Commons Sitting of 14 June 1875

MINUTES.
SUPPLY—considered in Committee—Resolutions [June 11] reported.
PUBLIC BILLS—Ordered—First Reading— House Occupiers Disqualification Removal (Scotland) * [210].
First Reading—Parliament of Canada* [209].
Second Reading—Supreme Court of Judicature Act (1873) Amendment (No. 2) [162]; Offences against the Person Act Amendment* [131], debate adjourned.

APOTHECARIES HALL (IRELAND)—LICENTIATES.—QUESTION.
MR. LYON PLAYFAIRasked the Chief Secretary for Ireland, How many Licentiates are there of the Apothecaries' Hall in Ireland who restrict themselves to Pharmacy, that is, who do not at the same time practice medicine or surgery; and, is there any other class of chemists and druggists in Ireland who can legally dispense medicines according to prescription?
SIR MICHAEL HICKS-BEACH, in reply, side, there were very few licentiates of the Apothecaries' Hall in Ireland who restricted themselves in the manner mentioned in the Question of the right hon. Gentleman. There was no other class of practitioners in Ireland who could legally dispense medicines according to prescription.

POST OFFICE—OCEAN POSTAL CONTRACTS.—QUESTION.
MR. JOHN HOLMSasked the Postmaster General, What Ocean Postal Contracts are terminable in 1876, and if the requisite notice has been given for their conclusion; and, if so, whether, having regard to the fact that ship owners competent to enter upon such contracts must have time given to them for preparation, it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to call for tenders for the ful-
1808
filment of these services; and, whether, seeing that steamers depart almost daily for the United States of America, Her Majesty's Government are prepared to avail themselves, so far as practicable, of any eligible vessel, and give no further subsidies for the conveyance of mails to that Country?
LORDJOHN MANNERS, in reply, side, that three ocean postal contracts would expire next year—namely, that with the Union Steamship Company for the Cape of Good Hope service, and those with Messrs. Cunard & Co., and with Mr. Inman for the American service. The requisite notice had already been given to the Union Company, and would, in due course, be given to Messrs. Cunard and Mr. Inman. Before the American contracts expired the Government would consider the best arrangement to be made; but at present it would be unwise to pledge themselves to adopt any particular course in regard to them.

NAVY—NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS OF ROYAL MARINES AS SERJEANT INSTRUCTORS OF VOLUNTEERS.

  QUESTION.
  MR. GORSTasked the First Lord of the Admiralty, Whether any arrangements have been made by which noncommissioned officers of the Royal Marines are allowed to be transferred to the permanent staff of Rifle Volunteer Regiments to serve as Sergeant Instructors?
  MR. HUNT, in reply, side, that arrangements had been made, and of several recommended for the purpose, three sergeants of the Royal Marines had already been transferred to the permanent staff of the Rifle Volunteers to serve as sergeant instructors.

IRISH FISHERIES—INSPECTORS—REPORT FOR 1874.—QUESTION.
MR. BUTTasked the Chief Secretary for Ireland, When the Report of the Inspectors of Irish Fisheries for the year 1874 will be laid upon the Table of the House; and, whether any loans for fishery purposes have been as yet made under the provisions of the Irish Reproductive Loan Act of last year; and whether any, and if so what, progress has been made in carrying out the arrangements contemplated by that Act?
SIR MICHAEL HICKS-BEACH: Sir, the Report of the Inspectors of Irish Fisheries for 1874 is now all in type, and I am informed that it will be forwarded next week for presentation to Parliament. The Inspectors have been employed for some time past in making the necessary local investigations into the circumstances and bona fides of the various applicants for loans under the Irish Reproductive Loan fund Act, as well as into the solvency of the sureties offered in each case. As many as 2,800 applications have been made. 113 have been approved of and forwarded to the Board of "Works, with whom rests the duty of paying the money. The delay is due to the considerable amount of fresh work which has been thrown by the Act upon the staff of the Fisheries Office.

