in it. He was appointed secretary of the Labour party in 1900 and held the position for n years; and editor of the " Socialist Library " in 1905. He naturally turned to public life, and served on the London County Council from 1901 to 1904.
In 1906 he was elected to Parliament as Labour member for Leicester, and held the seat for a dozen years. It was as chairman of the Independent Labour party the section led by Mr. Keir Hardie that he entered the House of Commons; and he ex- plained at the congress of the party in April 1907 that its object was to mould society into the socialist State. He adapted him- self early to parliamentary conditions. One of the points which he constantly pressed, with eventual success, was that the terms of Government employment should be as good as those offered by the best private firms. In the controversy with the House of Lords he openly proclaimed himself a Single-Chamber man. On the National Insurance bill in 1911 he pointed out that a funda- mental change of opinion had taken place, both parties now accepting the principle that social welfare was the care of the State. In that year he became the chairman of the Labour party in Parliament. He brought the whole weight of his party to bear in favour, first of the Parliament bill, and afterwards of the Home Rule bill. But he was suspicious of Sir Edward Grey's foreign policy, which he thought too slavish in its follow- ing of Lord Lansdowne; and he opposed the naval increases of the years before the World War, as the socialists in Berlin had opposed the German increases which provoked British rejoinders.
His devotion, indeed, to the ideal of international socialism caused him, at the outbreak of the World War, to lose touch not only with British public feeling in general, but even with the sentiment of the Labour party which he led. In response to Sir Edward Grey's statement in the House of Commons on Aug. 3 1914, he contended that no proof had been given that the country was in danger; that the conflict could not be con- fined to the neutrality of Belgium; that the action of Russia was suspicious; that France could not be annihilated; and that, in consequence, Great Britain should remain neutral. He found, however, that the bulk of the Labour party were convinced by the words of Sir Edward Grey and by the action of Germany; and he resigned the leadership of his party, being succeeded by Mr. Arthur Henderson. He remained a pacifist throughout the war, and used his influence in this direction in the labour and socialist movement, but he seldom spoke in Parliament, though he associated himself with the occasional anti-war demonstra- tions of Mr. Snowden and Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, and claimed the right of public meeting and free speech for pacifists. He endeavoured unsuccessfully to prevent the Labour Conference in Jan. 1916, at the time of the first Military Service bill, from pledging themselves to support the Government in the prosecu- tion of the war; but he declared at the same time, to the general surprise, that he and his friends were the most bitterly anti- German section of the people. He was active in the summer of 1917 in promoting the participation of representatives of the English Labour and Socialist parties in an International Social- ist Conference at Stockholm, to which German representatives were coming, and he went to Paris with Mr. Arthur Henderson on a fruitless mission to secure the cooperation of French and Belgian socialists. He himself did not get to Stockholm, as the Sailors' and Firemen's Union, whose distrust of Germany was based on practical knowledge of her crimes at sea, refused to permit him to sail. His record as a pacifist cost him his seat at Leicester at the general election of Dec. 1918; he received only 6,347 votes to the 20,570 polled for his opponent, Mr. J. F. Green, a leading member of the National Democratic party.
Mr. Macdonald published several works on socialism and labour, besides a couple of books on India, which he visited in 1913 as a member of the Public Services Commission. He also wrote a memoir of his wife, Margaret Ethel, daughter of the eminent chemist, Dr. J. H. Gladstone, a woman of much character and ability, who died in 1911, leaving two sons and three daughters.
MACDONALD, SIR JOHN HAY ATHOLE (1836-1919), British lawyer and judge, was born at Edinburgh Dec. 27 1836. He was educated at Edinburgh and at Basel University, was called to the Scottish bar in 1859, and rapidly made his name as an advocate. From 1874 to 1876 he was sheriff for the counties of Ross, Cromarty and Sutherland, and from 1876 to 1880 solicitor- general for Scotland. In 1880 he became a Q.C. and sheriff of Perth, and from 1882 to 1885 was dean of the Faculty of Advocates. In 1885 he successfully contested Edinburgh and St. Andrew's universities in the Conservative interest, and was appointed lord-advocate by Lord Salisbury's Government, re- suming this office when the Conservatives returned to power in 1886. In 1888 he became lord justice clerk of Scotland and president of the second division of the Court of Session, with the courtesy title of Lord Kingsburgh, retiring in 1915. He was made K.C.B. in 1900 and G.C.B. in 1916. He died at Edinburgh May 9 1919. Macdonald was all his life a strong supporter of the volunteer movement, for which he did much valuable work. He published various books on the subject, the most important being Fifty Years of It (1909).
MACDONELL, SIR JOHN (1846-1921), British jurist, was born at Brechin, Forfarshire, Aug. n 1846, and was educated at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1873 and for some years was counsel to the Board of Trade and the London Chamber of Commerce. In 1889 he was made a Master of the Supreme Court and in 1912 was appointed King's Remembrancer. His knowledge of the science of law, both ancient and modern, was wide and exhaustive. He was Quain professor of comparative law in the univer- sity of London (1901), president of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (1912-3), a member of several royal commissions and editor for many years of the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law. In 1913 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy and in 1914 was created K.C.B. Besides edit- ing the State Trials (1887), The Civil Judicial Statistics (from 1894), the Criminal Judicial Statistics (from 1900) and Smith's Mercantile Law, he published works on the subject of capture at sea and the law of master and servant, and was the author of many papers on questions of international law. He was also for 40 years an influential leader-writer for The Times. He died in London March 17 1921.
MACH, ERNST (1838-1916), Austrian physicist and psychologist {see 17.232), died in 1916.
MACHINE-GUN (see 17.237). Prior to 1910 the standard machine-guns of all nations were comparatively heavy and unwieldy. The principal types in use were the Maxim and the Hotchkiss, each of which weighed about 75 lb.; and, as they were mounted on tripods of about the same weight, the combined weight of the gun and tripod was approximately 150 pounds. The bulky nature of these machine-guns was a serious handicap to their usefulness, and the efforts of the inventors and designers reflected a universal desire for a lighter automatic weapon.
The Benbt-Mercie. The desire for a lighter gun was met in France by the production of a portable automatic weapon designed by the Hotchkiss Company. This gun, which is known in Europe as the Portable Hotchkiss, and in America as the Benet-Merci<5, weighs less than 30 lb. complete. It has no tripod but is supported at the muzzle by a pair of light folding legs and at the breech by an adjustable rest which telescopes into the butt-stock. By means of these attachments the rifle is rested at the proper height for firing from the prone position. The gun resembles the heavy Hotchkiss in mechanism, and, like it, is air-cooled and fed by metallic feed strips or charger bands holding 30 shots each. Following the developments of the World War, this weapon would be classed, not as a machine-gun, but as a machine-rifle, a type which has its own sphere of usefulness, but which cannot fulfil the r&le of the machine-gun in modern tactics.
However, at the time when this weapon was first introduced, the art of machine-gun design and manufacture had not advanced to the point where the production of a diversity of different types forced a tactical division of automatic weapons according to weight and fire capacity. Consequently, the gun entered tests as the competitor of heavy-type machine-guns. After extensive trials it was adopted by the United States in 1909 as the service machine-gun, succeeding the Maxim, which had been adopted in 1904. The several hundred Maxims on hand were, however, continued in service. After its adoption by the United States the Portable Hotchkiss was tried in Great Britain, and a number were purchased for cavalry use. The British also used this gun with great success for the arming of tanks during the World War.
