Monday, May 15th.—The continued absence of Mr. Asquith is causing much speculation in the Lobbies. Will the new Irish Privy Councillor come back from Dublin, like Lord Beaconsfield from Berlin, bringing peace with honour in his pack? Or will he, as so many British statesmen have done before, find the inherited hostility of Irishmen to one another an insuperable obstacle? An hon. and learned Nationalist was not encouraging. "When," he was asked, "were the seeds of this trouble sown?" "When Sthrongbow came to Ireland," was the answer. "And when do you think it will be over?" persisted the questioner. "When the world's at an end."

Last Session Mr. King was easily the champion of Question-time. But this year, thanks to the Sinn Feiners, Mr. Ginnell is coming up with a rush. Mr. King has however one consolation. Mr. Ginnell rarely extracts much information from Ministers; often it is nothing more than "There is no foundation for the allegation contained in the question." Whereas his rival, whose queries cover a much wider field, frequently elicits important facts. Like the rest of the world he has been puzzled by the coloured tabs now so commonly seen on officers' tunics. What did they mean? Mr. Tennant for once was communicative. "I think," he said, "green stands for intelligence." Mr. King is now more regretful than ever that he is over military age; the green badge would just suit his mental complexion.

Ever since the Military Service Bill came under discussion the public galleries have been full of men in khaki. As it seems difficult to believe that their presence is due to the intrinsic fascination of debates, which have been for the most part insufferably dull, another theory has been started. Should the opponents of the Bill become too obstructive and threaten its passage, will these doughty warriors leap over the barriers, drop down on to the floor of the House (in the manner already made historic this Session) and execute a new "Pride's Purge"?

A rather unkind trick was played upon the Simonites by Mr. Barnes. He has a good deal of influence with the Government nowadays, and when he delivered an eloquent defence of conscientious objectors, describing them as the men who kept the spiritual fires burning, there were high hopes that he was going to secure an enlargement of the loopholes in the Bill. But as he went on to explain that his remarks only applied to genuine cases and had nothing to do with the shoal of frauds who had discovered a conscience within the last month or two, the enthusiasm below the Gangway fell so suddenly that you could almost hear it drop.

Tuesday, May 16th.—To invite the House of Lords to go in for daylight saving is rather like carrying coals to Newcastle. The Peers habitually set an excellent example in this respect. No matter what the importance of the subject under consideration they almost invariably manage to conclude its discussion before the dinner-hour.

Some of Lord Lansdowne's friends are beginning to fear that association with wicked Radicals like Lord Crewe is having a deteriorating effect upon his political faith. They were shocked to hear him allude almost disparagingly to the innate conservatism of the national temperament, which put Greenwich mean time on the same level as the Thirty-nine Articles. He even spoke disrespectfully of the sun, to the marked disapproval of that other shining light, Lord Salisbury.

In the Commons the Simonites made a determined effort to get the minimum age raised from 18 to 19. But Mr. Long was obdurate, though he promised that, subject to exceptional military necessity, no conscript should be sent abroad till he was 19. Eventually the Bill passed its Third Reading by 250 to 35.

A characteristically bitter speech from Mr. Snowden evoked an appropriate retort from Sir Arthur Markham. Observing that the Hon. Member had been against the War throughout, he charged him with "making vitriolic speeches and dropping acid drops in every direction." Mr. Snowden (remembering the case of Mr. John Burns) may think himself lucky if he is not known as "The Acid Drop" for the rest of his political career.

Wednesday, May 17th.—The Summer Time Bill passed into law to-day, in spite of the gloomy prognostications of Lord Balfour of Burleigh. He foresaw the time when the Committee of Privileges might be called upon to pronounce a new judgment of Solomon on the question whether a peerage should go to a boy born at 2.50 A.M. on October 1st or to his twin-brother, born actually half-an-hour later, but according to statutory time half-an-hour before.

