(Mr. Ridout’s committee) was read it began to look like malice; committee after committee was revealed, and the name of Humphrey Crewe might not have been contained in the five hundred except as the twelfth member of forestry, until it appeared at the top of National Affairs.  Here was a broad enough field, certainly,—­the Trusts, the Tariff, the Gold Standard, the Foreign Possessions,—­and Mr. Crewe’s mind began to soar in spite of himself.  Public Improvements was reached, and he straightened.  Mr. Beck, a railroad lawyer from Belfast, led it.  Mr. Crewe arose, as any man of spirit would, and walked with dignity up the aisle and out of the house.  This deliberate attempt to crush genius would inevitably react on itself.  The Honourable Hilary Vane and Mr. Flint should be informed of it at once.

CHAPTER X

“For bills may come, and bills may go”

A man with a sense of humour once went to the capital as a member of the five hundred from his town, and he never went back again.  One reason for this was that he died the following year, literally, the doctors said, from laughing too much.  I know that this statement will be received incredulously, and disputed by those who claim that laughter is a good thing; the honourable gentleman died from too much of a good thing.  He was overpowered by having too much to laugh at, and the undiscerning thought him a fool, and the Empire had no need of a court jester.  But many of his sayings have lived, nevertheless.  He wrote a poem, said to be a plagiarism, which contains the quotation at the beginning of this chapter:  “For bills may come, and bills may go, but I go on forever.”  The first person singular is supposed to relate to the United Northeastern Railroads.  It was a poor joke at best.

It is needless to say that the gentleman referred to had a back seat among the submerged four hundred and seventy,—­and that he kept it.  No discerning and powerful well-wishers came forward and said to him, “Friend, go up higher.”  He sat, doubled up, in number, and the gods gave him compensation in laughter; he disturbed the Solons around him, who were interested in what was going on in front, and trying to do their duty to their constituents by learning parliamentary procedure before the Speaker got his gold watch and shed tears over it.

The gentleman who laughed and died is forgotten, as he deserves to be, and it never occurred to anybody that he might have been a philosopher, after all.  There is something irresistibly funny about predestination; about men who are striving and learning and soberly voting upon measures with which they have as little to do as guinea-pigs.  There were certain wise and cynical atheists who did not attend the sessions at all except when they received mysterious hints to do so.  These were chiefly from Newcastle.  And there were others who played poker in the state-house cellar waiting for the Word to come to them, when they went up and voted (prudently counting their chips before they did so), and descended again.  The man with a sense of humour laughed at these, too, and at the twenty blackbirds in the Senate,—­but not so heartily.  He laughed at their gravity, for no gravity can equal that of gentlemen who play with stacked cards.