mr. Eden promised: "To strengthening the authority of the League of Nations, Great Britain will devote every endeavor!"

P: Cheered Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin when he announced that the House will soon be asked to pass a bill which, although it will not define what are "political uniforms," will make it illegal to wear them.* This was later introduced by Home Secretary Sir John Simon.

P: Yawned as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, the Laborites led by harassed Major Clement Attlee, found their Party so internally divided that they were unable to attack His Majesty's Government on its policy of covert support of the Spanish White Armies (see p. 35) or on any other aspect of British foreign policy. The best Major Atlee and 40 Labor M.P.s could do was to sign a protest against the German Government's execution of a German Communist last week in Hamburg, and thus arouse individual British Labor sympathizers to chalk London Streets last week with anti-Nazi slogans and hurl bricks through the windows of new German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. Brick-throwing Laborite Miss Ruth Ellen Gastar screamed in police court: "The people of the British Government wine and dine with Ribbentrop, but the British people do not want these Nazi murderers!"

* On Austria's statute books is a similar law and Viennese have been arrested by hundreds for wearing white socks when the Austrian Police had reason to suspect that anyone under whose trousers could be found white socks was a Nazi.

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