At the Brighton Mayoral banquet on Wednesday Mr. Rudyard Kipling
made an amusing speech upon the Houses of Parliament. He began by saying that a few hundred years ago the South Saxons took little interest in politics, and when they did "the hon. Member for Lewes was as likely as not to record his vote against the hon. Member for Brighthelmstone with an axe or a sword." But our ancestors were careful to give any man who had courage in war, wisdom in council, or skill in administration a place in the Council of the King. And they knew that the son of a picked man, if he were any good, would be likely to have absorbed much of his father's knowledge, and if he were no good, he would disappear sooner from the picked assembly than from an ordinary crowd. "In essence the House of Lords is what it was from the first,—a body of democratic aristocrats." Mr. Kipling went on to say that the Lower House was just as aristocratic and hereditary. "Lest there should be any doubt in the matter, it has surrounded itself with an etiquette which would be extreme in a Spanish Court."
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