FRANCE—COOLIE EMIGRATION TO THE FRENCH COLONIES.

  QUESTION.
  SIR CHARLES W. DILKEasked the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Whether Her Majesty's Government have received the recommendations made by the French Labour Laws Commissioners for securing more efficient protection to Indian Coolies who are taken to Réunion, Guadaloupe, Martinique, and Cayenne; and, if so, whether there is any objection to lay upon the Table a Copy of such recommendations and of the draft of any new legislation on the subject which the French Government may have announced its intention to propose?
  MR. BOURKE: Sir, Her Majesty's Government have only received extracts affecting Indian Emigration to the French Colonies from the French Labour Laws Commission's Report, and there is no objection to laying these Papers on the Table of the House; but with regard to the draft of any new legislation which the French Government may propose on the subject, we have only got a Projet de Loi, which may or may not become law, and which we have no objection also to lay on the Table. Perhaps, therefore, the best course will be for the hon. Gentleman to move for these Papers, and if he will privately communicate with me I will arrange with him the form of the Return.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION ACT—COMPULSORY ATTENDANCE.

  QUESTION.
  SIR LAWRENCE PALKasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, If his attention has been called to a report in the "Daily Telegraph" of June 7th, that a coal dealer at Wolverhampton named Boxall was summoned by the Local School Board for not sending his children to school; that in consequence of his absence a warrant was issued for his apprehension; on hearing which he came back, and there being only one magistrate present, he was locked up for four days in the police cells; and, whether the statement is true; and whether, if so, such a detention in the police cells was either usual or legal?
  MR. ASSHETON CROSS, in reply, side, that from inquiries he had made, he believed that the facts of the case were substantially correct as stated by the hon. Baronet. With regard to the imprisonment in the cells, he could honestly say that he believed such a course was entirely unusual; but he should not like, in his position, to say that it was illegal. He hoped, however, it would not be repeated.

ARMY—SECOND LIEUTENANT-COLONELS—GRIEVANCES OF OFFICERS.

  QUESTION.
  MR. STACPOOLEasked the Secretary of State for War, If he is going to bring forward the case of those Second Lieutenant Colonels who were placed on compulsory half-pay when their regiments returned from India, who are now on full pay, although not in command of a regiment, in order that on their retiring from the service they may receive their over-regulation money?
  MR. GATHORNE HARDY, in reply, side, when he brought forward the Estimates on account of the Army Purchase Commission, it would be his duty to state how far he proposed to address himself to the grievances of the officers in question.

SUGAR CONVENTION, 1864—REFINED SUGAR.—QUESTION.
MR. WAITasked the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Whether he is in a position to state that the communi-

1811
cations between the Government of Her Majesty and the French. Government, in reference to the export of refined sugar, have led to a satisfactory result; and whether he will state to the House the result of such communications?
MR. BOURKE, in reply, side, a Conference had lately taken place upon this subject at Brussels, and the delegates at that Conference comprised the Representatives of various Foreign Powers who were parties to the Treaty of 1864. The delegates had drawn up a Convention which they had submitted to their respective Governments for examination and approval. Until that examination had been made it would be premature to state whether or not in the opinion of Her Majesty's Government the result of the deliberations would be satisfactory.

MERCHANT SHIPPING ACTS AMENDMENT BILL—MERCHANT SHIPPING LEGISLATION.—QUESTION.
MR. GOURLEYasked the First Lord of the Treasury, If he is aware that the uncertainty in reference to future legislation with reference to British shipping is causing depression throughout the Country in the shipbuilding trade; if it be the intention of Her Majesty's Government to proceed with or withdraw the Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Bill; if the former, if he will fix a day for going into Committee?
MR. DISRAELI: Sir, I am not aware that "the uncertainty in reference to future legislation with reference to British shipping," as stated in the Question of the hon. Gentleman," is causing depression throughout the Country in the shipbuilding trade." I am not aware of any uncertainty upon the subject, and my information as to the shipbuilding trade is quite the reverse of that possessed by the hon. Member. Her Majesty's Government intend to proceed with the Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Bill, but I cannot now fix a day for the purpose.

