A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 99, 21 January 1935, Page 7

A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

* Housing, in Britain Drastic proposals for the elimination of overcrowding in town and country are contained in the British Government’s new Housing Bill. It is estimated that at least 834,000 new houses are required in England so that each family unit may have its own separate dwelling. Nearly 2,250,000 houses were built in the 14 years from March, 1919, to March, 1933. The problem has been accentuated by the drift of population southward to new industries growing up round London. This has meant in the south an increase of families nearly equal to the increase in houses. There is also the difficulty that many of the houses which were built to meet the first rush of industrial development in Victorian England are now falling into final dissolution. It is estimated that at least 150,000 new houses will be required annually for the nexit 10 years to meet all needs, and that these will have to-be available at a rental not exceeding ten shillings a week. A rapid clearance of slum areas is being made, and the Minister of Health has promised legislation that will make overcrowding illegal. A Smaller Cabinet.

Mr. Llloyd George is advocating a small Cabinet, of Ministers exempt from departmental pre-occupation similar to the former War Cabinet. The old Cabinet system—the Cabinet comprising anywhere from 20 to 20 members—subsisted until December, 1916, but Mr. Lloyd George, on his accession to the Prime Ministership, instituted a striking constitutional innovation. “You cannot,” he said, “wage war with a Sanhedrim.” Consequently, the old Cabinet was superseded by a War Cabinet, consisting at first of five and later of six members. Of these, one only, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was head of a department or closely connected with the House of Commons. The rest, including the Prime Minister, were intended to be free to- devote themselves, uninterrupted by departmental or Parliamentary business, to the conduct of the war. The War Cabinet met almost daily—3oo times in 1917—and received at every meeting reports from the Foreign Secretary, the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The heads of departments attended only when the affairs of their several departments were under discussion. The War Cabinet system did not long survive the war. Peace was hardly signed before Parliament began to manifest some curiosity, if not impatience, as to the prolongation of the war-time experiment, and in October, 1919, it was quietly announced that a Cabinet of 20 members of the pre-war type had been appointed. Subsequent Cabinets have not deviated from the old pattern.

Support For Mr. Lloyd George.

Both Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Snowden have congratulated Mr. Lloyd George on the opening of his reconstruction campaign. To have these three in combination is an extraordinary thing. All three have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and each has said some bitter things of, and to, the others. The strength of Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George lie in the fiery quality of their imagination. Lord Snowden is cold, critical, and deliberate. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill have been described as constitutional revolutionaries, and Lord Snowden as a social conservative. Mr. Churchill has been everything by turns and held every opinion worth holding. Mr. Lloyd George has been described as a “will-o’-the-wisp” of politics, while Lord Snowden has not altered from his ideas of Socialism and his passionate adherence to Free Trade. Winston Churchill, the grandson of a Duke, has been a Conservative, a Liberal, and again a Conservative, and now is in revolt against his own leader. Lord Snowden’s father was a worsted weaver in Yorkshire, and Lord Snowden was educated at a board school, and later entered the Civil Service. Mr. Lloyd George was born in Manchester but brought up by an uncle in Wales, a village bootmaker, and became a lawyer. Mr. Lloyd George entered the House of Commons in 1899; Mr. Winston Churchill in 1900; and Lord Snowden in 1906. Mr. Lloyd George is 72 years old ; Mr: Winston Churchill is 60; and Lord Snowden, 70. Cotton in America.

The Department of Agriculture in the United States has limited cotton production this year to 10,500,000 bales, an approximate increase of 1,224,000 bales over 1934. To reduce the cotton acreage in 1933 the planters ploughed up 10,000,000 acres, 25 percent. of growing cotton, holding the yield down from more than 17.000,000 bales, which would have been the second largest in history, to 13,000,000 bales. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, approved on May 12,1933, provided for the reduction of acreage in 1934 and 1935 to 25,000,000 acres and the, crop to about 9,000,000 bales. • But it’ has been found in actual practice that the more the acreage has been restricted, the more intense is the cultivation, and the larger the crop. Tno land taken out of cultivation is always the poorer land. In administering the Agricultural Adjustment Act farmers who adjust their production to the effective demand are paid compensatory payments supplementing their market returns. Plebiscite. The plebiscite ou the Saar has rei suited overwhelmingly in a vote for the return of the territory to Germany. A plebiscite is a general vote of the whole community or a country. The word itself comes from the Latin plebiscitum, which, in turn is made up of two other words, “plebs,” the common people, and “scitum.” a decree. In Roman days a plebiscitum was a decree, later called a law. passed by the common people assembled in the Comita Tributa. It was originally binding on the plebians alone, but its effect was afterward extended to the whole people. _The Comita Tributa were practically district councils. Yahoos The late Professor J. Macmillan Brown, deploring the reduced expenditure on education in New Zealand, said “the people will soon become yahoos.” The word yahoos was a name given by Dean Swift in his “Gulliver’s Travels” to a race of brutes, ’escribed as having human forms and vicious and degraded propensities. They were subject to the Houyhnhnms, or horses endowed with human reason. Hence the term is applied to a rough, low, boorish or uneducated person.