or not, but there were two points which a matter of this kind. Immediately bewere very unwisely carried out. In the fore the war began this was an India first place there was a large importation Office occupation on the coast in order to of Indian camels into Somaliland which promote trade with Aden. 1 Then the were not suited by the climate and which India Office handed it over to the Foreign died like flies. Secondly native levies Office, who in turn handed it over to the under British officers were employed after a War Office to carry on the war. The considerable sum had been spent on their Secretary of State spoke as if the country training, but the moment the first shot was was a portion of British territory as is fired they all bolted leaving the officers in India. Nothing of the kind. We had a position of great danger. He wished to never been in the country. There were no know whether that practice would be magistrates, no residents, and no British stopped, and also whether the House officials in it. It was a desert country would be consulted before any larger where we had never been. At present operations were undertaken. there were no frontiers, but ultimately no doubt they would be drawn, and possibly the territory the Committee was now discussing would be handed over to someone else as a vast neighbouring territory of the same kind had been handed by us to Abyssinia. To speak of such such a territory which they had merely taken by colouring it red on the map, as British territory in the sense in which the United Kingdom or India was British territory was simply misleading the House of Commons. The moral of the whole thing was that the House should. be a little more careful than they had been in former times, in the matter of pegging out claims.

MR. SYDNEY BUXTON said the Secretary of State seemed surprised at the Committee being taken aback by this Supplementary Estimate. But surely it was not surprising, considering the original Estimate was only £250,000, and that the Supplementary Estimate now asked for amounted to £1,600,000. The Secretary of State said that when British territory was invaded it was the duty of this country to drive out the enemy. As a general principle they all agreed to that; but he wished to ask whether the Secretary of State thought that the Government or the House of Commons would have undertaken to drive out the Mullah if they had known it would lead to such enormous expenditure and such great loss of life. That was a question which met with the highfaluting of the Secretary of State. Now that they were in it they would have to go through with it. The original criticism on the expedition, that it was like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, had unfortunately been justified. The Mullah had only to retreat and it was most unlikely that he would be brought to book. The only satisfaction which the Secretary of State was likely to get was that the war would be like the Dutch war in Sumatra which had been in progress for fifty years. This was one of the cases in which the cost had not been counted before the expedition was entered upon, and it was clear that there was a great deal of miscalculation and muddle in connection with it.

*SIR CHARLES DILKE (Gloucestershire, Forest of Dean) said that the Secretary of State had put altogether too high the doctrine of British territory in

MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER said he had not put the question as one of territory at all. It was a question of treaty obligations. It was perfectly open to the House on a proper occasion to discuss whether the Government ought to have entered into those treaties or not, but, having entered into them for the protection of life and property for our own purposes, he held, although the opinion might be regarded as heretical by hon. Gentlemen opposite, that they were bound to give effect to them. The hon. Member for Poplar asked whether the Government would have entered on this expedition had they known what would happen. If a war for the protection of life and property was justifiable, the question of cost ought not to decide whether it should be undertaken or not. If it were right to go to war to protect those to whose protection this country was pledged, then the question of money did not in his opinion enter primarily intoa ccount.

fighting for. If there was a possibility | small demand of Ireland in regard to of spending £100,000,000 he wanted to technical education. know under what conditions they were going to make peace. Were they to go. on pursuing the Mullah until they caught him? Whenever we quarrelled with any of these tribes, we, in order to bring to them the blessings of Christianity, sent out an expedition to burn down their houses, and to destroy all we possibly could; and then, having mowed down the natives with our machine guns, we thanked God we were superior to them. There was no use in continuing these operations. If the Mullah was really caught another would arise. Nobody could show the slightest possibility of any benefit accruing from this expenditure of this money, and therefore he should gladly vote for the Amendment.

