public recantation of his hostility to Women's Suffrage caused a large
attendance of Members, Peers and the general public. The interval of
waiting was beguiled by, among others, Mr. PEMBERTON BILLING, who, having
been told by Mr. MACPHERSON that the number of accidents during the
training of pilots during the last half-year of 1916 was 1.53 per cent.,
proceeded to inquire, "What is the percentage based on? Is it percentage
per hundred?" Mr. BILLING may be comforted by the recollection that a
greater than he, Lord RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, confessed that he "never could
understand what those d--d dots meant."

The Editor of _The Glasgow High School Magazine_ must be a proud man this
day, for he has been mentioned in Parliament. It seems that he has been
refused permission to post his periodical to subscribers in neutral
countries, and Mr. MACPHERSON explained that this was in pursuance of a
general rule, since "school magazines contain much information useful to
the enemy." It is pleasant to picture the German General Staff laboriously
ploughing through reports of football-matches, juvenile 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