Has this Bill any relation to the disgraceful leaflet which has just been issued at Walsall by the Tory party?

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill read a Second time, and committed.

Moneylenders' Restriction Bill

Order for Second Reading upon Friday next read, and discharged; Bill withdrawn.

I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."

I want to give a short historical survey of the general principles of compensation to injured workman. I find the first time ever this question was introduced into this House was by a Private Member in 1849. At that time the House, and people generally, regarded it as something which would probably never be accomplished. Time went on and in 1880 we passed the Employers Liability Act, which was the first Act that gave any recognition to the principle of compensation for injuries to workmen. From that time on to 1896 or 1897 it became one of the test questions for Parliamentary candidates and in the latter year we got the first Workmen's Compensation Act. We found by experience that it fell far short of the ideals and anticipations of the workers and the community as a whole, consequently we got another Act in 1906 which is now cited as the original Compensation Act. Again, from experience of it, we found that it fell short of meeting the requirements and of giving adequate compensation for injuries received, and just after the expiration of the war a very important Committee was appointed to investigate the whole matter, presided over by a gentleman who I think everyone will agree stands in the first rank in regard to knowledge of compensation law—Mr. Holman-Gregory. When the report was issued the workers' hopes and anticipation rose and they believed that a really good Bill would be the outcome of the recommendations of the Committee.

But not until 1923 was any real effort made to give effect to those recommendations. A Bill was passed in that year which was rushed through not only in the closing days of the Session but of the life of a Parliament. If the First Lord of the Admiralty, who piloted that Bill through the House, were in his place now' e would admit that Amendments from every part of the House were considered, and some of them included in the Bill probably without fair and reasonable consideration. It will probably be argued to-day that the period is too short between the passing of that Act to the present time to make any change, but it is only by experience of previous Acts of Parliament that we have been able to find out their disadvantages and disabilities. That is why I have given a short history of the various Acts which have passed through the House. It was only by the experience that was obtained of the working of these Acts that we were able to find out where the disabilities and disadvantages lay. We have had sufficient time to find out a good many weaknesses that now exist in the 1923 Act. This Bill does not seek even to try to get redress for all the wrongs we think there are in the 1922 Act, but we are asking for some of the most outstanding disadvantages to be amended with a view to bringing that Act more more into line with the desires and aspirations of the people who have to benefit from it. Again no time is a short time if you find out some wrongs. The best thing you can do is to put the wrongs right at the earliest possible moment, and if the House is satisfied that the points which are included in the Bill would remedy what we think are wrongs in the existing Act, the House which legislates for the people generally ought to try to put them right by giving the Bill a Second Reading.

I think everyone who has had anything to do with the working of the present Act will be prepared to admit that it has been very difficult to operate. Some of our most eminent judges have passed some very scathing remarks in regard to the difficulty of construing it. Laymen like myself have found it exceedingly difficult to define and to give proper effect to its Clauses. I say laymen like myself, because the trade union of which I am a member has an agreement with the employers of the district that all our cases are settled by a committee under Home Office Orders, but we have found tremendous difficulties. We have submitted them to legal minds, and they have been in as much difficulty as ourselves. The whole point of the Bill is to try to remove these difficulties which have arisen from our experience of working the 1923 Act. As I have already stated, the Bill I am presenting falls far short of what I would like to see a compensation Bill do. I have in my hand a large number of amendments sent in from different trades unions, and if they had all been incorporated in the Bill it would have been considerably longer than it is, but although we have not been able to do that we are very desirous of getting some anomalies removed. It will be argued, doubtless, that a good many of the Clauses in this Bill were put forward as Amendments to the 1923 Act, and that will be correct, but it does not disqualify us from asking the House to reconsider the Amendments put forward in 1923.

Turning to the Clauses of the Bill, I want to direct attention to the proposed first Clause. It introduces what may be considered to be a new idea. We are asking that it shall be definitely laid down by this House that the widow of a deceased man shall be assured of getting not less than £250. I am quite well aware that at the present time she can get up to £300 if her late husband had been earning wages sufficient to enable her to claim that amount. But we want if we can to insert a definite flat-rate, so that, regardless of what may have been earned, the woman will have security that she will get nothing less than £250. Also, we are not satisfied with the amount now paid to the children. We are quite prepared to admit that the Act of 1923 was a considerable improvement in that respect on the previous Act, but we are satisfied in our minds that even by the 1923 Act we have not reached the standard we would like to attain. I have had experience in a good many of these cases, and the experience sometimes is a tragedy. When you have to sit down and allocate, say, £300 among five or six children, the youngest child being probably in its first year, you find that after you have allocated the widow her share and then a share for each child, very often the widow is dependent upon Poor Law relief for her support. We say the Poor Law ought not to have to make provision for things that are attributable to industry, that our industries ought to make ample provision for all who fall by the wayside in the industrial struggle. If any Member would try to visualise the sum of £300 divided among five or six, and sometimes seven or eight children, he will find, after having calculated for periods of ten, twelve, fourteen or fifteen years, that there is not very much at the end of the week for the widow to maintain herself and her children on. We are asking that that amount should be raised to £800, and we are asking, also, for what we call definite security so far as the children's money is concerned.

At the present time I hope the House will excuse me for using instances that happen in my own locality—when we have made a settlement for a widow, all the money is invested in the name of trustees for the benefit of the children, and sums are drawn from that fund every week and sent direct to the widow, and we have to get the best investments we can. This may be out of order, but I should like to mention in passing that even in respect of that fund the Treasury claim income tax from us, because, they say, it is a fund which ought to pay income tax, though the money is coming from nobody but the children themselves. We suggest in this Bill that all the money should be paid into the State for the benefit of the children, so that whatever might happen there would always be the security that the children's money was under safe control, and no fears need arise in the minds of those responsible for the upbringing of the children. We are asking, also, that a specific sum should be given per week to these children. The sum is named in the Bill. It cannot be said to be extravagant or excessive. I feel sure hon. Members will realise the amounts we are asking for in this Bill per week per child are not excessive—that with them we shall scarcely be able to give the child a proper standard of life. But we believe that by being modest in our requests there may be some possibility of our getting these things incorporated in the Bill.

Then I turn to another point in the Bill. In Sub-section (3) of the Act of 1923 the sum of £15 is paid in respect of a person who is killed who has no dependants. We ask for that amount to be raised to £20. It is not, a large amount, and we are doubtful in our minds whether it would allow a man to be buried with the ordinary respectability that is expected, and without assistance having to be obtained from the Poor Law towards burying the man.

I come now to a more contentious portion of the Bill, I think—that is, the pay ment for total incapacity to work. Under the 1923 Act a workman gets nothing for the first three days unless he has been off a month. If he has an injury that keeps him from his work for a month he will be entitled to the first three days. We ask that the period should be made fourteen days instead of a month. The reason for that is that in the industries named, which stand highest in the list so far as percentage of accidents is concerned, a large proportion of the accidents are what we call "minor accidents," that is, accidents of short duration. Under the existing conditions in industry a man who may be disabled and thrown off work for a fortnight, if he has a large family to maintain, finds when he gets his pay every Saturday that the money is practically spent before he really gets it. Therefore when the accident occurs we very often find that the man has nothing to fall back upon, and he has to rely only on the compensation he gets from his employer. We ask that the waiting period should be changed from four weeks to the incapacity lasting for 14 days or upwards, and that would make for the good of everybody concerned. I know it has generally been argued that if you lessen the time there is an inclination in some oases to malingering, but I submit that all the insurance societies, indemnity societies, and employers' organisations are now so well equipped with a medical service that within a day or two of an accident the employer's medical officer has an opportunity of examining the man, and therefore, so far as malingering is concerned, the chances are very remote, and he is a very clever man if he can escape the vigilance of the medical officer, and even if he succeeded in doing this I think he deserves to have the money.

We consider that it is only right from the earliest possible time the injured man ought to receive compensation. In Clause 3 we are asking for a substitution of words now contained in the 1923 Act in regard to disablement as to when a man will really be entitled to compensation. Speaking as a miner, I would like to see the words "arising out of and in the course of his employment" struck out, but I am afraid I shall not be able to accomplish that. In mining and other industries as well, when a miner goes down the mine, he is expected to lend a hand in the case of certain things happen- ing in the mine. He may be a piece worker but he will be expected to lend a hand to assist in moving anything to expedite the work of the mine.

In every part of the mine a day wage man may be called upon for the benefit of the mine to lend a hand to get things moved. If the man meets with an accident whilst he is employed in that way we have difficulty in convincing the management that that man was doing something for the good of the colliery in the course of his employment. I want to submit to this House that that man was doing all he could to facilitate the working of the mine, and he was doing what he thought was a good thing so far as the employers were concerned. We are asking in cases like that where an accident happens and a man is disabled, that he may be brought in as being entitled to compensation.

Next, I come to another very important point, at any rate important to those who sit on these benches, and I also hope to hon. Members opposite, who represent industrial constituencies, and that is the question of the medical referee. I have to be very careful here, because I know the sensitiveness of the medical fraternity. We are not raising any personal objection to anyone, but we think the present system puts too much on one man because he has to decide so many matters of vital importance that arise. As a matter of fact I think it is asking too much of one man to have to decide what is really a matter of bread and butter to any man who may be injured in the mine. In. the first place the injured man has to be examined by the employer's doctor, and he gets a notice under Clause 14. He has then to get a report from his own medical man and very often that is difficult because as a rule medical men do not take very kindly to supplying these reports. All this evidence is submitted to the medical referee, who in nearly all cases is a man living in the immediate district where the accident has happened. Of course, the referee is a medical man, who has to live like everybody else, and the result is that it is difficult to bring in a, man who is in-partial and not in some way connected with the parties whose cases are submitted to him. Of course the referee is only human like the rest of us, but nevertheless he cannot help himself, and he is called upon to decide a very important point which means a good deal to the man who is to be examined.

Of course the medical man will probably do his best in the examination of this man, but I submit that generally speaking, in areas of that kind, the medical men are more of a general character and they are not experts on any particular subject. Therefore, instead of putting the onus on one man I think it ought to be placed in the hands of three persons who should act independently of either the man or the employers so far as the industry is concerned. These three men should make a thorough examination of the case, and I believe if we could get that system established, it would give general satisfaction to the workmen of this country.

We also ask that the referees should not be concerned in any way directly or indirectly in practice in employers' liability or workman's compensation cases either on behalf of an employer or workman or by any insurers interested in such cases. We are not asking for any special favour, nor that the medical board should consist of men we would approve of, but we are asking that the medical referee shall be superseded by three men independent of all parties concerned, and in that way we believe their decisions would be more respected than they are to-day. We are quite satisfied in our minds that we must have finality, but what we do say is that that finality or that final court should be of the highest possible order, because the bread and butter of the man who is to be examined, and his wife and children is going to depend on the decision of the people who have the case before them. Therefore we ask that only those of the highest possible standard engaged in the profession should be employed in arriving at a decision which involves so much to our workmen.

Now I come to Clause 6. In that Clause we ask for a change in the amount to be paid in case of incapacity. At the present time it is 50 per cent. of his actual earnings, and certain calculations are made which mean earning less than a certain amount. In this case those who decide have not only to have a knowledge of the law of compensation, but they have also to be very good at mathematics. Therefore, we have had to take special training in that direction. We want to simplify it, and we want to put in a definite figure. We are, therefore, asking in this Bill that the incapacitated workman should be given 75 per cent. of his earnings, and 75 per cent. is not excessive. I want to submit that when a man is injured his liabilities to his household do not cease. He has still his rent to pay and his liabilities to meet, and by reason of his accident his liabilities are increased rather than diminished, because he needs more attention, more nourishing foods, and probably a good many things which he has to do without when working ordinarily are prescribed for him by his doctor, and have to be given to him if they can possibly be obtained. We, therefore, say that, if there be a time when a man needs real help, it is when he is incapacitated. We ask that, at any rate, he should be given 75 per cent. of his actual earnings, believing that the better care that is taken of the man the better it will be for his employer, as probably he will be able all the sooner to resume his work.

With regard to the Schedule, and, in regard to miners' nystagmus—I speak as one who has the misfortune to come from a county where there is a very high percentage of nystagmus cases. I think we are either the second or third highest on the list. Every day, when I am at home and go out, I meet men who have come out of the mines with nystagmus and are at present receiving no compensation at all. The doctors state that the nystagmus has ceased, because oscillation has disappeared from the eye. Another disease to which I want to turn is phthisis, and I want to draw the attention of the House to a new disease, so far as I know, that is now occurring among miners. We have dealt with it under an Act called the Silicosis Act, but that Act does not make provision for adequate compensation, and the men are at present excluded from the Workmen's Compensation Act. I think I am right in saying that five deaths have occurred in Somerset, and there are several cases now of men who are in a very delicate state of health owing to what the medical authorities have definitely declared are the results of them working in stone of a silicosis nature.

Can the hon. Gentleman say exactly where those cases have occurred.

In Somerset, in the Radstock district. There is only one case of which I know in my own county. The man resides in the same town as myself and for the last fifteen months he has been unable to follow his employment. The medical man says that this is the direct result of stone dust. The man receives no compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Act, and he cannot receive any compensation under the other Act, because the stone that he mines is not for sale, and, a certain percentage not being for sale, he does not come in for anything. The natural result is that the man is dependent upon Poor Law relief, I submit that it is not right that the ratepayers of the district should be liable for a man who is unable to work owing to incapacity arising out of his industrial occupation. We therefore ask that these matters should be given due attention by the House. There are some things which are not scheduled as industrial diseases, and men consequently are outside any benefits under the Workmen's Compensation Act. We ask that all these things that can be traced as the direct result of men following their employment in industrial occupations should be included, and that provision should be made in a Workmen's Compensation Act for them to receive compensation. The Bill we now present to the House tries to make provision for these things.

This Bill has not caused as big a flutter as some other Bills that will come on later in the Session. It has not been of much value to the newspapers. But I can assure hon. Members that to men in industrial districts who are following dangerous industrial occupations it is of more importance than any other Bill. I have the honour to represent a Division composed as to 80 per cent. of industrial workers, iron and steel workers, men on the railways, men in iron and ore mines, in coalmines and quarries, and men in every industrial occupation. While the 1923 Act did make some better provision than existed before, we have still a long way to go before we get adequate and proper compensation for workmen who suffer from accidents or for the dependants of workmen who fall in the struggle that is going on in the industrial world. I therefore ask the House to give this Bill a Second Reading. Let it go upstairs and in Committee hon. Members will have ample opportunity for giving vent to their feelings and putting down their Amendments. Any Amendments that go to improve the Bill will be heartily welcomed. So far as I personally am concerned, I am wise enough to know that it can be improved. I know that it does not come up to the expectations of a good many of my hon. Friends on these Benches, and it falls far short even of the recommendations of the Holman Gregory Committee. We want by degrees to find out weaknesses in Acts of Parliament, and it ought to be the business of this House to strengthen those weaknesses and legislate for the benefit of the people as a whole.

I beg to second the Motion.

