TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SETTING TO WORK.
SINCE the days of David and Goliah it has often happened that undertakings heralded with pomp and ceremony have ended in nothing, and that unostentatious beginnings have led to great results. It would not be unprecedented were the "hopeless session" to accomplish more than many from which great things have been anticipated. There is an unpretending earnestness about the opening of this session that ahnost awakens hope where hope has long been a stranger. True, the Royal Speech in the House of Lords had more ladies than legislators for auditors : but let that pass—the Speech there is as much a matter of mere form as the breaking of the bottle of wine on the bows of a frigate about to be launched. In the House of Commons, an absence of flourish and an eagerness to set in for serious bu- siness were remarked. Some old familiar faces were missed on the first night—Stanley on one side of the House, and O'Connell on the other : but this was all in favour of better work and fewer personal bickerings. It was with a kindlier, almost regretful re- membrance, that Members missed the venerable head—removed, with reverence be it spoken, to a higher sphere—which nightly appeared over the clock in front of the Speaker's qallery, mysteriously impersonating Time--" past, present, and future." Were we of those who can discover great secrets in trifling indica- tions, we might infer that the Representatives of the People are really bent upon accomplishing something this session, from the aifficulty encountered in getting in to them. Alchemists, when the hour of projection approached, betook themselves to out-of-the-way places, where they were secure from in- terruption; and no usurer's den or shoplifter's plunder-store ever was reached by so many tortuous windings—through so many buildings pulling down and buildings running up—round so many temporary sheds, and over so many thoroughfares rubbish- encumbered—as is the House of Commons in February 1845.
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