hand.

When the House was about to go into Committee on the Corn Production
Bill a strange thing happened. Before leaving the Chair the
SPEAKER was proceeding to lop off a few excrescences in the way
of Instructions that appeared on the Order-paper. Meanwhile the
SERGEANT-AT-ARMS had advanced to the Table to remove the Mace. "Order,
order!" exclaimed the SPEAKER, upon which Sir COLIN KEPPEL, much
abashed to think that he, the guardian of order, should have been
regarded as even potentially insubordinate, beat, for the first time
in a gallant career, a hasty retreat.

The Government had to withstand a massed attack by the Free Traders,
who even in war-time have not entirely shed their prejudices against
subsidizing the farmer at the expense of the rest of the community,
although the object of the subsidies is to ensure the rest of the
community having enough to eat. Mr. RUNCIMAN and his colleagues had
the temerity to take a division which ran very much upon the old
party-lines; but on this occasion the Nationalists, in the interest
of Irish farmers, were not "agin' the Government," but helped it to
secure the comfortable majority of 84.

_Wednesday, July 11th_.--In the matter of the Mesopotamia Report a
large section of the public and the Press is in the mood of _Sam
Weller_, "Ain't nobody to be whopped?" Anxious to satisfy this demand
and at the same time to do justice to the individuals arraigned,
the Government proposes to set up a special tribunal under the Army
(Courts of Inquiry) Act. That measure, passed to deal with the strange
case of the Bashful Lieutenant and the Lively Lady, and now to be
utilized for this considerably larger issue, appears to resemble