§ MR. J. L. RICARDOwished to know in what order the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade proposed to take the Bills relating to this subject.
§ MR. BOUVERIEbogged to ask, if the right hon. Gentleman would make any statement of the Amendments he proposed to make in the Mercantile Marine Bill?
§ MR. LABOUCHERE, in reply to the 1208 question of his hon. Friend the Member for Stoke upon Trent, begged to say that he had no reason to believe he should alter the arrangement of the Bills as they now stood, taking the Merchant Service Bill first. With respect to the question of his hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock, it was quite impossible, consistent with the rules of the House, to lay upon the table the alterations in the Mercantile Marine Bill, until the Bill was read a second time. If the House assented to the principle of the Bill on the second reading, he would allow sufficient time to consider it in those parts of the country that were interested in the measure.
MR. CARD WELLunderstood the case to be this—the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, for technical reasons connected with the rules of the House, had no opportunity of giving notice of alterations; at the same time, important alterations had been submitted to the right hon. Gentleman, and so far entertained by him, as to be under serious consideration. Would it be possible to convey to the parties interested, through some channel or other, the nature of those alterations, to enable them to judge of the Bill at the time of the second reading? The principle of the Bill would be mainly contained in the details, and would turn upon the actual arrangement of those details; and would the right hon. Gentleman adopt some means of giving the parties interested a definite notion of what the Bill actually was, in order that they might know whether they considered that those arrangements constituted a principle to which they would assent or not?
§ MR. LABOUCHEREhad been in communication with the hon. Gentleman's constituents in Liverpool, as well as with merchants in Glasgow, London, and other places, and had endeavoured to state frankly to them the nature of the alterations; and he did not think, when they came to discuss the Bill on the second reading, that the Gentlemen who represented the sea trade would be at all in ignorance of the general purport of those alterations—alterations which, he repeated, were not at all directed to the principle of the Bill. That being the case, he thought there would be considerable convenience before he finally made up his mind to the alterations, in his hearing the discussion on the second reading. He thought it was better that they should adhere to the usual course, and not lay any formal statement 1209 of details before the House and the public, until they received the assent of the House to the principle of the alterations on the second reading.
§ Subject dropped.