It is hard to say whether the Peers were convinced.
Simultaneously in the House of Commons the Prime Minister was engaged in
the same task, but with greater success. Mr. Lloyd George has no equal in
the art of persuading an audience to share his faith in himself. How far
our military chiefs approved the recent decision of the Versailles
Conference is not known. But everyone applauds the patriotic
self-effacement of Sir William Robertson in silently accepting the Eastern
Command at home.
In Parliament the question of food has been discussed in both Houses with
the greatest gusto. Throughout the country it is the chief topic of
conversation.
[Illustration: SECRET DIPLOMACY
WIFE: "George, there are two strange men digging up the garden."
GEORGE: "It's all right, dear. A brainy idea of mine to get the garden dug
up. I wrote an anonymous letter to the Food Controller and told him there
was a large box of food buried there."
WIFE: "Heavens! But there _is_!"]
To the ordinary queues we now have to add processions of conscientious
disgorgers patriotically evading prosecution. The problem "Is tea a food or
is it not?" convulses our Courts, and the axioms of Euclid call for
revision as follows:
"Parallel lines are those which in a queue, if only produced far enough,
never mean meat."
"If there be two queues outside two different butchers' shops, and the
length and the breadth of one queue be equal to the length and breadth of
the other queue, each to each, but the supplies in one shop are greater
than the supplies in the other shop, then the persons in the one queue will
get more meat than those in the other queue, which is absurd, and Rhondda
ought to see about it.
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