PUBLIC OPINION’S PART

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 13 January 1938, Page 3

PUBLIC OPINION’S PART

THE POPULATION BILL l ßy Air Mail—From Our Own Correspondent] LONDON. 16th December. Mr A. P. Herbert has handsomely accepted Sir Kingsley Wood’s amendments to the Government’s Population Bill as satisfying all his demands. He is now prepared to support the Bill, and claims the denouement a sproof of the right working of democracy. I am not so sure that the claim could be substantiated in the sense the Oxford M.P. implies. It was the newspaper attack on the Bill that first brought it into public notice. Before that happened not a solitary M.P. seemed in the least concerned about the proposed bureauciatic inquisition into people’s private lives. True the Press criticism might not have had much effect without Mr Herbert’s sensational speech against the Bill on its -econd reading, but even after that tour de fprqe there was a ma-

jority in the House of Commons for the measure. It is the force of public opinion, plus Ministerial anxiety about possible electoral wrath to come, not House of Commons action solely or mainly, that has saved the humble citizen from a very grave tyranny of officialdom. The contention that the Bill remains identically the same, despite amendments, simply will not hold water. The radically offending clause hae been cut right out.

A northerner was being shown the sights of London. The Tower and the Houses of Parliament left him cold. It was not until St. Paul’s was reached that he displayed any interest. “Bah gum!” he said, in an awed voice, after staring at the Cathedral. “T’ parson chap here keeps a champion lot o’ pigeons.”

“Pa, what does it mean here by diplomatic phraseology?” “My son, if you tell a girl that time stands still | while you gaze into her eyes, that’s ! diplomacy, but if you tell her that her i lace would stop a clock you're in for it”