Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1 CHAFrER III "M.P." The hurly-burly of the General Election is over; the six hundred and seventy members who constitute the House of Commons have been duly returned; and it is well to consider now the pleasures and tribulations, the disadvantages and advantages of a member of Parliament. Lord Macaulay has described a Parliamentary career as— A career in which the most its combatants can expect is that by relinquishing liberal studies and social comfort, by passing nights without sleep and summers without one glimpse of the beauties of nature, they may attain that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of lxiwer. Sir George Trevelyan, in his "Life of Lord Macaulay," corroborates his uncle, and gives us, from personal experience also, a graphic description of what he calls "the tedious and exhaustive routine" of an M.P.'s life during the sitting of Parliament. Waiting whole evenings to vote [he says] and then walking half a mile at a foot's pace round and round the crowded lobbies ; dining amidst clamour and confusion, with a division twenty minutes long between two of the mouthfuls ;trudging home at three in the morning through the slush of ;1 February thaw; and sitting behind Ministers in the centre of a closely packed bench during the hottest week of the London summer. If this were a complete picture of Parliamentary life —if M.P.s were such slaves and martyrs to duty as they are here described—it would indeed be difficult to understand why a seat in the House of Commons should be regarded as the highest object of ambition, and be sighed for, and schemed for, and fought for by thousands of able and wide-awake men. Above all, one would be at a loss to comprehend the action of men who, having had experience of Pa...