Sometimes a common phrase will be given a new meaning. Thus, the mass of legislation is strictly local in its character. Over a thousand bills come up for consideration in the course of a session, but a very few of which affect the interests of the State at large. The latter and the more important private bills are, or ought to be, carefully studied by each member; but it is a physical impossibility for any one man to examine the countless local bills of small importance. For these we have to trust to the member for the district affected, and when one comes up the response to any inquiry about it is usually, “Oh, it’s a local bill, affecting so-and-so’s district; he is responsible for it.” By degrees, some of the members get to use “local” in the sense of unimportant, and a few of the assemblymen of doubtful honesty gradually come to regard it as meaning a bill of no pecuniary interest to themselves. There was a smug little rascal in one of the last legislatures, who might have come out of one of Lever’s novels. He was undoubtedly a bad case, but had a genuine sense of humor, and his “bulls” made him the delight of the house. One day I came in late, just as a bill was being voted on, and meeting my friend, hailed him, “Hello, Pat, what’s up? what’s this they’re voting on?” to which Pat replied, with contemptuous indifference to the subject, but with a sly twinkle in his eye, “Oh, some unimportant measure, sorr; some local bill or other--_a constitutional amendment_!” The old Dublin Parliament never listened to a better specimen of a bull than was contained in the speech of a very genial and pleasant friend of mine, a really finished orator, who, in the excitement attendant upon receiving Governor Cleveland’s message vetoing the five-cent-fare bill, uttered the following sentence: “Mr. Speaker, I recognize the hand that crops out in that veto; _I have heard it before_!” One member rather astonished us one day by his use of the word “shibboleth.” He had evidently concluded that this was merely a more elegant synonym of the good old word shillalah, and in reproving a colleague for opposing a bill to increase the salaries of public laborers, he said, very impressively, “The throuble wid the young man is, that he uses the wurrd economy as a shibboleth, wherewith to strike the working man.” Afterwards he changed the metaphor, and spoke of a number of us as using the word “reform” as a shibboleth, behind which to cloak our evil intentions.