BRITISH POLITICS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9555, 30 July 1909, Page 5

BRITISH POLITICS.

SOUTH AFRICAN UNION BILL. READ A SECOND TIME IN THE LORDS. ijnitod Press Association—By Electric Telegraph Copyright. Received July 29, 8.30 a.m. LONDON, July 28. The South African Union Bill has been unanimously read a second time in the House of Lords. The speakers paid splendid tributes to all concerned in bringing about the union. Lord Crewe, Secretary for the Colonie3, eulogised Mr Chamberlain's aid in the initial stages of the movement. Colonel Seely, Undc-Secretury, in explaining the Bill in the Commons, expressed the Imperial Government's gratitude and wonder at the unanimity of the colonies concerned. THE BRITISH BUDGET. THE LONDON MEETING OF PROTEST. FREE TRADE FINANCE, Received July 29, 8 25 a.m. LONDON, July 28. Mr Balfour in the course of his speech at the anti-Budget meeting, declared that those who may have doubted the necessity for fiscal reform before the Budget was brought down, could surely doubt it no longer. Those who saw what in the hands of the present Government free trade finance really meant, must have lost those illusions which had a real basis of sound finance behind them in the old days of Peel and Gladstone, but which had lost all their justification, and were rapidly losing all their glamour, and would soon be rejected by the commonsense of the community as a whole.

SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA CONDEMNED.

Received July 29, 8.45 a.m. LONDON, July 28. Addressing an overflow meeting, Mr Balfour declared that Mr LloydGeorge's Budget embodied the beginning of a Socialist propaganda aiming to destroy private property, not by a sanguinary revolution, but by the peaceful, slightly more prolonged, but not less efficacious method of unjust and undue taxation. Mr Balfour's remarks were received with loud cheers.