allowed, and the night nurse, when she entered the kitchen, went into almost complete darkness. No sooner was she in the kitchen and fumbling for what she required than a faint noisethat of the cup being twitched by the cotton leading to the mischievous coster's bed-arose on the shelf, and convinced her that she was in the presence of a mouse. She retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and caused the trick to be detected.

The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and the early slumberhour which the hospital rules prescribe is not welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous musicits mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to the crime's perpetrator. The flustered nurse gropes her way down the ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting it. Half-an-hour after the ward has quieted down, the other gramophone (some wards own two) whirs off into impudent song-it also has been primed. Nurse is wiser on future occasions: she stows the gramophones, when she comes on duty, where no one can tamper with them. Even so, she may have her nerves preyed upon by eerie tinklings, impossible to locate in the darkness: these are caused by two

knives, hung from a nail fixed high up in the rafters. By jiggling a string, which is conducted over another rafter and down the wall to his pillow, the patient makes the knife-blades clash. Sometimes two strings, leading to different beds, complete this instrument of torture. After a determined search, nurse finds one string, and, having cut it, flatters herself that she has got the better of her enemies. Not a bit of it. She has scarcely settled in her chair again before the tinklings recommence. The second string is in action; and as she hunts about the ward for the source of the melody in the ceiling, muffled convulsions of mirth, from the dim rows of beds, furnish evidence that her naughty charges are not getting the repose which they require, and to ensure which is part of the purpose of her presence.

A nurse who happens to be unpopular never has these pranks played upon her. They are in the nature of a compliment. Nor do they occur in a ward where there is a patient seriously ill. It is impossible to imagine warhospital patients acting inconsiderately towards a distressed comrade. This observation renders all the more amusing the scandalized concern which I once beheld on the demure physiognomy of a visiting clergyman when he gathered the drift of certain allusions to a case on the Danger List.

The name of the Danger List explains itself. When a patient is put on the Danger List his relatives are sent for, and may be with him whether it is the visiting afternoon or not. (If they come from the provinces, they are presented with a railway pass, and, if poor, are allotted lodgings near the hospital, a grant being made to them from our Benevolent Fund.) For the information of the V.A.D.'s who answer visitors' questions in the Inquiry Bureau at the main entrance

to the hospital, a copy of the Danger List hangs there, and it is on record that an awestruck child, seeing this column of patients' names, and reading the heading, asked: "What does 'Danger List' mean? Does it mean that it's dangerous to go near them?" Now, in Ward C22 a patient, a Cockney, was on the Danger List-which circumstance availed nothing to depress his spirits. In spite of considerable pain, he poked fun at the prospect of his own imminent demise, and was himself the chief offender against the edict of quietness which "Sister" had issued for her ward. He would talk; and he would talk about undertakers, post-mortems, epitaphs, and the details of a military funeral. "That there top note of the 'Last Post' on the bugle doesn't 'arf sound proper," he said—a verdict which anyone who has heard this beautiful and inspired fanfare, which is the farewell above a soldier's grave, and which ends on a soaring treble, will endorse. "But," he went on, "if the bugler's 'ad a drop o' somethin' warm on the way to the cemetery, that there top note always reminds me of a 'iccup. An' if 'e 'iccups over me, I shall wanter spit in 'is eye, blimey if I won't." This persiflage had been going on for a couple of days, and getting to be more and more elaborate, and allusive, infecting the entire ward, so that the fact that the man was on the Danger List had become a kind of catchword amongst his fellows. Entered, in all innocence, the clergyman. ("The very bloke to put me up to all the tricks"-from the irreverent one.) At the same moment a walking patient, also a Cockney, who had been reading a newspaper, gave vent to a cry of feigned horror. "Boys!" he announced, "it says 'ere there's a shortage of timber!" Guffaws greeted this sally. Everyone saw the innuendo at once everyone except the clergyman,

