Parliament is not sitting, but there is, unfortunately, no truth in the report that in order to provide billets for 5,000 new typists and incidentally to win the War, the Government has commandeered the Houses of Parliament.  The Times Literary Supplement received 335 books of original verse in 1916, and it is rumoured that Mr. Edward Marsh may very shortly take up his duties as Minister of Poetry and the Fine Arts.  Mr. Marsh has not yet decided whether he will appoint Mr. Asquith or Mr. Winston Churchill as his private secretary.  Meanwhile, a full list of the private secretaries of the new private secretaries of the members of the new Government may at any moment be disclosed to a long suffering public.

On the Home Front the situation shows that a famous literary critic was also a true prophet: 

  O Matthew Arnold!  You were right: 
  We need more Sweetness and more Light;
  For till we break the brutal foe,
  Our sugar’s short, our lights are low.

The domestic problem daily grows more acute.  A maid, who asked for a rise in her wages to which her mistress demurred, explained that the gentleman she walked out with had just got a job in a munition factory and she would be obliged to dress up to him.

[Illustration: 

COOK (who, after interview with prospective mistress, is going to think it over): 

“’Ullo!  Prambilator!  If you’d told me you ’ad children I needn’t have troubled meself to ’ave come.”

THE PROSPECTIVE MISTRESS:  “Oh!  B-but if you think the place would otherwise suit you, I dare say we could board the children out.”]

Maids are human, however, though their psychology is sometimes disconcerting.  One who was told by her mistress not to worry because her young man had gone into the trenches responded cheerfully, “Oh, no, ma’am, I’ve left off worrying now.  He can’t walk out with anyone else while he’s there.”

[Illustration:  THE RECRUIT WHO TOOK TO IT KINDLY]

February 1917,

The rulers of Germany—­the Kaiser and his War-lords—­proclaimed themselves the enemies of the human race in the first weeks of the War.  But it has taken two years and a half to break down the apparently inexhaustible patience of the greatest of the neutrals.  A year and three-quarters has elapsed since the sinking of the Lusitania.  The forbearance of President Wilson—­in the face of accumulated insults, interference in the internal politics of the United States, the promotion of strikes and sabotage by the agents of Count Bernstorff—­has exposed him to hard and even bitter criticism from his countrymen.  Perhaps he over-estimated the strength of the German-American and Pacificist elements.  But his difficulties are great, and his long suffering diplomacy has at least this merit, that if America enters the War it will be as a united people.  Germany’s decision to resort to unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1 is the last straw:  now even Mr. Henry Ford has offered to place his works at the disposal of the American authorities.