PARLIAMENTARY & c. ELECTIONS—THE LAW OF REGISTRATION.—QUESTION.
MR. HAYTERasked the First Lord of the Treasury, Whether, after the vote given by all the Members of the Government present in favour of the House Occupiers' Disqualification Removal Bill, which purposes to remove
1812
an anomaly from the existing Law of Registration, he will undertake to deal with the Law of Registration as a whole, in order to remove other anomalies and to diminish the uncertainty consequent upon the state of the present Law as declared from the Judicial Bench? He begged to quote an opinion of Mr. Justice Byles pronounced in the Court of Common Pleas in 1868, to the effect that—
"The various existing enactments are such as to expose both. Voters, Revising Barristers, and this Court to many difficulties of construction in which they may be easily entangled."
Justices Keating and Brett took a similar view.
MR. DISRAELI: Sir, I do not see that because Her Majesty's Government the other night supported the removal of a petty grievance with regard to the law of registration they are logically bound to deal with that law as a whole. I, of course, hear anything that falls from the Bench with great respect, and the opinions of the Judges will always have due influence with me; but I must say that, in my opinion, those learned gentlemen are a little too apt to criticize Acts of Parliament. We must remember the circumstances in which many opinions of that kind are given by the Judges. They sit in courts which are not properly ventilated, and in that respect they are not, perhaps, treated as well as they ought to be by the country. Whatever other influences affect their opinions I know not; but I fear it is a fact that the learned Judges do not treat Acts of Parliament with the respect and decorum which I trust we shall always show towards themselves.

THE DEAN FOREST AND HUNDRED OF SAINT BRIAVELS BILL.

  QUESTION.
  COLONEL KINGSCOTEasked the Secretary to the Treasury, Whether, taking into consideration the period of the Session and the state of Public Business, he will withdraw the Dean Forest and Hundred of Saint Briavels Bill, which stands for Second Reading on Monday June 21st; and, whether, seeing how necessary it is that some immediate steps should be taken to improve the state of affairs in Dean Forest, he will at once bring in a Bill, similar to the Act 1 and 2 Will. IV., c. 12, to appoint

  1813
  commissioners who shall visit the forest and report to the House of Commons how, in their judgment, the evils which were shown to exist by the evidence taken before the Select Committee which sat last Session may be best and most speedily remedied?
  MR. W. H. SMITH, in reply, side, that in consequence of the late period of the Session it would not be possible to obtain a proper consideration for the Bill that Session; but still he did not think it would be desirable that a Commission should be appointed to report upon the subject as the matter had been fully inquired into by a Select Committee.

DOMINION OF CANADA—IMMIGRATION OF PAUPER CHILDREN.

  QUESTION.
  MR. EVELYN ASHLEYasked the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Whether he will lay upon the Table of the House that portion of the Report of the Select Committee of the Canadian Legislature on Immigration which relates to the emigration of pauper children from this country; and to the statements concerning it made by Mr. Doyle, an Inspector of the Local Government Board?
  MR. J. LOWTHER, in reply, side, the Report of the Committee of the Dominion House of Commons to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred only reached his noble Friend the Secretary of State late on Saturday, so that he had not yet had sufficient time to enter into the necessary communication with the Local Government Board upon the subject. He would, however, let the hon. and learned Gentleman know as soon as a decision had been arrived at.

