If we cast our eyes over the debates of the last six months, we shall find that hundreds of members of the House of Commons have exhibited the most extraordinary powers of ill-directed labour.  And then their capacity of endurance!  Arguments that would have knocked down any reasonable elephant have touched them no more than would summer gnats.  Well, why not awake this sleeping strength?  Why not divert a mischievous potency into beneficial action?  Why should we confine a body of men to making laws, when so many of them might be more usefully employed in wheeling barrows?  Now there is Mr. PLUMPTRE, who has done so much to make English Sundays respectable—­would he not be working far more enduring utility with pickaxe or spade than by labouring at enactments to stop the flowing of the Thames on the Sabbath?  Might not D’ISRAELI be turned into a very jaunty carpenter, and be set to the light interior work of both the Houses?  His logic, it is confessed, will support nothing; but we think he would be a very smart hand at a hat-peg.

As for much of the joinery-work, could we have prettier mechanics than Sir James GRAHAM and Sir Edward KNATCHBULL?  When we remember their opinions on the Corn Laws, and see that they are a part of the cabinet which has already shown symptoms of some approaching alteration of the Bread Tax—­when we consider their enthusiastic bigotry for everything as it is, and Sir Robert PEEL’S small, adventurous liberality, his half-bashful homage to the spirit of the age—­sure we are that both GRAHAM and KNATCHBULL, to remain component members of the Peel Cabinet, must be masters of the science of dove-tailing; and hence, the men of men for the joinery-work of the new Houses of Parliament.

Again how many members from their long experience in the small jobbery of committees—­from their profitable knowledge of the mysteries of private bills and certain other unclean work which may, if he please, fall to the lot of the English senator—­how many of these lights of the times might build small monuments of their genius in the drains, sewerage, and certain conveniences required by the deliberative wisdom of the nation?  We have seen the plans of Mr. BARRY, and are bound to praise the evidence of his taste and genius; but we know that the structure, however fair and beautiful to the eye, must have its foul places; and for the dark, dirty, winding ways of Parliament—­reader, take a list of her Majesty’s Commons, and running your finger down their names, pick us out three hundred able-bodied labourers—­three hundred stalwart night workmen in darkness and corruption.  We ask the country, need it care for the strike of Peto’s men (the said Peto, by the way, is in no manner descended from Falstaff’s retainer), when there is so much unemployed labour, hungering only for the country’s good?