rarely, if ever, end badly, for the Government is ever in want of money, and a Government has always forty staunch supporters who are ready to stay in the House in order to help it to get through its business.  But Tuesday belongs to no man in particular.  The Government don’t bother themselves about it, because they don’t have money to get at the end of it:  instead of its being occupied with one Bill, which can raise a definite discussion, Tuesday has a number of motions on all sorts and kinds of subjects; and, in short, what’s everybody’s business is nobody’s; and Tuesday constantly ends about eight or half-past eight o’clock in a count-out.  The Government delightedly look on; it is an additional argument in favour of taking away the rights and privileges of private members and turning them into the voracious maw of the Government.

[Sidenote:  Wales in a rage.]

A curious difference presented itself between the interior and the exterior of the House on the following day (February 23rd).  Inside, there was for the most part a desert, yawning wide and drear, except on the benches which were occupied by the sons of Wales; while outside in the outer lobbies surged a wild, tumultuous, excited crowd, eagerly demanding admission from everybody who could be expected to have the least chance of giving it.  Every Welshman in the world seemed to have got there.  I saw Mr. Ellis Griffiths—­an impassioned and brilliant Welsh orator who ought to be in the House; my friend, whom I used to know as Howell Williams, and I now have to call Mr.  “Idris,” as if he were an embodied mineral water, and many others.  The secret was that the night was devoted to the Suspensory Bill for the Established Church in Wales, and anybody who knows Welshmen, will know that this is a question on which Welsh blood incontinently boils over.  Terse, emphatic, business-like Mr. Asquith put the case for Disestablishment on the plain and simple ground that the Established Church was the church of the rich minority, and that the overwhelming majority of the Welsh representation had been returned over and over again to demand Disestablishment.

[Sidenote:  The cynical Gorst.]

Sir John Gorst has an icy manner and generally the air of a man who has not found the world especially pleasant, and delights to take rather a pessimistic view of things.  His great argument was that if this Bill were carried, young men would not find enough of coin to tempt them into the Church, and that accordingly it would languish and fade away.  To such a prosaic view of the highest spiritual vocation, the unhappy Tories listened with ill-concealed vexation, and Gorst once more increased that distrust of his sincerity in Toryism which perhaps accounts for the small progress he has made in the ranks of his party.

[Sidenote:  Randolph again.]