What emotions have there found vent! These walls, sheathed in oak, have echoed to the voices of the great Parliamentarians of three reigns—Victoria, Edward and George—Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Cobden, Disraeli, Bright, Parnell, Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Chamberlain, Balfour, Asquith, John Redmond, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Lord Hugh Cecil—laying down beneficent truths or pernicious fallacies. Think of the groans of despair and the shouts of exultation these forcible and vibrating personages have aroused! With what volumes of sound, rising from the hearts of men and expressive of every phase of human feeling—joy and grief, pathos and humour, pity and contempt, exasperation and rage—has the Chamber reverberated. Fine things have been said here, and mean things. Great ideas have been expressed by great men who worthily served them. The storms of passion, evoked by the clash between opposing reason and thought in the political controversies that have been fought out there at close quarters, have made the atmosphere of the House of Commons humid and warm with emotion, and one with a mind at all sympathetically attuned to the spirit of places cannot be there very long before the effluence that emanates from these panelled walls is thrilling him through and through. Yet there are objects within the Chamber, made sacred almost by history and tradition, which at once catch the eye. The visitor will notice with becoming awe the high-canopied Chair, surmounted by an oak carving of the Royal Arms, and will look with fitting reverence on Mr. Speaker in his big grey wig and black silk gown. At the head of the Table, beneath the Speaker, sits the Clerk of the House and the two assistant clerks, all in the gowns and short wigs of barristers-at-law, busily discharging their multifarious duties, such as sub-editing papers handed in by Members containing questions to be addressed to Ministers, amendments to be moved to Bills, and notices of motions to be proposed should opportunity offer, and also taking minutes of the proceedings for the Journals of the House. The Table is indeed a “substantial piece of furniture,” as Disraeli once described it when he spoke of his satisfaction that it lay between him and Gladstone, who had just concluded a fierce declamatory attack. It contains pens, ink and stationery for the use of Members, volumes of the Standing Orders and other works of reference. At the end of the Table, on either side, are two brass-bound oaken boxes. These are the famous “dispatch-boxes” on which Ministers and ex-Ministers lay their notes when addressing the House, and following the traditional example of great statesmen in the past, thump to give emphasis to an argument or, metaphorically, to bash the head of an opponent.