[ILLUSTRATION:  A GREAT INCENTIVE

MEHMED (reading dispatch from the All-Highest):  “Defend Jerusalem at all costs for my sake.  I was once there myself.”]

[ILLUSTRATION:  ONE UP!]

Parliament has for once repelled the gibe that it has ceased to represent the people in the tribute of praise paid by Lords and Commons to our sailors and soldiers and all the other gallant folk who are helping us to win the War.  On the strength of this capacity for rising to the occasion one may pass over the many sittings at which a small minority of Pacificists and irrelevant inquisitors have dragged the House down to the depths of ineptitude or worse.  In the debate on the Air Force in Committee, one member, if we count speeches and interruptions, addressed the House exactly one hundred times, and it is worthy of note that his last words were:  “This is what you call muzzling the House of Commons.”  If we were to believe some critics, the British Navy is directed by a set of doddering old gentlemen who are afraid to let it go at the Germans, and cannot even safeguard it from attack.  The truth, as expounded by the First Lord, Sir Eric Geddes, in his maiden speech, is quite different.  Despite the Jeremiads of superannuated sailors and political longshoremen, the Admiralty is not going to Davy Jones’s locker, but under its present chiefs, who have, with very few exceptions, seen service in this War, maintains and supplements its glorious record.

Save for an occasional game of “tip and run,” as with the North Sea convoy, enemy vessels have disappeared on the surface of the ocean; and the long arm of the British Navy is now stretching down into the depths and up into the skies in successful pursuit of them.  If the nation hardly realises what it owes to the men of the Fleet and their splendid comrades of the Auxiliary Services, it is because this work is done with such thoroughness and so little fuss, and, as Mr. Asquith put it, “in the twilight and not in the limelight.”

[ILLUSTRATION: 

AUNT MARIA:  “Do you know I once actually saw the Kaiser riding through the streets of London as bold as brass.  If I’d known then what I know now I’d have told a policeman.”]

The general sense of the community is now practically agreed that compulsory rationing must come, and the sooner the better.  Lord Rhondda is still hopeful that John Bull will tighten his own belt and save him the trouble.  But if we fail, the machinery for compulsion is all ready.

Reuter reports that a British prisoner has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for calling the Germans “Huns.”  On the Western front Tommy usually calls them “Allymans,” “Jerry,” or “Fritz.”  But even if this prisoner did use the word he cannot be blamed.  The choice was the Kaiser’s when, as Attila’s understudy, “Go forth,” he said, “my sons.  Go and behave exactly as the Huns.”

Apropos of the Kaiser, it appears that a certain Herr Stegerwald, addressing a Berlin meeting, said:  “We went to war at the side of the Kaiser, and the All-Highest will return from war with us.”  If we may be permitted to say anything, we expect he will be leading by at least a couple of lengths.