formed, there are at least eight ministerial appointments, one of them a principal sec retaryship of State, which must go to the lawyers : and of the patronage which falls to an administration, the more valuable part must of necessity go to the lawyers, and by long usage to lawyers who are of the House of Commons. The majority of the prizes in English political life fall to the lawyers, and if the grounds for the protest of the session of 1898 are as stated, the prizes fall to the lawyers for less public service than at any time in the history of the House of Com mons. It is true that constituencies nowadays are more demanding than ever, and that lawyers, no more than other members of the House of Commons, dare neglect the calls which their constituencies make on their time. But while this is so, there is, I think, no member of Parliament now prom
inent at the bar who has ever had to curtail a speech to a jury, because the sergeant- atarms was at his elbow, commanding his im mediate presence in the House of Commons. Off-hand I cannot say until what period, later than the Reform Act of 1832, these visits of the sergeant-at-arms with the mace to the courts were continued. It is safe to assume that the sergeant and the mace have not been seen in the courts on the hunt for delinquent lawyer members since 1883, when the judges moved to the Palace of Justice in the Strand, two miles away from Westminster Hall. The attractions of the House of Commons to members of the bar must also have become greater since the Reform Act of 1832; for in the first House of Commons chosen after the Reform Act, there were seventy-one lawyers; while in the House of Commons, elected in 1895, there were one hundred and thirty-one.
