Later in the evening Mr. Stanton indicated that unless the salaries of Members of Parliament were raised he should have seriously to consider the question of returning to his old trade of a coal-hewer, at which I gathered he could make much more money with an infinitely smaller exertion of lung-power.
The vote for Agriculture and Fisheries was supported by Sir A. Griffith-Boscawen in a speech crammed full of miscellaneous information. We learned that the Minister once smoked a pipe of Irish tobacco, and said "Never Again"; that the slipper-limpet, formerly the terror of the oyster-beds had now by the ingenuity of his Department been transformed into a valuable source of poultry-food, and that the roundabout process by which the Germans in bygone days imported eel-fry from the Severn for their own rivers, and then exported the full-grown fish for the delectation of East-end dinner-tables, had been done away with. In the matter of eels this country is now self-supporting.
"The stock markets showed a good deal of uncertainty this morning and dealers marked prices lower in many cases to protect themselves against possible sales on the Budget proposals, particularly the excess profits duty and the corruption tax."—Provincial Paper.
Mr. Chamberlain omitted to mention the last-named impost, but no doubt that was his artfulness.
LITTLE BITS OF LONDON.
"The Bear-Garden."
The authors of the guide-books have signally failed to discover the really interesting parts of Law-land. I have looked through several of these works and not one of them refers, for example, to the "Bear-Garden," which is the place where the preliminary skirmishes of litigation are carried out. The Bear-Garden is the name given to it by the legal profession, so I am quite in order in using the title. In fact, if you want to get to it, you have to use that title. The proper title would be something like "the place where Masters in Chambers function at half-past one;" but, if you go into the Law Courts and ask one of the attendants where that is, he will say, rather pityingly, "Do you mean the Bear-Garden?" and you will know at once that you have lost caste. Caste is a thing you should be very careful of in these days, so the best thing is to ask for the Bear-Garden straightaway.
It is in the purlieus of the Law Courts and very hard to find. It is up a lot of very dingy back-staircases and down a lot of very dingy passages. The Law Courts are like all our public buildings. The parts where the public is allowed to go are fairly respectable, if not beautiful, but the purlieus and the basements and the upper floors are scenes of unimaginable dinginess and decay. The Law Courts' purlieus are worse than the Houses of Parliament's purlieus, and it seems to me that even more disgraceful things are done in them. It only shows you the danger of Nationalisation.