At the Civil Service dinner on Wednesday, Sir William Harcourt
made the interesting announcement that be could never become a Peer. In speaking of Lord Welby, he said that he was severed from him for ever, so far as public life is concerned. " I cannot go to him, and he can never return to me." Indeed, he spoke in terms which strongly suggested that he was thinking of the, parable of Dives and Lazarus. There was, he said, " a great gulf " fixed between them. Did he think of Lord Welby as Dives, and himself as Lazarus on Abraham's bosom, or of Lord Welby as Lazarus and of him- self as Dives P He did not even hint. But as it was only insuperable reluctance which constituted for him the impossi- bility of ever joining Lord Welby, we must infer that he must have thought Lord Welby to be on the wrong side of the great gulf, and himself on the right side. So far, however, Lord Welby does not seem to find the House of Lords a place of torment, and can hardly have been gratified by Sir William Harcourt's implied description of it. Probably Lord Welby thinks the House of Commons a much nearer approximation to a political Gehenna.
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