While the Lords were illuminating the daylight the Commons were engaged in ventilating the air. The present administration of the Flying Services was severely criticised by Mr. Joynson-Hicks, who wanted an Air Minister—not Lord Curzon, but "someone with a reputation to lose." Mr. Tennant promptly announced that the ex-Viceroy of India would be President of the new Air Board.

Colonel Churchill launched into a lengthy history of the Air Services, from which we gathered that but for the exertions of a former First Lord, who used to divert money voted for hospitals and coastguard stations to the building of aeroplanes, the country would have had no aerial defences when the War broke out. He joined in the demand for an Air Ministry. In fact, he had himself proposed it to the Prime Minister a year ago. It is possible that he even indicated a suitable person to fill the post.

Before the War it was sometimes said of Lord Hugh Cecil that his Parliamentary speeches were too much up in the clouds. Since he has taken to exploring those regions as a member of the Royal Flying Corps, that criticism no longer applies. In a severely practical speech he flatly contradicted the accusations that had been made against our Air Service, and boldly claimed that it was the most efficient in the world.

After that, Mr. Bonar Law had a comparatively easy task in persuading the House to give the new Air Board a fair trial. In reference to the fears that had been expressed as to the powers to be accorded to its President he drily remarked that from his experience in the Cabinet he did not think Lord Curzon would be found lacking in personality.

All through the afternoon Mr. Pemberton-Billing had been popping up with questions, interjections and points of order. Now he rose to continue the debate, but Members had apparently had enough of him for one day. After a few minutes he suffered the most inglorious fate that can befall a Parliamentary crusader. One by one his audience melted away, until there was not enough left to make a House. "P. B." was counted out.

Thursday, May 18th.—Lord Lansdowne at least is not afraid of the new Order in Council prohibiting reference to Cabinet proceedings. In answer to complaints of the delay in introducing Compulsory Service he told the old story of the widow who married a widower, and complained to a friend that "his children are always fighting with my children and frightening our children." That, he implied, was what went on in the Coalition.

The Commons enjoyed a pretty little duel between two old friends. Ex-Professor Hewins delivered a long lecture on elementary economics, leading up to the conclusion that we could not beat the Germans without an immediate dose of Tariff Reform. The House, expecting an equally solemn defence of Free Trade from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was at once surprised and delighted when Mr. Chamberlain rose to reply.

Though tied to the Tariff movement "by my heart-strings as well as by my head," he thought it would be imprudent to embark on it at this moment. After the War it would very likely meet with general consent. Mr. Hewins must have felt like Alice with "jam yesterday, and jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day."

THEIR SCRIBES AND PHARISEES.

[It is reported that the citizens of Berlin are agitated about the serious difficulty that has arisen with regard to the removal of dust. A Berlin journal has championed their cause.]

DAYLIGHT SAYING.

A Nursery View.

Last Sunday morning an hour was lost. The children had been discussing the question beforehand.

"Where will it go?" asked one.

"I suppose the fairies will take it," said Joyce.

"Perhaps it will go behind the clock," said another.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'd like to do," said Joyce deliberately. "I'd like to get up in the middle of the night, when the hour is going to be lost, and put on my dressing-gown without waking Nannie, and go out into the garden and see for myself how they lose it. It's sure to be about somewhere."

"You couldn't," said one of the others. "Nannies always sleep so that they wake up at once if you move. You'd never get up without her knowing."

"Well, why do they want to lose it?" asked Joyce, realising that the last argument was unanswerable and so darting off on to a new train of thought altogether.

"Because they'll save a lot of other hours that way. And then, you see, if we get up earlier we shan't have to pay the pennies for gas and electric light, and all those pennies can go to help Daddy win the War."

"Yes, but where will the hour be gone?"

And so we came back to the beginning again.

There, was a long pause.

"Well," concluded Joyce, on a note of finality, "it's a very good plan anyway."

That settled it.

"MR. BIRRELL'S REBELLION REVELATIONS."

"Westminster Gazette" Contents Bill.

But in justice to the late Chief Secretary it should be said that the Sinn Feiners also had a hand in it.