Like my hon. Friend, I speak as a representative of a great industry—the railway industry—which pays such a terrific toll each year in killed and wounded by accident. My hon. Friend has shown to the House the progress that this idea of Workmen's Compensation has made. He has illustrated how slowly that progress has been, and he has told the House that the present Bill is an attempt to get into law the Amendments which we moved in 1923. I speak also as an old railwayman, who has had the unpleasant duty of having to assist in rendering first aid to our unfortunate victims, and I want to do all I can to alleviate the mental anguish that our victims suffer. All those who have dealt with men injured in industry know the fortitude with which our men will suffer physical pain, but they can also bear witness to the terrible anguish that our men feel when they think of those at home. The single man will talk of his dear mother; the married man will, between his groans, refer to his wife and children. I have gone through that so far as being the child in a home where that occurred. My father, when I was a boy nine years old—before there were any Compensation Acts—met with a terrible accident on the railway. He had one leg cut off, the other terribly mutilated, scalp wounds, and so on, and was off duty for 15 months. I afterwards worked with men who rendered him first aid, and took him to the hospital. They said that his one cry, his one care, his one thought during the whole of that period was, "What about my wife? What about my children?" He knew full well that not a copper would be received from his employers, in those days, while he lay at home disabled; he knew, which was worse, that all his prospects of life were gone, and that he would have to put up with any sort of job when he was well enough to resume some sort of duty.

We feel all the more strongly on this side, because so many accidents are due, firstly, to lack of proper safeguards and, secondly, to devotion to duty; and the experience I believe in the mines—I know it is on the railways—is that, in so far as we penalise this lack of provision, greater provision is made. It does seem that as we make it expensive to injure people, so we get safety appliances. In the early railway days, it was a common saying that a man had better by far kill a man than a horse on a railway, because a new horse cost, perhaps, about 50 guineas, while a man could be had for nothing. That was a common saying until these Acts came in. [Hon MEMBERS: "No !"] It was a common saying. My right hon. Friend the senior Member for Derby (Mr. J. H. Thomas) illustrated this point in 1923, when he moved a similar Bill. He showed how he himself had gone round the footplates during snow and blinding rain, in order to see that the engine was in good order, and to ensure the safety of those behind. We engine drivers have all done it. We do not ask anything for it; it is our duty. The craft spirit still lingers in all workmen. The factory system, the industrial machine, does a good deal to kill it, but the craft spirit is still there—the desire to excel in one's work—and it is a cause of accidents.

The old Act, as my hon. Friend has pointed out, does place men in some danger in that way. I should like, if I may, to give an example. In the Railway Rule Book there is a rule, No. 55, designed for safety, which states that, on stopping at a home signal with an engine or train, the fireman must proceed to the signal-box, and acquaint the signalman of his whereabouts. In a fog or a, snowstorm, it would be little short of manslaughter if a driver sent an inexperienced fireman to the signal-box. In many places where this occurs, where there is a number of lines of rail, we do not send the firemen; we go ourselves. I remember that some few years ago I was involved in a case where one of my friends, a driver, was stopped at a signal in a fog, and, knowing that he dare not send his own fireman, went himself. In walking along the 4-foot way, he stumbled at a bridge, and fell between the longitudinal sleepers. At that moment he heard coming the up Manchester express of which I happened to be the driver, and he told me the next day that, had he been an inexperienced fireman, he probably would have tried to scramble out of the way, but he had the presence of mind to lie down. I passed over him at about 56 miles an hour, and he was saved. But he was not following his "usual employment"; he should have remained on the engine, and the fireman should have gone. But we look after our people, and we could not send them to what, perhaps, might be almost certain death. May I say that that poor fellow, although he escaped death that night, was killed about two years ago by the breaking of a working part on an old engine, and I am proud to say that the evidences on that engine, when it was examined after the accident, showed that, although the connecting rod had cut through the fire-box, and he was in a perfect hell of steam, boiling water and fire, he stuck to his post, and put the engine in such a position that the train stopped before he was blown off the footplate to death. His fireman was also blown off. That was over two years ago, and to-day, when he is walking about with one arm, helpless, limping, going every day to the hospital to receive electrical treatment, he is not receiving enough in compensation to keep him and his wife and children alive, his mates having to help him as they go along.

My hon. Friend has raised the point about being in "usual employment." We had in my union recently a case of a relief signalman—that is to say, a man stationed at a certain point, who has to proceed to signal-boxes in a given district to relieve signalmen. This man was regularly relieving at a signal-box, owing to the illness of the regular signalman, and, in going home by passenger train, at a certain station where there was a lot of heavy, luggage, he got out to render assistance to the guard and porter, so as to help to get the train along, and in order that it might not be delayed, as they often are. On one occasion he was injured by a box. The stationmaster—the company's representative—knew that he was there, and knew that he was doing it, but, because he was injured in doing work that he was not supposed to do, that poor fellow did not get any compensation.

We talk a good deal about compensation, but it is not compensation that we are really after—it is safety that we seek. I know that, in the mines, friends whom I meet in that industry are always insisting on these things, and making suggestions. We on the railways are doing the same. The society of which I am proud to be a member was responsible for the Prevention of Accidents to Railway Servants Act. That was resisted at first by the railway companies, but there is not one railwayman who would go back to the old days. The old engineers, I suppose, without giving it a thought, put our tool-boxes on the back of the tender, so that if you wanted a spanner, or any other tool, while the train was in motion, you had to go to the back of the tender, and snores of men have been killed in that way while passing under bridges. As a fireman, I have gone time after time on an express train, with a stick in my hand to measure the water in the tank, in order to see if we had enough to get to our destination. We were instrumental in getting gauges put on the front of tenders. Again, the gauge-glasses on the boilers were exposed and unprotected, with a pressure of, perhaps, 160 to 200 lbs. per square inch. We got that altered. Many men have been injured in that way, but all these things were resisted. No one would go back now, because I believe that as a rssult of these changes, the companies are saving money rather than otherwise.

I agree with my hon. Friend that what we really want is a more comprehensive Measure—something in the nature of co-ordination on the lines of the Holman-Gregory Report. But we are not going so far as that. What I submit is that this Bill is more along the lines of the spirit of the age and strict Parliamentary traditions. We are seeking by that which we ask to go along by degrees. This Bill seeks to go a little further than the present regulations. When I say "the spirit of the age" I mean that there grew up during the War, and still lingers, the idea that we have a greater responsibility to one another than used to be regarded as the case. I believe that the great question which has come down through the ages "Am I my brother's keeper?" can be, and is being, answered in the affirmative. We ought to accept this responsibility to a greater degree than ever we have done before. In the words of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Seaham (Mr. Webb) in presiding over the Labour Party Conference in 1923 —

In Clause 1 of the Bill we are not so very extreme. As my hon. Friend has pointed out in regard to the widow, we are not asking for £300 for her benefit on the death of her husband. There are not many people in industry to-day whose wages for three years would not amount to £300, allowing for the difference in values between now and pre-War time. We are not asking that; we are actually reducing it by £50. I dare say that from some of our people 12 N. there will be a storm coming down upon our devoted heads. But we think we are doing the right thing, and will face the country on it. We are at least attempting to do what I think is most important, and that is to standarise things. We are standardising the amount to the widow, and the liability to the employer, and this applies to the children as well as to the widow. Under the present Act the liability is greater on the employer where a man has a number of children than where there is only one child. Here, again, we believe in the standardisation of the employer's contribution, and, certainly, the standardisation of the benefits for the children is of the utmost importance. We believe that each child should be treated alike, and that no child should be treated differently to any other, because one child, unfortunately, happened to have a labourer for his father, while the other happened to have a craftsman. The children cannot help who are their fathers, and in the interests of humanity and in the interests of the British nation these children ought to have a fresh start.

12 N.

As far as Clause 6 is concerned here we are asking for 75 per cent. with a minimum of 40s. We have at present one of our members living at Tottenham, a man with a wife and nine children, and he has 30s. a week. How is it possible for these people to live on that? Either they have to go to the Poor Law Guardians or their friends have to assist them! In 1923 we were told in this House that we were always "making raids on industry." One right hon. Gentleman, who has now gone to another place, reminded us that there was no hole in the ground out of which we could take money, and hand it to the child. But widows and the orphans must be provided for. The Home Secretary of that day, now the First Lord of the Admiralty said: of its casualties, as, indeed, and in the last analysis, it must. There is no other source from which it can be borne. If you drive the children to the Poor Law, or wherever you may drive them, it has to come out of industry in the ultimate. Why not, then, a reasonable measure of standardisation, which applies exactly where it ought to? We should then know exactly what we are doing. We cannot escape our responsibilities. We may neglect the orphan to-day, and leave him with an ill-nourished body. We may neglect his mind, but our liability will some day have to be accepted. It may be that it will be in hospital, in the lunatic asylum, in the workhouse, or in prison.

An incident comes to my mind at the moment where, at the Victoria Docks, one of my friends was on an engine, and looking over he saw alongside him a lad on the road. This little fellow asked my friend for a bit of bread. My friend inquired: "Why do you not go and ask your father?" The reply was: "I have no father." Then: "Why do not you go and ask your mother?" "My mother is at work." "Who looks after you?" "My sister," said the boy; "she is 11 years old." This little fellow appeared to be about seven. This was a boy down in one of the worst possible places for any lad to be—at a London Dock gates, where the only thing that the children are taught to be afraid of is the policeman, and where they are instructed that anything they can get away with is theirs. That mother, we contend, ought to have been kept at home to look after her children. I submit that if we neglect the children in the early years, the chances are that we shall reap the harvest later. We believe in this matter that if we "cast our bread upon the waters, we shall find it after many days."

Industry will not suffer, so far as I can see. Rather it may be that we shall accelerate the circulation of money and commodities. Our people will be employed on producing these commodities. Here, again, we on these benches, believe that what the world is suffering from to-day is a lack of purchasing power. It may be that the percentage of profit will be reduced, but the turn-over of concerns will become greater, and we shall generally be just as well off. We talk about "holes" and of wealth, but we on these benches know the meaning of real wages. We know it means commodities. We also know that these are produced by human skill and endeavour. We accept the definition of Ruskin "the only wealth is life" and most of us consider, too, that the opposite of that is "ilith." In Ontario, they have been doing better than we have been doing here. According to a report issued in 1923, the Workmen's Compensation Act there is administered by a State Board. The employer is taxed on the annual pay roll, and the money goes to a central fund, which is administered by the Board. All claims are settled by the Board, and the employers have no interest adverse to the injured workman. There is no insurance company, with its mind on dividends, jealously scanning each claim. Litigation has been entirely eliminated, and the judges of the Supreme Courts have praised the Act as a practical method of dealing with this question. What has been done there could be done here.

We believe that the obtaining of workmen's compensation should be as simple as obtaining sick benefit from an ordinary friendly society. We are not asking for compensation for loss of limb. We are not asking for compensation for pain and suffering. We are not asking compensation for the lack of opportunity which the injred workman cannot give to his children as a result of his injuries, and we are not asking for compensation for discomfort caused by the loss of limb. My poor father, every time there was a change of weather, experienced agonies from that part of his body where he had suffered his injury. We are asking for adequate compensation for the loss of wages.

In this Assembly, at various times when Bills have been asked for on behalf of the workers, all sorts of arguments have been put forward. When the House was asked, 80 years ago, to lower the hours of work for girls in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire from 12 hours to 10 hours, the reply was that "industry could not bear it," and that the British Empire would "totter" if that were done. We know that the people who said that were wrong. The British Empire and the textile trade did not rest on a few mill girls working two hours' overtime every day. We were told when the first of the Mines Acts was passed that it was absolutely necessary for women and dear little children of six or seven years of age to go down the mines. We know that the people who said that were mistaken. We know that the mines have flourished. To-day it may be said that any further advance in regard to the workmen's compensation would be such that industry cannot bear it. I refuse to believe that industry can only rest on the sufferings and degradation of those who fall by the way in industrial accidents. I believe that we can only succeed by doing justice, and that no state of society and no Empire is worthy of the name unless it he built on a happy, well-cared for people. For these reasons, I second the Motion that this Bill be now read a Second time.

I beg to move to leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof the words

While I congratulate both the Mover and the Seconder upon the moderate terms in which they have moved and seconded this Bill, I am afraid that I must criticise their remarks by saying that a great deal of what they said was not in any way germane to the question before the House. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh !"] That may be rather a strong statement, but it is correct.

It is an extremist statement.

It is, first of all, necessary that one should consider workmen's compensation legislation and the payment of money for injury in its true relation to industry. Before the Workmen's Compensation Act, you always had the liability, which still exists at common law, on the employer for accidents caused by his negligence, or caused by the failure to provide proper safeguards. That has been built up, not only by the long history of common law, but by the common law incorporating such Statutes as the Factory and Workshops Act and statutes of that type. Wherever the employer fails in his duty under the Factory and Workshops Act, and legislation of that type, he is liable at common law to the full extent and to make good the damage suffered by the workman who is injured as a result of that breach of duty, and to make it good to the fullest extent that money can make good the loss which the man has suffered. That is a very right and a very proper penalty upon the employer who is negligent.

I am far from saying that I am satisfied with the position of the common law, because it has always been my view that two doctrines which are very intimately associated should have been taken away as defences from the employer. One is the defence of common employment, and the other is the defence of what is known as Volenti non fit injuria or, in other words, the voluntary taking of all risk. If these two defences were taken from the common law we should then have a perfectly clear system under which the employer would be liable for any negligence on his part, for any breach of statutory duty, such as the failure to provide proper appliances, and he would be liable, under the principles of the common law, to make good the whole damage. The man who has been negligent should pay the penalty.

The Workmen's Compensation Act was introduced for the purpose of providing a middle course between the common law and the state of affairs in which the man was left without anything. That was the position where there was no negligence on the part of the employer. The Workmen's Compensation Acts went a little further, because they disregarded negligence on the part of the man. Notwithstanding the fact that the man may have been negligent and the employer guilty of no negligence, the man was given his rights under the Workmen's Compensation Acts, but it was never regarded as giving more than a partial insurance. There is a very good reason for that. As the two previous speakers have pointed out, it is essential that there should be a penalty for negligence, but if you make it just as expensive for a man to injured without negligence as it is for him to be injured with negligence, you take away the penalty altogether, and that would be the effect of making workmen's compensation, as put forward in the Workmen's Compensation Act, anything like an adequate system of insurance. Therefore one must not regard the proposals which are dealt with as compensation from the point of view of what would be an adequate compensation for all the loss that is suffered. One must regard it in its true principle, namely, as a sharing of the loss between the employer and the employed, in consideration of the fact that negligence is disregarded entirely for the purposes of workmen's compensation. I should be prepared to go a great deal further in this regard. I should be prepared to deal with a scheme which provides adequate compensation, if you deal with it as a scheme of comprehensive insurance, which is surely the right way of dealing with it, because there is no question of negligence at all, but if you are going to make a money payment of something which indemnifies the workman and his dependants completely for the monetary loss which they suffer, it is hopelessly unfair that it should fall entirely upon the employer. It should be a general burden provided by an adequate scheme of comprehensive insurance. Therefore it seems to me that arguments based, as so many of the statements of my hon. Friend are, upon the assumption that a man may or may not have to go to the poor law are arguments which might very well be brought forward in support of a comprehensive scheme of insurance, but have no place when you are dealing with something which never pro- fesses to be adequate insurance, and is partial because it would be hopelessly wrong were you to put the liability on the individual and to make him pay the same penalty when he is careful as you make him pay when he has been grossly negligent.

Having dealt with that matter I wish to refer to the suggestion, made by the Mover of this Bill, that the Act of 1923 was rushed through Parliament in the concluding days of the life of that Parliament. That is only correct in this sense that the Report stage of the 1923 Act was taken in this House on two whole days immediately before the dissolution of Parliament, but it leaves out of account altogether that the Bill was introduced in the early part of 1923, that it went to a Committee upstairs and that for 11 days amendment after amendment was discussed by a very adequate representation of the party opposite who put forward with great force and great skill their arguments which were received with the very greatest consideration by my right hon. Friend the present First Lord of the Admiralty and also by my right hon. Friend the present Secretary of State for Home Affairs. The matter was thoroughly thrashed out, and it is not fair to suggest that the Act of 1923 was in any sense of the word rushed through Parliament.

