When all the intelligent world was waiting for war news, a Birmingham paper had a “Space for Special News” in which football results were printed first and the war news second! The absurd folly and incongruity of this sort of thing never seems to strike the syndicated Press. The effect of it on the minds of our French and other Allies is too humiliating to be written. It might draw forth a letter from Snooks, if only Snooks’s opinion carried weight. But it doesn’t. The greatest “opinion” that could be imagined, even that of Plato or Shakespeare, doesn’t much matter to any one. It is not a time for individual criticism; it is only time for inspiration and action. A strong thought is always silent; it resolves itself into deeds rather than words. There has been altogether too much talk during the progress of the war; too many “Snookses” in too many newspapers. Snooks has even cropped up in the House of Lords, to say nothing of the House of Commons. And it should be borne in mind that Snooks _does_ nothing; he is not in the smallest degree useful to his country; he merely stands, like an old washerwoman leaning over her tub, and talks. He talks to any one who is idle and stupid enough to listen. He finds out all sorts of “queer things” about General this or Colonel that, and for women he has scarcely a good word to say. “_They’re_ no use!” he declares contemptuously. “All their sick nursing and sewing was done just for sheer man-trapping! Show them some new hats and they’d forget all about their patients!” When this heresy is indignantly refuted, he snaps his mouth in a firm, hard line, as though it were a steel box. “I’d bet you a hundred pounds,” he says, “that if it were women who were wounded in the war instead of men, you’d hardly find one of their own sex to wait upon them! They love fussing round a man! It’s a perfect godsend to them, especially the old maids! There’s an excitement about it; a sort of morbid interest! They delight in washing a Tommy’s face and brushing his hair. If it were one of themselves they’d scrub the face till the skin was ruined and brush the hair the wrong way! _I_ know ’em, I tell you! You give a pretty woman who is ill to an ugly woman who is well, to be nursed, and she’ll ‘nurse’ her! You’ll see what she’ll make of her in twenty-four hours! I tell you I take a calm, common-sense view of all this sort of bunkum!” Unfortunately for Snooks, his “calm, common-sense view” does not appeal to the world in general. It does not even impress the Premier, who, up to the present, has failed to consult Snooks respecting the “conduct of the war,” or to offer him a “portfolio.” He longs to be consulted. He yearns to be displayed on the headlines of the halfpenny dailies or Sunday pictorials in flamboyant beauty, or as,-- “MR. SNOOKS SPEAKS OUT”; or “THE GREAT MESSAGE OF MR. SNOOKS.”