Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place,
no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this
department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how
statistics were completing to their last decimal places the
prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and
exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and
strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.

It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he
seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that
popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But
these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and
yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the
strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if
the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other
the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down,
to support the Government. And with the Finance Act coming on the
question was whether to accept an increasing deficit in the revenue or a
declining majority in the Legislature. This could be read vaguely
between the lines of the report presented by the Minister of the
Interior. But all this time not one word was said about the coming
constitutional crisis which was in everybody's mind. That had been
thoroughly discussed by ministers sitting in real Council elsewhere, a
Council at which the Head of the Constitution had not been present, and
about which he would hear no more than the Prime Minister chose to tell
him.

And so, smoothly, equably, and uneventfully the Council reached its
conclusion; ministers one after another closed up their portfolios, and
sitting mute in their places respectfully waited the royal word of