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Party to the Labour Party, it passed a rule making members of the Communist Party ineligible for endorsement as Labour candidates either for Parliament or for any local authority. Both these resolutions were passed by overwhelming majorities. A third resolution laid down that no member of the Communist Party should be eligible for membership of the Labour Party; on this the voting was nearly even. At the same time the Executive Committee of the Party, in its Report to the Conference, emphatically repudiated the political principles, methods, and designs of Communism.

In fixing the earliest possible date for the dissolution, the Government, as Mr. MacDonald informed the Commons, had acted on the assumption that the House of Lords would immediately pass the Irish Bill, to which it had given a second reading the previous day, without alteration. His confidence in the public spirit of the House of Lords was not belied. On their going into committee on the Bill, Lord Carson moved an amendment, that confirmation of the Bill should also be required from the Parliament of Northern Ireland. This was warmly supported by other members, and if put to the vote would no doubt have been carried; but on being appealed to by the Marquis of Salisbury, who was also opposed to the Bill, not to provoke a conflict with the other House, Lord Carson withdrew the amendment, saying that he would be content with having his protest entered in the records of the House. The Bill was thereupon passed and received royal assent the same afternoon at six o'clock, just before the prorogation, so that the dissolution of Parliament was not allowed to jeopardise Britain's relations with Southern Ireland, as it might have done had the Boundary Commission been left in suspense.

The Parliament which thus brought its labours to a close had been elected barely ten months before, and had commenced its activities only eight and a half months before. It was the first British Parliament in which no single party, or regular combination of parties, possessed a majority. It had been enabled to function only by the support consistently given by one of the Opposition parties, the Liberals, to the Labour Government; and this support was naturally conditional on the Government's abstaining from the promotion of measures which conflicted with Liberal principles. The more active spirits of the Labour Party had chafed at this arrangement almost from the beginning; and the bulk of the party was by this time willing, if not anxious to see it brought to an end. Mr. MacDonald himself, to judge by the regretful manner in which he at first spoke of the need for an election, was not of this mind; but the Liberals, in calling on him to delete from the Russian Treaty the clause concerning a loan, had practically made his retention of office impossible without a new mandate. from the country. In the interests of the public he might have waited till this issue had been raised and debated in Parliament;

but when the Liberals, somewhat inadvertently, offered him an opportunity of defying them some weeks earlier, he seized it without hesitation, and deliberately rode to a fall on an issue in which there was no difference of principle between his party and theirs. Thus the dissolution of Parliament was brought about several weeks before its proper time, and on a matter which the public understood but vaguely and in which it was little interested.

The Liberals were bitterly accused in Labour circles of having formed a "plot" or "conspiracy" to turn Labour out of office and put the Conservatives in. They retorted that Mr. MacDonald had chosen of his own free will to make the Campbell motion one of confidence, and that the appeal to the country was entirely of his own seeking. They represented this motion, and the one on the Russian Treaty, as intended solely to prevent the Government from falling under the influence of the extremists in the Labour camp. Instead of trying to disarm this suspicion, the grounds for which were in truth very slight, Mr. MacDonald went out of his way to strengthen it, principally by precipitating the election. Slowly but surely large masses of the public which hitherto had been favourably inclined towards him came to believe that the Tory view of his character was after all correct-namely, that he was a dangerous extremist who ought never to have been entrusted with office; and this idea gave a powerful impetus to the Tory cause at the expense not so much of the Labour Party as of the Liberals, who had to bear the odium of having put them in office.

On October 1 the Premier had at length found time in the midst of his multifarious engagements to give his long-promised interview to the Executive of the Miners' Federation on the subject of the harm that might accrue to British mining from German coal deliveries under the Dawes scheme. While sympathising with the apprehensions of the miners, Mr. MacDonald held out no hopes of modifying the scheme, and no more was heard of the matter. How strongly the public in general favoured the scheme was shown by the fact that when the British portion of the German External Loan was offered for investment on October 15, the whole sum-12,000,0007.—was heavily oversubscribed in a single morning.

