arranged for a new Government to come in, it might very well be called
"The Grasshopper Government." That would look fine in the margins of the
history-books.

Yes, it is all very "dramatic." It is exciting to think of an English
lord nursing a grievance about a grasshopper for months and months,
seeing grasshoppers in every corner, dreaming about grasshoppers.... But
we must not waste time over the fantastic tale. We have not yet solved
our principal problem. Why did Mr. Lloyd George call him a
grasshopper--a modest friendly little grasshopper? Did he mean to
suggest that Lord Northcliffe hears with his stomach or stridulates with
his back legs?

Why not an earwig, or a black-beetle, or a wood-louse, or a centipede?
There are lots of insects more offensive than the grasshopper, and
personally I would much rather be called a grasshopper than an earwig,
which gets into people's sponges and frightens them to death.

Perhaps he had been reading that nice passage in the Prophet Nahum: "Thy
captains are as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the
cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is
not known where they are." I do not know. But _The Encyclopædia_ has a
suggestive sentence: "All grasshoppers are vegetable feeders and have an
incomplete metamorphosis, so that _their destructive powers are
continuous from the moment of emergence from the egg until death_."

A.P.H.

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