THE SUNDAY ACT—THE BRIGHTON AQUAEIUM CASE.—QUESTION.
MR. ASHBURYasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether, having regard to the judgment of the Lord Chief Baron and other Judges of the Court of Exchequer delivered on Friday the 11th June in favour of the plaintiff in the case of "Warner v. The Brighton Aquarium Company," and their Lordships' remarks thereupon, it is the intention of the Government to take any action during the present Session for a repeal or modification of the Act 21 Geo. III., c. 49?
MR. ASSHETON CROSS, in reply, side, he regretted that this matter had been brought before the Courts of Law and a decision obtained. The matter was one upon which there was a strong feeling upon both sides of the question, and one upon which public opinion must be gradually and perhaps slowly formed. It would be almost impossible for the Government to take up a measure of this character at that period of the Session. It was, however, the intention of the Government to take care that persons should not be vexatiously harassed by an undue enforcement of the law.

CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT (1871)—CONVICTION FOR PICKETING—ALLEGED ILL-TREATMENT OF PRISONERS—QUESTION.
MR. ANDERSON (for Mr. MUN-DELLA)asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, If his attention has been called to a Letter in the "Weekly Dispatch," signed by the five cabinet-makers who were convicted by Baron Cleasby under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1871, in which they contradict in the most explicit manner the reply given on the 31st of May as to their treatment while in prison; if it is true, as stated by them, that they were ordered to pick oakum, and threatened with a reduction of diet in case of disobedience, and if, after repeated protests and explanations that they were not sentenced to hard labour, they did pick oakum in their cells at night, after working at their trade by day; and, if so, who is responsible for the excess of punishment?
MR. ASSHETON CROSS, in reply, side, he had made further inquiries into the case of the five cabinet-makers, and he had sent to the Governor of the gaol in which they were undergoing their sentence an extract from the Weekly Dispatch containing their letter to that newspaper, in which they contradicted the reply given by him on the 31st of May as to their treatment while in prison. He held in his hand the answers not only of the Governor, but also of the warder and sub-warder, and those answers were precisely the same as the reply which he (Mr. Cross) had previously given to the Question. He thought the best course he could take was to refer these answers to the Visit-

1815
ing Justices with the request that they should make a special report on the matter.

SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE ACT (1873) AMENDMENT (No. 2) BILL— [Lords]— [BILL 162.]
(Mr. Attorney General.)

SECOND READING. ADJOURNED DEBATE.
Order read, for resuming Adjourned Debate on Amendment proposed to Question [10th June], "That the Bill be now read a second time;" and which Amendment was, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day three months."—(Mr. Watkin Williams.)
Question again proposed, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."
MR. FORSYTHside, he did not altogether concur in the praise which had been lavished upon the Judicature Act of 1873; but he acknowledged that it would introduce many salutary changes. While he agreed in the main object of the Act, which was confessedly to give to the Common Law Courts of this country enlarged powers and jurisdiction, enabling them to deal with equitable points as they arose, and thus to prevent the scandal of suitors being bandied about from Court to Court because they had mistaken their remedy, he wished the House to take that, perhaps the last, opportunity of rejecting those portions of the Act which he thought were not likely to be useful. The object desired, of settling questions brought before the Courts at once effectually and finally, would still be gained if certain sections were omitted. It was a popular delusion to think the object of the Act of 1873 was to fuse Law and Equity. One might as well talk of fusing Civil and Criminal Law as of fusing Law and Equity, and, indeed, he did not think it was intended by the Bill. The distinction between Law and Equity was radical. Separate subjects required to be dealt with in separate Courts. The distinction between Law and Equity was not artificial—it was in the nature of things, and could not be done away with by Act of Parliament. If anything of the kind were attempted, it would take 20 years to explain the meaning of the Legislature. He had
1816
no objection to the provision of the Act of 1873, which declared that where the principles of Common Law and Equity conflicted, the rules of Equity should prevail. But he did object to those parts of the Act of 1873 by which the new name of Division So-and-so would be given to a Court and the offices of the Chiefs of Common Law might be abolished under an Order in Council, and the number of the Common Law Judges would be reduced from 18 to 15. With regard to the latter, their number had hitherto been found by no means too great, and according to their own testimony the work was at present too excessive. He would remind the right hon. Gentleman at the head of the Government that it was as injurious to disturb the legal as the official hierarchy of an ancient nation. For himself, he held that law reform should be approached in a Conservative spirit, and that they ought to build upon the old lines and construct upon the old foundations. As to the Bill now under consideration, it was, no doubt, necessary for two reasons. First of all, it was necessary as an amending Bill, for it corrected an arithmetical blunder, the number of Judges having been erroneously put down at 22, instead of 21, in the Act of 1873; and, in the second place, it was also necessary in order to do away with the anomalous state of things created by that Act in retaining the House of Lords as the final Court of Appeal in Irish and Scotch causes, while it closed it against the English suitor. That was an arrangement which was generally condemned, and its single and sole apologist was the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Oxford. This Bill, for the first time amongst the various measures on the subject which had been before Parliament during the last few years, established an Intermediate Court of Appeal. He had always been in favour of such a Court, for in his judgment it was essential to the due administration of justice; but then came the question how that Court was to be constituted, and with reference to that point he would impress upon the Government to give due weight to the fact that not one lawyer had risen to speak in favour of the Intermediate Court which the Bill would establish. It was not a Court of Appeal which could either give satisfaction to the profession or be re-

