ate. On the first occasion, after Bill's collapse, that I prepared to take him a cup of tea, Sister stopped me. "Don't forget to take tea, and some bread and butter, to that poor woman. She looks tired. And some milk for the child." "Very good, Sister." I cut bread and butter, and filled an extra mug of tea. "Orderly! What are you doing?" Sister had reappeared. And I was rebuked because I was going to offer Mrs. Bill her tea in a tin mug (the patients all have tin mugs) and had cut her bread and butter too thick. I must cut dainty slices of thin bread and butter, use Sister's own chinaware, and serve the whole spread on a tray with a cloth. All of which was typical of Sister, who from that day treated Bill's wife with true tenderness; and Bill's wife became one of Sister's most enthusiastic adorers. It came to pass, after a week of pitiful anxiety, that the Medical Officer pronounced Bill safe once more. "Bloke says I'm not goin' ter peg art," he told me. I congratulated him, and remarked that his wife would be thankful when he met her, on her arrival, with such splendid news. "I'll 'ave the larf of my Missus," said Bill. "W'en she comes, I shall tell 'er I've some serious noos for 'er, and she's ter send the kid darn on the grarse ter play. Then I'll pull a long fice and hask 'er ter bear up, and say I'm sorry for 'er, and she mustn't tike it too rough, and all that; and she 'as my sympathy in 'er diserpointment: she ain't ter get 'er widow's pension arter all!"

The "fancy

get at Roehampton." leg" ended by being the favorite theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister, when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor of roller-skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never again be able to summon him for assault by kicking-the fancy leg would not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and on the floor. And of course there would be endless jokes about what had been done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so forth: some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible. But Bill had his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that, although once or twice, when he was very low, he gave way to a little fretting to me, he never, I am convinced, let fall one querulous word in the presence of his wife. She sat by her husband's side, and when things were at their worst the two said naught. The wife numbly watched her Bill's face, turning now and then to glance at the activities of Little Bill with his engine, or to smile her thanks to the patients who sometimes came and gave the child pickaback rides, When I intruded, I knew I was interrupting the cummunings of a loving and happily married pair; and the "slangings" of each other which signalized Bill's recovery and his wife's relief did nothing to shake my certitude that, like many slum dwellers, they owned a mutual esteem which

other couples, of superior station, might envy.

Personally I have never known a Cockney patient who did not evoke affection; and, as a matter of curiosity, I have been asking a number of Sisters The Spectator.

whether they liked to have Cockneys in their wards. Without a single exception (and let me say that Sisters are both observant and critical), the answers have been enthusiastically in the affirmative.

Ward Muir.

In any discussion of the control of National Expenditure by the House of Commons one has to divide the subject into two parts, and to keep those parts distinct. There is, first, the effective control of expenditure before it is incurred-that is to say, a control of the policy by which the expenditure is dictated and, secondly, machinery which will ensure that money will be spent upon the objects for which it is voted, and for none other. If the House of Commons, through a specially constituted permanent committee, is to do the first of these things, we must revise our whole theory of so-called ministerial responsibility; if it is to do the second through the Department of the Comptroller and Auditor-General, the Public Accounts Committee, and any other Select Committee which may be set up for the purpose, we must abandon the war system of "token votes." We must go back to definite detailed estimates such as we had in the distant days of peace.

The debate in the House was instructive, not the least because it showed how completely the House of Commons has lost or abandoned its constitutional rights as the controlling financial authority. Major Godfrey Collins, representing a substantial group of members, who are gravely concerned at the daily piling up of expenses and the wide gaps yawning between rough estimates and rude facts, moved for the appointment of a committee of the House, "with power to review all national

expenditure, examine Ministers and officials, and to report to the House." Although Major Collins repudiated Mr. Bonar Law's reading of his motion -that before any money could be spent the committee was to give its sanction yet the power of control and of review seems to be inherent in the terms of the proposal. A committee which had powers to "review all national expenditure, examine Ministers and other officials, and to report to the House," would stand between the Cabinet which proposed expenditure and the House which sanctioned it, and upon its report the House might be expected to act. If the House did so act, and the Cabinet held that the policy which it desired to carry out was interfered with by the financial revision of the committee, then we should have the resignation of the Cabinet. The committee system suggested by Major Collins and his supports, is really the French system of Budget committees, which does involve the complete control of policy and of interference with it. It does not follow because Major Collins' proposed committee was inconsistent with the theory of Ministerial responsibility which has grown up with us, that therefore it was bad. On the contrary, it may be quite good and necessary if the House of Commons is to regain any effective control over expenditure and over policy. But one could scarcely expect a Chancellor of the Exchequer who had inherited the English system

to be in any particular hurry to accept the French one, and with it a material curtailment of his own powers.

