PRIVILEGE PROCEDURE
SIR,—Your correspondent on " At Westminster " describes the recent ceremony in connection with two journalists at the Bar of the House as " a piece of Parliamentary procedure which no present Parliamentarian had ever seen." My experience goes further back than that of the Parliamentarians. From the Press Gallery in 1892 I witnessed the scene when Mr. Speaker Peel, by order of the House, admonished a group of directors of a small railway company, including an M.P., who were summoned to the Bar for Breach of Privilege in dismissing a servant mainly in consequence of his evidence before a Select Committee. No witness of that scene could ever forget it. Mr. Speaker Peel was a man of strong personality, with dignity and a sense of authority, and his fine voice gave full effect to the stern force of the admonition. There was a general sense of tension while the Speaker eloquently described the value attached by Parliament to Privilege, and the men standing at the Bar looked conscious of their position as he stressed the gravity of their offence against " the character, the dignity and the purity of
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