THE CATCH OF THE SEASON.
ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.
Monday, March 26th.—Major PRETYMAN NEWMAN has a bright sense of humour much appreciated by his fellow-countrymen from Ireland. His latest notion is that journals "of a comic and serio-comic nature" should be deprived of their stocks of paper in order that catalogues and circulars should continue to appear. Mr. GEORGE ROBERTS expressed his regret at being unable to discriminate between different classes of publications; but I understand that several Members have offered to satisfy Major NEWMAN's taste for light literature by lending him their old Stores catalogues.
Housewives who have been economising in their meagre supply of sugar in order to have a stock for jam-making have been alarmed by a rumour that they would be charged with food-hoarding and made to disgorge their savings. There is not a word of truth in it, and they may rest assured, on Capt. BATHURST'S authority, that our non-party Government entirely approves this form of Conservatism.
Misled by Mr. BRACE's appearance—I have before now noted his likeness to an amiable cat—Mr. SNOWDEN pressed his advocacy of a certain conscientious objector called PETT to such lengths as to discover that even this kind of cat has claws. "These conscientious objectors," said Mr. BRACE at last, "are not the angels he thinks they are, and it is only with the utmost difficulty that a large number of them will do anything like reasonable work." Thus a PETT illusion has been shattered. Mr. SNOWDEN, however, has plenty more.
Tuesday, March 27th.—If British artisans, as at Barrow-in-Furness, prefer to strike for Germany, it seems hardly reasonable to expect German prisoners to work for England. The nature of the "disciplinary measures" which caused the Germans promptly to return to work on normal conditions was not disclosed, but it seems a pity that they are not tried in the other case.
"We are getting on," as Sir HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN said on a famous occasion. Formerly it was considered the height of Parliamentary impropriety to say in so many words that an Hon. Member was not telling the truth; and all sorts of more or less transparent subterfuges, of which Mr. CHURCHILL's "terminological inexactitude" is the best remembered, were employed to evade this breach of good manners. But the present House is thicker-skinned than its predecessors, and heard without a tremor the following conversation between the MINISTER OF PENSIONS and Mr. HOGGE:—Mr. Barnes: "I never said there was a scale." Mr. Hogge: "Yes, you did." Mr. Barnes: "No, I didn't."