The day for the last Council meeting had arrived, the last before the closing of that long session of Parliament which, beginning in February, had run on at intervals into November. Then only a brief month, and the winter session with the new Government program would open. It was to this Council that the Cabinet's latest scheme for squeezing the Bishops out of the Constitution was to be presented; and for that to be possible, since he was so great a stickler for constitutional propriety, the King's consent had been necessary. A few days before, therefore, the Prime Minister had once more formally submitted the question; and the King had given his leave. "Produce what you like, Mr. Premier; I will no longer stand in your way." The brief autumn session was closing with a clangor of agitation which had not been heard in Jingalo for half a century at least. Everybody outside the machinery of party was profoundly dissatisfied with the parliamentary system and with all its doings and undoings; and this general dissatisfaction was being quaintly expressed by a refusal to let Parliament rise. The Women Chartists were battering at its closed doors; and from peep-holes and other points of vantage within, smiling and indifferent legislators saw those bruised bodies, those strangely obsessed minds, those indomitable spirits carried off to magisterial lack of judgment and to prison. With a good deal more concern they saw strikes breaking out in their own constituencies, and riot becoming the normal accompaniment of the industrial demand for better conditions. Three strike leaders were in prison under sentence of death for having killed by purposeful accident a few over-zealous policemen; and from great working centers over a hundred miles away thousands of men were marching to demand remittance of the death penalty. The Government was, in consequence, in a great hurry to get the session closed. It was an undignified scramble of the red-tape worms of various departments to be well out of the way before those slow, heavily shod feet of labor arrived upon the scene. At every town they came to they stopped, made inflammatory speeches, gathered funds and adherents, and then, a swelled body of discontent, marched stolidly on toward the capital; and this not from one point alone but from half-a-dozen at once. If there was not to be conflict between the police and these converging forces, appeasement of some sort must be devised, or official vacuum must be there to meet them. And behind all this was the ministerial fear that, if they were not quick about it, it would be impossible to close Parliament with due ceremony. The Lord High Functionary had put it bluntly to the Prime Minister. "If those men get here we can't have out the piebald ponies and the state coach; they wouldn't stand it."