side of
Government bungalows--the haunts (if some critics are to be believed) of
the Great Uncombed, even of the Hidden Hand. The men of forty-one were not
wanted last March. Mr. Lloyd George tells us that they are wanted now, or
it would mean the loss of two Army Corps. The Germans, by the way, appear
to be arriving at a just conception of their relative value. Lord Newton
has informed the Lords that the enemy is prepared to release 600 English
civilian prisoners in return for some 4,000 to 7,000 Germans. Parliament
has developed a new grievance: Ministers have confided to Pressmen
information denied to M.P.'s. And a cruel wrong has been done to Erin,
according to Mr. Dillon, by the application of Greenwich time to Ireland,
by which that country has been compelled to surrender its precious
privilege of being twenty-five minutes behind the times. The injustice is
so bitter that it has reconciled Mr. Dillon and Mr. Healy.

The Premier has hinted that if the House insisted on having fuller
information than it receives at present another Secret Session might be
held. When one considers the vital problems on which Parliament now
concentrates its energies--the supply of cocaine to dentists, the
withholding of pictures of the Tanks, etc.--one feels that there should be
a Secret Session at least once a week. Indeed, if the House were to sit
permanently with closed doors, unobserved and unreported, the country might
be all the better for it.

[Illustration:

A STRAIN ON THE AFFECTIONS

NORWEGIAN (to Swede): "What--you here, too. I thought you were a friend of
Germany?"

SWEDE: "I was."]

It is the fashion in some quarters to make out that fathers do not realise
the sacrifice made by their sons, but complacently acquiesce in it while
they sit comfortably at home over the fire. Mr. Punch has not met these
fathers. The fathers--and still more the mothers--that he knows recognise
only too well the unpayable nature of their debt.

They held, against the storms of fate,
In war's tremendous game,
A little land inviolate
Within a world of flame.

They looked on scarred and ruined lands,
On shell-wrecked fields forlorn,
And gave to us, with open hands,
Full fields of yellow corn;

The silence wrought in wood and stone
Whose aisles our fathers trod;
The pines that stand apart, alone,
Like sentinels of God.

With generous hands they paid the price,
Unconscious of the cost,
But