1817
garded with confidence by the country. They had only a certain number of Judges to deal with, and the difficulty would be to constitute a Court. It was proposed that the Court should consist of five ex officio and as many ordinary members. The ex officio members were to be the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, and the three Chiefs of the Common Law Courts; while the ordinary members were to be the two Lords Justices, two salaried Judges of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and one other Judge to be appointed by the Crown. In theory that seemed to be a very strong Court, but it would not be found to be so in practice; and the great objection to a Court of Appeal so constituted was that all its ex officio members, with the single exception of the Lord Chancellor, would have their time fully occupied in trying cases in Courts of First Instance, while as regarded the ordinary members of the Court, there appeared in it too much of the Equity element. Therefore, it was extremely desirable that the whole question of the Court of Intermediate Appeal should for the present remain in abeyance, for he thought they could not well devise such a Court until they had settled what the Final Court of Appeal was to be. More than once he had been asked to join the committee which had been established with a view of preserving the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, but he had uniformly declined to do so—first, because he did not wish to commit himself to any opinion before the subject was discussed in the House of Commons; and, secondly, because he was by no means in favour of retaining that jurisdiction as it now existed. It was true that that jurisdiction was just at present exercised by a strong Court; but this was a mere accident, and age, death, disease, or indolence might soon render that tribunal most inefficient. Those who talked most loudly of the House of Lords seemed to be really thinking of the establishment of a new Court, which they wished to make part and parcel of the House of Lords. Two hundred years ago Sir Matthew Hale denounced, in the strongest terms, the idea that the House of Lords, as a co-ordinate part of the Legislature, ought to be the Court of last resort. That eminent lawyer proposed that a certain number of legal members of the House of
1818
Lords should be selected and associated with a certain number of Judges, so that thus a strong Court might be formed. To such a plan there could be no objection. At present, however, he thought that the wisest course for the Government to adopt would be to postpone altogether the question of Appellate Jurisdiction; to bring into operation only such portions of the Act of 1873 as went admittedly in the direction of real reform; and with regard to the other matters—especially with respect to questions of Intermediate Appeal and Final Appeal—to wait until next Session, when they could have a comprehensive measure which would prove acceptable both to the country and to the profession.
MR. LOWEside, his excuse for trespassing on a discussion which had hitherto been entirely forensic was that he did not intend to travel over the ground which had already been so well laboured by those who had gone before him. He desired to deal with the question rather as one having reference to the House of Commons than with reference to any legal distinctions. There was no subject within his memory certainly, and perhaps there had been no subject for many years past, which was at once so momentous and had been so carefully considered as that of the jurisdiction of the House of Lords. The consideration of that subject commenced with the labours of an able and most painstaking Commission. That Commission reported in 1869, and four years were taken to consider its Report. The matter of the Report was referred to a Committee of the House of Lords, which reported against the continuance of the jurisdiction of that House, and a Bill was subsequently introduced in 1873 in the House of Lords itself, which took measures for the abolition of its Appellate Jurisdiction. That Bill was carried. There was some opposition to it. Lord Redesdale divided the House, but had only had very small minorities on his side. When that Bill, having been passed by the Lords, came down to the House of Commons, it was wonderful to see how little difference of opinion there was on a question which might have seemed likely to interest the passions and interests of the House, and the consequence was that it passed with the assent of both Parties. The present and the late Prime Minister, the present and

