A SLOW END.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13614, 24 December 1909, Page 8

A SLOW END.

Parliament is dying hard, and the h.-ipe expressed by Sir Joseph Ward the other day, that Mr Massey and the other Northern members would eat their Christmas dinners in their own hemes is not at all likely to he realised. Never before has Parliament sat so close to Christmas Day. The nearest approach to the state of things this year was in 1887, the first session of Sir Harry Atkinson's last Ministry, when Parliament, which had met on October 6th, prorogued' on December 23rd. In 1897, after Mr Seddon's return from the Diamond Jubilee, Parliament sat on until December 22nd. It has remained for Sir Joseph Ward to keep members at work until Christmas Eve. The spectacle presented by the House during the last week or two is nothing short of a scandal to the Dominion and a reproach to the Government. Visitors to the Chamber during this period and particularly last night, even the Speaker slept in his chair, would see the process of "legislation by exhaustion" going on under their eyes. The members are literally exhausted by continued long sittings in a polluted atmosphere, and their weariness and discomfort are intensified by .he heat of the weather. They are too tired to work—too weary, one would fancy, to think, for day after day they have sat from ten o'clook in the morning until well on into the smell hours of the next day. Legislation, under such conditions, becomes merely farcical. No man can properly do work such as the members are called upon to do, when body and brain are alike exhausted, and if there is any comfort to be extracted from so pitiable a spectacle as the House has lately presented, it is the thought that it will never be repeated. The methods of Parliament must be brought into accord'anee with ordinary oommon-sense, and the first thing to be done is for the Government to reform its own methods.