and when he grasped the point, that Ol' Chum So-and-so was on the Danger List, and a shortage of timber was supposed to imply that he might be done out of a coffin, he was visibly shocked. Perhaps he did not understand Cockney humor. . . . However, one may add that our irrepressible friend, at the moment of writing, is off the Danger List (albeit only after a protracted struggle with the Enemy at whom he jeered) and is now contriving to be as funny about Life as he was funny-and fearless-about Death. I caught sight today of another Cockney acquaintance of mine, whose Christian name is Bill, trundling himself down the hospital drive in a wheeled chair. Perched on the knee of his one leg, with its feet planted on the stump which is all that is left of the other, was his child, aged four. Beside him walked his wife, resplendent in a magenta blouse and a hat with green and pink plumes. The trio looked happy, and Mrs. Bill's gala attire was symbolical. When Bill was in my ward he, too, was on the Danger List. I remember that when he first came to us, before his operation, and before he took a turn for the worse, his wife visited him in that same magenta blouse (or another equally startling), and that for some reason she and "Sister" did not quite hit it off, "had words," and subsequently for a period were not on speaking terms. Later, when Bill underwent his operation and began to sink, his bed was moved out on to the ward's veranda. Here his wife (now wearing a subdued blouse) sat beside him, hour after hour, while Little Bill, the child, towed a cheap wooden engine up and down the grass patch, oblivious to the ordeal through which his parents were passing. It was my business, as orderly, to intrude at intervals upon the scene on the veranda, to bring Bill such food as he was able to toler

ate. On the first occasion, after Bill's collapse, that I prepared to take him a cup of tea, Sister stopped me. "Don't forget to take tea, and some bread and butter, to that poor woman. She looks tired. And some milk for the child." "Very good, Sister." I cut bread and butter, and filled an extra mug of tea. "Orderly! What are you doing?" Sister had reappeared. And I was rebuked because I was going to offer Mrs. Bill her tea in a tin mug (the patients all have tin mugs) and had cut her bread and butter too thick. I must cut dainty slices of thin bread and butter, use Sister's own chinaware, and serve the whole spread on a tray with a cloth. All of which was typical of Sister, who from that day treated Bill's wife with true tenderness; and Bill's wife became one of Sister's most enthusiastic adorers. It came to pass, after a week of pitiful anxiety, that the Medical Officer pronounced Bill safe once more. "Bloke says I'm not goin' ter peg art," he told me. I congratulated him, and remarked that his wife would be thankful when he met her, on her arrival, with such splendid news. "I'll 'ave the larf of my Missus," said Bill. "W'en she comes, I shall tell 'er I've some serious noos for 'er, and she's ter send the kid darn on the grarse ter play. Then I'll pull a long fice and hask 'er ter bear up, and say I'm sorry for 'er, and she mustn't tike it too rough, and all that; and she 'as my sympathy in 'er diserpointment: she ain't ter get 'er widow's pension arter all!"

I believe that this program was carried through, more or less to the letter. Certain it is that I myself overheard another of Bill's grim pleasantries. He was explaining to Madame that they must apprentice their offspring to the engineering trade. "I wanter mike Lil' Bill a mowter chap, so's 'e can oil the ballbearings of me fancy leg wot I'm ter

The "fancy

get at Roehampton." leg" ended by being the favorite theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister, when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor of roller-skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never again be able to summon him for assault by kicking-the fancy leg would not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and on the floor. And of course there would be endless jokes about what had been done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so forth? some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible. But Bill had his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that, although once or twice, when he was very low, he gave way to a little fretting to me, he never, I am convinced, let fall one querulous word in the presence of his wife. She sat by her husband's side, and when things were at their worst the two said naught. The wife numbly watched her Bill's face, turning now and then to glance at the activities of Little Bill with his engine, or to smile her thanks to the patients who sometimes came and gave the child pickaback rides, When I intruded, I knew I was interrupting the cummunings of a loving and happily married pair; and the "slangings" of each other which signalized Bill's recovery and his wife's relief did nothing to shake my certitude that, like many slum dwellers, they owned a mutual esteem which

other couples, of superior station, might envy.

Personally I have never known a Cockney patient who did not evoke affection; and, as a matter of curiosity, I have been asking a number of Sisters The Spectator.

whether they liked to have Cockneys in their wards. Without a single exception (and let me say that Sisters are both observant and critical), the answers have been enthusiastically in the affirmative.

Ward Muir.

