CHAPTER XXIX. A STORMY PARLIAMENTARY SITTING.
I have not been in the House since the debate on the savings bank question. It will be remembered that this was prior to the recent general election, and that the House, or as it was styled, the Committee of Government, was then composed exclusively of those members of the Socialist party who had sat before the Revolution, the seats of all the members of the various other parties having been declared vacant, in consideration of the fact that all such members had been returned through the influence of capital. To-day, however, the newly elected opponents of Socialism sat in their places, occupying the entire left side of the House, and numbering about one-third of the seats.
The only lady member who has been returned, the Chancellor’s wife, sat in the middle of the front Opposition bench. She is a fine, dashing woman, with plenty of energy: to my thinking she was perhaps a trifle coquettishly attired for the occasion. She followed her husband’s speech with marked attention, at one time nodding approval, and at another shaking her head--she wore ringlets, and had red ribbons in her hair--to denote dissent.
The Government side of the House lay under a very apparent cloud of depression, resulting from the news of the large deficit. The Opposition, on the other hand, was very lively in its sallies. The strangers’ galleries were densely packed, the number of women present being especially large, and the excitement everywhere considerable.
A debate on the condition of the national finances was down for the order of the day, and I will endeavour to reproduce here the main points of the debate as to the causes of the great deficit. The first speaker was
The Chancellor--“The fact of a considerable diminution in productive values having taken place in our country, a diminution so great that those values are now only one-third of what they were before the great Revolution, is a fact that it ill becomes us either to be-laugh or to be-weep, but which we must all endeavour to grasp and to comprehend. Prominent amongst the causes of that retrogression are the opponents of our socialistic system.”
The Member for Hagen, on the Left--“Oh, oh.”