choice, you err,"

Just hand her to the other bloke—

That's what they did with Marie Löhr.

YET ONE MORE PLAN FOR IRELAND.

Feeling rather lonely because almost everybody had entered for the great Irish Problem Competition in the morning and evening press except myself, I sat down and wrote the following solution, which I posted immediately to the Editors of The Times and of The Westminster Gazette:—

"Sir"—I began indignantly, for I noticed all the best competitors begin like that. In these Bolshevistic days I should have preferred of course to have started off with "Comrade" or "Brother," or even, since I was writing from the heart of the country, have opened with "Eh bor," as people do in dialect novels, but, fearing I might be disqualified, I began, as I say, "Sir," and went on, much as the other statesmen did:—

"In all the lengthy annals of this Government, vacillation between weakness and tyranny has never proved so disastrous as it is proving in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. Out of all this welter and confusion two salient facts are seen to emerge:—

"(1) No two Englishmen are agreed upon a settlement that will at the same time satisfy the just aspirations of Ireland and preserve the integrity of the British Empire.

"(2) No two Irishmen are either.

"At the same time the number of sane and carefully considered plans for the government of Ireland was never so great as it is to-day. When will our incompetent Cabinet perceive that the only way of warding off the stain of perfidy which dogs their footsteps and threatens to overwhelm them is to make use of all these plans? I put aside for the moment the most violent proposals of the extremists on either side, such as that of the annexation of England by the Sinn Fein Empire and that of the deportation of all Irishmen to the Andaman Islands and the re-colonisation of the country with correspondents to the daily press; but between these two extremes there surely lie innumerable solutions which both can and ought to be employed. I will only name here a few of them:—

"And there are infinite shades and variations of all these.

"Every one of the policies I have named, and as many more as possible, should now be adopted at once, one after the other, I suggest, for quarterly periods and in alphabetical order.

"But let there be no mistake. They must be strictly enforced. It must be impossible for Irishmen to come to England in the future and say to her, as they have so often said in the past, 'You made us promises which, when we leant on them, proved a broken reed and turned to dust and ashes in our mouths.'

"One of the bitterest reproaches that is hurled, and hurled justly, at British maladministration is that through all the seeming variations of misgovernment there has been in fact no change. Dublin Castle remains where it did. This must be altered at once. The site of Dublin Castle must be moved every three months. There must be infinite change, and it must be infinitely thorough and infinitely systematic, so that, side by side with the continuous grievances of all dissatisfied parties, will be the certain assurance that those grievances will in strict rotation be remedied.

"The objection will, of course, be raised that these continual changes of government will involve a certain amount of disorder; that one system will scarcely be working before it is superseded by another; that the rapid alterations in the personnel of the judicature, civil service and police will be inconvenient; that everything, in fact, will be in a muddle. But by how much is not well-organised muddle to be preferred to unsystematic anarchy? And as each type of government recurs in due course will it not be found to work more simply and satisfactorily?

"To those who shrug their shoulders and say that a series of kaleidoscopic changes in Irish administration would never be approved by the good sense of the British electorate I can only urge that it is precisely this attitude of intolerance towards and ignorance of Irish psychology which has rendered our behaviour to Ireland for so many centuries a by-word not only throughout Europe but the whole civilised world and the United States of America.

"I am, Sir, yours, etc."

Through some accident or other, either because I have not followed exactly the prescribed rules of the competition, such as writing on one side of the paper only, or addressing it from the National Liberal Club, or obtaining the signature of five witnesses, my solution has not yet appeared in The Times or in The Westminster Gazette either. Feeling it a pity, however, that any helpful suggestion should be lost at a time when never in the annals of Irish misgovernment has vacillation vacillated so vacillatingly as it does to-day, I have repeated my strong but simple proposals here.

K.

"Clever forgeries of Fisher notes are in circulation in St. Pancras.

Last night, during the busy period, a number of publications in the Kentish Town district were victimised."—Evening Paper.

We had no idea that Kentish Town was such a literary centre.

"Even Paris seems willing this season to add a few inches to the length of skirts, and six to eight inches is becoming the accepted length for street wear. This is an excellent length, not so long as to endanger the chic of the costume, nor so short as to be unbecoming in either sense of the word."—Fashion Paper.

We refrain from any speculations as to the previous length of these skirts before the "few inches" were added.

THE POLISH HUG.

Bolshevist. "YOUR ATTITUDE CONVINCES ME, KAMERAD, THAT WE WERE MEANT TO BE FRIENDS."

Willium (having at critical stage in four-handed game undertaken to spot the red). "'Tis all over, Gearge—my hand be stuck in the pockut."

ELIZABETH OUTWITTED.

"An' when I dies they give me fifteen pounds on the nail an' no waitin'," said Elizabeth triumphantly, as she explained her latest insurance scheme.

"On what nail?" I asked distrustfully. I could not understand why Elizabeth felt justified in paying sixpence per week for a benefit fraught with so