On the Geographical Distribution of Approval

The Committee of Territorial Enquiry has approved the appropriation for my survey of occupational lung disease, subject to the exclusion of the southern quarries and the foundries of the inner bay. Every member of the committee holds an estate in the eastern interior. Every seat descends under a marriage settlement which specifies, with considerable precision, the succession of persons entitled to misunderstand my estimates. When I observed that their amendments confined a national enquiry to their own neighbourhood, Lord Marchbank assured me that the House of Lords represented the kingdom’s landed interest. I asked whether land elsewhere in Calder had lately ceased to exist, and requested that his answer be entered in the minutes.

The composition of the chamber explains the amendment more satisfactorily than any objection advanced against my figures. These are the surviving peerages of Harnwood, whose House was added to Calder’s parliament at the union. The Grendon dynasty married into the continuing Caldric line; the Crown and the kingdom retained Calder’s name. Victory over Sudermark supplied the occasion for arrangements whose consequences now extend to the purchase of sputum jars. Tarnis stands at the meeting of the old borders, but a committee may sit in the capital without acquiring a national field of vision.

I have therefore returned the amended schedule. Eastern mining districts alone cannot answer the question I proposed, since their ores, ventilation practices and workforces differ from those elsewhere. I offered the committee a cheaper preliminary enquiry, explicitly confined to those districts, and required the word national to be struck from its title. Lord Marchbank called this an excessive concern for nomenclature. His own settlement distinguishes seven classes of possible heir; I had expected him to appreciate the practical importance of describing precisely what an instrument includes.