increasing the chances of a Bill by twenty or thirty fold. Suppose they had ten Bills or motions they desired to bring forward. They usually had more, but ten is sufficient to contemplate. These were arranged in accordance with their claim to priority. Every member of the party wrote his name down in the ballot-book, thus securing an individual chance at the ballot. Whilst the ballot was in progress, each had in his hand a list of the Bills in their order of priority. The member whose name was first called by the Speaker gave notice of the most urgent Bill, the second and third taking the next favourable positions, and so on to the end.
It will be seen that, supposing fifty or sixty members thus combined, their pet Bill would have fifty or sixty chances to one against the hapless private member with his solitary voice. The secret was long kept, and the Irish members carried everything before them at the ballot. Now the murder is out, and there are almost as many syndicates as there are private Bills. All can grow the flower now, for all have got the seed. But it naturally follows that competition is practically again made even. The advantage to be derived from the syndicate system has appreciably decreased, whilst its practice immeasurably lengthens the process of balloting.
LOUIS JENNINGS. Mr. Louis Jennings, though he sat on the same side of the House as Sir Walter Barttelot, and within a week or two of his neighbour's departure likewise answered to the old Lobby cry, "Who goes home?" was of a different type of Conservative, was a man of literary training, generous culture, and wide knowledge of the world, and made his fame and fortune long before he entered the House of Commons. It was the late Mr. Delane whose quick eye discovered his journalistic ability, and gave him his first commission on the Times. He visited America in the service of that journal, and being there remained to take up the editorship of the New York Times, making himself and his journal famous by his successful tilting against what, up to his appearance in the list, had been the invincible Tweed conspiracy. He edited the "Croker Papers," and wrote a "study" of Mr. Gladstone—a bitterly clever book, to which the Premier magnanimously referred in the generous tribute he took occasion to pay to the memory of the late member for Stockport.
Mr. Louis Jennings.
Upon these two books Mr. Jennings's literary fame in this country chiefly rests. It would stand much higher if there were wider knowledge of another couple of volumes he wrote just before he threw himself into the turmoil of Parliamentary life. One is called "Field Paths and Green Lanes"; the other "Rambles Among the Hills." Both were published by Mr. Murray, and are now, I believe, out of print. They are well worth reproducing, supplying some of the most charming writing I know, full of shrewd observation, humorous fancy, and a deep, abiding sympathy with all that is beautiful in Nature. I thought I knew Louis Jennings pretty intimately in Parliamentary and social life, but I found a new man hidden in these pages—a beautiful, sunny nature, obscured in the ordinary relations of life by a somewhat brusque manner, and in these last eighteen months soured and cramped by a cruel disease. Jennings knew and loved the country as Gilbert White knew and loved Selborne. Now
The circuit of the summer hills
Is, that his grave is green.
His Parliamentary career was checked, and, as it turned out, finally destroyed, by an untoward incident. After Lord Randolph Churchill threw up the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and assumed a position of independence on a back bench, he found an able lieutenant in his old friend Louis Jennings. At that time Lord Randolph was feared on the Treasury Bench as much as he was hated. For a Conservative member to associate himself with him was to be ostracised by the official Conservatives. A man of Mr. Jennings's position and Parliamentary ability was worth buying off, and it was brought to his
