gentle Mr. Duke has retired from the Chief Secretaryship to
the Judicial Bench; Mr. Shortt, his successor, recently voted against
conscription for Ireland; Lord French, the new Viceroy, is believed to
favour it. The appointments seem to have been made on the cancelling-out
principle, and are as hard to reconcile as the ministerial utterances on
the recent German push. Thus Mr. Macpherson declared that the crisis came
upon us like a thief in the night, while on the same day Mr. Churchill
observed that the German offensive had opened a month later than we had
calculated, and consequently our reserves in munitions were correspondingly
larger than they would have been. Anyhow, it is a good hearing that the
lost guns, tanks, and aeroplanes have all been more than replaced, and the
stores of ammunition completely replenished, while at the same time
munition workers have been released for the Army at the rate of a thousand
_a_ day. These results have been largely due to the wonderful work of
the women, who turned out innumerable shells of almost incredible
quality--not like that depicted by our artist.

[Illustration: THE DUD]

Mr. Bonar Law has brought in his Budget and asked for a trifle of 842
millions. We are to pay more for our letters, our cheques, and our tobacco.
The Penny Postage has gone, and the Penny Pickwick with it. For the rest we
have had the Maurice Affair, which looked like a means of resurrecting the
Opposition but ended in giving the Government a new lease of life, and Sir
Eric Geddes has given unexpected support to the allegations that the German
pill-boxes were made of British cement. At least he admitted that the port
of Zeebrugge was positively congested with shiploads of the stuff.
Proportional Representation has been knocked out for the fifth time in this
Parliament; and we have to thank Sir Mark Sykes for telling us that the
Whip's definition of a crank is "a wealthy man who does not want a
Knighthood, or a nobleman who does not want to be an Under-Secretary."

War is a great leveller. The Carl Rosa Company are about to produce an
opera by an English composer. And war _is_ teaching us to revise our
histories. For example, "'Nelson,' the greatest naval pageant film ever
attempted, will," says the _Daily News_, "tell the love story of
Nelson's life and the outstanding incidents of his career, including the
destruction of the Spanish Armada." No scandal about Queen Elizabeth, we
trust. The _Daily News_