poems and letters
to the Editor complaining of the rise in prices at the tuck-shop, in order
to discover that Second-Lieutenant Blank, of the Umptieth Battery, R.F.A.,
is stationed in Mesopotamia, and therefrom to deduce the present
distribution of the British Army.

The SPEAKER occupied the Chair during the discussion of the recommendations
of his Conference on Electoral Reform, and heard nothing but good of
himself. It was, indeed, a notable achievement to have induced so
heterogeneous a collection of Members to present a practically unanimous
report on a bundle of problems acutely controversial.

Only on one point did the Conference fail to agree, and that was in regard
to Women's Suffrage. But, after Mr. ASQUITH'S handsome admission that, by
their splendid services in the War, women had worked out their own
electoral salvation, even that topic seemed to have lost most of its
provocative quality; and there is a general desire to forget what the late
PRIME MINISTER described as a detestable campaign and bury the hatchet and
all the other weapons employed in it.

[Illustration: "CO-ORDINATION."

_Foreign Office._ _Admiralty_
LORD ROBERT CECIL. SIR EDWARD CARSON]

Do you recall the distraught lady in _Ruddigore_, who was always charmed
into silence by the mystic word "Basingstoke"? More than once during Mr.
CLAVELL SALTER'S over-elaborated speech I hoped that he would remember his
constituency and take the hint. But he went on and on, occasionally
dropping into a vein of sentiment and working it so hard that I quite
expected to hear him say, "Gentlemen of the Jury" instead of "Mr. Speaker."
When it came to the division, however, he only carried some three-score
stalwarts into the Lobby, and the House decided by a majority of 279 to
support the Government's intention to give immediate effect to the
recommendations of the Conference.

_Thursday, March 29th._--Employers in want of agricultural labourers should
apply to Lord NEWTON, who has a large selection of interned Austrians,
Hungarians and Turks, and undertakes to supply an alien "almost by return
of post." The Turk is specially recommended, as, even if he fails to give
complete satisfaction, the farmer can relieve the monotony of an arduous
existence by "sitting on the Ottoman."

Brave man as he is, the FOOD CONTROLLER is not prepared to prohibit
entirely the manufacture of cakes and confectionery. But he is preparing to
do something hardly less