Apart from everything else I remember very well that during the Committee stage a number of points were raised in connection with this Bill and the then Home Secretary promised to consider those points, and on the Report stage in this House, in accordance with the promise which he made, he brought forward amendments designed to meet the points which had been made in Committee. With regard to one point which is now brought forward in this Bill he actually proposed in this House on the Report stage an amendment to the Bill of 1923 for the purpose of putting it into the Act, and not one of the hon. Members on the other side, although they were led for that purpose by my right hon. Friend the senior Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) challenged the proposals which he brought forward as the result of the discussion which had taken place upstairs. It does seem to me in those circumstances that it is rather playing with things to bring forward a Bill which is simply a series of amendments rejected after the fullest consideration, some of which are in the teeth of concessions which were made by the Government to meet hon. Members opposite who did not challenge those concessions when they were brought forward in this House.

Turning to the provisions of the Bill, and with regard to the first Clause, the hon. Member who seconded the Bill admitted freely—and I am not sure that the House caught the full significance of it—that one effect of this Bill, if it were passed, would be to take away from every widow who is left without children, and whose husband's earnings were more than £1 12s. 6d. per week, £50 of her compensation. That surely is a matter of importance. What right have we, having conferred upon the widow a right to £300, to come along, and, under the guise of an amending Act, take away £50 of her compensation.

One is a minimum and the other is a maximum.

No, the provision is under the law as it at present stands. The widow of every worker whose wages come to more than £1 12s. 6d. will get more than £250. She may get anything according to calculation between £250 and £300, but she is not subject to any assessment at all. It is merely based on a mathematical calculation. The hon. Member who seconded the Bill must know many cases in which the average over three years comes to less than £300. I think that he assents to that proposition. Anyone who knows the position to-day knows that that is correct. So that what this comes to is that in the majority of cases in which a widow is left alone the effect of this would be to deprive her of £50 of her compensation. I think that it is just as well that the public should know how, in the majority of cases, and in every case in which the wages are over £l 12s. 6d., the particular guardians, or those who claim to be the guardians of these people in this House, deal with their rights when they bring forward a Bill of this kind.

What would he the effect if the wages were £1 a week?

It would add £50 to the compensation of the widow. I am not disguising the effect. What I am saying is, Do not, under the guise of giving benefits, take benefits away.

What about the deductions that are made of weekly payments that bring the amount down to 2200?

There is nothing which affects that, because under the Act of 1923 you are not allowed to reduce the amount which is payable below £200. I am not at all sure as to what the effect would have been, but it may very well have been to deprive the widow of that right. It does not affect that question one way or the other. That was provided for by the Act of 1923, and is not altered by this Bill. The hon. Member is referring to something which is not dealt with in this Bill, and I shall, therefore, pass from it. Let me come to what is a much more serious matter, namely, the method of dealing with the money of children. I refer to Clause 1, Sub-section (1, b ). I quite appreciate that that does provide an increased amount of compensation in certain cases. It does so in almost all cases. But first of all it has no relation whatever, and the compensation bears no relation whatever, to the age of the child. Under this Clause, as drawn, if a workman leaves a boy aged 14 years and 10 months and no other children, that boy gets £500. Equally, if he leaves, subject to something which I shall detail presently, 10 children, all of them under 14, the amount is still £500, and the compensation under this Section beam no relation of any kind to the age of the child. It puts a liability on the employer which, as I shall show, really has no reference to the child at all.

Take the position I have given of a boy or girl aged 14 years and 10 months. £500 is to be paid by the employer. Does the child get the benefit of it? Not at all. What happens to that £500 under this Bill is that the money goes into a central fund, to be administered by the Secretary of State in accordance with Regulations, which means, I suppose, putting up an official or something like a public trustee to administer it. It goes into that fund, and all that the child will get out of it will be 10s. a week for the two months of his life that remain between 14 years and 10 months and 15 years. Can anyone imagine a more farcical thing than to give compensation with one hand and to take it away with another and give it to someone else's children? Under what principle of law do you make the employer, who has not been negligent in any way, subject to a penalty of £500, which is not to go to the benefit of the dependants of his workmen, but is to go to the benefit of the children of workmen of other employers? That is the effect of the Bill. But take the straight case, where the money really does accrue to some extent for the children of the actual workman of the employer. This Bill sets up a totally new method of dealing with compensation—a method which, I think, nobody who has had practical experience of the working of these Acts would wish to see adopted. I say that for this reason. At the present time money which is recovered by way of compensation for a widow and children is administered and used in the most careful way for the benefit of the widow and children.

I do not want to weary the House, but I think it is necessary that this matter should be discussed fully, in fairness to those who at present administer these Funds, the County Court Judges and the County Court Registrars. I was discussing this question only yesterday with one of the Lords Justices of. Appeal, who authorised me to give his view and his illustration with regard to it. At the present time we have, under the rules of the High Court, a rule by which damages which are recovered for infants should be invested in the name of the Public Trustee and administered by him. That is in a sense very similar to this system, but the experience of the High Court Judges has been that that was a most unsatisfactory way of dealing with the matter. What has happened has been this. In almost every case where damages are recovered for an infant the request is made to the Registrar of a, County Court in the area where the infant lives to allow him to have the money invested in his name so that he may administer it for the benefit of the child, because it has been found in the administration of workmen's compensation that that is one of the most useful tribunals for that purpose.

What is the system to be displaced by this Bill? At present workmen's compensation is paid into the County Court. The widow goes to the Court The Judge instructs the Registrar to make the fullest possible inquiries. Those inquiries are made. The widow goes to the Court and sees the Judge in his private room, accompanied by the Registrar. They go thoroughly into the matter. The Judge considers her circumstances. Ho asks what money she has coming in from other sources. Then he says to the widow, "In order to bring your family up how much per week do you want out of this fund?" She states the amount which she thinks necessary, and so far as the compensation will go it is paid to her out of the money which is in the Court. According to this Bill, no matter how much a widow may have from other sources, she must take for each child, 10s. for the first, 7s. 6d. for the second and 6s. for every other child under 15. She may not need it at all. Hon. Members opposite seem to think that that is an unusual procedure. In my own experience it is by no means unusual. Not only is it by no means unusual, but the widow often says to herself this: "I can manage perfectly well without this money. I think it will be far better for the money to remain in Court, so that when my children get to the age of 14 or 15 it may be used for the purpose of apprenticeship, or when my children reach the age of 21 it may be used to give them a little money with which they may be able to do something to better themselves in life in a way that would otherwise not be possible." This Bill takes away from the children every right of that kind. The money must be used week by week, and if there is any balance left it is taken from the children so that other children can have it.

Would there be any reason why the widow should not pay the 10s. into a fund?

There is no reason why she should not put it into the Post Office Savings Bank if she wants to do so, but on the other hand there is every reason in the world for not disturbing a safe investment where the money may be used ultimately and where the children have complete right.

Is the Post Office not safe?

No one suggests that it is not. I can quite understand that it is more in accordance with the principles of hon. Gentlemen opposite that the money which is awarded to one particular infant should be used for the infants of other people rather than that the child should have that which is properly its private property. I suppose that must explain it. There is one other thing. Hon. Members are proposing to raise the amount from £600 to £800. I declined, as some hon. Members know, to discuss any matters in Committee on the 1923 Bill on a mere question of amount. I very well remember being taken to task in Committee by a Member who sat on this side of the House as to whether I accused him of insincerity because I thought the remarks he made about the burden on industry were bringing forward merely a bogey. I still hold that opinion about many remarks of that kind; they are brought forward merely for the purpose of diverting attention from the real question, just as many remarks made from the other side of the House, which are calculated to appeal to the sympathies of hon. Members of this House, are brought forward as though they had some relation to the question before the House when in fact they have not. When you are dealing with a question of partial insurance, when the previous Statute has only been 15 months in operation, and when there is under consideration, as there is at the present time, a general and comprehensive system of insurance, is it wise to start tinkering with the amounts which may be paid under a system quite different from a comprehensive system, and not intended to have, the same effect.

I come to Clause 2 which deals with the words in the 1923 Act tary promised to consider the matter, and to bring up an Amendment on the Report stage. On the Report stage my right hon. Friend the then Home Secretary in this House brought forward an Amendment fixing four weeks instead of 14 days. When my right hon. Friend brought that Amendment forward he was not challenged by a single Member on the other side of the House. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) was sitting on those benches in full force and raised no objection whatever to that Amendment. Clause 3 of this Bill merely adds some words and extends Section 7 of the principal Act to deal with classes of cases held to be outside the previous Act because they arose from acts done in contravention of statutory rules and regulations. Section 7 of the Act of 1923 allowed compensation to be given in certain limited cases even though the man concerned had been guilty of gross disobedience of rules and regulations made for the safety of the whole business. These were cases in which the accident resulted in the death or the serious and permanent disablement of the workman. I moved an Amendment to substitute for "serious and permanent disablement" the words which it is now sought to insert. That proposal was objected to by the learned Solicitor-General, and, as far as I can remember not one gentleman on the opposite Benches supported my Amendment. I frankly state I do not think the Amendment was a good one, but it was turned down without any objection from hon. members opposite, and I am surprised to find that after being unable to support it in Committee, and after it had been rejected with their assent, they are now trying to bring it, forward.

Clause 4 deals with medical referees. During the discussion of the 1923 Act the question was considered of whether there should be compulsory reference to one medical referee. I took a strong view on that point. I did not believe in compulsory reference, and I do not now. I do not think the position is improved by increasing the number of referees from one to three. When you proceed to say, as this Clause does, that any medical referee shall not engage in or be concerned in any way directly or indirectly in practice in an employer's liability or workman's compensation cases, or by insurers interested in such cases, and when you go on further still to say that he shall not engage in or be concerned in private professional practice in the district in which he is appointed to be a medical referee, then I think you are going much too far. You cannot do that without seriously impugning the good character of the medical profession, quite apart from anything else. You are also doing a serious injury to the choice that you may have of medical referees. You are going to make them merely afraid of the Court. You deprive them of any chance of practising in the district of the Court which may be very large indeed, and they would then have to practice at a great distance from the Court if at all. It means really they would have to be permanent officials of the Court. The best system is that which attracts the best class of medical man to the position, and you will never attract the best class of medical man to the position unless you give him the right to practice and trust to his honour when you appoint him a medical referee.

In reprinting Clause 5 I find that those responsible for the Bill have even perpetuated a clerical error. If Clause 5 were passed in its present condition, it would have the effect of repealing a provision of the 1906 Act which is extremely valuable with regard to seamen. Para graph ( c ) of Sub-section 1 of Section 7 of the principal Act is the paragraph which gives the right to certain people to take depositions abroad and makes those depositions admissible as evidence in this country. The fact of the matter is that they never intended to replace paragraph ( c ) at all, but paragraph ( e ), and that same clerical error appeared in an Amendment which was put down in 1923. Paragraph ( e ) merely provides that a shipowner shall not be liable to pay compensation in the time during which he is bound by Statute to keep a seaman and bring him back to this country. There is no reason why he should be so liable, but, as this proposal stands, the liability of the employer would commence immediately after the accident. One advantage of the present system is that the workman conies back to his home in this country. If this Clause were passed, the workman might not, and probably would not come back, and you would have extraordinary difficulty in the fact of an employer being under liability to pay compensation to a British seaman who had chosen to remain abroad and wander over the world.

What reason is there for altering the present system under which liability attaches directly the man arrives in this country, and under which, until he arrives in this country, the shipowner is absolutely bound to take the fullest responsibility for him, to keep him in food, to provide him with lodging, and treatment and so forth, and to do all that is necessary to bring him back? In regard to Clause 6, hon. Members opposite have become more ambitious since 1923. Then they only asked for 66⅔ per cent., and now they ask for 75 per cent. The House rejected the 66⅔ per cent. proposal, and they now think that the House will give them 75 per cent. The hon. Member who submitted this Bill seemed to think that this proposal would get rid of the mathematical calculations. It will do nothing of the kind. The hon. Member will still have to be an accomplished arithmetician, and I am not quite sure that he will not have to be even a little more accomplished than formerly, because 75 per cent. is not always as easy to deal with as 50 per cent. However that may be, my general comment upon that Clause is that it was never intended to be a complete or an adequate insurance, but was always intended to be partial insurance, having regard to the circumstances of the case.

Now I come to the last Clause, which is in some ways the most serious of all. The Clause brings into the Schedule nystagmus and phthisis under particular conditions. By the Act of 1906, certain industrial diseases were scheduled with reference to certain industries. As a matter of fact, industrial diseases apply wherever the industrial disease is contracted in the course of employment, but the purpose of putting a process in the second column of the Schedule of the 1906 Act was to make the fact of the man having an industrial disease evidence that it was actually contracted in the particular employment. I think it is conclusive, but it is, at any rate, prima facie evidence, and he would have no need to call evidence to show that it was so contracted, and the burden would be on the employer to show that it had not been contracted in the industry. It was always thought that that Schedule was by no means comprehensive, and so this provision was put into the Statute:

Does the hon. and learned Member mean to convey that the power invested in the Home Secretary with respect to disease is confined purely to the mining industry, or does it extend to others?

It extends to every industry. The Secretary of State has power, in the case of any industry, where it is shown to him that there is an industrial disease contracted in that industry, to add that industry by Order to this Statute, and he may make such conditions in adding it as he chooses. Dr. Court has had an almost unrivalled experience of miners' nystagmus, and no one will accuse him of not being extremely and rightly sympathetic to the men among whom he has worked, but Dr. Court holds the very strong view that no compensation should be paid to a man in respect of nystagmus for more than six months, because, in his opinion, if you pay compensation to a man for longer than six months you are likely to continue the trouble and also to bring on very serious after effects. [ Interruption .] I am not saying that that is right or wrong. I am certainly not going to suggest on any medical question that medical science is by any means conclusive—I do not think it is—but it does show the absolute importance of caution in this matter. Suppose Dr. Court is right, would it not be wrong, in the interests of the men themselves, to do something in this Bill which would merely mean adding to their sufferings? It would be grossly wrong, and, therefore, before you deal with a Schedule of this kind, you must consider the matter from every point of view, or you may do a great deal of injury. It is also essential to have the power to modify the conditions from time to time.

If this Clause were passed, you would be putting something inelastic in the Bill, and you might do a great deal of harm, whereas the matter can be dealt with at the present time by the Secretary of State, and the idea of doing it by Act of Parliament is, in my opinion, opposed to the best interests of the men, and would defeat the very purpose for which that Section was put in the Act of 1906, a Section which has worked extremely well. The Act, as passed, included only six industrial diseases, but at the present time it includes 24, and all except six have been added by Order of the Secretary of State, as the result of inquiries which are not only made by his Department but, as everybody knows who has experience of these matters, are continually being made in the interests of industry and of those who have to earn their daily bread by the practice of industry. In these circumstances, to bring forward a Bill of this kind, which is merely a rehash of Amendments that have been carefully considered and rejected, is really trifling with this House as a legislative assembly. I venture to suggest, without any lack of sympathy at all for those who are engaged in industry—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh !"]—and with every desire to do all that one can for them—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh !]—after all, I have spent a great deal of my life struggling in that way and struggling for men in that way—I venture to think that, in matters of this kind, if you are going to deal with this question, it requires far more consideration than has been given to the matter in the preparation of this Bill, and if you are going to extend workmen's compensation to a general and adequate scheme of insurance, you should do it by a comprehensive Measure, and not by piecemeal legislation of this kind.

I beg to second the Amendment.

