Look at him as he stands at the box. You can see that he has been bred into almost impudent self-confidence, by those coercion tribunals, in which the best men of Ireland lay at the mercy of a creature like Mr. Balfour and the meaner creatures who were ready to do Mr. Balfour's work. Mr. Carson, not a year in the House, places his hands on the box, then on his hips, with all the airs of a man who had been in Parliament for a lifetime--attacks Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, Mr. Justice Mathew--three of the highest-minded and ablest men of their time--as though he were at Petty Sessions, with Mr. Cecil Roche dispensing justice. It is an odious sight. It makes even Englishmen shudder. But it has its uses. It throws on to the floor of the House of Commons with all the illumination of those great times, the abysses and passions and sinister figures in Ireland's moving tragedy. CHAPTER VII. A FORTNIGHT OF QUIET WORK. [Sidenote: Dulness.] The House did very good work during the last fortnight in March. This has a corollary more satisfactory to the public than to the journalist; for, whenever business is progressing, it invariably means that the proceedings have been extremely dull. It is a well-known phenomenon of the House of Commons, that the moment there is a chance of anything like a personal scene--though the encounter be of the smallest possible moment and affect nothing beyond two personalities of no particular importance--it is well known that whenever such scene is promised, the benches of the House of Commons prove too small for the huge crowds that rush to them from all parts. Mr. Fowler introduced one of the most revolutionary measures ever brought into the House of Commons--revolutionary I mean, of course, in the good sense--and yet he delivered his new gospel of emancipation to a House that at no period was in the least crowded, and that was never excited. Happy is the country that has no annals, fruitful is the Parliament that has no scenes. [Sidenote: Uganda again.]