ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.
Tuesday, February 29th.—Mr. Lloyd George announced to-day that the Members of the Cabinet had decided to take one-fourth of their salaries in Exchequer Bonds. Murmurs of applause followed, and before they had died away Mr. Hogge launched his great joke. Leading up to it with the remark that Exchequer Bonds can be sold the next day, he asked, "Would it not be a good idea to call them the Laughing Stock?" Mr. Hogge is not one of the chartered jesters of the House so his jeu d'ésprit just caused "a laugh," as the reporters say, and nothing more.
On the Third Beading of the Consolidated Fund Bill Sir John Simon renewed his attack upon the Military Service Bill. The tribunals, he declared, were disregarding the appeal of the widow's only son; the Yellow Form, of which the late Home Secretary takes the same jaundiced view as he did of the Yellow Press, was being sent out indiscriminately to all whom it did not concern: the War Office had issued a misleading poster; and everywhere men were being "bluffed" into the Army. He himself would have been inundated with correspondence if he had not had the happy inspiration of diverting the flood into Mr. Tennant's letter-box. Passionately he called upon the Government not to imitate Germany's brutality.
Mr. Long, suave as usual, deprecated Sir John Simon's ferocity, reminded him that all cases of hardship could be considered by the Appeal Tribunals, and promised to investigate the cases that had been mentioned. "May I send in my list too?" asked Mr. Watt. But Mr. Long, unwilling to share the fate of Mr. Tennant, suggested that the Secretary for Scotland would form a more appropriate dumping-ground for Mr. Watt's dossier.
After Mr. Snowden, Sir Thomas Whittaker and Mr. Lough had reinforced Sir John Simon's case with added instances the Government found an unexpected champion in Mr. Healy. He was amazed to hear the late Home Secretary—"one of the Ministers who made the War"—gloating over the inefficiency of the War Office at a moment when round Verdun was raging a battle in which the fate of Paris, and perhaps of London, was involved. Why had he not imitated the monumental silence of Mr. Burns? Instead, he, the suppressor of obscure Irish newspapers, had done more to injure recruiting than any Connemara editor.
I never expected to live to hear the Bank of England described in the House of Commons as a useless institution. In Mr. Healy's opinion, "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," like the other who lived in a shoe, has too many children, and her attempt to get 190 of them exempted from military service moved him in a moment of "vituperative irrelevance," as Mr. Pringle subsequently described it, to say the rudest things about her financial capacity.
Wednesday, March 1st.—Sir Owen Phillips, once Liberal Member for Pembroke, returned to the House to-day as Unionist Member for Chester. To signalise the capture of so gigantic a prize—he is 6ft. 6in. in his stockinged feet—Lord Edmund Talbot and Sir G. Younger, Unionist Whips, conducted him to the Table; and as they are both of moderate height the procession gave the effect of a Mauretania going to her moorings in charge of a couple of tugs.
When Dr. Macnamara moved a Supplementary Estimate of £10 for the Navy, I was reminded of Praed's lines "On seeing the Speaker asleep in his chair":—
"Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense Of the House on a saving of thirteen pence."
But there were differences. The £10 was not an ordinary "ten-pun' note" but was a "token" representing something like four and a half millions received by the Fleet for services rendered to Foreign Powers and others; and Mr. Whitley, who was in the Chair, too so far from being asleep, was intensely wide-awake. Members who sought to discuss Naval policy generally were promptly pulled up, and the Secretary of the Admiralty, when in his third or fourth attempt to explain the Vote he remarked hypothetically, "Suppose we were to sell a battleship——" was himself called to order, Mr. Whitley evidently regarding such a reduction of the Fleet as unpatriotic even in imagination.
A vote for £37,000 to extend the British Consulate buildings at Cairo united both sides of the House in criticism. Mr. Ashley thought what was good enough for Lord Cromer should be good enough for his successor. Mr. Hogge, by a somewhat obscure process of reasoning, now understood why the Germans were so anxious to get to Egypt. In vain Mr. Lewis Harcourt, usually so persuasive, explained that they were now buying for £3 10s. a metre land for which the owner wanted £12 a metre not long ago. Sir F. Banbury, shaking his pince-nez at the Treasury Bench, retorted that he might ask £5 for this pair of glasses, for which he had paid half-a-crown (more war economy), but he would not expect to get it.
A vote for £50,000, to complete the purchase of the estate of Colonel Hall-Walker, who has presented his racing stud to the Government, evoked some opposition and much facetiousness. Mr. Acland, who proposed it, did not help his case by remarking that personally he regarded racing as a low form of sport. The fact that some of the horses have been leased by the War Department to Lord Lonsdale for racing purposes "on sharing terms" caused Mr. McNeill to inquire whether Mr. Tennant would act as the Ministerial tipster; and Mr. Hogge, who displayed a knowledge of racing which will, I fear, shock the unco' guid of East Edinburgh, thought it ridiculous that Ministers should preach economy in the City and start a racing stud at Westminster.