MR. JOSEPH DEVLIN (Kilkenny, N.) said if the Government embarked upon an expedition of this kind this country ought to pay for it, and he did not see why Ireland should be called upon to contribute any share for this expedition to Somaliland. Last night a claim was made for £3,000 for technical education in Ireland, and it was treated in the spirit in which the Treasury always treated claims of a practical character from Ireland. Now £1,800,000 was to be expended upon hunting the Mad Mullah of whose future peregrinations they had no assurance. The hon. Member for King's Lynn had asked what was to be done with the Mullah when he was caught. Might he suggest that he should be made President of the Tariff Commission or found a seat upon the Treasury Bench. This was a useless expenditure because the Mad Mullah was simply a religious enthusiast and that was no reason why he should be pursued at a cost to the taxpayers of £1,800,000. There were religious zealots in this House but they did not spend any money in pursuing them. It was scandalous that such а sum of money should be taken from the British Treasury when there was so much need for social reform and for more generous treatment towards Ireland in matters like technical education. He entirely associated himself with the hon. Member for Galway, in protesting, against this outrageous expenditure and against the refusal of the Government to grant the

*MR. AINSWORTH (Argyllshire) said it was desirable that some responsible memberof the Government should tell the House what was their policy in Somaliland. The South African War and its results proved that without a definite policy confusion and loss were certain to follow. It was impossible to see the end of this expedition. What was it intended for? This Vote was no criterion as to the further amounts the House would be asked for, and he sincerely hoped that before the House voted on the matter some undertaking would be given as to what the Government had in view.

MR. JOHN BURNS (Battersea) said he shared the distinction of opposing the Somaliland expedition for the last five or six years both by speech and vote. In the early days of this expedition he remembered both the hon. Member for Northampton and himself being gibed and jeered at by hon. Members opposite. It was suggested that they were unpatriotic and not touched with the new Imperialism, and it was said that they were not alive to the true interests of the British Empire. He claimed that they had been more prescient than those who jeered at them, and to-night he was using the same arguments against this expedition as he had urged before. He contended that the Mullah had the right, as a religious zealot and a tribal chief, to exercise what rights he thought he had and to contend for them with other men of similar ambitions and views. It was not our business to go to the four corners of the earth adjusting religious differences between Buddhist passive resisters and high Churchmen there. Mullah was a sort of fiscal reformer on the ramp whose authority was disputed, but the fact that he held those views was no reason why this country should do what had been done in Somaliland. See how appetite grows on what it feeds upon. The sum of £80,000 was the amount of the original Estimate for this expedition, and it grew from that to £250,000. Now they found that it had become £1,800,000, and if they continued Mullah hunting he believed the total

The

would be nearer £5,000,000.

He wished would be told the same thing next year, and the answer would be, "This man must be suppressed." There was no particular evidence that the Mullah had done any great harm; it might be said that he made people slaves, but it did not lie in the mouth of this. Government to accuse a wild native religious zealot of treating people badly or of making other people slaves, because the Government had done it themselves and were continuing to do it. Those tribal wars and military expeditions conducted and started mainly when the House of Commons was not in session were not only a scandal to their name but they broke the tradition they professed of treating inferior races kindly, and they involved this country in tremendous expense and a great waste of money. He appealed to the Secretary of State for War to withdraw the troops from this expedition in which there was no honour, glory, or credit. When the right hon. Gentleman was reorganising the Army he might with the money which was being thrown away on this expedition be able to do something better for Tommy Atkins. He protested against the wicked expenditure of money on wanton expeditions.

to take time by the forelock, and he protested against a continuation of this expenditure. There was an impression that these expeditions benefited trade, but there was not a greater illusion. The idea that they could extend trade in this way was a ridiculous one. The man who had done most to kill British trade in Africa was Mr. H. M. Stanley, whom the Government had imitated. They ought to do all they could to develop trade routes, but they should not interefere with tribal customs. They ought to let those tribes have their rows on religious matters just as they did in Belfast and other parts of the British Empire. If they broke each others heads it was only only a way they had got, but if they thought they were going to benefit trade by pursuing the Mullah all over the place they were very much mistaken. Ireland had just asked for £3,000 as a grant towards technical education. Not long ago men were running up and down the country telling us that the time for economy had arrived, that we were a dying race with languishing industries and disappearing trade, and we were told that we must go into competition with the world with new commercial ideas. The policy of the Government was like the policy initiated by Solomon 4,000 years ago, and was correctly described in the words "The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth." He did not object to hon. Members paying for their foreign policy out of their own purses, but he did object to the East Coast of Africa being made a sort of enlarged Salisbury Plain, about 1,000 miles long and 70 miles broad, on which our men were sent in a hopeless quest after a religious will o'-the-wisp who was continually dragging them into difficulties, dangers misery, and suffering, with an objective which did not warrant or justify the policy of the Government in any sense whatever. When they heard so much cheap sympathy expressed for the unemployed he contended that this £2,000,000 would have been better spent on harbours of refuge around the Irish or Scotch Coast or in establishing Charlottenburg schools in different parts of this country. If this Government remained in office they

