NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE Conservatives could not be content on Thursday with- out obstructing the Prime Minister's motion to suspend the Standing Orders, in order that he might give his account of the Franchise Bill,—an obstruction of which Sir Stafford Northcote himself was evidently ashamed. Mr. Chaplin insisted that the mind of the Government ought to be as much absorbed as his own is in foot-and-month disease,—that they ought to be going about deep in meditation on the best way of keeping it out when it is out, and of stamping it out when it is in. Mr. Raikes, on the contrary, was so profoundly convinced that the Government should be groaning under the moral pangs due to the consciousness of Supplementary Estimates not yet con- fided to the House, that they ought not to have a cheerful moment till they had made a clean breast of them ; and Sir Henry Wolff held that their imagination ought to be so absorbed in the military difficulties of the situation in Egypt, that their con- fidences to Parliament should be confined exclusively to that subject. Lord Randolph Churchill posed for once as a magnanimous foe, anxious to use any little influence he had, to get Sir Henry Wolff to withdraw his motion of adjournment, but we need hardly say that his speech was devoted to sup- porting the case of the Obstructors. The Speaker did not interfere, though the speeches were certainly most irrelevant ; and so three-quarters of an hour or more of precious time followed the hour and a half already devoted to upwards of threescore of the most insignificant questions on record.
