and cheers, and cries of 'Beer' and 'Whisky'). Those who wanted to drink whisky, let them, but enlightened people knew that it was far better to drink milk than whuskey' even if they did come from Scotland (laughter).

One wonders what Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the orator who threw an air of geniality over teetotalism,' would have thought of this specimen of parliamentary humour. The trenchant wit which was never absent from his own speeches would hardly be appreciated in the House to-day. Someone had made the astounding discovery that the working man was in danger of losing his beer. Sir Wilfrid replied: 'I get sick of the working man argument. I consider the working man to be the Uriah the Hittite of politics If there is any abomination to be done, any political crime to be committed, the working man is always put in the forefront of the battle; but when the contest has gone on a little while, the poor man is slain in the political affray, and one of the factions marches to victory over his prostrate corpse.' Nor were his sallies confined within the boundaries of the temperance campaign. For instance, he says:

The country is now being amused with discussions as to who is to be the leader of the Liberal Party. I cannot find out much about what the Liberal Party is going to do, but there is plenty of discussion as to who is to lead it. I propose that an advertisement be put in The Times, and I think it should read as follows: Wanted: a leader for the Liberal Party. He must be a respectable young man. The work is very light. No person need apply who is addicted to crotchets or encumbered with any principles.'

Much might be written of the political humour of the parliamentarians of the last two generations. It abounds in the speeches of Disraeli, who entertained the House, on his first appearance, with references to a 'political duel in which recourse was had to the secure arbitrament of blank cartridges'; of Lord Randolph Churchill, who ransacked the whole arsenal of denunciatory phrases' and yet found none fit to express his disapproval of a Government measure; of Bobby' Lowe, who tempered his uncompromising attitude on the whole question of Reform with a wit that delighted both sides of the House. Hear him on the Borough Franchise Extension Bill in 1865:

Sir, I have been weary and sickened with the way in which this question has been dealt with. The way in which the two parties have tossed this question from one to the other reminds me of nothing so much as a young lady and young gentleman playing at battledore and shuttlecock. After tossing the shuttlecock from one to the other a few times, they let it drop and begin to flirt.

Or, again, at the close of his speech on the Representation of the People Bill a year later :

I have said that I am utterly unable to reason with the Chancellor of the Exchequer for want of a common principle to start from; but there is,

happily, one common ground left to us, and that is the Second Book of the Eneid of Virgil. My right honourable friend, like the moth which has singed its wings in the candle, has returned again to the poor old Trojan horse, and I shall, with the permission of the House, give them one more excerpt from the history of that noble beast, first premising that I shall then turn him out to grass for the remainder of the session.

And if one troubles to retreat another fifty years, there is no better exponent of true parliamentary wit and caustic humour than Lord Plunket. There is space here for one quotation only. He is speaking in the Irish Parliament against the Legislative Union of 1800:

By the temerity and boasting of a very young man the Parliament of one country is committed against the other. What is done by the Minister when the disappointment is announced ? . . . He makes a turgid, lofty speech; talks in high-sounding, general terms of increased resources and consolidated strength, a couple of powdered lacquies of epithets waiting upon every substantive. . And after all this absurd jargon, which has been so often exposed, he proceeds to inform the British House that he is satisfied that an enlightened majority must proceed to adopt the measure; and after the great leviathan has concluded his tumblings a young whale puts up his nostrils, and spurts his blubber on this country.

It is true that whales do not 'spurt blubber'; but one can readily condone this small piscatorial error in a man who could write of ' powdered lacquies of epithets'

One would have to listen long and attentively to hear wit of this order at Westminster to-day. It would seem to require the mention of beer or bananas to put Members in really good humour. The wit of the present House is well exemplified in the outcry which arose lately over the 'puffing' of a Minister by one of the official propagandists of his own department. An insignificant and puerile play on the right honourable gentleman's name was sufficient to convulse the House with laughter, in which, no doubt, the right honourable gentleman himself joined. It was on a parallel with the merriment which greeted Mr. Lloyd George's speech, a year or two ago, when he branded Trotsky as an 'aristocrat.' Die-hards probably laughed as loudly as their opponents. It was an astute speech and a glib one, and it achieved its purpose. But reading through the speech to-day, one wonders exactly what it was that shook the House of Commons with paroxysms of laughter. Perhaps the fact that the speech was delivered after dinner may help to account for it. On the other hand, much of the wit and humour of Mr. Lloyd George's bitterest opponents-Die-hards or Live-easies-is drivel without being astute.