THE QUARTERMASTER.

A Word of Advice to New Officers.

Mormonism in England?

"A Minister's Wives' Meeting will be held at Whitefield's, Tottenham Court Road."

FROM THE FRONT.

"Hurrah!" I said, "I've got a letter from the Front."

"Well done!" said Francesca. "Who's it from?"

"From Walter. It's not a very long one."

"That doesn't matter a bit. The great thing is to have one from the Front, even if it's only to thank you for a pair of socks."

"Mine's better than that," I said. "It runs into nearly two pages."

"Yes," she said, "but it doesn't tell you much, now does it?"

"No, to tell you the truth it doesn't. They're under an honourable obligation, you know, not to reveal things."

"Poor boys! It isn't much a Second-Lieutenant could reveal, is it. There's nothing said in your letter about Sir Douglas Haig having called Walter up to Headquarters——"

"You mustn't say Headquarters; you must say G.H.Q. if you want to impress people."

"I'm not talking to people; I'm talking to you. There's nothing said in your letter, is there, about Walter having been asked by Sir Douglas Haig to draw up a plan for the Big Push?"

"No, there isn't; but Walter would draw up a dozen if he were asked. He's that sort."

"Don't talk about my first cousin once removed in that flippant way."

"I'm not."

"You are, and it's most ungrateful of you."

"Ungrateful?"

"Yes, ungrateful. He's written you a letter that you'll be able to chat about for a fortnight. I can hear you mentioning it to your train-friends, Major Boger and Dr. Apthorpe. You'll bring it in in a careless kind of way. 'I've had a letter,' you'll say, 'from a chap at the Front, a cousin of my wife's, and he tells me they're expecting a move now at any moment.' Then they'll both say, 'Ah,' as if they didn't think much of your chap, and each of them will produce a chap of his own with some highly private information about the Crown Prince having been taken to a lunatic asylum in a motor-car so heavily iron-clad that nobody could see who was inside, but he was recognised by his shrieks; and Dr. Apthorpe will cap it all with some cock-and-bull story about German ships having bombarded one another in the Canal last week. And so you'll get to London."

"Francesca," I said, "you are a holy terror. How do you know all these things? You have never travelled to London with Major Boger and Dr. Apthorpe, and yet you're able to misrepresent them as if you'd heard them speak every day of your life. It's wonderful."

"Clever fellow," said Francesca; "we won't pursue the question of your boastings. They're innocent enough, I dare say. Let me hear what Walter actually does say in his letter."

"Well," I said, "he doesn't actually say very much. The weather is fine, he says, and his particular lot have been having rather a slack time lately. There was a stampede of horses last week, but his Battery was not involved in it, and would I mind sending him a packet or two of chocolate, some strong brown boot-laces and a briar-root pipe, he having broken his last one, and he's never felt fitter in his life, and anybody who wants to know what health is had better come out to France at once. That's about all; but you can read it for yourself." I handed it over to her and she skimmed through it.

"I'll tell you what," she said, "I strongly advise you not to show this letter about."

"I certainly shall show it," I said, "but only to friends."

"Well," she said, "I wouldn't even do that, unless you want to get Walter into trouble."

"What nonsense!" I said. "It's the most discreet and honourable letter I ever received.".

"Yes," she said, "but it's so cheerful. If certain newspapers got hold of it there wouldn't be any peace for Second-Lieutenant Walter Carlyon. He'd be told he was like all other Englishmen—he didn't take a serious view of the War. Then they'd say that he was one of the men who were responsible for the French not understanding us, and for the Russians failing to appreciate our efforts, which, indeed, could hardly be called efforts at all, and for the Italians despising us as we deserved to be despised for tolerating such a Government as we were afflicted with—and lots more of the same sort, all because poor Walter doesn't go about in a state of perpetual gloom, as if he expected the whole of Great Britain to be sunk into the sea the next minute."

"Francesca," I said, "your warmth is excusable, and there's a good deal in what you say, but I shall show Walter's letter all the same."

