Then, indeed, the fat was in the fire. Many Scotsmen are generous, but there is no stronger characteristic in the race than the determination not to be "done," not to pay a penny more under compulsion that is ightly due. A Scottish case was recently heard in the Law Courts which involved the sum of 43d. The question' was whether this sum could or could not be legally demanded from a Scottish yorking man, and he and: his organization fought the case through every court up to the Supreme Court of all, which is the legal side of the House of Lords. Scots-mani were proud of that working man. A case which may become be] one of the most famous in our political history is that of Kerr versus Bryde. The Dumbarton Sheriff found that the tenant was right and the landlord wrong. The landlord appealed and the Court of Session upheld the tenant. The landlord appealed to the House of Lords and the highest tribunal of all again upheld the tenant. This was enough. The great rent.strikée at once began. The Government are between two fires. The tenants demand that increases paid between 1920 and now should be returned, as in strict legality they ought to be, and that the landlords should be forbidden to recover in the Courts the rents that are.now being refused by the tenants. The landlords, on the other hand—and they are powerful with this Government—demand that there should be retrospective legislation, making the increase legal right back to 1920, and giving the legal right both to keep the money that has keen paid and to recover the rents that are now being denied. Mr Ramsay Macdonald, the Labour{ leader and head of the Opposition in the House of Commons, declares solemnly that if the Government do what the landlords ask, they vill be deliberately heading for a revolution." That is a fairly grave threat. Yet, be it noted, no one denies that in 1920 Parliament definitely intended to grant to the landlords the power to increase rents. The landlords only failed to fulfil the legal formalities necessary to carry Parliament's intention into effect.
There is clearly here a legal and a moral question, and people are hotly divided according as they lay stress on the importance of legality or the over-riding title of n.0ral obligation. Those who insist on legality say that what matters is not what Parliament is supposed to -have intended but what Parliament enacted: that it is ill xork to make legislation retrospective because one section of the community has chosen to be careless or negligent; and that it would be worse work still to intervene on the side of the careless and negligent when they happen to belong to more comfortable classes society. On other hand, th2 moral.argument is very strong and the airy way in which the Scottish Socialists (and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald) waive it aside leave an unpleasant impression. This is the view which Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, the Socialist leader, has expressed I am a worshipper of moral right; there is not nearly enough moral right embodied in law. But observe the worship done by these new yearners after moral right in statutes. They begis by discarding the moral right of tenants enshrined in the "notice to quit' provision; they discover the majesty of moral right only as a0 escape from the penalty of legal de linquency; their devotion to it comes on a case when law empties the pockets of interests kindred to their own and this moral right fills them.
Tam suspicions of this.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.