likely to say something worth hearing, not forgetting to call on a new man who rises to make his maiden speech. By seizing on the dull hours, when the House is not full, an undistinguished member can often get his chance. Still, there are many men who sit impatiently with what they believe to be effective little speeches ready to be fired off upon an appreciative public, and see their chance slipping away.[297:1] Perhaps they are bores, but on them the closure falls as a blight, and they raise the bitter cry of the curtailment of the rights of private members. [Sidenote: Closure at the End of a Sitting.] The closure can be moved at any time, even when a member is speaking, but perhaps its most effective use is at the close of the sitting. A standing order adopted in 1888 provides[297:2] that when the hour arrives for the cessation of debate--technically known as the interruption of business,--the closure may be moved upon the main question under consideration, with all others dependent upon it. This gives an opportunity of finishing a bit of work without appearing to cut off discussion arbitrarily, and it is especially valuable now that the new rules of 1902 have established on four days of the week[297:3] two regular sittings with an interruption at the end of each. [Sidenote: The Guillotine.] While the closure is effective in bringing to an end debate on a single question, or in getting past some one particularly difficult point in the career of a bill, it is quite inadequate for passing a great, complicated government measure that provokes relentless opposition. Here it is as useless as the sword of Hercules against the Hydra. Amendments bristle by the score at every clause, and spring up faster than they can be cut off. The motion that certain words "stand part of a clause," or that a "clause stand part of the bill," was intended to work like the hero's hot iron, because if the motion is adopted no amendment can afterward be moved to that word or that clause. But in practice such motions cannot be used ruthlessly. The government discovered the insufficiency of the closure under the Standing Order of 1887, during the debates on the very bill whose enactment it had been adopted to secure, and resorted to a procedure which had already been used by Mr. Gladstone on a couple of Irish coercion bills in 1881.[298:1] Five days had been consumed on the first reading of the Irish Crimes Act of 1887, seven on the second reading, and fifteen days more had been spent in Committee of the Whole on four out of the twenty clauses of the bill; when the government moved that at ten o'clock on June 17, being the end of the next week, the Chairman should, without further debate, put all questions necessary to bring the committee stage to an end.[298:2] The motion was adopted, and from its trenchant operation the process was known as the "guillotine." It served its purpose, but from the point of