There was a time when our system of Ministerial responsibility for expenditure-control by the whole Cabinet, under the watchful and jaundiced eye of the Treasury-had in it some reality. Down to the Chancellorship of Mr. Asquith the Treasury did keep a firm hand upon expenditure, and though the yearly Budgets expanded, there was some effective balance held between the claims of the various departments. The Cabinet as a whole, guided by the Treasury, did discharge the functions of a revising Budget committee. But in the spacious days of Mr. Lloyd George the Treasury became one of the greatest of spending departments, and since it asked for so much to run its own projects was gravely handicapped in putting the drag upon other departments' projects. There became a race between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the heads of other spending departments as to who should first get his fingers into the national money-box, and the Chancellor, profiting by the start given by his position, generally won. Mr. Churchill, at the Admiralty, ran Mr. Lloyd George a good second, which, as it turned out, was very fortunate indeed for the country when war broke out. Between 1908 and 1914 Cabinet responsibility for expenditure almost disappeared, and since the war nothing has taken its place. There is now no Cabinet in the old constitutional sense and no Treasury control. The Exchequer and Audit Department is, we are informed, hard at work daily checking current expenditure, but it has no control whatever over it. Each Ministerial department is a law unto itself in its demands for money, and no one knows, not even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the expenditure in any year or in any month is going to

were

be. Last year the estimates exceeded by a million pounds a day; this year they may be exceeded by as much, or more. No one can tell, and the manner in which the national finances are being allowed to drift, by a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is too busy with other matters to do anything but borrow and debase the currency by inflation, is a cause of serious anxiety to thoughtful observers.

While Mr. Bonar Law repudiated entirely the implied suggestion that Major Collins' proposed committee should be permitted to review the policy of the Government, which involved expenditure, he agreed that machinery should be set up which would satisfy the country, and the House of Commons, that everything possible was being done to secure economy. He offered the appointment of a Select Committee of the House for two purposes: (1) to consider whether additional control can be obtained and in what way it can best be obtained, as a permanent arrangement, and (2) to go into the departments, examine the methods of expenditure, and to make recommendations either to the House of Commons or to the departments. The suggestion of this Select Committee, he declared, was not one intended to shirk the problem, but was designed to ensure that we did, in practice, get value for the enormous sums which we are spending upon the war. The House accepted this suggestion of the Chancellor, and we may hope that, when the committee gets to work, it will at least give us some idea as to how we stand.

Mr. Bonar Law himself is, we are glad to note, going to devote himself more closely to the work of his most arduous department. Hitherto he has been Chancellor of the Exchequer, de facto Leader of the House of Commons, and a member of the War

The publication of “A Feast of Lanterns," in the Wisdom of the East Series (E. P. Dutton & Co.), adds to the debt of gratitude already due to L. Cranmer-Byng and his associates for introducing western readers to some of the finest and most representative products of Oriental. literature. The present volume contains translations from twenty or more Chinese poets, ranging from the seventh to the eighteenth century, rendered in musical and flowing English verse. As the translator explains in his Introduction, whoever would translate from the Chinese "must have soaked himself in the traditions of the Chinese masters, their reticence, their power of suggestion, their wonderful color-sense, and, above all, their affinity and identification with their subject." To an unusual degree, Mr. Cranmer-Byng exemplifies the principles which he defines, and it is a practically exhaustless storehouse upon which he draws, for the collected poems of the T'ang dynasty alone number 48,900.

In "The Air Man: His Conquests in Peace and in War" by Francis A. Collins (The Century Co.) American readers have for the first time a clear, compact and intensely interesting ac

count of the progress which has been made in aviation since the Wright brothers made their first experiments. At a time when the airplane disputes with the submarine the first place in modern machinery of war, and the United States is planning to spend six hundred million dollars in building airplanes and training 100,000 aviators, such a volume as the present is peculiarly welcome, and the chapters relating to air-fighting-most of all, perhaps, that on "The Chivalry of the Air," which describes the remarkable consideration shown by enemy aviators for each other in time of disaster-will be read with eager interest. But the earlier chapters on Learning to Fly, and on the joys of the the aerosportsman and explorer, and the possibilities of aerial transportation are scarcely less absorbing. Forty illustrations from photographs add to the value of the book.

Mary Fisher, whose "Journal of a Recluse" had so notable a success when published anonymously, several years ago, now appears as the author of a novel, "The Treloars." Its scene is laid on the Pacific Coast, and its principal characters are: Richard Treloar, a young newspaper man with ideals which San Francisco editors