346 AN AGRICULTURAL PARTY 



Party. But it is not merely the number of possible votes that 

 have to be looked at so much as the fact that a group of members 

 existed to watch over and further agricultural interests ; for 

 your Committee are convinced that the mere knowledge of the 

 existence of such a party would prevent agriculture being played 

 with or neglected as has been the case in the past. 



5. Another statement which raised some comment was that 

 two party agricultural groups already existed in the House of 

 Commons, but that, in the opinion of the Organisation Committee, 

 such party groups were useless. Our opponents have used the 

 existence of these groups in an endeavour to show that an Agri- 

 cultural Party is " unnecessary." In this connection we quote 

 the remarks of two well-known Unionist members of Parliament. 



In the Southern Daily News of the 21st December, 1907. Lord 

 Edmund Talbot, M.P., is reported as having said: 



" . . . There was at this moment in the House an 

 Agricultural Committee to which he had the honour to 

 belong, and which met to consider every agricultural question 

 which was brought forward in the House, and he believed 

 it would be wisest to leave this question of the Agricultural 

 Party in the hands of that Committee." 



But in the Hampshire Chronicle of 7th December, 1907, and 

 in other local papers of that date, Mr. A. H. Lee, M.P., is reported 

 to have said : 



" He had been a member for several years, representing 

 what was largely an agricultural constituency, but he had 

 never been invited to the meeting of any such Committee, 

 and he did not know until he read this report of the Central 

 Chamber that there was supposed to be an Agricultural 

 Committee of members of the House of Commons it had 

 never been brought to his notice, he had never been invited 

 to it." 



In the opinion of your Committee, if these groups ever did 

 anything to justify their existence their use has long since entirely 

 vanished. 



(3. Many critics have said that the agriculturists have not 

 made out sufficient need for an Agricultural Party, and that we 

 should remain satisfied with the present representation of agri- 

 cultural constituencies. Your Committee, therefore, think it 

 worth while to state a few recent facts connected with agricul- 

 ture in Parliament which have come before them. 



7. In the last Parliament there were about 110 M.P.'s who were 

 members of the Central Chamber ; in the present Parliament 

 there are about 80. Every year these members have been asked 

 to ballot for private members' Bills at the beginning of each 

 session. On an average barely twenty have replied at all, and 

 of those only three or four have promised their ballot. Recently 

 twelve members were asked to put their names on the back of a 



