when one considers the acute anxiety of the last four months.  But it is the way of England to endure felicity with calmness and adversity with fortitude.  In the House of Lords Lord Inchcape and Lord Emmott have been propitiating Nemesis by their warnings of the gloomy financial future that is in store for us, while in the Commons the Bolshevist group below the gangway are apparently much perturbed by the prospect that Russia may be helped on to her legs again by the Allies.  Mr. Dillon’s indictment of the Government for their treatment of Ireland has had, however, a welcome if unexpected result.  Mr. Shortt, the new Chief Secretary, an avowed and unrepentant Home Ruler, has been telling Mr. Dillon’s followers a few plain truths about themselves:  that they have made no effort to turn the Home Rule Act into a practical measure; that instead of denouncing Sinn Fein they had followed its lead; that they had attacked the Irish executive when they ought to have supported it, and by their refusal to help recruiting had forfeited the sympathy of the British working classes.  Mr. Lloyd George, in his review of the War, warned the peacemongers not to expect their efforts to succeed until the enemy knew he was beaten, but vouchsafed no information as to his alleged intention to go to the country in the political sense.  In spite of the Premier’s warning the Pacificists made another futile attempt on the very next day to convince the House that the Germans were ready to make an honest peace if only our Government would listen to it.  They were well answered by Mr. Robertson, who was a Pacificist himself until this War converted him, and by Mr. Balfour, who declared that we were quite ready to talk to Germany as soon as she showed any sign of a change of heart.  Up to the present there has been no sign of it.

Food is still the universal topic.  Small green apples, says a contemporary, are proving popular.  A boy correspondent, however, desires Mr. Punch to say that he has a little inside information to the contrary.  Nottingham children, it is stated, are to be paid 3d. a pound for gathering blackberries, but they are not to use their own receptacles.  Captain Amundsen is on his way to the Pole, but we fear that he will not find any cheese there.  The vocabulary of food control has even made its way to the nursery.  A small girl on being informed by her nurse that a new little baby brother had come to live with her promptly replied:  “Well, he can’t stay unless he’s brought his coupons.”

[Illustration: 

LATEST ADDITION TO MINISTRY STAFF:  “What’s the tea-time here?”

CICERONE:  “Usual—­three to five-thirty.”]

Yet one of Mr. Punch’s poets, in prophetic and optimistic strain, has actually dared to speculate on the delights of life without “Dora”; Dickens, with the foresight of genius, wrote in “David Copperfield” how his hero “felt it would have been an act of perfidy to Dora to have a natural relish for my dinner.”