“The haste of the Fisher Government to do things lately moved Alfred Deakin to describe its proceeding as ‘quick-lunch legislation.’ Poor old Alfred’s variety was ‘fasting man’ or ‘dry-crust legislation.’ You sat down at the table and looked at Alfred’s political bill-of-fare. In about three years a dead waiter came, and you ordered chops. The waiter departed slowly in a state of decay, and fell into dust before he reached the door. Then you stayed around, through geological periods, till Judgment Day, and, looking down from the battlements of heaven, you saw Alfred’s cook still chasing the sheep through perdition. Truly there was no quick lunch about the Deakin methods! In his restaurant the dropped soup took six months to reach the floor, and, as likely as not, you saw Alexander the Great at the next table, for time didn’t matter there.” One politician who reached the limit in the matter of political amenities, and who has died very recently, was Mr. J. H. Graves. The abuse, the satire, and the damning with faint praise, the awful disclosures, and the still more awful insinuations, that Mr. Graves indulged in, were a perfect nightmare to the House of his day, all the more to be dreaded from the fact that he never spoke at random, that all his shafts were at once winged and barbed by truth, and their course directed by a sure and certain knowledge of the tenderest portion of his writhing victim’s conscience. People said, and, I believe, with truth, that J. H. Graves kept a carefully compiled Doomsday Book, containing the history of every member of the House, with every possible detail of his every mistake and misdemeanour, and all the mistakes and misdemeanours, the scandals and family skeletons, of his progenitors. A speaker in the House cannot be summoned for libel; all that can happen is that he should be called upon to apologize for anything particularly insulting—and Mr. Graves was ready to apologize with cheerful alacrity. There was always plenty more in that fatal book. It is said that Mr. J. L. Purves, by whose death the Australian Bar has lately lost one of its most brilliant members, once got hold of the original book and burnt it; and that, though another was begun, it was so much less voluminous and comprehensive, members ceased, from that time onwards to feel cold shivers running down their backs when Graves’s glance fell upon them; and so much of his power was lost, though in a dispute with another man, who came from the same county as himself, this second book was actually produced in proof of its existence.