Punch (73.1877)

26

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

[July 28, 1877.

PUNCH'S ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.

and Lord Cabxingfobd.

On the question of Crime in Ireland, the authority of a Lord-Lieutenant and an ex-Lord Chancellor may well outweigh that of a
High-Tory Irish Peer out of temper with recent changes, and naturally disposed to make the worst of anything that admits of two
constructions. It is satisfactory to know that, bad as things Irish may he in some counties—in agrarian offences especially—they are
much better than they were, and are even now on the mend. The Irish Vehm-Grericht still works, but less widely and less wickedly.
There is no case for increase of gagr-and-muzzle law.

(Commons.)—After the usual Monday's Miscellany—out of which afresh outbreak of Cattle-plague in the unsavoury locality of Bethnal
Green crops up like a hideous apparition—the House did short and sharp sentence on a late appointment. . .

E pur si muave ; all is not stationary, even in that official world where promotion by favour is the rule and promotion by merit the
exception. "When in jobbing your job you also slap a Special Committee in the face, look out to have the slap returned, and with
interest.

So in this case, after a Select Committee had sat on the Stationery Office, to consider whether there was no remedy, but the House
must groan and sweat under all that weary load of waste-paper, and the cost thereof, and had reported that if _ that Office could be
provided with a Head that knew something about the matters the Office has to do with, such as red-tape, pens, ink, paper, printing,
and binding—the material and munitions, in fact, of Departmental warfare—savings by the thousand might become the rule, instead of
waste by the waggon-load, they did not mean their recommendation to be treated after the way of the Stationery Office—as waste-
paper, but to be acted upon by the appointment, as the next Controller, of a man who understood the Office work as an expert.
Such a man was at hand, in the second in command. But Lobd Beaconsfield passed him by, as well as the recommendation of
the Select Committee, for a son of an ex-Rector of Hughenden—a very clever and efficient Junior War-Office Clerk, sixty-ninth on
the list, who besides good friends, could plead good service in the Office, and, thanks to both, had basked in much sunshine of
Private Secretaryships and Secretaryships of Commissions, and was now pitchforked over many heads out of his Junior Clerkship at