A Voice: Shut up!
Lord Lansdowne (smartly): If any further expressions of private opinion are delivered from the well of the Court, I, for one, shall protest.
Mr. Chamberlain (to the unknown person): Ked!
The Court then proceeded to call further witnesses.
Mr. Henderson, Gentleman-Agriculturalist, deposed that it was the habit of foreigners, principally Frenchmen and Dutchmen, to arrive in his district of Norfolk every summer with great masses of vegetables, principally onions, which they had grown at least three weeks earlier than they could honestly be produced. There was less infamy of this kind in agriculture perhaps than in other trades—but it was there all the same. The witness mentioned melons and giant earlies, and alluded in passing to yellow kidneys, mammoths, Reading prides, and other vegetables, in proof of his contention. But the chief example was Hessian fly.
Cross-examined: Witness could not see what all this had to do with machinery. Perhaps he had mistaken the day.... Anyhow he was a practical man.
(Here followed a short and awkward pause.)
The witness then stood down with an inconclusive frown.
Mr. Lutworthy, of 236, Eton Square, and “The Knoll,” Birmingham, deposed that for the last fifteen years German hardware of all kinds had been flung at his head, and that it was not in human nature to withstand it. To give an example. Iron king-bolts with flange attachments selling in Newcastle at 35s. the imperial gross in 1897, by discount, were rebated on the margin—(here the Duke of Marlborough started violently, recovered himself, gazed wildly at the witness, and then began taking notes)—on the margin, he repeated, at a cover of 10 to 8 according to the higgling of the market. In 1898 the margin had risen to the minimum fifth, in spite of heavy buying from Russia. In 1899⸺
Lord Halsbury: Was not that before the little trouble in South Africa?