be
present. The Minister lets himself into the House by a private door--of
which Ministers alone have the key--at the back of the Chair. For an
hour and a half, or perhaps longer, the storm of questions rages, and
then the Minister, if he is in charge of the Bill under discussion,
settles himself on the Treasury Bench to spend the remainder of the day
in a hand-to-hand encounter with the banded forces of the Opposition,
which will tax to their utmost his brain, nerve, and physical endurance.
If, however, he is not directly concerned with the business, he goes out
perhaps for a breath of air and a cup of tea on the Terrace, and then
buries himself in his private room--generally a miserable little
dog-hole in the basement of the House--where he finds a pile of
office-boxes, containing papers which must be read, minuted, and
returned to the office with all convenient dispatch. From these labours
he is suddenly summoned by the shrill ting-ting of the division-bell and
the raucous bellow of the policeman to take part in a division. He
rushes upstairs two steps at a time, and squeezes himself into the
House through the almost closed doors. "What are we?" he shouts to the
Whip. "Ayes" or "Noes" is the hurried answer; and he stalks through the
lobby to discharge this intelligent function, dives down to his room
again, only, if the House is in Committee, to be dragged up again ten
minutes afterwards for another repetition of the same farce, and so on
indefinitely.

It may be asked why a Minister should undergo all this worry of running
up and down and in and out, laying down his work and taking it up again,
dropping threads, and losing touch, and wasting time, all to give a
purely party vote, settled for him by his colleague in charge of the
Bill, on a subject with which he is personally unfamiliar. If the
Government is in peril, of course every vote is wanted; but, with a
normal majority, Ministers' votes might surely be "taken as read," and
assumed to be given to the side to which they belong. But the traditions
of Government require Ministers to vote. It is a point of honour for
each man to be in as many divisions as possible. A record is kept of all
the divisions of the session and of the week, and a list is sent round
every Monday morning showing in how many each Minister has voted.

The Whips, who must live and move and have their being in the House,
naturally head the list, and their colleagues follow in a rather
uncert