In any discussion of the control of National Expenditure by the House of Commons one has to divide the subject into two parts, and to keep those parts distinct. There is, first, the effective control of expenditure before it is incurred-that is to say, a control of the policy by which the expenditure is dictated and, secondly, machinery which will ensure that money will be spent upon the objects for which it is voted, and for none other. If the House of Commons, through a specially constituted permanent committee, is to do the first of these things, we must revise our whole theory of so-called ministerial responsibility; if it is to do the second through the Department of the Comptroller and Auditor-General, the Public Accounts Committee, and any other Select Committee which may be set up for the purpose, we must abandon the war system of "token votes." We must go back to definite detailed estimates such as we had in the distant days of peace.

The debate in the House was instructive, not the least because it showed how completely the House of Commons has lost or abandoned its constitutional rights as the controlling financial authority. Major Godfrey Collins, representing a substantial group of members, who are gravely concerned at the daily piling up of expenses and the wide gaps yawning between rough estimates and rude facts, moved for the appointment of a committee of the House, "with power to review all national

expenditure, examine Ministers and officials, and to report to the House." Although Major Collins repudiated Mr. Bonar Law's reading of his motion -that before any money could be spent the committee was to give its sanction-yet the power of control and of review seems to be inherent in the terms of the proposal. A committee which had powers to "review all national expenditure, examine Ministers and other officials, and to report to the House," would stand between the Cabinet which proposed expenditure and the House which sanctioned it, and upon its report the House might be expected to act. If the House did so act, and the Cabinet held that the policy which it desired to carry out was interfered with by the financial revision of the committee, then we should have the resignation of the Cabinet. The committee system suggested by Major Collins and his supports, is really the French system of Budget committees, which does involve the complete control of policy and of interference with it. It does not follow because Major Collins' proposed committee was inconsistent with the theory of Ministerial responsibility which has grown up with us, that therefore it was bad. On the contrary, it may be quite good and necessary if the House of Commons is to regain any effective control over expenditure and over policy. But one could scarcely expect a Chancellor of the Exchequer who had inherited the English system

to be in any particular hurry to accept the French one, and with it a material curtailment of his own powers.

There was a time when our system of Ministerial responsibility for expenditure-control by the whole Cabinet, under the watchful and jaundiced eye of the Treasury-had in it some reality. Down to the Chancellorship of Mr. Asquith the Treasury did keep a firm hand upon expenditure, and though the yearly Budgets expanded, there was some effective balance held between the claims of the various departments. The Cabinet as a whole, guided by the Treasury, did discharge the functions of a revising Budget committee. But in the spacious days of Mr. Lloyd George the Treasury became one of the greatest of spending departments, and since it asked for so much to run its own projects was gravely handicapped in putting the drag upon other departments' projects. There became a race between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the heads of other spending departments as to who should first get his fingers into the national money-box, and the Chancellor, profiting by the start given by his position, generally won. Mr. Churchill, at the Admiralty, ran Mr. Lloyd George a good second, which, as it turned out, was very fortunate indeed for the country when war broke out. Between 1908 and 1914 Cabinet responsibility for expenditure almost disappeared, and since the war nothing has taken its place. There is now no Cabinet in the old constitutional sense and no Treasury control. The Exchequer and Audit Department is, we are informed, hard at work daily checking current expenditure, but it has no control whatever over it. Each Ministerial department is a law unto itself in its demands for money, and no one knows, not even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the expenditure in any year or in any month is going to

secure

While Mr. Bonar Law repudiated entirely the implied suggestion that Major Collins' proposed committee should be permitted to review the policy of the Government, which involved expenditure, he agreed that machinery should be set up which would satisfy the country, and the House of Commons, that everything possible was being done to economy. He offered the appointment of a Select Committee of the House for two purposes: (1) to consider whether additional control can be obtained and in what way it can best be obtained, as a permanent arrangement, and (2) to go into the departments, examine the methods of expenditure, and to make recommendations either to the House of Commons or to the departments. The suggestion of this Select Committee, he declared, was not one intended to shirk the problem, but was designed to ensure that we did, in practice, get value for the enormous sums which we are spending upon the war. The House accepted this suggestion of the Chancellor, and we may hope that, when the committee gets to work, it will at least give us some idea as to how we stand.

Mr. Bonar Law himself is, we are glad to note, going to devote himself more closely to the work of his most arduous department. Hitherto he has been Chancellor of the Exchequer, de facto Leader of the House of Commons, and a member of the War