1819
the late Lord Chancellor, and the great legal authorities of both Houses mostly combined in approving the principles of the measure, and it became law. In 1874 the House of Lords, the parent of of that Bill, produced another measure to extend the abolition of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the Lords to Ireland and Scotland, therefore nothing could be more complete than the approval which the House of Lords gave to the Bill, and it was impossible to exaggerate the degree in which all parties and persons in both Houses were bound and committed to its principles. The subject had undergone a most thorough, solemn, and protracted investigation, and so little was it apprehended that there was any difficulty contained in it that the present Lord Chancellor, on the 9th of February this year, introduced the Bill which had been postponed, on account of pressure of Business, from last Session. He did so apparently without any misgivings or apprehensions on the subject; but on the 8th of March the noble Lord felt it necessary to state that, in consequence of certain communications about difficulties in the way, he despaired of being able to pass the measure. Shortly, after, on the 9th of April, he introduced a Bill of an entirely different character, a Bill which was not a modification, but was exactly the contrary of the one he had introduced on the 9th of February, for extending the abolition of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords to Scotland and Ireland. The object of the Bill of the 9th of April was ostensibly to postpone the abolition of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords for a year, but really and in truth to prevent the Appellate Jurisdiction of that House ever being abolished at all. The only ground stated for postponing the Bill was the objection of the House of Lords to the abolition of its Appellate Jurisdiction. Though still nominally a Bill only for postponement, he maintained that it must be treated as a Bill to put an end for all time, as far as the Government had any power, to the idea of ever doing away with the jurisdiction of the House of Lords. In introducing and carrying that Bill through the House of Lords the Lord Chancellor never gave it to be understood that he approved of the principle he was going to give effect to. The noble and learned Lord had always
1820
been thoroughly consistent in the matter, and it was only just to say that, though he had been the organ of the Government in carrying out the Bill, there was every reason to know, from all his declarations on the subject, that he entirely and thoroughly disapproved of the step. Then the case came to the House of Commons, where the hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General allowed it to be inferred that he disapproved of its principle, offering as he did no argument in its favour, but studiously avoiding doing so, only saying that an influential portion of the House of Lords desired that the clauses abolishing the jurisdiction of the House of Lords as a Court of Final Appeal should be put off, and that accordingly it was proposed that that should be done. The hon. and learned Gentleman did not say one word in favour of the principle of the Bill he was introducing to the notice of the House. Nay, he said something very strongly against it. He said that he did not consider the Bill a new thing; that the subject had already been fully discussed by Parliament in 1873; and that he could not regard it as a question that was really any longer open to discussion. That was, in effect and substance, what the hon. and learned Gentleman side, and it might fairly be concluded that he also was opposed to the principle of the Bill. It was not merely that the Government were dropping a measure which for want of time they found themselves unable to carry. That was a position in which any Government was liable to find itself, and in which it might fairly withdraw a measure, however persuaded of the justice of its principles they might be, rather than waste the time of the House and their own strength in a futile effort to carry it. But what he complained of in this matter was that the main object of this Bill, so far as it related to the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, was not merely to forbear from any further action, but, in point of fact, to repeal and rescind the whole operation of the Act of 1873 in that respect. He hoped that would be clearly understood, because everything he had to say hinged upon it. The House was asked not merely to forbear from doing a certain thing, but actually to reverse its steps. His present argument did not require him, and he entirely declined to

