Let Justice be suppressed by Might,
    And Mercy’s seat be overthrown;
  For Truth and Right the fools may fight,
    We fight but for “Ourselves Alone.”

Meanwhile, the 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, by the way, is much exercised by Mr. Punch’s language towards the enemy, which it describes as being in the Billingsgate vein.  In spite of which rebuke, and at the risk of offending the readers of that patriotic organ, Mr. Punch proposes to go on saying just what he thinks of the Kaiser and his friends.