Eight of us travel up to town every morning by the Great Suburban Railway. I have no politics. Gibbs is a Unionist Free Trader. Three of the others are Radicals and three Unionists. On one side of the compartment are ranged _The Daily Mail_, _The Daily Express_ and _The Daily Telegraph_. Boldly confronting them are two _Daily Chronicles_ and a _Daily News_. Gibbs contents himself with a _Daily Graphic_, while I choose every day the paper with the least sensational placard. You can imagine what the journeys are like. Filmer will put down his _Daily Express_ and say with feeling, "If I could only get that infernal Welsher by the throat." Then Rodgers will lay down his _Daily News_ and sneer, "What has aggravated the toadies of the Dukes to-day?" In a moment the battle is in full swing. Bennett breaks in with assertions that peace and unity will never prevail till the Cabinet has been hanged. Chalmers makes a mild proposal for the imprisonment of the Armament Ring which is gnawing at the country's vitals. And when there has been a by-election and both sides claim the moral victory I have no doubt that the men in signal-boxes think that murder is taking place in our carriage. However, one day Filmer made a reference to Marconi speculations which caused Rodgers to shake the dust from his feet (an easy thing on the Great Suburban line) and leave the compartment at the next station. Then Chalmers and Simcox bore down on Filmer with statistics about our booming trade. When we reached the next station, Filmer darted out of the compartment, declining to travel any longer with a set of miserable Cobdenite Little Englanders. I was horrified--not at the absence of Rodgers and Filmer, which could have been endured--but at the idea that the gaps they left in the carriage might be tilled up by even worse persons than politicians. Suppose golfers took their places. On one occasion, when Gibbs had influenza, an intruder had described to us the fixing of a new carburettor to his car. Then the great idea came to me--the formation of the Society. The next morning I went up to Filmer and Rodgers as they stood apart from us and each other on the platform and said, "Come to the others for a moment. They want to apologise to you." They didn't, but sometimes one has to choose between the cause of peace and that of truth. "Gentlemen," I said, "I have noticed this. Nearly all our little controversies begin in one way. Somebody says, 'I call a spade a spade and BONAR LAW (or LLOYD GEORGE) a lying, treacherous scoundrel.' I propose that we form ourselves into the Society for Not Calling a Spade a Spade." "What do you propose to call it? 'A Royal'?" This from Gibbs, who is a master of auction bridge.