"Well," she said, "when the storm bursts I shall let him know whom he's got to thank for it."

"I shall write to him," I said, "and warn him to write a really pessimistic letter next time, so that I may show it to influential people and get his name up."

"It'll be no good," she said. "Walter isn't one of that sort. He 's cursed with a profound and unreasoning belief in his country, and, being an Englishman, he'll go to his grave if necessary believing that England is bound to win the War."

"And, by Jove," I said, "I thoroughly agree with him."

"Yes," she said, "and so do I, but it doesn't do to say so to everybody nowadays."

R. C. L.

SPEED THE PLOUGH: A COUNTRY SONG.

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Except by keen politicians the fourth volume of Mr Buckle's Life of Benjamin Disraeli (Murray) may be found a little dull in comparison with its predecessors. That is not the fault of the biographer, who has done his best with a vast mass of somewhat dry material, but could not make this portion of his record so enthralling as that which preceded it or—we may confidently hope—that which will follow it. In 1855 Disraeli had arrived at respectability, but had not yet attained power. The Conservative Party recognised that he was indispensable, but continued to withhold its full confidence, with the result that, although his brain still teemed with the great schemes formed in his hot youth, he had to defer their practical accomplishment and to devote himself to educating his party and its titular leader, Lord Derby, for the day when the swing of the pendulum might give it a majority in the House of Commons. Only one great triumph came to him during these years in the wilderness. Disraeli had never visited India, but, owing perhaps to his Eastern ancestry, he had a truer intuition of Oriental needs than most contemporary statesmen; and it was fortunate that it fell to him in 1858, during one of the brief periods when the Conservatives held office on sufferance, to carry the Bill which transferred the government of India from "John Company" to the Crown. The principles which he then laid down, and which eighteen years later he carried a stage further in the Imperial Titles Act, justify Mr. Buckle in claiming the Coronation Durbar of 1911 as "the logical conclusion of Disraeli's policy." Apart from this one episode the volume is mainly concerned with the reconstruction of the Conservative party—"at about the pace of a Tertiary formation"—with which Disraeli's voluminous correspondence with Lord Derby was mainly concerned. Happily he had other correspondents, and, though too self-conscious to be a perfect letter-writer, he could be playful enough when writing to his wife or to Mrs. Brydges-Williams. In this volume Mr. Buckle has given us a careful portrait of the Politician Disraeli; in his next we look to see a little more of the Man.

It is probable, I think, that you will not have turned many pages of Brenda Walks On (Hutchinson) before being struck by a certain pleasing incongruity between its matter and style. Sir Frederick Wedmore is such an artist in words, so punctilious in the niceties of their employment, that to find him writing a story of modern stage-life, and using for it—with, as it were, a certain delicate deliberation—phrases peculiar to the jargon of the class of which it treats, gives one a series of small shocks. It is like hearing slang from a Dean. As a matter of fact, though, I was wrong in calling Brenda Walks On a story. It is rather a disquisition about stage people, stage art and life, and anything else whatever upon which Sir Frederick wishes to talk at the moment, from the beauties of the North-Eastern coast (the Scarborough part of the book carried me back to the far-off days of Renunciations) to the treasures of Hertford House. Even Brenda's chief suitor is capable of breaking off the avowal of his love to deliver a few well-chosen remarks about theatrical rents and the hazards of management. This suitor, Penfold, is perhaps the nearest approach to an actual character that the book contains. He was a writer of papers upon the drama of whom the author observes, "With a ready pen, indeed, Heaven forbid that he should have been cursed! It was better to have a careful one, faithfully ordered, allowing him to make sensible utterance of some part of the knowledge and thought that were in him." Which, by a happy coincidence, is exactly my verdict author's method in this graceful causerie.

