JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. Si 
coming to the capital to hear the debates are frequently 
disappointed. They expect to hear great eloquence, they 
simply hear business discussion. Nevertheless some of these 
discussions are really eloquent. 
But there are other aspects of parliamentary life. There 
are the silent members who never speak, who act on the old 
saying, ‘‘ They are the wisest part of parliament who use the 
greatest silence,’’ and who secure the approval of the leaders, 
especially of the party in office, and others who follow the 
rule never to be present at a debate or absent from a division. 
One of the cruel things in the life of a member who 
aspires ‘‘the listening Senate to command’’ is that after 
devoting days and nights to the manufacture of antitheses, 
epigrams and other flowers of rhetoric for his speech in a great 
debate, he patiently sits night after night waiting to ‘‘catch the 
Speaker’s eye,’’ but fails to find the attention of that wander- 
ing orb, while he hears his arguments and illustrations used 
by other men who had probably gone to the same source for 
them, until at last the end comes suddenly, perhaps by some 
arrangement of the leaders, without an opportunity being 
afforded him of relieving his mind of the weighty unspoken 
speech which oppresses it. Then his constituents complain 
that he is a useless silent member because his name is not in 
the newspapers, and they are convinced he is neglecting his 
duty. He then feels much like the reporter who wore a tall 
hat as the representative of Zhe Irish Times at a proclaimed 
meeting, z. ¢., a forbidden political gathering. In the melee a 
policeman smashed his hat with a blow of his baton. ‘‘ What 
did you do that for?’ asked the reporter indignantly, ‘‘ I am 
a member of the press.”’ “Oh, I beg your pardon,’’ said the 
constable, ‘“‘I thought you were a member of parliament.’’ 
He had at least the consolation of the English author who 
said, ‘‘ I wrote books for twenty years and I was nobody, I 
got into parliament and before I had taken my seat I had 
become somebody.’’ 
There is no place in the British House of Commons for 
the reigning sovereign. The only king who was rash enough 