In doing so, I would like to say that I have the greatest sympathy on the subject of compensation for men and women of the working classes, and I hope that anything I may say will not be construed as an expression of opinion that I am against the payment of reasonable and adequate compensation; but I am in agreement with the hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord) when he suggested to the House that the time is not opportune to reopen an Act which was passed as recently as 1923. Only 14 months have passed since the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1923 was passed, and I suggest to the House that insufficient time has elapsed to see whether or not the benefits allowed under that Act are adequate and sufficient. Before I discuss the Bill may I suggest, as I see was suggested during the Debates in the Committee stage of the 1923 Act, that the time should come when the Government should bring in some consolidating Measure. After all, we have now to deal with a number of Acts. There is the Act of 1906—what I would call the primary Act—there is the Act of 1923, there is the short Act of 1924, and to-clay, if this Bill be accepted by the House and passes into law, we shall have yet another Act dealing with the question of workmen's compensation.

I see, in referring to the debates on the last occasion, that the then Member for Bodmin drew attention to the fact that the Act of 1906 was dovetailed with that of 1923, or would be dovetailed with that Act. He suggested—I think very rightly and wisely—that the time had come for a consolidating Measure, and he particularly drew attention to the fact that, under the law as it then existed—and there has been no change for the better on the particular subject to which I am going to refer—it was necessary for any- one claiming the benefit of that Act to seek the assistance of members of the legal profession, and he suggested to the Committee that there should be some consolidation and simplification that would eradicate the necessity of going practically on all occasions, to seek that assistance. A few days ago I raised a question in connection with the forthcoming legislation which. I understand, will be brought in on the Rent Restrictions Act, as to whether it would not be advisable to call in experts or to do something to simplify the legal questions that may arise under any future Rent Acts, and so save an immense amount of possible litigation. I hope on this occasion the question of the simplification of the law of compensation will be considered, and that a consolidating Measure will at some early date be brought in by the Government.

1.0 P.M.

As regards the merits of this Bill, we have been told—and, if I may, without presumption, say, in. a very fair, lucid and able manner—by the hon. and learned Member for Norwood that in effect this Bill is merely a rehash, bringing together a large number of Amendments that were discussed at great length in the 1923 Parliament, and were then turned down. It has been suggested that insufficient time was then given to consider those Amendments. The hon. and learned Member for Norwood has reminded the House that 11 days were given to the discussion and contemplation of that Measure, and I have taken the opportunity of referring to the OFFICIAL REPORT to see what was then said, and, as far as I understand the matter, practically every subject that could be considered or discussed in connection with the question of compensation was brought forward and debated. Therefore, it is a little idle for anyone to come before this House to-day and to say that sufficient time was not given to discuss Amendments which are now brought forward in the form of new Clauses to the Bill under consideration. With regard to the actual Bill itself, I am fully in agreement with the hon. and learned Member for Norwood when he said that to cut down the compensation which would, in certain cases, be paid to a widow was wholly wrong. I do not like that principle at all. We know, under the 1923 Act, a measure of compensation was given to a widow which in a good many cases, it is admitted, would amount to more than £250. I see no reason why, having given compensation, which at that time was regarded as adequate and reasonable, it should be cut down in any way. Then there is the question of the £500 to be paid for the benefit of a child or children. Frankly, I confess I do not see why an employer should be called upon to make any contributions for the benefit of children of anyone other than his own employés, but that is the effect of this Clause. A sum of £500 is to be paid into a central fund, and that fund is to be administered under State control, not for the benefit of the child or children of the workman whose life has been lost, but for other people's children, and to the detriment, as I suggest, of the person who has the rightful claim. If you are going to give any increased compensation, it seems to me that it should be given wholly and solely to those members of a family who have lost the parent. If you are going to do otherwise, it must be by means of a comprehensive system of State insurance. Let it be done by participation all round. Let the State pay part, let the employer pay part, and let the worker pay part; but if you are not going to have a scheme of that kind, I fail to see why the £500 should be paid by the employer who has had the misfortune of losing the services of the man, or why the amount should be paid into this central fund.

There is another question, which was not referred to by the hon. and learned Member for Norwood, and that is the benefit to be given to a widower. I think the House will agree that it is not usual to find a man existing on the energy and the work done by his wife, and if you do find a case like that, except where the man happens to be incapacitated, an invalid, or one who has suffered an injury, you generally find that he is a thorough waster, and you are going to present, in certain cases, the waster, the degenerate and the unreliable husband with £250. I do not know whether that is the feeling in this House. I should certainly be in favour, where the husband was an invalid, dependent upon the assistance and work done by the wife, of giving him compensation, but I will do nothing whatsoever which will put into the pocket of some drunken wastrel a large sum of money. What I want to say generally as regards this proposal is this: There has not been sufficient time to see whether the 1923 Act works adequately and reasonably for all parties concerned, and I want to remind the House, further, that although there were good and sufficient reasons, in the opinion of the then House, for increasing the compensation payable under the 1906 Act from a maximum of £300 to £600 under the 1923 Act, I do not see what has transpired in the 14 months to justify the increase of a further sum of £200, and I do not think these are opportune times to put upon industry any additional burden. We know that industry has to bear very largely increased rates and taxes, and that it is struggling along endeavouring to regain prosperity. I do not think this is a time when we should put an additional burden upon it. In any event, these Clauses, or the majority of them, were previously discussed. The matter was gone into carefully, and if these Clauses were not discussed previously, it was the fault of those who are supporting them to-day in not bringing them forward when, in 1923, the matter was gone into at great length, and what was then considered by the House of Commons as being a reasonable and an adequate increase of compensation should in my view be sufficient at the present time.

It is a matter of considerable regret to us on this side of the House that the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord) has found it necessary to place this Amendment on the Paper. We had hoped that we should be allowed a Second Reading of the Bill, which even the hon. and learned Member, who is not sparing in his condemnation of Members on this side of the House on occasion, has hesitated to describe as extremist or revolutionary or wrong. We are yet hopeful that the Government will give the Bill an opportunity of going upstairs. We realise that it will depend on other matters—it will depend on the goodwill of the Government—and I hope to urge a few reasons why the Government should give the House an oppor- tunity of reconsidering the question of workmen's compensation. I do not propose to follow the hon. and learned Member for Norwood either in delivering a lecture on Workmen's Compensation Acts in general or in making what, I believe, even with my short experience of the House, was a speech better designed for Committee stage than for Second Reading. He started his extraordinary speech by saying, as I understood him, that he had some doubt whether the Legislature had not make a mistake in removing the inability of the workman to recover compensation under the common law whenever he was negligent. That seemed to be the tenor of his remarks. I do not know why he brought the common law into the matter at all. It has nothing to do with the Bill. When he spoke of the common law, what he said, in my opinion—I acknowledge his experience in these matters—was in many respects entirely incorrect. It is not true that under common law when once a workman showed that he was not negligent he received the right to compensation. It was necessary to prove negligence in a very technical form by the employer. There was the doctrine of common employment, by which if one workman suffered through the negligence of another he was disentitled to compensation or damages. But I do not propose to deliver a lecture on the Workmen's Compensation Acts. There are other institutions where these matters may be adequately listened to. I want to come directly to the Bill.

It has not been stated—and I do not think the hon. and learned Member for Norwood was quite frank with the House on this point—that the greatest proposal in the Bill is directly taken from the Holman-Gregory Report. To hear the hon. Member speak about this proposal in Clause 1, which among other things does readjust the right of compensation of the widow with children and proposes the Central Fund, one would think this was some scatterbrain idea devised by persons who knew nothing about the administration of the Workmen's Compensation Acts. As a matter of fact it is one of the main recommendations of the Holman-Gregory Committee in which, under "Summary of Main Recommendations," after discussing the reason why in the opinion of the very learned Chairman of that Committee, a person equally learned in compensation law with the Mover of the Amendment, assisted by a great number of acknowledged experts and having heard a great deal of evidence from everyone who contributed any information on the subject, they recommended that the sum should be £250 for a widow and 7s. 6d. and 6s., and the whole of the recommendations which are made in the Bill, and they recommended that the allowance be provided by the payment by the employer into the Central Fund of £500. I do not think the hon. Member for Norwood was frank with the House. Knowing as he must have known, that the whole of that proposal was contained in the Holman-Gregory Report, he never mentioned that Report from beginning to end of his speech. That is not putting before the House all the material evidence which it ought to have in order to come to an opinion on this Bill.

I did not mention it because when a thing is bad I do not think it helps it to say a number of people have recommended it.

Let us follow that up. It is suggested that this is bad. One of the reasons why it is bad is that it is brought forward by inexpert and incompetent people who do not understand the administration of the Workmen's Compensation Acts. That was part of the argument. Now in fact it appears that this proposal was the direct result of the recommendations of a Committee specifically appointed by the Home Office. Therefore I say on that ground alone we are entitled to ask the Government, not necessarily to accept that recommendation but, by affording this Bill a Second Reading, to give an opportunity for the reconsideration of what we on this side believe to be very valuable from the point of view of the children of injured people. That is not a proposal which ever received adequate consideration in 1923. It is a proposal to which pages of this Report are devoted, and it is a proposal which stabilises and standardises the payments which are to be made to children and really does not place any higher burden on the employer than is placed on anyone at present. The money is paid into a Central Fund and the amount the child has is not made dependent on the mere accident of the amount of compensation which the particular injured workman receives. It looks after the necessities of the child without further burdening the employer. That proposal is entitled to rather more serious consideration and rather less special argument and pleading than it received from the hon. Member. He took the case of children aged 14 years and 10 months, and pointed out what would arise in that case. Supposing there is something in his point, surely that is a matter which could be considered in Committee. Here is a proposal, not ours, but the proposal of a very learned lawyer, employers and workmen and representatives of the Home Office giving evidence, a proposal which we say is entitled to the serious consideration of the House, that there should be a Central Fund, and that proposal is embodied in Clause 1 of this Bill. As to many of the Clauses—for example, Clause 2, and I think I am right in saying Clause 3—many of them, the hon. Member agrees with them, and he went further and claims credit for having himself moved Amendments to the same effect to the 1923 Act. He talks of us playing with the House, but I can imagine nothing more playful than to come here and say "I agree with this proposal, I moved an Amendment myself and I glory in it, but it was rejected, and now I ask the House not to consider it." My hon. and learned Friend ought to be more courageous, and not accept defeat so easily.

Will my hon. and learned Friend excuse me for one moment? I did move an Amendment which is in accordance with Section 3, but the argument advanced against it was that the words referred to had received judicial interpretation and it was inadvisable to try to substitute others for them; and I accepted that argument, I thought it was a good one, and I thought it defeated my proposal, and that is why I am content.

I hope my hon. and learned Friend will let me continue. I do not want to be unfair, but I am pointing out that a number of proposals he is now asking the House to reject he, on his own admission, asked the House to accept, and I ask him to be a little more courageous in the matter. I know he does not act without careful thought and judgment, that he is not a rash man—he has told us that he is not an extremist—and that he gives a matter consideration before he puts in on the Order Paper of the House, and I refuse to believe that the hon. and learned Member was so rash as to put down proposals which he never intended should be seriously considered by this House.

Then there is the question of the medical referee. I do not think it is at all right that anyone should suggest that any accusation or suggestion was made against the medical profession by this proposal. A person would have to be over-sensitive to look at it in that way. The hon. Member will know, and the House will know, that this matter also was discussed by the Holman-Gregory Committee, and this is not one of the points where I believe their final view supported what I claim; but the matter was never put on that ground at all. There was a feeling among my hon. Friends behind me, who, after all, had great experience of the administration of this Act—not legal experience, though many of them have that, but direct experience, which the hon. and learned Member and I myself both lack in the sense in which they have had it—that they would be in a safer position and would have a better tribunal if there were three doctors on it instead of one. I do not see why the medical profession should object to that. We in the law would never object to a tribunal that had three Judges instead of one; we should say it would increase the market; and I cannot see why any doctor can say, "No, I object to this Clause because three of my kind are going to be employed instead of one." That is all it really amounts to.

There remains over the question of an increase in the payment for incapacity. It may be this House is more generous than the House which was here in 1923. We have been told, and we have accepted it, that the passion for social reform and the amelioration of the poor burns strongly in the hearts of hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite, and surely we are entitled to make this experiment to see whether they will not agree that there shall be a slightly greater degree of compensation paid to these unfortunate people than has hitherto been paid. They may not be as hardhearted as their predecessors, and we believe we can make out a ease for 75 per cent. and the 40s. Then we do not say that there shall be a total compensation. I do not understand my hon. and learned Friend's point there. We are not asking for 100 per cent., we are asking for 75 per cent.; therefore we admit the principle, which he suggested, that there is a distinction between a claim for compensation and a claim, possibly, to complete payment. At the moment it is only a question of amount. Is that a reason for rejecting this Bill? Then the hon. and learned Gentleman attacked the addition of certain diseases to the Schedule. It is a matter of indifference to me, and I think to my hon. Friends, whether these diseases appear in the Schedule or are put in by an Order of the Home Secretary. As a matter of fact, in the original Bill it was suggested that the Secretary of State should put all the industrial diseases in by Order, but it was not done in that way.

But the important point is this, and that is why I had hoped and still hope that the Government will help us, that there must be many other matters which have come to the knowledge of the Home Office, and of persons concerned in the administration of these Acts, which necessitate the amending of the Act of 1923. I am not in the least impressed by the argument of the hon. and learned Member that something is or is not in the other Act. There has been an amendment of the National Health Insurance Act practically every year from 1911 down to last year, when it was codified, and no doubt that will go on. Every year it has been found necessary to make amendments in the Unemployment Insurance Act. And so it is with nearly all this legislation. This Act of 1923 was an experiment, and it was an unsatisfactory experiment in this respect, that having appointed the Holman-Gregory Committee to consider the whole of this matter a great many of their recommendations were ignored, and others were carried out in ways not intended by that report.

There is another thing. If the Government wish, this Bill of the Labour party, or any other Bill of the Labour party, can be refused a Second Reading, but would that be wise? Is this really the sort of Bill where they ought to exercise their power to prevent Second Reading. We hear a great deal, and I am not arguing against it, in favour of the promotion of goodwill between employers and employed in industry and in social life. Is it really going to assist, even in work in this House, for the purpose of social reform, if every Bill which is brought in from this side of the House on Private Members' day is to be refused a Second Reading? It really is not very much encouraging to hon. Members on this side of the House if they know that every Bill, however innocuous, however, conciliatory, however temperate, and this Bill is innocuous, conciliatory and temperate, is going to be wrecked on some absurd and sophisticated Amendment such as is now put on the Order Paper? It is stultifying any work which can he done on this side of the House. It may be that a question of vital importance, such as giving votes to young ladies, may excite a considerable difference of opinion—I am not saying that that Bill ought not to have obtained a Second Reading; I think it should have, and I voted in favour of it. Such Bills may cause excitement. Then there is artificial excitement on other kinds of Measures, like the Trade Union Bill, which is stimulated in newspapers. Bills which do not excite the people very much, except that the newspapers have told them that they have got to be interested, and they react to that suggestion. This Bill falls into neither category. It is neither a Bill which is a real issue, like the Bill extending the franchise among women, or an artificial issue, like the Trade Union Bill. It is simply a Bill put forward as an honest attempt to go upstairs—to see, possibly, if we cannot drop some of the proposals here—and possibly to put in other propoals which the Government may give us, but at any rate to see if we cannot remove grievances and difficulties which operate at present in the working of workmen's compensation. I appeal even to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Norwood to withdraw this Amendment, and to make his Committee speech in Committee again when the Bill gets upstairs. I do think, and this is my last word, that no one, certainly not the Government, will deny that there is need for amendment of the law relating to workmen's compensation. Hon. Members opposite know as well as I do how many of the Sections of the Act of 1923 have proved to be working badly, and may be improved by Amendment. I will not refer to what judges have said privately, but I know what judges have said publicly and in every Court in this country. The judges have declared that the Act of 1923 has made these cases more complicated than they were before that time. We have had the opinion of hon. Members on this side of the House on this question. Of course the number of miners in the Norwood Division is very small, but there are on both sides of the House persons who represent industrial constituencies.