While Parliament was in session, Mr. MacDonald's attention at the Foreign Office had been occupied with the maintenance of British interests in Iraq and in Egypt. During September, Turkish bands had carried out raids into Iraq, and British aeroplanes from the garrison at Mosul had been used to repel them. Turkey protested, and Britain justified its conduct in a Note which, by a strange irony, was read in summary by Lord Parmoor to the League of Nations Conference at Geneva on September 25, in the midst of his labours on the drawing up of an agreement for universal peace. The Note pointed out that the raids had been carried out into territory, including the vilayet of

Mosul, which was unquestionably under British administration, and protested against the flagrant violation by the Turks of solemn undertakings given by them in an instrument which. had been duly ratified and brought to the League of Nations for registration. Fethi Bey, on behalf of Turkey, disputed the British interpretation of the Lausanne Treaty regarding boundaries, and said that Turkey had never ceased to maintain her rights in regard to Mosul. She was, however, prepared to accept any frontier on a basis of a referendum of the population. In the House of Commons on September 30, Mr. Thomas, replying to questions, insisted that there was no question of a state of war between Turkey and Britain. He said that a series of protests had been made to the Turkish Government against alleged infringements of the Iraq frontier, and the British authorities in Iraq had been empowered to take all measures necessary to prevent incursions by Turkish forces. The Government had brought these events to the notice of the Council of the League, as provided by Article 11 of the Covenant, and had asked the Turkish Government to order all Turkish forces to be withdrawn from Mosul and the small area to the north of it.

The Turks paid no attention to the British request, and their troops continued to occupy the territory which they had seized. After a fortnight of waiting the patience of the Government was exhausted, and on October 9 it sent a peremptory Note to Turkey demanding the immediate withdrawal of the invading force, under pain of action being taken by the British commander in Iraq. To this the Turks replied that they could not withdraw their troops as, according to their own view, they had not infringed on the status quo which, according to their agreement with Britain, was to be observed till the frontier should be fixed by the Council of the League of Nations. They offered, however, to refer to the Council for immediate decision the question of what constituted the status quo, on which there seemed to be a difference of opinion. To this the British Government consented, allowing the Turkish troops meanwhile to remain where they were; and by the middle of October the crisis had blown over.

In dealing with Egypt, Mr. MacDonald's diplomatic methods failed to secure any better result than those of his predecessor. In accordance with his undertaking, Zaglul Pasha came to London on September 23, and in the course of the next few days had several interviews with the Prime Minister. A number of conversations were devoted to the creating of the requisite "atmosphere," but as soon as the discussion became strictly. practical, on October 3, it showed agreement to be unattainable. Zaglul would not budge from his demands that Britain should withdraw her troops from the Suez Canal and cede the Sudan to Egypt. Mr. MacDonald, who on the same morning had received a visit from Lord Allenby, refused to make any concession on either point. Zaglul accordingly departed from England forthwith, leaving matters precisely where they had been.

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Mr. MacDonald made clear his position in a despatch to Lord Allenby issued from the Foreign Office on October 7. He stated that he had left the Egyptian Premier under no illusion as to the position which the Government was compelled to take up with regard to Egypt and the Sudan. No British Government could divest itself wholly, even in favour of an ally, of its interest in guarding such a vital link in British communications as the Suez Canal; and as to the Sudan, there could be no question of Britain abandoning the country till its work there was done.

