§ Colonel Torrenssaid, that though he might not be strictly in order, yet he trusted that he might receive the indulgence of the House while he asked a question of the hon. member for Boroughbridge, whom he saw in his place. He having long been a liveryman of the city of London, was, on a recent occasion, requested to move at the Common-hall the petition of the Livery to the House of Lords in favour of the Reform Bill. The hon. and learned Member, on a previous debate, when he was not in the House, had thought proper to animadvert on certain expressions which he was supposed to have let fall on that occasion. Had the hon. member for Boroughbridge not failed in the usual courtesy due from one Gentleman to another, he might have been saved the trouble of descanting in that House upon the proceeding which took place at the Common-hall. He did not wish to wear his opinions loosely about him. He always endeavoured to fix them in their proper places by some peg of argument—some buckle of reason. The expressions to which the hon. Member had objected were used hypothetically, and described the position of the House of Lords in what he hoped and believed to be an impossible case. Conceiving that the desire for Reform throughout the country was not a temporary impulse, but a sentiment growing necessarily out of the state of improvement at which we had arrived, he was under the conviction that this desire would not pass away, but would increase with the increasing intelligence of the people. On the supposition, therefore, that the demand for Reform, would certainly become more general and more intense on the part of the people, and that it would be pertinaciously resisted on the part of the House of Lords, he had put the question, what the position of the House of Lords under these circumstances might ultimately become and he answered the question by saying that such unwise resistance to a perpetually increasing force, would lead to more sweeping demands on the part of the people, until, in the heat of popular excitement, a change might be demanded in which the House of Lords might find themselves placed in schedule A. This was the expression to which the hon. 520 member for Boroughbridge objected. Now that hon. Member was peculiarly gifted with a fertile imagination and a creative fancy; and could, no doubt, readily supply some more correct and appropriate image by which to represent the position of the House of Lords under the circumstances supposed. He called upon the hon. and learned Member to substitute a more correct and appropriate expression for that to which he had objected. He had no partiality for the expression; it was thrown off under the excitement of he moment; and it was, doubtless, open to correction. On the hon. and learned Member who raised the objection the task of correction naturally fell. It could not all into more able hands; and therefore he called upon the hon. Member to furnish a more appropriate expression to designate the position of the House of Lords, under the supposition that the desire for Reform should perpetually increase on the part of the public at large, and should be perpetually resisted by the Peers. He would not defend the unpremeditated expression he had himself employed, but he was entitled to call upon the hon. Member who objected to substitute a better.
§ Sir Charles Wetherellsaid, the hon. and gallant Member had been pleased to say that he was a person of fancy and imagination. He had no pretensions to such qualities, but the hon. and gallant Member certainly had fancy to imagine a case which he could not fancy. In the debates on the Reform Bill, he had alluded, as he had a right to do, to a speech which the hon. and gallant Member had delivered elsewhere. In that speech the hon. and gallant Member had scheduled the House of Lords; and that being the case, he (Sir C. Wetherell) had a perfect right to animadvert upon such words in that House. He did that which he had a right to do—he referred in the course of the debate on the Reform Bill, to a speech which he found attributed to a Member of that House, and he argued, as he also had a right to do, that there was abroad a spirit of insolent threat and of unconstitutional terrorism, bordering even upon illegal threats, and an actual breaking the law, the object of which was, to overawe the deliberations and the decision of the other portion of the Legislature, with regard to the measure of Reform. He thought that in following up such an argument as that, his allusion to the speech 521 attributed to the hon. Member was not out of place, and the approbation with which the House received his observations on that occasion, proved that the House did not think them irrelevant to the subject then before it. When it was notorious that the public press was pursuing an illegal and unconstitutional system of threats and intimidation on this subject, if he could show, that a Member of that House had, out of that House, to a certain degree participated in those threats, he had a perfect right to do so. The hon. Member had now thought fit, in the exercise of his discretion, to revive this topic. That was the hon. Member's affair, and not his. The hon. Member had not, however, imputed to him any misstatement, or misrepresentation of the opinions which he had expressed at the meeting of the Livery. He had been asked if he could not suppose, that if the Lords exercised their undoubted right, and rejected, as he trusted they would, the Reform Bill, and all similar Bills whenever brought before them, that the consequence would be, the Lords would be placed in schedule A? He replied to that interrogatory, that he could suppose no such thing. He must say, that exerting his fancy to the utmost stretch, driving imagination to its wildest flights, and pushing it into the ultimate wilderness of extravagance, he could imagine no case in which the House of Lords could be scheduled which did not necessarily and inevitably involve a tumultuary, violent revolution, destroying, with the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Crown, the Constitution, and the Church. But the hon. Member treated the result of the supposition which he had made rather in the way of a fact than of a piece of fancy. He had insinuated, that resistance on the part of the House of Lords would lead to that noble body being placed in the schedule A in some future Bill. Now the hon. Member was a soldier, and a gallant one, and what would he say to that adversary who attempted to intimidate him from doing his duty by threats? Did the gallant Member suppose the Peerage of this country had no feelings of high honour or of courage to maintain? Did the gallant Member imagine, or could his fertile fancy, for he was the fancier, lead him to entertain in seriousness the thought, that a noble and illustrious body like the House of Peers would be frighted from the discharge of their duty, lest they 522 should be scheduled and destroyed by some future bill as revolutionary and jacobinical as the present Reform Bill?
§ Colonel Torrenswas happy to find that he had not paid an exaggerated compliment to the fertile imagination of the hon. and learned Member. The hon. Member was asked to substitute for the expression which he had censured, an expression more appropriate, and he replied by a discursive flight of fancy. He was satisfied at finding that the hon. and learned Gentleman could mend the language at which he cavilled. He was asked to define what the position of the House of Lords would become, should their Lordships pertinaciously resist a permanent and constantly increasing demand on the part of the nation for Reform? He repeated, that he had no wish to defend the hasty expression which he had thrown out, as in some way descriptive of their Lordships' position under the circumstances supposed; but he contended, that the hon. and learned Gentleman was not entitled to censure that expression, unless he could substitute one less exceptionable, and more appropriate.
§ Subject dropped.