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman suggest that I do not represent a working-class constituency?

No, I should not make that suggestion for a moment, because I do not happen to know what constituency the hon. Member represents.

Loughborough.

Then he does represent an industrial constituency, and I think he ought to call upon the Government to bring in a codifying Bill.

But I do not think this additional compensation should now be paid.

At any rate the hon. Member for Loughborough thought a change ought to be made, but the hon. and learned Member who represents the amenities of Norwood did not suggest any alteration. Of course he was very concerned about the £50 for widows, but he was not much concerned about the other proposals. For these reasons I appeal to the representative of the Home Office to allow this Bill to have a Second Reading, not only for the sake of the proposals we are making but in order that he in Committee may have an opportunity of amending the Act. If the Government will only go into partnership with us in this matter, I assure them that we shall not claim the Measure as being anything else but the product of our joint work. We honestly desire to improve the working of the Compensation Act, and for these reasons I hope the House will afford this Measure a Second Reading.

I desire to support the Second Reading of this Bill. I listened with great interest to the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord), and, as far as I could make out from his Amendment and his speech, his main objection to passing this Bill now is that last year some of these proposals were dealt with in Committee, and he suggested that in the future a more comprehensive scheme of insurance, including compensation generally, should be brought forward. I think the House ought not to be deterred in this matter by what happened in the past, or restrained by anticipation of the future. It was rather remarkable, coming from the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Norwood, that all the points he now objects to were apparently proposals made by himself in Committee, and, therefore, I must assume that his real grievance is that he does not like these proposals to come away from their true parents.

Another specific objection he made seemed to me to go to purposes other than his ostensible one. He said, "I find in this Bill that the poor widow, for whom my heart bleeds, who used to be able to get £300 will now only get £200." That is apparently intended to get into the papers in order to show that the real friends of the poor widow are to be found in the Tory party. As a matter of fact when you look at this point more closely under the Bill the amount is £150 as the minimum and £300 is the maximum. Under the old Act where there happens to be only a widow, and where the average earnings of the deceased were such as to amount to £300 or more during the previous year, then, and then only, was she to get the £300. Of course, that happens once in 1,000 cases, but in the other 999 cases what happened to the widow? She got perhaps £100 or £150. The real way is not to legislate to pick out one widow that would have done better under the old legislation, but you should pick out the aggregate of the widows under this Bill and see if they would do any better.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Norwood dealt with the question of compensation. I do like myself to have some clear conception of what are the Tarots of compensation. It was £300 under the 1916 Act, as a maximum. There was a maximum of £600 under the 1923 Act, and the maximum under this Bill is £800. One naturally asks why £800. Why is it that amount, and not much more? My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Norwood said that what the common law would give is no test, because the reason full compensation was given there is because you would not impose a full penalty upon negligence. To me that argument is wholly new. Until this system of Workmen's Compensation came into operation there was no case in which compensation was given except on account of negligence, and this was not confined either to master or to servant, and it was an broad as there are relations in view of life.

A man who has been injured simply says, "Here I am an injured man not through my fault, but through your fault, why should you not compensate me." That was the principle of the Act and it was not then considered to be a penalty. Until the new principle which underlies these Acts is recognised, you are quite unable to say, "You, the master, are at fault unless you can prove negligence, or unless you are able to prove that you did not put this man to work with defective machinery under an incompetent management." What does this new principle do? It is a principle which was introduced tentatively in 1897 by the present Earl of Oxford and was applied to a few big industries, and I think the principle was extended again in 1906 by a Liberal Government.

I want the House to understand what was the new principal then introduced. It was this. Men and women who meet with mishaps in carrying on industry meet with them as part of the inevitable result of what: may occur in the production of wealth. They are to be compensated just as they should be compensated if through some person's careless act they were injured. Why? Because they become injured by the act of industry in producing goods in which the whole of the community share. That was the principle, and, once you had established that principle, it was a necessary sequitur that if compensation was to be paid it should be the ordinary natural compensation. Loss of wages and the expenses to which the injured person is put—all that, logically and correctly, has to be paid as compensation once you recognise the principle that the man is injured through bringing about the production in which the whole of the community share. It was because it was recognised that human nature was so weak, that men were so forgetful, and so careless, that organisation could not be trusted, and that a thousand and one factors entered into the bringing about of these accidents that the broad principle was adopted that compensation for accidents which were the outcome of industry should enter into the cost of production just the same as raw material and wages.

Why was not that principle carried to its full extent? For no other reason than that it was too big a thing. We must proceed gradually to see how it will work. I am one of those who think that the logical outcome of this compensation legislation must be that the man or woman injured, or the dependants of the man or woman killed, will get every penny that he or she would get if injured or killed by an outside agency. We are not going so far as that in this Bill. Here is rather an interesting thing that I would like to tell the House as bearing that out. Under the old common law, there were a great number of answers that the Courts put into the mouth of the employer. You are liable for accidents, but the man may accept the risk. A man falls into a vat when working on the edge of it, but when he agreed to work there he accepted the risk of falling in. The man may have contributed by his own negligence. You escape there. The man may have been injured by the negligent act of a fellow workman. You escape there. That was the old common law, and it was like trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle for a poor man to get any compensation at all.

I remember—at least I know it as a lawyer—that the first innovation was the Employers' Liability Act. That Act was brought forward in order to wipe out one of these defences and to allow the man to get the full compensation that he would otherwise have got. But, though it purported to wipe out one of the defences, it, only went half way. They did not have the courage to say, "We will give full compensation." No, they said, "He should get full compensation, but we are still frightened, and we will give him only three-quarters." It is precisely the same thing which has crept in with reference to the Workmen's Compensation Acts. There is no principle in it. They are just as entitled in this case as in the other to full compensation, but the amount would be too great, and we are proceeding cautiously. If I have made that clear, I venture to say that it is no answer to a Bill of this kind to say that you are on the road towards giving the man a full indemnity for the injury suffered. Of course you are, and continue on the road until you give it him.

I am sorry the late Solicitor-General (Sir H. Slesser) is not here, because I think, whoever drafted this Bill, has at all events in one important Clause, Clause 3, not effected what he intended. Clause 3 is the one which says

When the Courts came to deal with it, they entirely defeated the purpose of the Act. What the Courts said was this: "That is all very well, but the general class of misconduct that we are up against is where a fellow disobeys a notice, 'Do not work here' or 'Do not light a match here,' or where he gets an express order to do something and does not do it. That is the class of misconduct that we are always meeting." They said, "How can you say that a man who meets with an accident when he is disobeying his master is at the same time serving his master?" Logically you cannot, and, therefore, they said that that class of misconduct throws a man entirely outside the scope of the Acts, and he cannot recover at all. That was the position when the Act of 1923 was framed, and the Act of 1923 did say, and quite rightly, that the mere fact of the misconduct being in disobedience of a regulation or of an express order will not, notwithstanding what the Courts have said, constitute something done by the man outside the sphere of his work. But it added, and quite rightly, at the end of the Section, "Provided that the man is on his master's business."

I do not know what the Bill was intended to do in regard to this, but the ex-Solicitor-General will probably, if he reads my speech, think it over again. It says that if the man suffers substantial injury he is in the same category as if he is permanently disabled. He is not, because., while this Bill, in the case of a man who suffers substantial loss in his earning power while misconducting himself or disobeying an order, would bring him within the scope of his employment, it would leave untouched that Section of the Act of 1906, which excuses wilful misconduct, and it really would not carry you a bit further. Then, with regard to the words that are omitted from the 1923 Act, under this Bill as it stands, if a man, while disobeying an order, printed or verbal, meets with a, substantial accident, he is intended by the Bill to be entitled to compensation, whether, when disobeying the order, he is acting in furtherance of his job or not. Where will that end? Let me give an illustration. Take the case of a man in the mine who is lighting a lamp. That is a dangerous thing in the mine. After the Act of 1906, if a man struck a match in a mine and was injured, he could get no compensa- tion, because that was undoubtedly disobeying an express order, and he was outside the scope of the Act. Under the Act of 1923, if a man struck a match in a mine and was injured, he still might get compensation provided he could show that he struck the match for the purpose of lighting him to his work at the coal face.

You are wrong in that.

I beg pardon; I am not wrong. Under the Act of 1906, if a man struck a match he could not recover. Under the Act of 1923, if a man struck a match and thereby disobeyed an order, provided—to quote the words—that he did it

With regard to the last provision of the Bill, in relation to the referees, I think that those responsible for the Bill would do well to consider one criticism that was made upon it by the hon. and learned Member for Norwood. It is quite right to say that medical men who are in and about the locality are apt to become prejudiced. Of course they are. We are merely going up in a balloon and shutting our eyes to facts if we do not know that. Medical men are human beings like the rest of us. But you must not run from one extreme to the other. If it is proposed to amend the provision as to medical referees as appears in this Bill, there is the possible danger of convert- ing the medical referees into a permanent body of officials, and that is far more dangerous than the other——

No, far better.

My own experience, in the Courts and otherwise, is that, the moment you put a man permanently on a job, he begins to operate on labels, en rules, on everything to ease his mind. He says, "We have done that class of case before," and he gets out of the human and personal view very much. That has been found always, notably in the case of the policemen. I am obliged to the House for listening to me, and I hope that when the Committee stage is reached this Bill will be thoroughly gone into and sifted, so as to make it a really good workable Measure.

As one who has had considerable experience in the working of the Workmen's Compensation Acts, and who has for some three years acted as a medical referee, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to say a few words on this Measure. I wish to say, to start with, that I support the proposed Bill, because I have long felt the extreme difficulties of the question of the medical referee. I am not sure that the proposals embodied in Clause 4 are going to be very workable in their present form, but at the same time I wish to see this question of the referees reopened, in order that its difficulties may be thoroughly gone into and some attempt may be made to straighten them out. There are two main proposals, as I take it, in this Bill in regard to the alteration in medical referees. Perhaps it would be best to take first the one that Domes second in the Bill—that is the question of what shall be the qualifications in the future of a medical referee. Up till now the medical referee has been able to practice in the locality in which he has been referee, but he has not been supposed, in the ordinary way, to act in cases in which he has come into personal contact. That has not absolutely held good, because it has been extremely difficult in many cases for it to be strictly enforced.

Most of the medical referees are members of the staffs of the hospitals, either as surgeons or physicians. In their position, in their particular places, they come in contact with a large number of these cases of workmen's compensation, the people being their patients; and for this work they receive no remuneration—if they give it as honorary members of the staff. It has been found almost impossible for the medical referee not to have dealings with some of the individual eases. When he has had to give reports of cases on behalf of the man, or the employer, he has, as a rule, stood down from being referee. In the case where he has only seen the case as an ordinary surgeon or physician, he has then as a rule been allowed to act. This has all brought about very considerable difficulties, and there is no one who realises that more than I myself do. In fact the reason why I resigned from being medical referee some years ago was because I found one was getting mixed up between one's patients and one's duty as a medical referee. While I, therefore, am fully agreed that it is right that some other method should be arranged in the appointment of medical referees, I foresee great difficulties which are not referred to here in the Bill, and which, I think, are not fully realised by those who have framed the Bill in its present form. The value of the appointment of a medical referee in a given area, even in a large industrial area, is very small. So far as I can remember, in three years, I do not think in any year the remuneration I received as referee exceeded If you are going to have a whole-time referee, as you will have under the very stringent rules of Clause 3, it will mean that you are very, very greatly going to increase the working expenses of the Act. If you are going to have a whole-time man and cannot spread the area very widely, then, although it may be done to some extent, it will make it extremely expensive to have a whole-time man in place of the two or three men who are now perhaps receiving £30 or £40 a year. So that there is one great difficulty in that.

2.0 P.M.

To come back to the second great alteration proposed in the Bill, the appointment of three referees in cases where the referees are going to make decisions for themselves, that is away from the Judge. I think here you are going to find it extremely difficult to get three whole-time referees and for a given case. It means that you will have to gather them from all parts of the country. If you are going to have three whole-time men you must enlarge the areas, make them very much larger than those they work at the present time. You are practically, by the second proposal in the Bill, negativing the first proposal, that is, bringing three referees in place of one. I cannot say that I think it is necessary that there should be three referees if you are going to have an absolutely impartial whole-time man for the work, any more than there is a necessity to have three Judges sitting in the County Court. I do not think that is really a necessary or practicable proposal when you have one apparently open and unprejudiced person. Then in regard to the question of Schedule referred to in Clause 7. Reference has been made to it, and I quite agree with what was said by the last speaker who spoke on this particular point, that it would be very much better if the Schedule were arranged by the Home Secretary. In regard to the particular Schedule relating to nystagmus, I agree that is one of those things in which there should be an alteration made in the Schedule. Reference has been made to my own county. I am not an eye-specialist. Therefore I never sat on the matter of nystagmus, but I have been in very close contact with those who have dealt with it, and I do not suppose there is any question where there is more doubt on the part of many specialists than that of nystagmus. There are undoubtedly many cases which suffer from nystagmus in the early stages, that is to say of oscillation of the eyeballs. There are many who suffer from that part of the disease in the early stages, then that passes off leaving the nervous symptoms which remain after the actual oscillation of the eyeball has gone, and this causes just as much disability as oscillation of the eyeball.

It is extremely unfair that that man should be deprived of benefit simply because he has lost one outward symptom of his disability; because he has simply lost that one particular visible thing, when he still has great disability from his nervous condition. There are many other things which ought, perhaps, to have been introduced into this Bill if a complete list is to go into the Schedules. One has been referred to in the House within the last week, and that is the question of miners' beat-knee. There is at the present time a great difficulty in the definition of what is beat-knee. I myself have had difficulties in this particular matter, and it is only right that in that case the law should be amended. At the present time beat-knee and beat-elbow are treated on different terms, although their cause is due to exactly the same matter and the same reason, and that is constant pressing on hard substances. Although I do not agree with many of the Clauses of the Bill, and I think they will have to be very much modified if this Bill goes to Committee, at the same time I think there is a case for further consideration of this matter of workmen's compensation, especially in the direction of medical referees.

I am sure that we on this side of the House are very glad to have heard that this Bill has earned the support of the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Derby (Sir R. Luce). I think his testimony is particularly significant in view of the fact that he has had a close working acquaintance with the Compensation Act, and knows the many problems with which this Bill seeks to deal. I hope that the hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord) will respond to the appeal of my hon. and learned Friend the late Solicitor - General, and withdraw his Amendment. His assistance upstairs would' be very valuable. The only point on which I did not agree with the hon. and gallant Member for Derby was in regard to the Schedule. [f we are having a Bill at all, and if a disease is definitely established and known as associated with industry, it ought to be put on the Schedule. While it is true that the Home Secretary has added a number of diseases, something like 16 in about 20 years, many of these diseases have had to be recognised for a very long time before they were added to the Schedule. Phthisis, which is mentioned in this Bill, caused by dust or other irritant, which has been long recognised as a predisposing cause of the disease, should have been on the Schedule long ago. Therefore, we ought to take the opportunity in connection with this Bill of adding these diseases.

