Parliament's Week

The Lords:

P:Heard the second murder case appealed to Their Lordships in the entire history of Parliament (640 years).

The prisoner, a young Dorset farm laborer named Reginald Woolmington, sat between two strapping warders on a back bench in the gallery from which he could not even see his august judges, the three Lords of Appeal, the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Lord High Chancellor. "I have given up hope," said Prisoner Woolmington, convicted at Somerset of murdering his 17-year-old wife and again found guilty before Mr. Justice Swift at Bristol on appeal.

"This case," Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip informed Their Lordships, "involves a legal point of exceptional urgency."

Ensued hours of lordly legal buzz-buzz, enlivened when Baron Atkin, a Lord of Appeal, murmured: "But ought we not to inspect the actual sawed-off shotgun?"

Hampered by his wig and robe, the counsel for the Crown found it difficult indeed to manipulate the sawed-off shotgun and failed to convince Their Lordships that the prisoner was lying when he said he shot his wife by accident. Announced the Lord High Chancellor at last: "The contents have it."--which meant nothing whatsoever to the lout in the gallery on trial for his life.

"Stand up," ordered a warder, and Reginald Woolmington stood up, still uncomprehending. Said the warder afterward: "It took us I should say 20 minutes to make him realize that Their Lordships had set him free, that he is innocent."

Their Lordships, having thus loftily reversed a murder conviction on appeal for the first time in the life of the Mother of Parliaments, went home to dinner with their minds full of tne "legal point of exceptional urgency."

Point: The lower courts left Woolmington to prove, if he could, his contention that he shot his wife by accident, ordered him hanged when he failed to do so. Instead, ruled Their Lordships, the burden of proof was upon the Crown to show, if it could, that Woolmington did not shoot his wife by accident but by intent, which the Crown failed to do. Therefore Woolmington, though he undoubtedly shot his wife and may have murdered her, is guiltless.

P:Pinned down the jingoistic Earl Stanhope, Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, to account for his efforts at Geneva to sabotage President Roosevelt's proposal for enforced armament publicity in all the Great Powers. Ingeniously the Earl explained : "I am extremely doubtful whether the Senate of the United States would ever agree that an international committee with Japanese and other foreigners upon it should be allowed to inspect American factories in order to see that the United States Government was telling the truth and rendering an accurate return to the League of Nations."

To this Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, old-time British peace-peer, retorted with scorn for Stanhope in his tone: "It is perfectly hopeless to speculate as to what the United States would do. The Senate is just as likely to reject a scheme on the ground it is too small as to reject it on the ground it is too large. The only thing that can be done is to get the best treaty possible and hope for the best when it gets to America."

P:Sorely vexed the Japanese Government by debating with Olympian superiority whether Great Britain's duty is to "intervene and mediate" between China and Japan.

"Most certainly our duty is clear," declared Baron Barnby, chairman of British industries' recent trade mission to Japan and Manchukuo. Also for intervention were two crusty British civil servants long accustomed to telling Orientals what is best--Baron Lamington, onetime Governor of Bombay, and the Earl Peel whilom Secretary of State for India. As cables flashed off their remarks to Tokyo, provoking sharp retorts (see p. 24), 'other peers rebutted with spirit.

"I prefer the real Government of Japan to the camouflage Government of China !" boomed the Duke of Atholl. "The best plan is to leave Japan alone to occupy Manchuria and Inner Mongolia."

"A few years ago when America created the puppet Republic of Panama," chimed in Baron Newton (no descendant of Sir Isaac), "nobody said a word."

The Commons:

P: Voted $250,000 for official celebration of Their Majesties' Silver Jubilee after stringy-haired Scottish Laborite James Maxton, M.P. had hoarsely denounced "this costly carnival of monarchist propaganda!"

To Scotsmen, logical and thrifty, the costly Jubilee amid Depression makes no sense. Scotland's temper is such that George V has canceled as quietly as possible, his announced Jubilee visit to Edinburgh. In , Glasgow's poorer districts many streets are plastered with Communist slogans and to venture there there would would mean a chorus of "Down with the King"

Speaking quietly in the Commons last week for a group of Scottish proletarian M.P. s, Mr. Maxton said: "A very large proportion of the world manages to conduct its affairs reasonably well without maintaining an hereditary monarchy. My group does not propose to cast any votes which tend to perpetuate a monarchist institution."

Others who did not vote for the $250,000 Jubilee appropriation included Sir Stafford Cripps and militant Laborites who are grooming him for Prime Minister Voluntary censorship kept the vote off all news service wires.

P:Buzzed at authoritative rumors that His Majesty's Government have invited onetime Prime Minister David Lloyd George to confer with them on his proposal for a "British New Deal" (TIME, Dec. 24), nebulously vague until the Welshman recently reduced it to a secret memorandum at the Cabinet's request.

That the Lloyd George Deal has strongly appealed to Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald sufficiently appeared when his political henchman Baron Allen declared at Manchester: "It is surprising what a volume of popular support can be mobilized in favor of far reaching programs of this sort to cover, say, five years. It would be criminal if such an opportunity were cold-shouldered." In a nutshell the Lloyd George Deal is understood to be "public works and still more public works."

P:Deeply sympathized with Godfearing, humdrum Conservative Hamer Russell M. P. who fainted dead away last week when his sprightly son John received a five-year jail sentence for "attempted murder"; in abetting the attempted suicide of an expectant mother and abetting on two other occasions illegal operations. Said Expectant-Mother Carol Leadbeater: "I still love John and want to marry him. He did not throw me into the River Trent! No such thing !"

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