"Mr. Herbert Samuel asked if the Government would give an undertaking that nothing would be done to expend public money in this connection before the House had had the opportunity of discussing the question?"--_Provincial Paper._ Fie, fie, Mr. SAMUEL. * * * * * "It is the new magistrates who have broken the ice, and the supporters of both camps are curiously watching to see if they will now find themselves in hot water."--_Liverpool Echo._ We thought this sort of thing only happened in the geyser-region. * * * * * "Home offered delicate person on small farm; partner pig, poultry, dairy."--_Observer._ This ought to cure any delicacy he might start with. * * * * * TO LORD RHONDDA. DEAR LORD RHONDDA,--When you were an unassuming undergraduate at Caius College, spending your leisure-time in an eight-or a pair-oar, and stirring up the muddy shallows of the Cam, as you did to some purpose, I cannot believe that any premonitions of the heights of celebrity to which you would some day attain disturbed your mind. And yet here you are, a survivor from the foul and murderous shattering of the _Lusitania_, a coal-owner, a member of the Government, a peer, and the Food-Controller of a whole nation at war. Your predecessor, Lord DEVONPORT, had no very happy experience of the post you now hold, and I can well understand that his life during his tenure of it cannot have been a pleasant one. Every crank with an infallible recipe for catching sunbeams in cucumber-frames and turning them into potatoes, or whatever might be the fashionable food at the moment; every grumbler who imagined that every rise in prices must be entirely due to the malignity of men and not to the scarcity of the article; every politician with a grudge to satisfy or an axe to grind--all these pounced upon Lord DEVONPORT as a victim made ready to their hands, and gave him a time which can only be described as a very bad one. Add to this the mistakes almost necessarily made by an office which was entirely new and dealt with unexampled conditions, and it is not on the whole surprising that difficulties were encountered and that the right way for overcoming them was not always taken. Indeed there was or there seemed to be at one time a lively controversy between Lord DEVONPORT and Mr. PROTHERO about the true meaning of the words _maximum_ and _minimum_ as applied to prices, and we were left to infer that these Latin monsters are virtually indistinguishable from one another.