ned in the five hundred except as the twelfth
member of forestry, until it appeared at the top of National Affairs.
Here was a broad enough field, certainly,--the Trusts, the Tariff, the
Gold Standard, the Foreign Possessions,--and Mr. Crewe's mind began to
soar in spite of himself. Public Improvements was reached, and he
straightened. Mr. Beck, a railroad lawyer from Belfast, led it. Mr. Crewe
arose, as any man of spirit would, and walked with dignity up the aisle
and out of the house. This deliberate attempt to crush genius would
inevitably react on itself. The Honourable Hilary Vane and Mr. Flint
should be informed of it at once.

CHAPTER X

"FOR BILLS MAY COME, AND BILLS MAY GO"

A man with a sense of humour once went to the capital as a member of the
five hundred from his town, and he never went back again. One reason for
this was that he died the following year, literally, the doctors said,
from laughing too much. I know that this statement will be received
incredulously, and disputed by those who claim that laughter is a good
thing; the honourable gentleman died from too much of a good thing. He
was overpowered by having too much to laugh at, and the undiscerning
thought him a fool, and the Empire had no need of a court jester. But
many of his sayings have lived, nevertheless. He wrote a poem, said to be
a plagiarism, which contains the quotation at the beginning of this
chapter: "For bills may come, and bills may go, but I go on forever." The
first person singular is supposed to relate to the United Northeastern
Railroads. It was a poor joke at best.

It is needless to say that the gentleman referred to had a back seat
among the submerged four hundred and seventy,--and that he kept it. No
discerning and powerful well-wishers came forward and said to him,
"Friend, go up higher." He sat, doubled up, in number, and the gods gave
him compensation in laughter; he disturbed the Solons around him, who
were interested in what was going on in front, and trying to do their
duty to their constituents by learning parliamentary procedure before the
Speaker got his gold watch and shed tears over it.

The gentleman who laughed and died is forgotten, as he deserves to be,
and it never occurred to anybody that he might have been a philosopher,
after all. There is something irresistibly funny about predestination;
about men who are striving and learning and soberly voting upon measures
with which they have as little to