Christina's Son (Wells Gardner) is a disarming book. It overcomes criticism by the direct simplicity of its attack, in which only later do you begin to suspect a concealed art. Miss W. M. Letts tells a tale that (you might say) has nothing in it; nothing certainly at all sensational or strikingly original. But this story of a middle-class North-country woman grips the attention, and holds it, by some quality hard to define. Christina, as wife of a man she can never greatly love, and, later, as mother of a son whom she adores but only half understands, becomes, for all her commonplace environment, a figure that dwells in the memory because of what you feel to be its absolute truth. The atmosphere of the story is so crystal clear that every detail of its chief characters stands out with the distinctness of a landscape after rain. And because, by all the rules, these characters should be so little interesting, and the very provincial society in which the thirty or so years of the book pass is so entirely undistinguished, you are faintly astonished all the way through (at least I was) at not being bored. I see that one critic has praised a previous story by Miss Letts for its humour, should not have picked this out as a characteristic of Christina's Son. Rather has it a certain gravity and sobriety of aim, which in part explains its appeal; if there is humour it is generally below the surface and never insisted upon. There is a moment when its rather restrained style rises suddenly to rare beauty, where the theme is old age; and throughout there is a maturity of judgment in the writing that will make it perhaps less attractive to the young than to those whose outlook has reached the same stage.

If I were to give away the plot of Miss Mary L. Pendered's The Secret Sympathy (Chapman and Hall) I think that you would sniff. It is not likely to cause animated discussion in intellectual circles. We are introduced to a girl who, finding herself reduced from affluence to poverty, takes a garage and runs it with success, and we become acquainted with a chauffeur and a peer, and the former turns out to be—but that is just what I am not going to tell you. If you want a book in which the hero is a very perfect gentleman indeed and the villain really is a villain, then here you are. Miss Pendered's scheme is not too subtle, but what she has set out to do she has done, and done well. Although her characters play their part in the War, she resists the temptation to smother them with V.C.'s and other decorations, and for this abstinence and for Miss Chetwynd, a middle-aged spinster of shrewd sense and humour, I warmly commend her. I confess myself in love with Miss Chetwynd and should dearly like to hear her candid opinion of The Secret Sympathy. But I feel sure that, if she smiled a little at the wonderfulness of it all, her final verdict would be as benevolent as mine.

Mr. Richard Maher's The Shepherd of the North (Macmillan) looks a little like one of those rather elaborate Catholic tracts in form of a novel of which we have so many classic examples. Mgr. Winthrop, the Bishop of Alden, way up in the Adirondacks, was indeed a noble old fellow, somewhat given to long speeches, but with a great heart in the right place, and wise and tolerant withal. He was known and loved by the small farmers and lumber-men as The White Horse Chaplain for a deed of valour done in his youth in the Civil War. And he carried that high quality of courage into his work of defending his people against the machinations of the U. & M. Railroad, which swept down upon them and stuck at nothing, not arson on a Teuton scale or judicial murder, to get the prize it was after—valuable iron ore in the hills through which its track ran. However, it was the Bishop's oar, dexterously thrust in, which finally won the victory. There is a point which puzzles me considerably. The crisis of the story turns on the secret of the Confessional. A young man is accused of murder, and the Bishop, his friend, has heard the confession of the real murderer, so that his lips are sealed. But his fiancée also unwittingly overheard the essential of the confession screamed by the dying man. Mr. Maher seems to think her bound by the same sacred ties as the Bishop, even to the point of allowing her lover to go to the chair because of her silence. But is that sound moral theology? I should doubt it. I ought to add that there's nothing to shock the most sensitive evangelical conscience, and quite a good deal to edify, instruct and entertain.

Overheard at a fashionable restaurant:—

1st Guest. I read in one of the Sunday papers that Benjamin Franklin discovered the Daylight Saving Bill by noticing that the sun shines the moment it rises, and not several hours afterwards, as is popularly supposed.

2nd Guest. How interesting! By the way, Franklin's body has never been found since he discovered the North Pole.

3rd Guest. No, poor fellow, although Stanley went in search of him.

1st Guest (correcting). He found him right enough, but Franklin preferred to stop where he was. Rough on Stanley.