7
The old Houses of Parliament had no such pleasant lounge as the Terrace, which extends the whole length of the river front. On summer nights Members who desired a blow of fresh air promenaded old Westminster Bridge. “It was a beautiful, rosy, dead calm morning when we broke up a little before five to-day,” wrote Francis Jeffrey, M.P. and editor of the Edinburgh Review, to a friend on April 20, 1831, in reference to a late and stormy sitting over the first Reform Bill, “and I took three pensive turns along the solitude of Westminster Bridge, admiring the sharp clearness of St. Paul’s, and all the city spires soaring up in a cloudless sky, the orange-red light that was beginning to play on the trees of the Abbey and the old windows of the Speaker’s house, and the flat green mist of the river floating upon a few lazy hulks on the tide and moving low under the arches. It was a curious contrast with the long previous imprisonment in the stifling, roaring House, amid dying candles, and every sort of exhalation.” If Jeffrey could return from the Shades and see the Terrace, especially on a fine afternoon in June or July, when “five o’clock tea” is being served, how amazed he would be, and how he would curse his fate that he should have been born a century or so too soon! Perhaps? For there are legislators who think that “Tea on the Terrace” is a function lowering to the dignity of Parliament. A part of the Terrace is reserved for their sole use by a notice, “For Members Only,” where they may ruminate in gloomy aloofness undisturbed by the smiles of beauty and the rustle of her skirts.
As the new Member explores the corridors and rooms, he will see the walls hung with portraits of all the Prime Ministers, all the Speakers, and a long line of Chancellors of the Exchequer, besides those of other distinguished politicians who never attained to office. Apart from their innate interest as counterfeit presentments of great statesmen, in mezzotints or line engravings, these pictures should stimulate the ambition of the new Member to make a name for himself. There is one way in which the new Member may employ his leisure at Westminster with profit to the tax-payer. That is to follow the excellent example set by Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist, who sat in Parliament for a number of years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Writing in his autobiography, A Few Footprints, he says:
I would write the words “Waste not, want not” over the doors of parliament houses, palaces, cottages, workshops and kitchens; and if the spirit and meaning of the motto were put in practice the world would spin through space with a double joy. While a Member of Parliament I always, when opportunity offered, lowered the gas within reach that was burning to waste. I did so for a double reason—to prevent waste and to preserve the purity of the air of the House; but I never saw or heard of any other Member or servant of the House doing a similar thing.
“True political economy,” Edwards adds, “is in reality true moral economy. I hate waste anywhere and everywhere.”