But on February 27th, he, as much as everybody else, must have been surprised to find that his utterances, which, in truth, were stumbling enough, should at every point be punctuated by a deep bellow of cheers such as might have delighted the most trained and the most accomplished orators in the House.

The House itself was at first taken aback by this outburst of deep-throated and raucous cheers, and after it had sufficiently recovered from its surprise discovered that it all came from one bench--the front bench below the gangway.

On this bench there were gathered together a number of the younger members of the Tory party.
[Sidenote: The claque in Parliament.] At once it was seen what had taken place; the Tories, stung to action by the taunts of their own press, had concerted a new system of tactics.
And one portion of these tactics was to introduce into the House of Commons a phenomenon new to even its secular and varied experience--namely, an organized claque.

It was really just as if one were in a French theatre.

Uniformly, regularly, with a certain mechanical and hollow effect underneath its bellowings, the group below the gangway uttered its war notes.