CHASTISEMENT OF TRUANT MEMBERS.
"If the honourable Member persist in his disorderly conduct, I shall be obliged to name him," is a threat of the Speaker of the House of Cominons in desperate cases. A candid Speaker was asked on one occasion, what he should have done had the honourable Member continued refractory after he had been
named? Mr. Speaker replied, "The Lord knows " .
Truant Members from -Railway Committees are now na ad to the House by their respective Chairmen. Were the House asked what was to be done with any honourable Member whose truant propensities were unsubdued by this exposure, its reply would probably reveal quite as much conscious helplessness as the Speaker's. To bid the Sergeant-at-Arms take him would have little effect : the truant might prefer the Sergeant's lenient surveillance in a coffeeroom, with newspapers and other means of whiling away time, to the durance of the Committee-room. To give a Police- man charge to watch his motions and bring him to the Com- mittee-room at the hour appointed, would be more efficacious ; but should the number of refractory Members prove considerable, this might occasion too severe a drain on the effective staff of the force.
These considerations appear to have suggested to the Commit- tees the idea of framing their reports of absentees in terms likely to pique them to attend—" The Committee had not suffered any inconvenience from their temporary absence." He must be in- deed impenetrable to shame who could run the risk of having his uselessness proclaimed twice at the bar of the House.
Might not this ingenious device for shaming Members of Par- liament into business habits be tried, experimentally, in other departments of state ? There is, for example, Lord Stanley, who, to judge from the Court Circular, must be an incarnation of the perpetual motion—incessantly flitting, "as light as bird from bough," from Knowsley to Tunbridge, from Tunbridge to New- market—resting nowhere, least of all in the Colonial Office. Might not his Lordship be reclaimed by gazetting him—in per- fect consistency with truth—as absent on such and such days from "the Office," but mahout any inconvenience to the despatch of public business?
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