A PEER'S PENSION.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 116, 22 June 1914, Page 5

A PEER'S PENSION.

Lord Balfour of Burleigh, who held the position of Secretary for Scotland until 1903 in the last Unionist Government, replied in the House of Lords recently to the Kadicals who have been challenging his right to retain the pension of £I2OO a year he draws as an exCabinet Minister.

''Everybody knows," he said "that I hold a political pension of the second class, and that the condition on which such a pension is given is that the financial circumstances of the recipient are such as to require it.

"When I entered the Cabinet in 1895 the step involved a considerable loss of income. When I resigned—voluntarily—l was unable to recover what I had abandoned. . All I have to say on that point is that the circumstances will stand the most rigorous examination.

"The Prime Minister said it was a matter of honour, and there I am content to leave it, but if the Prime Minister wants to know the facts which I disclosed to his predecessor he shall have them.

'' Gradually in tlie course of years other things came to me, and when my earned income increased I made to a friend high in the confidence of the Treasury an offer to resign my pension with the power to resume it should that earned income cease.

"I was informed there was no precedent for such a course and the legal conditions were such that I could not be sure of a resumption of my pension. If the difficulty can be got over I am prepared to make the same offer again. "During forty years I have been working in the service of the State. I have served on nine Royal Commissions, and have been chairman of seven. I have served on a large number of in-ter-departmental committees. "For some years I have spent more than 150 days in that unpaid work. I arrr on the panel of chairmen of arbitrations, appointed by the Board of Trade, and have been chosen chairman five or six times by coal masters and miners of Scotland to help them to settle their disputes. "I have taken'no consideration for any of those continue that course."

Lord Crewe, for the Government, said he was sure the House had heard the statement with sympathy. "I can only repeat," he said, "what the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons, that we have the most complete confidence in the absolutely stainless honour of the noble lord.''