Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/185

 business and thwart the Government? I pointed out that they were entitled to move a gentleman into the chair for that occasion only, and without any previous nomination or any obligation to continue him in the office, which was immediately done, and the public business proceeded. The duty of a member of the House is sufficiently onerous without being driven in self-defence to review cases like these. I had hardly time to look hastily into the facts that day. At ten o'clock in the morning, I was sitting in a committee on the completion of Parliament House; at twelve o'clock I was sitting in a committee on the Postal System; at two o'clock in a committee on Standing Orders; at half-past three in the committee of Elections and Qualifications, and the House met at four, and sat till seven o'clock, leaving barely time to read the Parliamentary papers when I went home."

Looking back at these transactions through the serener light of experience, I cannot but admit that I was sometimes too peremptory and brusque in these controversies. I had taken a fierce part against the Administration at the General Election, and it was not easy for them to look on me with a friendly eye, a relation which ought to have suggested more courtesy and forbearance on my part. In the Parliamentary Buildings Committee, to which I have alluded, the Commissioner of Public Works produced his plan for the new Parliament Houses. I pointed out several errors in it, and one most serious one; in the House of Commons no one can enter or leave except by a single porch where the door-keeper is on duty, but the Chamber itself may be entered from the lobbies at various points. In the Victorian House it was proposed to have three entrances, and the Chamber itself was reached by folding doors on each side through which a carriage might be driven. With a little more suavity on my part these errors would no doubt have been amended, but party spirit was now awake, and the supporters of the Government on the committee thought it their duty to insist on the unamended plan. The result was that the two clumsy and useless entrances to the Chamber were locked up at my instance a few weeks after the House was occupied, and in five-and-twenty years after I never once saw them opened.