I am mistaken. I am reminded it was the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) who threw out that suggestion. I do not think he is right, for, as I have said, in our experience we have found that the companies have been very reasonable in meeting the claims upon them. After all, it is very much the same with fire insurance. If one has a fire in one's house, the insurance company almost tumbles over itself to pay up, because it looks upon every claim paid as a good advertisement and a source of increased premiums for the future. There was another point mentioned by the hon. Member for Preston. He said that to assess the value of a man's life at £300 is an extremely cynical proceeding. Suppose you assess the life at £1,000. To my mind that would be just as cynical. It is not the actual figure you place upon the life as valuation that is cynical. What is cynical is to attempt to reduce human life to a money valuation. The point of the matter is that one has to fix some nominal conventional figure in order to express the relative loss to a man's family between loss of limb and loss of life. Therefore, I do not think it is right to speak of cynicism in this matter, when it is merely a conventional figure which has to be fixed in any ease.

Those, however, are minor points. The real point on which I disagree with hon. Members opposite is that they keep suggesting that the State should interfere in this matter, or that the burden should be put upon the industry rather than upon the individual employer. If they consider the matter carefully, I think they will agree with me that you cannot put a burden on an industry. It is the individuals in that industry who have to put their hands in their pockets and withdraw the money to meet that burden. An industry is in just the same position as the State. It is not a thing that can bear a burden; it is not a thing that can pay money. It is individuals always who have to pay money in these cases. I hold very strongly, as an individualist and as an employer of labour, that the whole of this burden should be taken up by us as individuals; that, if we, employ a number of men, it is our very first duty to see that those men are insured against privation due to injury received while they are working for us. If you say that an industry as a whole must insure its own men, en bloc, against death from accidents, or against minor accidents, you at once introduce the extremely vicious principle that the man who is endeavouring, either by working shorter hours or by instructing his foremen and managers not to press too hard for output, or by working day work in preference to piece work—the man who in these ways makes the risk of injury and accident in his works very much less —is, under a system of insurance by industry, going to pay for the man who is utterly regardless of his workers.