men lead,
Of which I know the hopes and fears
Better than those of shadier spheres;
And, if at first you don't succeed,
If you should hear the critics croak,
"As to your heroine's choice, you err,"
Just hand her to the other bloke--
That's what they did with MARIE LOeHR.

So shall creative art suggest
A world where people may revise
Their silly past, and realise
Those second thoughts which are the best;
Where, having seen the larger light,
A perfect liberty to hedge
And swap the wrong man for the right
Is "Every Woman's Privilege."

O. S.

* * * * *

YET ONE MORE PLAN FOR IRELAND.

Feeling rather lonely because almost everybody had entered for the
great Irish Problem Competition in the morning and evening press
except myself, I sat down and wrote the following solution, which
I posted immediately to the Editors of _The Times_ and of _The
Westminster Gazette_:--

"SIR"--I began indignantly, for I noticed all the best competitors
begin like that. In these Bolshevistic days I should have preferred of
course to have started off with "Comrade" or "Brother," or even, since
I was writing from the heart of the country, have opened with
"Eh bor," as people do in dialect novels, but, fearing I might be
disqualified, I began, as I say, "Sir," and went on, much as the other
statesmen did:--

"In all the lengthy annals of this Government, vacillation between
weakness and tyranny has never proved so disastrous as it is proving
in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs
is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a
gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. Out of all this
welter and confusion two salient facts are seen to emerge:--

"(1) No two Englishmen are agreed upon a settlement that will at the
same time satisfy the just aspirations of Ireland and preserve the
integrity of the British Empire.

"(2) No two Irishmen are either.

"At the same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans
for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When
will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding
off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to
overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the
moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side,
such as that of the annexation of Englan