Bums, Winnie & Honest Abe

With the British Dole fund already $437,000,000 in debt last week, Scot MacDonald's Government asked authorization from the House of Commons to borrow another $121,500,000 from the Exchequer.

"This sum will last until next January if we have only 2,500,000 unemployed," said the Minister of Labor, Miss Margaret ("Saint Maggie") Bondfield. "With 2,750,000 unemployed it will last until November; and with 3,000,000 it will last until October."

The $121,500,000 demanded last week roughly equals half the cost of the Royal Navy for a year. The House of Commons promptly voted the borrowing of this huge sum 283 to 236. That no British party dares to risk loss of votes by abolishing the Dole appears from the fact that when last in power the Conservatives (now its chief opponents) not only did not abolish the Dole but did not even curtail it though they had complete control of the House of Commons.

Observed pungent Winston Churchill, immediate predecessor of Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer: "To ask a British Socialist Government to ... put its funds into solvency is like asking a fish to climb a hill. That is not what he is for; he is not made that way. . . . Lax and lavish expenditure on the Dole . . . is good electioneering."

Intoxicated by his own aptitude at phrase-coining, Mr. Churchill declared that Britain is heading straight for a "Government of the Dole-drawers, by the Dole-drawers and for the Dole-drawers." Above these Churchillisms the Daily Mail printed a cartoon showing the benches of the House of Commons prophetically occupied by vacant-eyed bums (Dole-drawers). Towering above them but ignored, loomed the futile ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

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