MR. RITCHIE (Croydon) thought it was a great pity that language of exaggeration was used in regard to this matter. He was sure that a plain statement of the facts of the case would be sufficient to show how serious was the position we were in in Somaliland, and he was satisfied nobody in that House regretted more than His Majesty's Ministers the size which this expedition had now unfortunately assumed. Notwithstanding what the Secretary for War had said in regard to our responsibilities, he did not believe that His Majesty's Ministers would have entered upon an expedi tion of this kind if they had dreamt for a moment that it was going to reach its present size. He did not quite agree with his right hon. friend the Secretary for War when he assumed that it was the duty of the Government to enter upon such expeditions as this over such a vast expanse of territory, involving such an enormous outlay of money and loss of life, with regard to every portion of territory which was assumed to be more or less under

our protectorate. He thought that was putting it much to high. It was a great pity, he thought, that we should enter as freely as we did on obligations of that kind. He was satisfied that it was very largely true that we ought, as far as possible, to confine our responsibilities to the sea-coast, and not endeavour to undertake obligations in the trackless desert as in this case. The position was not really quite as his right hon. friend suggested, that there was a large number of people under our protection who had been raided and massacred. His recollection was that a large portion of the inhabitants of this territory were rather in sympathy with the Mullah than with us. It was understood when this expedition was entered upon, that we were to drive the Mullah from certain territory which was of service to his cattle and followers, and that having done that we should consider our responsibilities at an end, retire then to our own territory, and endeavour subsequently, by the extension of trade routes, and perhaps of railways, to extend our peaceful influence and so counteract the effect of the Mullah's movements. But be quite saw the original intention, against the will of the Government, had had to be abandoned, and they had had to go further and further in this matter, much beyond what they at one time anticipated. That was the danger of these expeditions, we never could tell when we entered on a small expedition how far we should be drawn on. He quite acknowledged that we could not leave this territory now without inflicting considerable damage on the Mullah. We had inflicted considerable damage already, he understood; and he thought they ought to ask the Government to define to the House what was to be the limit of the expedition to which we were committed. He was rather alarmed at some expressions which fell from his right hon. friend, who seemed to assume that this expedition might possibly go on indefinitely. He did not think that would be satisfactory to the House or the country; and they ought to hear from the Govern. ment whether, after having inflicted considerable injury on the Mullah, as we had done, and shown that we were not disposed to accept the

situation which was created, a period would be put to this expedition. It would be satisfactory to know that at some not remote period they might look forward to the termination of this very great expense.

MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER said he was rather astonished at the speech of his right hon. friend. There had been two definite appeals to the Government from the people under our protection. His right hon. friend agreed to the sending of the first expedition, which was successful in driving the Mullah out of our protectorate. The blow, however, was not a severe one, and the Mullah commenced to raid again. His right hon. friend approved of the second expedition, and that expedition suffered very serious defeat. Was that the time when we ought to have retired?

MR. RITCHIE: Certainly not.

MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER said they then undertook a third expedition, which was now, he hoped, in process of coming to a fortunate conclusion. [AN HON. MEMBER: What is it going to do?] His right hon. friend suggested that they ought to have brought the expedition to an end at some other period

MR. RITCHIE said the right hon. Gentleman must really not misinterpret him. He had never disputed the fact that he, along with his colleagues, was responsible for entering upon this expedition; he never disputed the fact that the Government had been driven, necessarily, and very much against their will, far beyond what they originally intended, and that they had no option but to go on. The question he had asked was what was the limit to the expedition which the Government anticipated; because his right hon. friend, in some of his remarks, had seemed to assume that it might go on indefinitely. He had never denied his responsibility, or the duty of the Government to go on with it, although he deplored it, as he

believed the Government did.

MR. ARNOLD-FORSTER said he was very glad then to find that they were entirely in agreement. He certainly