As the new Member explores the corridors and rooms, he will see the walls hung with portraits of all the Prime Ministers, all the Speakers, and a long line of Chancellors of the Exchequer, besides those of other distinguished politicians who never attained to office. Apart from their innate interest as counterfeit presentments of great statesmen, in mezzotints or line engravings, these pictures should stimulate the ambition of the new Member to make a name for himself. There is one way in which the new Member may employ his leisure at Westminster with profit to the tax-payer. That is to follow the excellent example set by Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist, who sat in Parliament for a number of years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Writing in his autobiography, _A Few Footprints_, he says: I would write the words “Waste not, want not” over the doors of parliament houses, palaces, cottages, workshops and kitchens; and if the spirit and meaning of the motto were put in practice the world would spin through space with a double joy. While a Member of Parliament I always, when opportunity offered, lowered the gas within reach that was burning to waste. I did so for a double reason—to prevent waste and to preserve the purity of the air of the House; but I never saw or heard of any other Member or servant of the House doing a similar thing. “True political economy,” Edwards adds, “is in reality true moral economy. I hate waste anywhere and everywhere.” CHAPTER VIII ASSEMBLING OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT 1