The hon. and gallant Member who spoke last, referred to nystagmus and sequelæ. What he said was true. The hon. and learned Member for Norwood also spoke about nystagmus, and quoted the opinion of a medical man who said that if a miner got compensation for nystagmus for more than six months it considerably aggravated the nature and course of the disease. That was a very strange suggestion, and it seemed to me to partake of something of the nature of the new psychology, which is not yet a sufficiently exact science for Parliamentary acceptance. In regard to the medical referees, I think this section of the Bill will have to be amended. I am afraid it is not workable. In addition to the suggestion of the last speaker of there being one permanent full-time man, with no local connection, as being a sufficient substitute for the present arrangement, I think that those on this side might well consider having as the three referees, one, the man's doctor, one, a doctor nominated by the employer, and one outside doctor. That would give a panel of three, of a kind which would be a very great advantage in many ways. It would not present the difficulties which the somewhat stringent Regulations suggested in the Bill would involve. Something on those lines might be adopted in Committee.

For the doctors' own benefit it would be desirable that there should be a panel of three. Sometimes there is dissatisfaction at present which is entirely groundless. As a good trade unionist, I am going to stand up for the medical profession in this respect. Very often the medical referees are blamed and suspected of bias, when it has been very largely a ease of ignorance of technical points on the part of those affected. A panel of three as suggested would have a very important effect in obviating that criticism. It would also be impossible in certain diseases, for instance, in nystagnnts, or some other eye condition, to get three eye specialists to conform to the provisions of this Bill. Those on this side of the House, and especially those promoting the Bill, are very willing, I am sure, to meet any suggestion on these points from any part of the House which will help to make the Bill more effective.

As it was only on these medical points that I rose to speak, I will not delay the House further, except to make one general statement. In connection with the mining industry, and many other industries, the question of compensation is often a very sore point. We are anxious for as much friendliness in industry as we can possibly have. Although hon. Members opposite may sometimes hear very strong and very extreme opinions expressed from this side, I claim that, as a whole, the members of our party do their very utmost to bring about as much good will in industry as is possible. I have found in my own constituency that nothing has embittered the workmen and their relatives and families more than the feeling of injustice which they often experience in connection with the matter of compensation. Hon. Members can hardly realise how callous in some cases companies can be. I have had experience in connection with mining accidents, and, after seeing the sufferings that men have endured, I have gone to their homes, and, meeting their wives and families and hearing how they have been treated in regard to compensation, I have understood something of the cause of that bitterness which I am sure all of us regret is very often shown in the relations between employer and employed. I appeal to the House to give this Bill a Second Reading, and to discuss upstairs the various Amendments which are necessary. Do not let us make the mistake of rejecting this Bill. If the House gives the Bill a Second Reading, it will have no cause to regret it, and it will be helping towards that peace and good will which we all have at heart.

Every hon. Member will realise that the discussion has been conducted in a very sympathetic manner. I have heard no criticism of the intentions which have been so well expressed by the mover and seconder of the Bill. We on this side are as interested in workpeople and as generous in our treatment of cases which come before us under the Workmen's Compensation Act as are members in any quarter of the House. My experience of the Workmen's Compensation Act began on 1st July, 1906, at the mill where I was employed in a very minor capacity. It was a Saturday morning, and after work was finished one of our female operatives, who was about to leave the mill, fell down some steps and broke her leg. Then a discussion began on the first day of the Act as to what the Clause "Out or about their employment" meant. From that time I have been intimately connected with the work- ing of the Act. I have served on a Committee which has administered this Act for many years. In the trade to which I have the privilege to belong, we do not have recourse to insurance companies. We are our own insurance company, and we feel that our operatives and ourselves are better off in this way. I submit that if this system were adopted in the rest of the trades it would remove a great many of the anomalies which at present exist, because we know the details and we can deal with them. I was discussing this subject with the hon. Member for Withington (Dr. Watts), who for 25 years was Medical Officer of Factories in one of the Lancashire districts, and he knew cases of this kind, and he had also acted on behalf of the trade union in the district as their medical referee. We have also heard from two hon. Members who are medical men on the medical side of this question.

There is only one point to which I wish to refer on this matter. In the old days the doctor used to visit the machine and the place where the accident occurred. He was living in the district and was familiar with the trades of the district. That does not happen to-day. His Majesty's inspector does it, and not the medical man. If the medical man could see exactly what had taken place, he would be able to have a better understanding of the case. With respect to the last speakers asking for a panel of three doctors to adjudicate on cases, I would certainly agree with a panel being set up. I have difficulty from this particular point. I think that I have raised this question before in the ease of a woman who was afflicted with a skin disease. She immediately put the ease in for compensation on the ground that it arose out of her employment. She wore a little fancy machine around her wrist. She became absolutely full of erysipelas and eczema, and claimed against the firm. We took it to Court and she lost. We paid her expenses for medical treatment and her wages, but we had to stipulate a limit to these cases.

The Mover of this Bill said this morning that he had heard that in times past we had pushed further burdens on the trade, and that the trade could not stand in many cases. The human element comes into this more than anything else.

I think that when this Compensation Act was framed, it was done in a purely sympathetic spirit. I would like to remind hon. Members opposite that this is one of the things for which we have to pay. It is not a, contributory benefit. It has always been placed on a voluntary basis for us. A point has been raised to-day with which I would like to deal with regard to the proposed Fund under this Bill, the distribution of 10s., 6s., and so on, per week for the children. I am inclined to have great sympathy with some proposal of that description because I have had instances coming under my notice which suggest the necessity of it. I do not quite agree with the statements made this morning, but I should be prepared in Committee to go into full details with the idea of framing something on those lines.

My reason is that I once had the very arduous work of taking a girl out of a machine. She was fast in the machine. She was 16 years of age. When I took her out her arm was taken off. She was the eldest of five children. I took her to the infirmary myself, and with the doctor helped to put her hand into the trough. I stood there half an hour and it made me ill for a week. My managing director went to the infirmary to see what he could do. An hon. Member of this House who is not here this afternoon was touched with, such sympathy that he asked how much he could pay that girl in compensation, and he found the money to pay to the girl. I could not afford it as I was only a working man. That girl was in the infirmary for five weeks, and when the guardians got to know of this contribution they stopped for a period the contribution of the board of guardians. I am inclined to have great sympathy in such cases, but we must take the matter a little further.

In the Factories Bill which was proposed last there were certain clauses that are applicable to workmen's compensation. I have travelled in many countries and have seen the conditions of working men in countries which are very much up to date, and in countries which are very much the opposite. In some States of the United States of America it is compulsory for the employer of 400 workpeople to keep a doctor on the premises, and in a mill of that kind, where you could see an accident when it occurred and render first aid immediately, the rate of absence due to accidents was much lower than in this country. In addition they have an operating-room or a room that could be set apart for operations, of course with full surgical appliances and a fully qualified nurse, and I should welcome a provision in the Factories Bill that a similar arrangement should be made in this country. I submit that it will really help to cheapen our rates for workmen's compensation in this country.

There is a lot of ignorance with regard to what are known as industrial diseases. I think that I have proved to the House that I am sympathetic to the workmen in this matter because I have been a workman myself, and I am one to-day, but we had a lot of theatrical rubbish printed in the London papers about men doing work and contracting certain diseases. We have protested against that, as it is hopelessly wrong. My point is that as the Home Secretary has the power to list these diseases, anything outside the list should not be criticised without its having been first refused by the Minister responsible. I do not want to have a discussion on this point, but when we have these new kinds of diseases brought forward by certain men in certain places we should act on the principle that we cannot agree to recognise any disease which is not on the Schedule.

I do trust that this Bill will not be pressed. I think that this Bill might come forward with the Factories Bill. It would be better if you took the two of them together, because both are under public authority and we have to pay for one as well as the other. I have a great deal of sympathy in this matter, but I think that it would be better to have a Bill from this side of the House, somewhat on the same lines, but better drawn; not made up of the Amendments which were refused last year, but a comprehensive Measure dealing with the whole situation. I hope that my hon. Friends will give this matter careful consideration, and I appeal to them not to make it a matter of propaganda. If there are anomalies in the Compensation Act, if there are things in the Factory Acts that need to be dealt with, let us have a comprehensive Measure dealing with them all. So far as I am concerned, I would like the Government to introduce a Bill to deal with the matters raised. Such a Bill would have a good chance of being passed.

I have listened with great interest to the last speaker. I was hoping that he was not only going to express sympathy with this Bill, but was going to translate his words of sympathy into action by voting for the Second Heading of the Bill. Unfortunately, like so many other speakers who very often express sympathy, when the psychological moment comes that sympathy is not translated into practice. The hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord), who moved the Amendment, told us that perhaps he had as much sympathy with the workers as any Member on the Labour Benches. Then he proceeded at length to dissect the Bill and to urge its rejection before even it had a chance of consideration in Commitee. Ire said, first of all, that the Bill consisted almost exclusively of Amendments that were rejected in 1923. The last speaker made a similar observation. Is it to be understood that any Amendments on any Bill coming before this House at any time must never be resurrected or repeated? If new evidence reveals that the failure to give effect to any proposed Amendment is causing injustice to men, women and children, must those Amendments never be brought forward again on another Bill? The hon. and learned Member for Norwood went on to state that we were actually proposing to deprive widows of some part of the money to which they are entitled under the present Act. Later, he said that we were going to make widows receive money that they could manage very well without. Then he told us that children were not to receive the money which would he payable under Clause I of this Bill. Next he said that this Bill would he too costly and that workmen must he called upon to hear a share of the burden of any accident that may happen and of the resultant loss in wages.

In listening very attentively to the hon. and learned Member I thought he did extremely well when he had a very poor case, and, slimming up his arguments, it appeared to me that he would support this or any other Bill so long as it did not happen to cost any money. It has been stated that in 1983 we allowed the Amendment relating to weekly compensation to go by without so much as entering the slightest protest. As a matter of fact an Amendment was moved to give two-thirds of the weekly earnings as compensation instead of the maximum of 30s. under the existing Act. Therefore, the statement of the mover of the Amendment was not based on facts. Various hon. Members have referred to the Bill in general terms. It would not be out of place if we brought the existing Act in practice down to terms of hard cash, so that it can be better understood as applicable to the individual home. Clause 1 sets out to make fundamental changes, with all of which I agree. Under the present Act weekly payments to children are too small; secondly, they do not last until the children reach working age; and, thirdly, they are faulty because payments are based on the earnings of a deceased father instead of on the present need of the children. Under the terms of the existing Act the maximum payment to a child is 6s. a week, and the minimum can be as low as 3s. If we take one or two examples we can observe the failure of the present Act to mete out any sort of equal justice to children.

Take a family with two children, aged one and three years respectively. In less than 10 years from the moment of the death of the parent, the whole of the £300 will be absorbed, leaving the two children dependent upon some form no charity, from the ages of 11 and 13 respectively, until they are able to earn their own livelihood. Take a case where three children are left, aged one, three and five years respectively in slightly over six years the whole of the compensation money is absorbed, and these children, then aged seven, nine and 11 years respectively, will be dependent upon some firm of charity. Take a family of four children, aged one, three, five and seven years respectively. Compensation money would be disposed of in four years and 10 months, and the family would be condemned to pauperism through no fault of their own or their parents. This new Bill sets out to equalise the payment to the widow, and, secondly, to equalise the payment to the children. If you have a parent who, through no fault of his own, is earning but 30s. or a little more per week—perhaps because of short time, or one of the many factors which regulate the weekly wage—his children are bound to feel the effect in the weekly compensation. Under the terms of the present Act they can receive as little as 3s. per week. Does any right hon. or hon. Gentleman opposite think that a widow ought to be called upon to rear a family of healthy and intelligent children on 3s. or 4s. a week? It is totally impossible. Many women, through sheer economic pressure are compelled to contract debts that otherwise would never have been contemplated.

Under this Bill the amount of £500 would be paid into a central fund. Then, an income would be secured for the child until it reached the age of 15. From that point of view alone, the giving of security to the children, the giving of a sense of equality, ought to appeal not only to the sympathy of hon. Members opposite, but ought to induce them to give that sympathy practical expression by voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. In connection with Clause 3 referring to the medical referees. I am very pleased to note the observations of the hon. and gallant. Member for Derby (Sir R. Luce) who speaks with a good deal of knowledge on this subject. Whilst it may appear on paper, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Home Office said yesterday in reply to a question, that the present provisions regarding medical referees ought to work out fairly well, yet in practice we discover that this is not so. We find it happens too frequently that a medical man with undoubted medical or surgical skill is constantly found in Court taking the side of the employers in compensation disputes. It could almost be said that he is constantly acting as the professional representative of a body of insurers or employers, yet on the morrow we find this representative of the employers or the insurers acting as referee in a compensation dispute. Without attempting to impugn the honesty or devotion of medical men I submit that it gives rise to grave dissatisfaction among workmen to be called upon to accept as final and conclusive the decision of a medical referee who is constantly employed and paid by those interested in having these applications rejected. Without attempting to labour that point I suggest that in practice the present system of appointing medical referees does not do justice to the injured person. If we could only remove the suspicion by having independent medical men who are not interested either in the employers' or the workman's side we should get much more satisfaction. So far as Clause 6 is concerned, the weekly compensation under the terms of this Bill would be increased. The Amendment of the hon. and learned Member for Norwood contains a statement which is not strictly true. In line 4 it contains the words would receive 30s. or 23s. 9d. respectively. Surely these amounts are no more than can be adequately met even by the present premiums.

Clause 2 refers to payment for the first three days of injury. Prior to the 1923 Act any person injured and kept from work for 14 days, was entitled to compensation for the first day, so that, so far from the 1923 Act making a concession in this respect, as suggested by the hon. and learned Member for Norwood, it actually made the position worse for the worker than it was previously. What happens in practice? A person whose wages are £3 per week or over, if kept from work for 14 days, receives in compensation £2 5s. for two weeks or the equivalent of 22s. 6d. per week, and if his wages only happen to be £2—and he is less able to save for a rainy day—he only gets 10s. 10d. per week for the first two weeks. The House need not fear to support a Bill which contains a Clause dealing with this matter. As regards the Schedule dealing with cases of nystagmus, it is understood by those in close contact with men suffering from this disease, that when they are so far recovered as to have lost the oscillation of the eyeballs, they are not only deprived of compensation, but, what is infinitely worse, they are also deprived of their employment. Colliery companies are hesitant to re-employ a miner who has suffered from nystagmus. I think I can say with truth that from one small district in the particular division which I endeavour to represent, two men are to-day reclining in an asylum as a result of their economic difficulties arising out of nystagmus and its consequences. Therefore, T suggest that the House would he conferring but justice on these sufferers by giving support to this particular Clause.

If we are asked where the money is to come from to deal with these cases, I would remind hon. Members that the premiums paid for compensation in 1020 were over £8,250,000, while the amount received by people who were injured or on behalf of those who were killed was less than £3,000,000, so that it took £5,000,000 in order to provide for working expenses and I would commend those figures to the hon. Member who is going to move his Bill on Friday of next week, when he is making reference to the high cost of working expenses in another direction. Again, with regard to the question of where the money is coming from, in Ontario, in the home, as it were, of one of our Dominion children, they have such a compensation arrangement that on every £100 paid in for compensation premiums, only £2 go for expenses, while £98 find their way into the pockets of the injured people. I do not want to delay the House by referring to the payments that they make, but it is sufficient for my purpose to have brought these various money payments before the House, so that they can better understand their weekly application to the standard of life of people who meet with injuries while at work. If I were to offer a criticism at all, it would not be for what the Bill contains, but for its very serious omissions. The evolution of compensation has been on its way since 1880, or for 45 years, and it seems to me that the House ought to give this Bill its unanimous support. Let us make the best of it we can, and translate our words of sympathy into real practice by giving an element of justice to the workers of this country.

