ouse of Commons, stampeded in terror against a
proposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known and
responsible men. London, alas! does not seem to care how its members are
elected. What Londoner knows anything about his member? Hundreds of
thousands of Londoners do not even know which of the ridiculous
constituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our London
they are in. Only as I was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court,
Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me in
the councils of the nation while I write....

After some slight difficulty I ascertained that my representative is a
Mr. Burdett Coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, Mr.
Ashmead-Bartlett. And by a convenient accident I find that the other day
he moved to reject the Proportional Representation Amendment made by the
House of Lords to the Representation of the People Bill, so that I am
able to look up the debate in Hansard and study my opinions as he
represented them and this question at one and the same time. And, taking
little things first, I am proud and happy to discover that the member
for me was the only participator in the debate who, in the vulgar and
reprehensible phrase, "threw a dead cat," or, in polite terms, displayed
classical learning. My member said, "_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_,"
with a rather graceful compliment to the Labour Conference at
Nottingham. "I could not help thinking to myself," said my member, "that
at that conference there must have been many men of sufficient classical
reading to say to themselves, '_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_.'" In
which surmise he was quite right. Except perhaps for "_Tempus fugit,"_
"_verbum sap._," "_Arma virumque_," and "_Quis custodiet_," there is no
better known relic of antiquity. But my member went a little beyond my
ideas when he said: "We are asked to enter upon a method of legislation
which can bear no other description than that of law-making in the
dark," because I think it can bear quite a lot of other descriptions.
This was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, gloomy
dissertation about nothing very definite, a muddling up of the main
question with the minor issue of a schedule of constituencies involved
in the proposal.

The other parts of my member's speech do not, I confess, fill me with
the easy confidence I would like to feel in my proxy. Let me extract a
few gems of eloquence from the speech of this