Mr. MacDonald opened the election campaign in general, and his own party's campaign in particular, with a speech at Glasgow on October 13. It consisted mainly of a tirade against the Conservative and Liberal Parties for joining together to turn the Government out on a trivial issue. The motive assigned by the Labour leader was one which both parties heard with no little astonishment. "It is our success that is our trouble," he said. "Had we made a mess of things, how happy they would have been. If I had made a mess of Europe, if my friend Wheatley had made a mess of it, we would not have been out. They would have given us a much longer tether." Mr. Asquith, in opening the Liberal campaign the next day at the Queen's Hall, described Mr. MacDonald's speech as a piece of "amazing rhodomontade," and compared the speaker to the Poll Carmichael of whom Dr. Johnson had said: "She was wiggle waggle, and I never could persuade her to be categorical.' The Liberals, he said, had spent a great deal of their time and energy in saving the Government from the pits they had dug for themselves, and they got for their pains gibes from one quarter and ingratitude from another. Mr. Baldwin opened the Conservative campaign the next day, also at the Queen's Hall. He said that until the Labour Party could purge itself of its extremist elements, as the majority desired to do, it could never play its part as a patriotic and constitutional party. In a speech the next day which was broadcast over the country, he said that what the country needed was a sane, common-sense Government, not carried away by revolutionary theories or hare-brained schemes-by which he probably meant Mr. Lloyd George's schemes for developing electric power in England.

In the earlier stages of the campaign the Campbell case occupied a prominent place in election oratory, but it was gradually thrust into the background to allow of the attention of the electors being concentrated on more permanent issues. Foremost among these was the question whether power should again be entrusted to a Government which professed Socialist principles. The manifesto of the Labour Party talked of the "forward march towards a really Socialist Commonwealth," and mentioned, among the steps which it would take for reaching this goal, the nationalisation of the mining industry, of electrical power, and of the whole of the country's system of transport, along with bulk importation and distribution by the Government

of foodstuffs and household necessaries, as a means towards. establishing reasonable and stable prices. No mention was made of the Capital Levy, and in regard to the Russian Treaty a pledge was given that no loan should be guaranteed to Russia till compensation had been secured to British subjects for their losses in that country and till Parliamentary authority had been given for the guarantee of the loan. The Socialism contained in this programme was not of an extreme type; but it was sufficient to unite the Liberals with the Conservatives in a determination to turn the Government out. In his speech at the Queen's Hall, Mr. Asquith had said that "in their view, as Liberals, the establishment of such a Commonwealth as proposed by the Socialists would be the death-blow to personal liberty and the enthronement in its place of one of the worst forms of class domination." Mr. Lloyd George, who followed him, was no less explicit. "If Toryism stands alone," he said, "fighting the extremists of the Socialist Party, it will not be long before the existing order is overthrown."

The bulk of the Liberal Party shared the sentiments of their leaders, and so found themselves espousing a common cause with the Unionists. In a considerable number of cases this community of purpose led to more or less active co-operation. A few Liberal candidates formally allied themselves with the Conservative Party as anti-Socialists or "Constitutionalists," and in addition a number of prospective Conservative candidates stood down in constituencies where a three-cornered contest might enable a Labour member to be returned on a minority vote. One of the Liberals in whose favour this arrangement was made was Mr. Asquith himself. On the other hand, Liberals stood down in about a hundred constituencies in which there had been three-cornered contests in the previous election; and in some cases the avowed intention was to make matters easier for the Conservative candidate.

Nominations of candidates were made on October 20. There were only 32 unopposed returns, as against 50 in 1923. The Speaker, Mr. Whitley, and Mr. Baldwin were among the number. For the 583 contested seats there were 1393 candidates-the same number as in 1923 for 18 seats less. The Unionists increased the number of their candidates from 500 to 518, and the Labour Party from 420 to 500, but the number of Liberals (not including 10 ex-Liberals who stood as "Constitutionalists"), dropped from 443 to 333. There were 41 women candidates against 34 at the previous election. Of the contests 217 were between Unionists or Constitutionalists and Labour; 47 between Liberals and Labour; and 48 between Unionists and Liberals; while in 251 all three parties joined.

In view of the small number of candidates put forward by the Liberals, it was practically certain from the outset that they would come back to Parliament the least of the three parties, and it was hardly possible to take seriously the state

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