FIRST DAY OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT.

The real business of the session began yesterday with all the parties and all the leaders in their places, and the House probably fuller than this Parliament is likely to see it again. Mr. Asquith and his friends had possessed themselves of six seats on the Front Opposition Bench at what the butchers would call a “best end,” and Mr. Asquith sat side by side with the new Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald.

Whether the rivals have signed any pact as yet is not clear, but if any persons expected a scuffle for seats yesterday they were disappointed. Mr. Asquith put in the half-pathetic plea that he feared he would be reduced to “impotence and silence” if he were required to speak from any place in the House except one or other of the two boxes, at which he has stood for the last thirty years, and no doubt he will not be disturbed.

Mr. Lloyd George has no box to speak from, for he has taken the corner seat just below the gangway on the Opposition side. But then he needs no such adventitious aid to oratory as a box. Like The Mactavish of the story, where he sits is – for him – the head of the table. Mr. Chamberlain, Sir Robert Home, and Sir Laming Worthington-evans formed a grim triumvirate of their own on the other side below the gangway on the top row but one. As for the rank and file of the Free Liberals, they sat sprinkled among the Labour members, and were lost in the brown.