Like my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Derby (Sir R. Luce), I intend to support this Bill, and I should like to give a few reasons for so doing. It is true that I supported the Act of 1923, both downstairs and in Committee upstairs, but I must confess that I did so with a certain amount of misgiving. I was never quite satisfied in my own mind why that Act should fall short of the recommendations of the Holman-Gregory Report, which was an eminently sensible and reasonable document. Every interest was represented on that Committee employers and workers and every Blass, and, moreover, the Report was a compromise Report. The workers' representatives moderated a great many of their demands in order to secure a unanimous Report, and I feel all the more strongly now, as time has gone by, that that Report ought to have been carried out in the legislation of the day.

I do not intend to pledge myself to every line of this Bill, but I must confess that Clause I does appeal to me very strongly. It merely carries out the recommendation of the Holman-Gregory Report in proposing that, instead of giving a fixed sum to the widow, the widow should be compensated according to the necessities of her family. It does, in other words, what every scheme of compensation ought to do: it takes into consideration the size of the family. It does not seem to me consistent, either with justice, common sense, or reason, that children should be stunted and starved in youth, and thus handicapped for the rest of their days, merely because their father has lost his life in an industry, through no fault of his own. Clause 6 is another Clause which appeals to me very strongly. It is supposed that industry pays half a workman's compensation, but when a young miner, for instance, loses his earning capacity and is crippled for the rest of his life, it is idle to contend that the industry is paying half his compensation. We were told in 1923 that if we gave this extra compensation, we should be adding the last straw to industry; but I have no reason to think that if we vote for this Bill and pass these Clauses we shall be adding anything but a very infinitesimal extra charge to the industry of this country. And that is not an ipse dixit of my own, but, if hon. Members will refer to the Holman-Gregory Report, they will find that it was the considered opinion of the members of that Committee who signed that Report that the proposals they made would add but a very small and infinitesimal sum to industry. Even if it. does add a sum to industry, it will perhaps hasten what I think is a most desirable time, when we shall have a Workmen's Compensation Act which will give a workman compensation as a matter of right, and which will not take such enormous sums in administration as the present scheme does.

May I, in conclusion appeal to the Government at all events to support the second Reading of this Bill? We, as a party, are deeply pledged, from the Prime Minister downwards, to ameliorate the social conditions of the people and to remove all the hardships and injustices from our industrial system. If we are going to make the industrial system of this country acceptable to the people of this country, we have got, I think, to buck up and begin to get to work, because it is all very well to talk about Conservatives and social reform at the Election; what we want is something more definite and positive in the House of Commons.

One has been glad to listen to many of the speeches this afternoon, and to note the really admirable spirit in which they have been couched, and, if one might without effrontery offer a word of admiration, I would like to offer it to the Noble Lord the Member for South Nottingham (Lord H. Cavendish-Bentinck), whose spirit has ever been, since we have known him in this House, one devoted to social progress. Whatever he may label himself, everybody knows that he really does desire the well-being of his fellow-countrymen. I speak as one who remembers at first hand the whole operations of the employers' liability law from 1880, and, later, sitting 28 years ago in the public gallery when the Conservative party of that time brought in what proved to be one of the greatest social boons that ever any party has conferred upon the nation.

I am not going to follow the hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord) into the technical and legal complexities with which, I think, at least he did riot interest the House, but in 1897 I remember the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham said that the proposal of the Government was to compensate the workmen for all the risks of their industry, and at that time he made the remarkable statement that the average weekly wages of the workmen engaged in the industries that were included in that Act were 23s. a week. The average weekly wages in 1897 of the workers engaged in the most dangerous industries of the country were 23s. a week, and at that time a maximum of 20s. was established. Since 1897 the cost of living has gone up as nine is to four. That is not a mere statement of the hon. Member for Ince; it can be checked by anybody. Now if there is any purpose upon which this House might very well be resolved, they might say that, whatever might happen to the able-bodied, whatever might happen to those who can fend for themselves, at least the disabled, and the children of the disabled, should be placed in a position that would lift them above destitution.

3.0 P.M.

In 1923 we urged the Government to raise the amount that they had embodied in their Bill. We submitted to them that no change had taken place, except in the two Measures of 1917 and 1919, in the maximum amount of compensation to the workman for 26 years, notwithstanding the tremendous increase in. the cost of living. We thought that an argument of that kind would appeal to everybody, that, surely, however the able-bodied might fare in the economic world, at least the conditions of those who were disabled in industry, and those dependent upon them, should be held to move with the increased cost of living. Indeed, the Coalition Government in 1917, recognising at the time the necessity of doing something to meet the position, raised the 20s. to 25s. The cost of living still soared upwards, and, two years later, they raised the 25s. to 35s.; that is to say, they added 75 per cent. to the amount that hitherto had been the maximum that could be obtained by any injured workman, and made it 35s. Of course as hon. and right hon. Members know, in 1920 the cost of living had gone up, as compared with 1914, by nearly 200 per cent. There fore the increase was by no means adequate, but it was a step in the right direction, and it was a substantial improvement, for which the workers of the country were grateful. We appealed to the Committee. We pointed out the fact I am pointing out now, that the cost of living had gone up as 9 is to 4, that 9s. to-day is only worth what 4s. was in 1897, when the Conservative Government of that time passed the Act. We have made this appeal entirely on non-political grounds, because, as a matter of fact, both parties have deserved equally well in regard to this particular social problem, and this, which can be looked upon as a great social boon—a great social right, if you like—has not been the property of any one party in the State. Both parties have helped to confer that right upon the working people of the nation. In 1906 the Liberal party at that time gave us a great amending law, but it is quite true to say the basic law itself was given by the Conservative party.

I ask hon. and right hon. Members whether it is not really time to bring the payments to the disabled workers and to their dependants more in accordance with the increased cost of living? There is not a single man in this House who, if that question were submitted to him in the privacy of his own room, would not say, "Yes, that is a right thing to do." The Amendment says that the law has only been in operation just over 12 months, and it provided for largely increased benefits. As a matter of fact, as my hon. Friend, the Member for Don Valley (Mr. T. Williams) has pointed out, the entire opposite is the case. The maximum payment was 35s., and any person who had received £2 or over was entitled, up to the beginning of 1924, to receive 33s. a week. No man now, unless he is receiving £3 or over, can receive 30s. a week. Every person below £3 receives less than 30s., and the complexities of the Act are such that I defy the hon. and learned Gentleman—and I make this as a serious challenge—at any point below 30s. to calculate what is the amount of compensation properly due. I have had the handling of compensation cases for 28 years. My hon. and learned Friend came into active association with me for three or four years as a very worthy political opponent in the Ince Division. I wonder what his attitude would have been had he won the Ince Division? I think he is a native of that division. I am sure, knowing the industrial life of Lancashire as he does—and I give him credit for knowing it—he is speaking with his tongue in his cheek very largely when he talks as he has been talking to-day.

On these matters, as my speeches prove, my attitude was exactly the same in 1908, 1909 and 1910 as it is to-day.

There was no Compensation Act before this House, in 1908, 1909 or 1910.

From time to time questions of this kind arose. The matter arose before 1906. I took the same view then in a speech I made at Golborne.

That is another Division. I am speaking of Ince. He was not making speeches in Lice Division when he was making them at Golborne, nor at Norwood. Our appeal is this, that it is not too early to do a rightful thing. We made appeal after appeal in the Committee in 1923 in the earlier part of the proceedings. We suggested to the right hon. Gentleman who was then the Home Secretary, "It is 26 years since any sub- stantial alteration took place in the figure, and it may be many more years"—I myself used this argument—"before the House will be inclined, after leaving this Committee, to revert to the question of Workmen's Compensation. Why cannot you now, while you are dealing with it, bring the payment to disabled people and their dependents more in accordance with the cost of living? "I myself said, as can be proved by the records of the Committee, that now you have a stable condition of things. The cost of living is becoming stabilised. There is no early prospect of any serious fall in the cost of living. You may, therefore, looking back upon the years which have gone and the years which are likely to ensue, say this condition of things we will take as being stabilised, and if you will do that and bring the figures more into accordance with the facts no one can complain. Our appeal was rejected. The 35s. was reduced to 30s., and the amount of compensation was reduced by 15s., 18s. or £1 per week. In tens of thousands of cases the people who were really earning decent wages relatively to those earned in an industry like mining had 15s., 18s. and £1 a week knocked off their compensation, and yet we are getting an Amendment framed like this.

I give the hon. and learned Gentleman credit for right motives in framing it and endeavouring to put into its terms something in accordance with the facts, but he cannot possibly have thought it out, because 75 per cent. of the whole of the cases have had sweeping reductions made in their compensation. I appeal to the hon. Member in charge of the Bill. I appeal to hon. Members in all parts of the House. I myself have constantly given credit to the Conservative party for the very fair attitude they have taken up on many of these great social questions, but here is a case where they can do an act of real social justice. I will not trouble the House with small pettifogging legal complexities. The thing we ask is that the widow and her dependent children shall be in a condition which will enable them to live an honest life, will enable the children to be brought up under conditions which make them good citizens and enable the mother to bear without undue anxiety the loss of her breadwinner, keep her from being a burden on the parish, and will bring into the homes of the working-people, when accident overtakes them, a standard of comfort equal to that which they would have enjoyed had such accident not occurred. That cannot be done on the existing figures. There is not an hon. Member here who does not know that the payments made under the Workmen's Compensation Act are hopelessly out of focus. We say to the supporters of the Government: "Here you are, in the plenitude of power, able to carry out what I honestly believe many of you genuinely desire to assist, the social elevation and amelioration of the people, and you have here a real opportunity." I ask the Government and their supporters not to throw away this opportunity on the ground that this is a private Member's Bill and that we dealt with workmen's compensation only 18 months or a year and nine months ago. The need is urgent, the right is unquestioned, your own records would entitle you to carry out this urgent course, and I trust this afternoon we shall succeed in securing your assistance in the Division Lobby to carry the Second Reading.

Like my right hon. Friend who has just sat down, and my Noble Friend the Member for South Nottingham (Lord H. Cavendish-Bentinck), I was through all the Debates on the 1923 Act upstairs and in this House, and I do not believe anybody would have been more surprised than would the right hon. Gentleman opposite. If he had been told that only about a year after that Act had come into operation we should be discussing another big Bill on the same subject.

To show the right hon. Gentleman that he really is wrong on this occasion, I would like to tell him that his chief turned to me, and said: "Well, inasmuch as you are going to come into power yourself very shortly, you will have the opportunity of bringing in a new Bill." That was said in conversation, over his own shoulder, with his own chief at the time.

I am afraid I did not catch those remarks; but I am quite sure it is the case that if you had put it to most Members of that Committee they would have been very sur- prised indeed. This Act has been in operation for only just over a year—in active operation only just over a year.

A year too long.

So far as the Home Office are aware, this Act is working very well. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh !"] So far as we are aware. And so far as we are aware there is no general demand for a drastic alteration. Every single Clause in this Bill was, I think, discussed or withdrawn upstairs or on the Floor of this House. We had 13 days' discussion on the Bill of 1923, upstairs and downstairs, and if one includes the Bill brought in by the right hon. Gentleman the late Colonial Secretary (Mr. Thomas), and a Motion on the same subject brought forward by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ince (Mr. Walsh), we had no less than 15 days' Debate on these very questions only about a year and a half ago.

When I introduced that Bill the Government, both privately and publicly, gave it a Second Reading on the understanding that both Bills would be considered upstairs. The main proposals of my Bill, which was given a Second Reading, were not embodied in that Bill upstairs.

The right hon. Gentleman's Bill was practically identical with the Holman - Gregory Report, and a very substantial portion of that Report was embodied in the Act of 1923. Therefore, this Bill is merely a string of controversial propositions which have been turned down either in Committee or in this House about one-and-a-half years ago. The ex-Solicitor-General says, "Why not have a Bill of this kind every year, because we have an Insurance Bill every year." That is done for a very substantial reason, but so far as I can see there is no special reason for these proposals except so far as an increase of money is concerned. I believe it would he a sheer waste of time to consider this Bill in Committee upstairs, because by the end of the Committee stage I do not believe there would he a single Clause left in this Measure.

I should like to deal rapidly with some of the Clauses which have been mentioned. First of all there is Clause 1. which deals with the increase of the amount payable on the death of a workman who leaves children. The effect of that Clause would he substantially to carry out the whole of the recommendations of the Holman-Gregory Committee. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Derby opposite is quite ready to make use of the Holman-Gregory Report when it suits his own purpose, and perhaps we are liable to do that on both sides of the House. This Bill does carry out the recommendations of the Holman-Gregory Committee. They recommend that employers should he required, wherever a child under 15 years of age was left, to make a flat payment of £500 into a central fund under Government control, which would distribute the allowance for the benefit of the children.

This recommendation when it was made was thoroughly considered by the Conservative Government of the day, but they-considered at the time it was too heavy a liability upon industry. Then they considered an alternative course, and they recognised that the amount payable in the case of death ought certainly to be substantially increased over the amount provided for in 1906. Therefore, the Act of 1923 provided an additional allowance in all cases where the dependants included children under 15 years of age up to a maximum of £600. The Act gave £300 more as a maximum than the Act of 1906, and the whole of this compensation was to be paid into the County Court and dealt with as one fund for the benefit of the whole family. Therefore, the Act of 1923 went a very long way in the direction of carrying out the Holman-Gregory proposal. Under this Bill the maximum liability is now raised to £800, and in view of the present industrial conditions, which are very little better than they were one-and-a-half years ago, the Government do not feel that they can impose this very large additional burden upon industry. That is merely one criticism, quite apart from the serious criticisms made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord).

We now come to the question of the waiting period. Under the Act of 1906 compensation was only payable where the incapacity lasted for more than a week, and it was then dated back to the day of the accident if the incapacity lasted for two weeks or more. The Holman-Gregory Committee showed quite clearly that that provision had worked badly. They showed numerous instances where it had encouraged men to stay out longer than they otherwise would have done, and they unanimously recommended a waiting period of three days without any dating back at all. Then we hail very strong representations made by hon. Members opposite upstairs and on the Floor of the House, and, in deference to their representations, the Conservative Government of the day agreed to date back the compensation where the incapacity had lasted for four weeks or upwards. Hon. Gentleman opposite then moved an Amendment on Report trying to turn that four weeks into 14 days, but they were defeated. This present Clause merely repeats the 14 days' Amendment that was turned down in this House. It is open to exactly the same objections that were pointed out by the Holman-Gregory Committee, and, on these grounds, I do not feel that the Government could accept this proposal. The hon. Gentleman who moved the Second Reading of this Bill (Mr. Cape) said that he thought a successful malingerer really deserved to have the compensation. It is quite possible that he may find it impossible to get it, but I am not at all sure that malingerers ought to be encouraged.

May I say that I quite agree with the hon. Gentleman with regard to malingerers. When I spoke this afternoon, I made the reference as a sort of passing joke, that a man who could dodge all the restrictions and safeguards really deserved the compensation.

I quite realise that the hon. Gentleman was not speaking very seriously. We now come to Clause 3, Clause 3 is an extension of Section 7 of the Act of 1923, and it is in direct contradiction to the recommendations made by the Holman-Gregory Committee, Section 7 of the 1923 Act provides that where an accident resulting in death or serious or permanent disablement occurs, it shall be deemed to arise out and in course of the employment of the workman, notwithstanding that the workman at the time was acting in contravention of any Statutory Order or Regulation, if such act was done for the purposes of and in connection with his employer's business. The Seconder of the Bill, in his remarks, did not quite realise that that was the case. What does this Clause try to do? It seeks to extend the Act of 1923 to cases of disablement causing a substantial reduction in, the earning capacity of the workman, although no serious and permanent disablement results. That is to say, the only cases left out would be cases of comparatively trivial injury.

