Bitter Struggle

COMMONWEALTH (British Commonwealth of Nations)

"Here I am in this hospital room instead of being in the House of Commons fighting. . . . That is what is worrying me now. . . ."

Thus spoke James Ramsay Macdonald, leader of the British Labor party last week at Jefferson Hospital, Philadelphia. He has been severely ill with laryngitis, but last week his physician, Dr. Solomon Solis-Cohen, allowed him to receive reporters. A Morris chair was set at his bedside, and Mr. Macdonald, clad in flannel pajamas, got up, donned a bathrobe, sat down--frequently mopping his brow with a folded handkerchief. He spoke in a bitter, tired voice of the British Government's now pending anti-strike bill (TIME, April 25, et seq.).

Said onetime Premier Macdonald: "It is the most iniquitous piece of class legislation produced by blind and stupid people that I have known in the whole of my lifetime. . . .

"Its class bitterness is so deep, its prejudice so powerful, and its antagonism to everything labor stands for is so inflamed that a decent Government following the present one would be justified in impeaching the present one for disloyalty.

"It is a bill I believe labor will never tolerate and there can be no real peace while it is on the statute books."

Next day Dr. Solis-Cohen deemed Mr. Macdonald sufficiently recovered to allow him to proceed to Manhattan where he expected to embark for England on the Cunarder Berengaria.

Meanwhile, in London, the House of Commons was the scene of a quiet, determined fight upon the bill which was the source of Mr. Macdonald's vexation.

The Commons did not repeat last week its orgy of personal revilement of a fortnight ago (TIME, May 16). Instead steady filibustering by Laborites was pursued to the extent of offering some 350 destructive amendments. As a result, only seven words of the first clause of the measure passed second reading, and the Government announced that it would invoke cloture* something which has not been done in the British House of Commons since 1921 (during the latter period of Mr. Lloyd George's Premiership).

* Cloture consists in introducing a motion that "the question be now put." If the motion passes, its effect is of course to secure a vote without further debate.