THE BABES IN THE WOOD.
PARLIAMENTARY CASUALTIES.
Dear Mr. Punch,—I am told that Mr. ASQUITH considers that this has been a most unsatisfactory election. So do I. As you know, the principal function of the House of Commons nowadays is to provide amusing "copy" for the late editions of the evening papers and to give the "sketch"-writers a chance of exercising their pretty wits. As Mr. SPENCER LEIGH HUGHES once remarked in an after-dinner speech to Mr. BALFOUR, "You, Sir, are our raw material."
Now, what I complain of is that on the present occasion the voters have entirely disregarded the needs of the journeymen of the Press, and have ruthlessly deprived them of the greater part of their raw material. Mr. HUGHES himself, I am glad to see, has been spared, but he fortunately had not to undergo the hazards of a contest. I tremble to think what his fate might have been if at the last moment some stodgy statesman had been nominated to oppose him.
Against humour, conscious or unconscious, the voters seem to have solidly set their faces. It was bad enough that Mr. JOE KING—who has probably helped to provide more deserving journalists with a living than any other legislator who ever lived—should have declined the contest. Question-time without Mr. KING and his unerring nose for mare's-nests will be like Alice without The Mad Hatter. It was bad, too, that Sir HEDWORTH MEUX should have decided to interrupt the flow of that eloquence which we were forbidden to call "breezy," and that Major "Boadicea" HUNT, Mr. JOHN BURNS, Mr. TIM HEALY, and Mr. SWIFT MACNEILL should have withdrawn from a scene in which they had provided so much profitable entertainment for the gods in the Press Gallery.
These losses made it all the more incumbent upon the electors to see that the House should retain as much as possible of the remnant of its comic relief. But what do we find? Why, that practically every one of the gentlemen who made the journalist's life worth living in the last Parliament has been cruelly turned down.
For much of this grief the Sinn Feiners are responsible. They have easily accomplished what a few years ago six stalwart British constables could scarcely do and have removed the gigantic Mr. FLAVIN from his emerald bench. With him have gone nearly all his comrades; and the once-powerful Nationalist party, which for nearly forty years has been such an unfailing source of sparkling paragraphs, is reduced to the number immortalised by WORDSWORTH'S little maid.