IN DEFENCE OF A PRINCIPLE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 220, 13 June 1936, Page 10

IN DEFENCE OF A PRINCIPLE

Scenes of the kind witnessed in the House of Commons during the debate on the motion for the adoption of the report of the tribunal on the recent Budget leakage are happily rare. It was a painful occasion, the more painful because of the general popularity and esteem in which Mr. J. H. Thomas particularly was held, and of a prevalent feeling that his offending had been in the nature of an error of discretion rather than of a deliberate dereliction of duty. Both Mr. Thomas and Sir Alfred Butt were held responsible by a judicial tribunal for the Budget leakage. There was no appeal from the decision, and each has now resigned his seat in Parliament. The Prime Minister, in language of painful significance, said they had left the House for the last time. Nothing could have been more becoming to Mr. Thomas than' the manner in which he received the judgment, the high compliment paid by him to. the judicial fairness of the tribunal, or the hope expressed by him that during his career he had made some contribution to “what to-day is almost the only bulwark of democratic government in the world.” This distressing incident, which has ended a long and useful caieer in the service of the nation, demonstrates how vigilantly guarded is the principle in British public life that the holders of responsible offices must be free from the fact and the suspicion of self-interested motives in the discharge of their duties. There was no question of hushing the matter up. It is foreign to the British temperament to wound the feelings of a fellow-man deliberately, and it must have been particularly painful for the Government to deliver so grievous a hurt to such a genial and popular colleague. But a principle war at stake, and it had to Ire vindicated. It is to the credit of the Government, and an example to the younger democracies of the British Commonwealth, that it met the occasion in the manner it did.