In Committee especially the Bill met with stout opposition. The men of our front bench with Mr. Balfour and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach to lead them and such doughty champions as Mr. Walter Long and Mr. Chaplin ready at any moment to spring to arms, fought with great determination. Mr. Goschen was less than half-hearted. But behind the front bench were Mr. Hanbury, Mr. Byrne, afterwards a judge, and Mr. Bowles. Byrne was a famous lawyer and fighter of inestimable value, a standing menace to the Bill. Bowles who in his early days had had the advantage of sound financial training in the legacy department of Somerset House, had by sheer hard work and talent rapidly made himself a man of note in the House, to be enhanced later by the marked ability which he showed on the Public Accounts Committee. That inexorable coiner of happy nick-names, Toby M.P., had in consequence of a speech on naval affairs—the speech of a seaman full of technical knowledge—dubbed him “Captain Cuttle,” and Mr. Punch’s academicians from that time forth made him famous in that character, by representing him clad in a reefer and tarpaulin hat, with a hook where he should have had a hand. The joke was so exquisitely comic that it laid hold of the public, and so well was he known by the hook assigned to him by Toby M.P., that on one occasion when he was speaking some stranger who was told that he was Mr. Bowles indignantly denied the possibility, inasmuch as he had the full complement of hands, and no hook. Well, “the Cap’en,” as Toby called him, was the Chancellor’s most formidable foe, not only on account of his financial ability, but because by most accurate historical, legal and constitutional study he had made himself master not only of the complicated forms of the House but also of the facts and precedents which had given rise to those forms. That knowledge is one of the deadliest weapons which a Parliamentarian can wield. It is a study which is too much neglected, because it is one which needs the greatest industry, the most patient research. To most men it would seem intolerably dull; but it has its reward. It is not too much to say that most of the mistakes that have been made in recent years—some of them almost criminal—would have been impossible had members realized how they were flying in the face of the laws of their own august institution.