NEW WRITS. (Hansard, 29 December 1868)

VISCOUNT BURY

said, that with regard to the Writ which had just been moved for, he thought it was quite right that some Member of this House should take notice of the rather exceptional circumstances under which the House had assembled. The fact of their having met in the middle of the Christmas holy-days sufficiently proved the inconvenience to which he was about to call attention. Indeed, the inconvenience to Members was so great that he believed the Secretary to the Treasury was astonished that the House had been got together at all; and he shuddered to think of the inconvenience which would have arisen if the Government had been unable to make a House, and if they had been obliged to adjourn from time to time until some fortuitous occurrence of events should have brought a sufficient number of Members together. The only reasons which led to the holding of an Autumn Session had disappeared before the assembling of Parliament on the 10th of December. It was necessary, however, that the ceremony should be gone through in order that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Greenwich (Mr. Gladstone) might go to consult his constituents. It was not sufficient that the right hon. Gentleman had, during the previous election, delivered speeches which, in his opinion, would become the Reform book of the future and the Vade Mecum of Irish Church 22 repealers. Nor was it sufficient that the right hon. Gentleman had been designated to his present high Office by the people at large, and that he had been called to it by august decision of his Sovereign, but it was necessary that he should go again to Greenwich, as if the right hon. Gentleman's constituents had not already heard sufficient of his policy and intentions. As long as this custom had any real and useful effect the House looked on with indifference, but when, in order to carry on the provisions of a statute passed in the reign of Queen Anne, the convenience of the House was affected so closely, it was worthy of consideration whether the custom was not unsuited to the requirements, and contrary to the opinions of the present day. The cost of a Session to the nation was very considerable, and in addition to this there was the inconvenience to hon. Members of which he had spoken. Undoubtedly it was right, when the Act of Queen Anne was passed, and when the power of the Crown was on the increase, that every avenue should be jealously guarded, but nobody would venture to say that the power of the Crown was now on the increase and ought to be diminished. On the contrary, some might concur with Hallam, that it was somewhat overshadowed by the growing power of the House of Commons. This being so, it was not unreasonable that the House should in future refrain from acting upon the statute. If some Members of a new Ministry ought to go back to the constituencies, all ought; but only seven out of the fifteen Members of the present Cabinet and eight out of sixteen subordinate Members of the Government were, in the present case, under the necessity of doing so. The noble Lord, having briefly alluded to the circumstances under which the compromise of 1707 was effected, said that with regard to the observations made on a previous day concerning the Writ issued for the City of London, he was of opinion that no Writ ought to issue when there was a petition claiming the seat to which the Writ referred. In conclusion, he thought he should venture to put on the Paper a Notice of his intention to bring forward a Bill to repeal the objectionable section of the Act of Queen Anne.