It is a remarkable fact that during the war the House seems to have abstained from these exhibitions of wit. At least laughter' and 'loud laughter' are absent from Hansard and the

Press reports of 1914-18.
ludicrous that kept us sane.
order need not fear to show its head in times of national disaster
or distress. It is only when it lacks both inspiration and intelli-
gence that it is better left outside. It may be that the wits and
humorists on both sides of the House recognised this. If so, it is
to be regretted that these ebullitions of 'up-to-date' wit should
be so faithfully and regularly chronicled in print. For they are
as fatuous and inept in Peace as they would have been unseemly
in War.

Why? It was only our sense of the
Humour of a genuine and intelligent

HUGH CHESTERMAN.

THE SPECTATOR'

ROBERT STEPHEN RINTOUL, the founder of the present Spectator, was an exceptionally interesting man about whom one would like to know much more than has ever been published. He was an intellectual magnet attracting to him, out of a desire to share in his energising thought, men who counted in diverse spheres— political reformers, theologians, artists, poets, not to mention those who were interested in the technical side of printing. I have learned to know something of his methods and spirit from old volumes of the Spectator between 1828 (when it was founded) and 1858, when he sold it to Meredith Townsend. He borrowed the name of his paper, of course, from Addison's Spectator, which came to an end in 1712, and one may imagine that he desired to take over something more than the name-something also of the sobriety and good taste and the cultivated simplicity of style with which Addison succeeded in setting up new models and ridding Puritanism of its fanaticism and literary forms of their conceit.

In stating the bare facts of Rintoul's life, however, I cannot go beyond the Dictionary of National Biography. He served his apprenticeship in Edinburgh as a printer and in 1809 went to Dundee, where he became printer to the Dundee Advertiser, a paper of strong Liberal opinions. Somehow his personality forced itself from the printing house into the writing department, and within two years he had become editor. His courage and selfconfidence in advocating political and municipal reform brought him into association with the famous Dr. Thomas Chalmers.

The municipal reform which Rintoul advocated must not be confused with anything in the nature of what to-day we call 'social reform.' He had no leanings towards Socialism or bureaucratic Radicalism; he was a strong individualist; he wanted, as became one who collaborated with Chalmers, not to help the working man by giving him more money without inquiry, but by bracing him to save himself from dependence and demoralisation. The reforms in the Poor Law which followed the memorable inquiry of 1834 were derived directly from the experiences and practical demonstrations of Chalmers, and in the formation of Chalmers's doctrine Rintoul played his part.

The journals of those days were rather scrappy productions, and it was the merit of Rintoul that he thought considerably ahead of his times and conceived that a newspaper should take for its province everything that happened, everything that made up life. Nothing that was important enough to happen at all was too unimportant to be recorded, though his devouring curiosity was of course curbed by lack of space in his papers. His first aim, as was said of him in an obituary notice published in the Spectator of May 1, 1858, was to make his paper as completely a record of contemporary history as possible. In order that nothing of importance should be omitted, he sought to economise space; in order that none of the contents should be overlooked by the readers, he sought to perfect their distribution and arrangement.

After editing the Dundee Advertiser from 1811 to 1825, he came to London, on the advice of Douglas Kinnaird, the friend of Byron. In 1826 he joined the staff of the Atlas, but he soon fell out with the proprietors, apparently because he could not reconcile his political opinions with theirs. It may have been because Rintoul's political opinions were too prickly for general consumption that some of his friends, when they came to his financial rescue and set him up as the editor of a new weekly paper, made it a condition that this paper should be non-political. This new paper, of which the first number was published on July 5, 1828, at the price of 9d., was the present Spectator.

The condition that the Spectator should be non-political was not, and perhaps could not be, maintained very long. Rintoul and the Spectator soon became prominent in the fight for political eform. Lord Grey's Reform Bill was his great political objective, and it was he who invented the famous motto 'The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill!' Another of his enthusiasms was the advocacy of emigration and colonisation, always with a view to improving the conditions and self-dependence of manual workers. Bentham and Mill eagerly supported him, and his staff of writers was one of the most accomplished in the country. He inspired and revised everything that was written, but he did not write much himself. He had a great admiration for Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who to-day is not sufficiently remembered as the man who, after saving his own character, saved New Zealand for the Empire by landing emigrants and forcing the hand of the Government at home, and thus anticipating France in the occupation of the country.

I have been interested when looking through the early volumes of the Spectator to find how closely Rintoul's manner and arrangement resemble those of the Spectator to-day. His determination to give a faithful summary of the events of the week in notes which formed a running narrative was evident. I think that