A similar Amendment, I think in identical words, was moved in Committee by the late Minister of Labour. It was defeated, and at the same time another proposal was defeated, which was moved on behalf of employers, to limit the scope of the Clause to cases of death. The employers were trying to get more, and hon. Gentlemen opposite were trying to get more. We adopted a middle course, and I think it would be the greatest pity now to reopen the settlement that was arrived at a little over a year ago. If it were reopened, an immediate attempt would be made by the employers, naturally, to limit Section 7 of that Act to cases of death, and it would be impossible to say what the result would be. To my mind, I think that the Act of 1923 goes as far as general opinion would support at the present time, and I am afraid, therefore, that the Government could not possibly accept this proposal.

I now come to Clause 4, which deals with the institution of medical boards. This Clause reproduces, again practically word for word, the proposal made by the late Minister of Labour when the Debates were going on on the Bill of 1923. That Clause contains two proposals. First of all, it proposes to substitute a board of three referees for a single referee in certain cases. It also proposes the prohibition of medical referees from acting in any compensation cases, or being engaged in any private practice in the district for which they act as referees. I think this matter was dealt with in a question yesterday by the hon. Member for Don Valley (Mr. T. Williams). In regard to the board of three referees, the Holman-Gregory Committee unanimously turned that proposal down, and they turned it down for three reasons. They turned it down because they showed that it would be a very costly procedure—it would add very largely to the cost of the whole business. They turned it down because they said that the machinery would move much more slowly; and they turned it down because they showed that there would be no real case for a change in this respect, as the referees selected were always medical men of very high standing.

In regard to the second proposal, the objection is that it would necessarily mean the appointment of whole-time men—whole-time practitioners, that is to say, resident in the district. That, of course, would, again, lead to a very heavy extra charge. These practitioners who were made whole-time referees would not get sufficient work unless the areas were grouped and formed into larger districts, and, if you merely had whole-time men, I think that those persons would lose touch with general practice and gradually become less efficient and able to deal with their business. I agree, however, with hon. Gentlemen opposite, and I should like to make this quite clear, that a very close watch ought to be kept over the present situation, and any representations which are received from any quarter of the House, or from anybody, will be very carefully considered, including the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton (Mr. Hilton), I should like to point out, however, that this is really not a case for legislation at all. It is not really necessary to put it into the present Bill, because the whole of this matter of medical practitioners can be dealt with by an Order of the Secretary of State or by Regulations. Therefore, for the reasons I have mentioned, I am afraid, that, again, the Government would not be able to accept that part of the Measure.

In regard to seamen, I do not think I need say anything at the present moment. It is a minor question. But I should like now, if I may, to deal with a very important Clause, namely, Clause 6. That Clause provides for an increase of payment in case of incapacity: it raises the maximum weekly compensation from 30s. to 40s., and fixes 75 per cent. of the average weekly earnings as the minimum rate for all workers. If I may, I should like to point out that when the late Secretary of State for War says that these compensation eases have been reduced, he forgets that the War Addition Act did certainly increase the compensation rates, but that was a purely temporary Measure; and I should like to point out that no compensation under the War Addition Act has been knocked off for existing cases.

Reference has been made to the suggested increase of compensation to 75 per cent. of the man's average earnings in case of incapacity. May I point out that the Holman-Gregory Committee only proposed 66s. But there is something worse when you read the proposal of this Bill—and this point has not been made. at all— with Section 4 of the Act of 1923. We find that the compensation would range from 75 per cent. to 87½ per cent. in the case of some of the lower paid workers. I do not know whether hon. Members opposite realise that that is an impossible figure for the Government to accept. I should like just, if I may, to deal with Clause 7. This again deals with proposals that were turned down in Committee upstairs. It deals with miners' diseases by Statute. It deals with diseases produced by dust and with diseases of the eye. Let me say shortly why the Government cannot accept these proposals. Take the proposal in regard to miners' nystagmus. The objection to inclusion here is that it would stereotype the description of the disease and fix the final terms of compensation which is inadvisable. We have had a Committee of the Medical Research Council sitting on this, and the Committee has reported that the existing description of miner's nystagmus is already very much too wide. They recommend that there should be a stricter standard. In respect to phthisis there was another Committee, the Industrial Diseases Committee, and they reported against the inclusion of this disease under the Act of 1906. The matter is now being dealt with in another way. If it is shown that in any employment in any industry an individual employed suffers from the inhalation of silica dust; if he can make a good case, and bring it to the Home Office, the Home Office can make a scheme to include it under the Silicosis Act of 1918. No legislation is required on this subject at all. We are only too anxious to deal with these cases. The hon. Gentleman opposite said there had been five or six deaths. I do not know that that is known at the Home Office——

I think I am right in saying that if the hon. Gentleman looks up the records of the Home Office he will find that as a result of a deputation to the Home Office, in 1923 the Home Office sent down experts who have been going into this matter.

As a matter of fact the Mining Department is at present looking into the whole question, I believe. If a good case is made out: if the work involves boring through the rock to get at the coal and silicosis is caused through inhalation of silica dust, then a silicosis scheme will be certainly made by the Home Office, and the people concerned will get compensation. T am afraid this is rather a dry and technical subject, but. I do not want hon. Members opposite to think that the Home Office is unsympathetic to their point of view. In Committee in 1923, I, and the then Home Secretary, accepted several Amendments brought forward by the hon. Members opposite, which were opposed by some hon. Members on our own side. In listening to hon. Members opposite to-day, one might think that the Act of 1923 had done absolutely nothing, or one might think that it had done very little.

I know of 20,000 people for whom it has done nothing.

In the case of death, the amount of compensation was raised from £300 to £600. In case of disablement the weekly maximum was raised from £1 to 30s. [HON. MEMBERS: "No !"] in cases of the lower-paid wage earners, the maximum was raised from 50s., and a percentage given up to not less than 75 Tier cent. of their actual wages. They were also compensated for injuries lasting more than three clays. The income for non-manual wage earners was raised from £250 to £350, and various classes were brought under the Act who had been excluded before. Various administrative improvements were made in order to make it easier for the workman to get his compensation and to be protected against injustice.

The hon. Member says that the Act of 1923 brought many people within its purview who had been excluded before. Is he aware that the Act did bring in for the first time the cabmen of London, but practically not one penny of compensation has gone to these men, or very few have benefited by the Act?

That is new point, and I will look into it.

I can supply the information.

All these gains were very important gains. Surely we ought to wait to see how the Act is working. It is only one year old, and I do not feel that we ought to reopen the whole of this question after only a year's trial of the Act. Every proposal in the Bill, every single Clause in the Bill, was discussed a little over a year ago. Practically every proposal in the Bill was defeated upstairs, or on the Floor of the House, and I think it will be sheer waste of Parliamentary time to give this Bill a Second Reading and go through the whole of the Committee and Report stages again. That being so, I hope hon. Members opposite will reconsider their position.

Many of the speeches that have been made from the other side have dealt with points that do not require legislation, but can be dealt with by order of the Secretary of State. In those cases, we shall consider any recommendations that are made, and shall do our best to see that justice is done. That remark applies to at least one-fourth of the speeches made from the other side to-day. Do let us give the Act of 1923 a chance. Let us watch its operation and, if necessary, we can amend it later. In view of all these considerations, I feel that it is the duty of the Government to support the Amendment proposed by the hon. and learned Member for Norwood, and I hope the House will do the same.

May I say a few words as to the impression left upon my mind by the attitude of the Government on this subject? The whole of the arguments used by the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves-Lord) amount to this, that because legitimate amendments which in our opinion are still necessary, were rejected in 1923 they should not be brought up again until the right hon. Gentleman and hon. Gentlemen opposite consider that the time for doing so has arrived. There is no one in the House who does not recognise the ability of the hon. and learned Member for Norwood as an authority upon compensation law. I have a grateful recollection of the assistance which he rendered to myself in the Parliament of 1923 when I introduced a Resolution for the codification of the compensation laws, and I would remind the right hon. Gentleman that his predecessor the right hon. Member for Oswestry (Mr. Bridgeman) accepted the Resolution and promised to see what he could do to put it into operation.

But I would remind the hon. and learned Member for Norwood that the legal mind is somewhat wonderfully and fearfully organised. It is within my recollection, and I am sure within his, that if I am not mistaken he was professionally interested in a case which shows that the whole administration of compensation reeks with the necessity of having an early change. In that case against the employers, which was a very intricate one, our counsel succeeded, and in the week afterwards the same legal gentleman fought a case for an employer on exactly similar lines and he won that as well. I have never understood and I hope that the House will never understand, that Acts of Parliament are framed, as if they are the laws of the Medes and Persians, on the principle that there is no necessity for change for a long period. Let us follow that to its logical conclusion. I have had myself very painful experience of the laws of compensation. I myself was a victim of the intricacies of the Employers Liability Act. What happened showed the necessity for change and the change was not made from 1880 to 1897 though the necessity was glaring all the time.

Some hon. Members will remember that we had the absurd restriction of the 30 foot limit. If a man fell 29 feet 11 inches he got no compensation. For weeks and months the argument in the Courts was whether a well 20 feet deep was a building 30 feet high. The next connundrum was, When is a ship not a ship? Because of the omission of the word "ship" from the Factory Act, the casual labourer at the docks was not included under the Factory Acts. Therefore, a ship was a ship only when she was tied alongside the dock, and only that side of the ship along the dock was a factory and the other side was not. Therefore, a man working on the quayside came under the Factory Act, and the man working on the far side of the ship did not. Take the question of the average wage. The Act of 1897 laid it down that a man was entitled to claim only 50 per cent. of the wage earned under the firm in which he was insured. It cost us thousands of pounds and enormous litigation, which went to the highest Court in the land, to fight this point, and then we were beaten. Why? Because a man might work five and a half days in a week and earn five and a half days' wages with one employer, and in the last half-day of the last day he would be injured while in the employment of a different employer. With the agility of the legal mind, the Courts ruled that that man was entitled only to 50 per cent. of the half-day's pay which he earned in the employment in which he was injured.

I could go on quoting case after case. The hon. and learned Member for Non-wood knows these cases as well as I do, for he has had professional experience of them. Personally I think that no amount of compensation can compensate the widow or the children of the widow for the loss of the breadwinner. I do not see why there should be any differentiation between the wages that the man earned and the compensation which is paid. We have heard something about malingering, as if malingering were a monopoly of the manual worker. I would suggest that there are mental as well as physical malingerers. But we do not hear anything about doctors' certificates to certify whether they are able or unable to work. Will it be suggested in this House that, even under the present suggested generous contribution to the insured man, it pays any man to malinger for the money that he will get under the Compensation Act? There is nothing sound in that argument. No matter what hardship you suffer, you will find that immediate change is necessary. Legal minds cannot agree upon the interpretation of the existing Acts. There may be some consolation in that, because when legal minds differ the ordinary lay mind gets a bit of his own back occasionally. Putting aside all other argu- merits for the necessity for this Measure, I have quoted cases showing that in spite of the existence of glaring injustices 10 years elapsed between one change in the law and another. We never will get a satisfactory compensation law until the suggestion passed in this House and accepted by the Home Secretary is carried out. Personally, I would be prepared to accept a compromise on the existing compensation law. Owing to the practice of the present law, the advantages, if there were any, of the Employers' Liability Act have been absolutely wiped out by the administration of the Workmen's Compensation Act, and therefore the time has come to have codification of the law to give us a decent, intelligible Act of Parliament which cannot be misunderstood.

I wish to thank you Mr. Speaker for giving me the opportunity of saying a few words in this Debate, although my enthusiasm is somewhat damped, first by the fact of having sat here, all the afternoon, and heard many of my arguments taken by other speakers and secondly, because it was my desire to speak before the Parliamentary Secretary, so that T might have induced him to support the Measure. The hon. Gentleman mentioned in the course of his speech one or two points which could he altered without this Measure, and I wish he had been in his place when the hon. and gallant Member for Derby (Sir R. Luce) was speaking about the question of miners phthisis being added to the industrial schedule. I have taken up that matter with the Home Office and I hope the diseases mentioned by the hon. and gallant Member for Derby may be included. When the hon. and learned Member for Norwood (Mr. Greaves Lord) was speaking there seemed to be a difference of view regarding the amount of payment to a widow. He said that the present Act allowed £300 and I intervened, my point being that when a man is injured and dies some time subsequent to the injury, if he has lived 67 weeks and has received 30s. a week that amount can be taken from the widow's £300 bringing it down to £2,200. I tried to make that point clear but I think the hon. and learned Member did not quite grasp it.

I do grasp the fact that a widow's portion cannot be reduced below £200, but this Bill does not affect that matter in the slightest degree.

The point is that a widow might get £200 and no more in certain cases, and the Bill prevents that.

No.

Yes, the Bill stipulates that a widow shall not have less than £250, thus giving equality all round.

I beg the hon. Member's pardon. I see that in cases where the only compensation payable would he £200, this Bill does mike it £250.

The other point to which I wish to refer is with regard to the 75 per cent. Many hon. Members opposite seem to think a workman should not be compensated to the full amount of his earnings. I have always held, and I hold now, that a workman injured in the course of his work has as much right to be treated generously as a man injured on a battlefield. It is on the industrial battlefield that he receives his injury, and I shall never rest content, in this House or out, until we have got to the point when a workman gets the full amount of his earnings when he is injured, and when he returns to light work. One of the great men on the other side made a remark which is significant of what I am saying. When this question of work men's compensation was brought forward in 1893, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain said:

"No amendment to the law relating to employers' liability will be final or satisfactory which does not provide compensation to workmen for all injuries sustained

in the ordinary course of their employment, and not caused by their own act or default."

I take it that he meant full compensation, and not partial compensation. I agree that the successive Acts passed since then have not been able to give it, but we must understand that they have been trying to build up Acts of Parliament eventually to get there, and when we find that in 1897 compensation represented £1—and the right hon. Member for Ince (Mr. Walsh) has told us that the wages then were 23s. a week—it shows that the intention of the Legislature was eventually to get to the full 100 per cent., so that there is no apology on this side for asking for 75 per cent., and eventually coming forward for the whole 100 per cent. In reference to the three days, it has been said that the workmen are not suffering materially because of the three days' deduction, but when a workman was only paid 14 clays there were only six per cent, of the men injured that were paid less than 14 days. There are 56 per cent. of the men injured paid less than one month, which shows that more than half of the men injured are done out of some compensation. I think the Government in their wisdom might as soon as possible do something to alleviate many of the present grievances dealt with here. In regard to the sequelæ of miners' nystagmus, I understand the Home Office can add that if sufficient evidence is brought forward—[ Interruption .] As the time is nearly up, and I do not want to imperil the chances of this Measure, I will conclude.

Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

The House divided: Ayes, 147; Noes, 227.

Words added.

Main Question, as amended, put, and agreed to.

Resolved,

"That, hawing regard to the extensive amendment of the Law effected by the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1923, which has only been in operation just over 12 months, and which provided for largely increased benefits both for the workman and his dependants; having regard to the fact that the whole questions of workmen's compensation was discussed at length by Parliament both on the proceedings of the Bill of 1923 and on previous occasions during that Session, and seeing that the proposals in the present Bill are on all-important points identical with proposals which were brought forward but rejected by Parliament at that time, this House is of opinion that no useful purpose would be served by reopening the matter after such a short interval and declines to accord a Second Reading to the present Bill."