Sketches in the House: The Story of a Memorable Session (1893)O'Connor, T. P. (Thomas Power)
History
Sketches in the House: The Story of a Memorable Session (1893)
O'Connor, T. P. (Thomas Power)
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons; Home rule -- Ireland
Obstruction is a thing rather of temperament than intellect. The
occurrences of the early weeks of the Session of 1893 fully confirm this
view. The Tory party and the Unionists vowed in their organs, and proved
by their conduct in the House, that they determined to try and prevent,
by obstruction, the second reading of the Home Rule Bill being taken
before Easter. With this design they came down to the House every
evening with a plan of attack. The consequences were somewhat serious to
some members of the House. I saw young gentlemen suddenly developing
activity whom I had beheld in the House for many years in succession
without ever suspecting in them either the power or the desire to take
any part in Parliamentary debate. The same gentlemen now rushed about
with a hurried, preoccupied, and, above all, a self-conscious air that
had its disgusting but also its very amusing side. For instance, Mr.
Bromley-Davenport, during the six years of Tory Government, never spoke,
and rarely even made his appearance in the House of Commons. His voice
was as strange to the assembly as though he had never belonged to it.
But this Session he is constantly getting up in his seat, and he rushes
through the lobbies with the cyclonic movement of a youth bearing on
juvenile shoulders a weight too heavy to bear. Mr. Bartley is about as
dull a fellow as ever bored a House of Commons, and in the last
Parliament even his own friends found him a trial and a nuisance. He has
suddenly taken to making the House of Commons familiar with his voice at
every sitting. Lord Cranborne has been remarkable for the boorishness
and impertinence of his manners--or, perhaps, to be more accurate, want
of manners. I have seen him interrupting Mr. Gladstone in the most
impudent way with a face you would like to slap, and his hands deep down
in the depths of his pockets. Lord Cranborne is now nightly in evidence,
and leads the chorus of jeers and cheers by which the more brutal of the
Tory youth signalize the opening of the new style of Parliamentary
warfare.
[Sidenote: Jimmy.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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