1821
enter into the legal merits of the case as regarded the jurisdiction of the House of Lords; but what he wanted to point out to the House was that, if the statement he had made as to the proceedings in the matter was true, there was no Parliamentary case whatever for the House entering on the course that was now suggested. No argument was addressed to the House to induce it to commit itself not to do away with the jurisdiction of the House of Lords. He would use a very simple illustration. Suppose the Lord Chancellor sitting in his Court with a case relating to an estate before him. Suppose the counsel for the claimant should say he believed there was nothing in his client's behalf to be said on the law of the case—that he believed, in fact, that law and precedent were against him, but an influential portion of the House of Lords wished his client to have the estate, and therefore he asked the Lord Chancellor for a verdict in his favour. Suppose, further, that the Lord Chancellor should say he agreed with the counsel as to the law of the case, but, since that influential portion of the House of Lords desired it, he would give the judgment requested. That would be a judicial, theirs was a legislative, proceeding; but, apart from that, he failed to recognize any difference of principle whatever. They were identical. The persons who proposed this Bill were themselves opposed to it, but what was said by the hon. and learned Attorney General, and what was said by the Lord Chancellor was, that it was the will of an influential portion of the House of Lords, and therefore they must pass it. Had the Government come down and told the House that they had changed their opinion, that House was always open to reason and argument, and, if it had been addressed in the tones of reason and argument, would have listened with respect. But in place of that the Government simply came down to the House of Commons and said it was the desire of an influential portion of the House of Lords that this measure should pass. There was no Parliamentary ground whatever for doing what the House was asked to do. It was contrary to all Parliamentary practice for a Government to come down and tell the House that, notwithstanding the labours of the Commission, the Report
1822
of the Committee and the decisions of the Parliament itself, it was to surrender its own opinion and consent to repeal the Act of 1873 merely because a portion of the House of Lords desired that it should be so. So far as he knew English history—and he should be glad to hear of a precedent to the contrary from hon. Gentlemen opposite—such language was never addressed to the House of Commons before. The case came before the House absolutely without any support whatever. The merits of the Bill might be what they pleased. The question was whether the House of Commons ought to be influenced by considerations like these. Was it natural, was it reasonable, that the Government should come down and say that the House of Commons should be forced to do that which they themselves had been forced and coerced to do? Why should the Government assume the nominal Leadership of those who had forced and coerced them in this matter? Principles were the life and soul of a Government, if they meant to exist for any length of time. But how could a Government preserve its vitality, if it were ostentatiously and knowingly not only to abandon the principles which it held, but actually adopt the very contrary course, and place itself at the head of those who had coerced it? It might be said that some risk of collision with the Lords would have to be run if the Government persevered in their original intention. He did not believe it. But even to run some risk would be better than to exhibit such a spectacle as the House had before it. It was quite evident what the Government should have done. They should not have allowed themselves to be coerced. Their character for consistency and honour was at stake in not going back; and if it were intimated that an influential body of their supporters would no longer sustain them they should have met it manfully, and obliged those who, it appeared, were superior to Lords and Commons to declare themselves and show who they were—to deal with this matter not by messages to the Government, but by their votes in Parliament. Who they were would then be known; but because the Government had amalgamated themselves with them, nobody knew now what Party, what clique, what conspiracy was at work. If the Govern-

1823
ment had taken that step they would have received the approbation of all honest men, and would not have injured their own position in any way; the public would have appreciated their conduct, and if the measure had failed, no blame would have been attributed to men who had done their best to vindicate their honour. As it was, the matter was in a situation that no friend to Parliamentary government could look upon without the greatest regret. Because it really came to this—their debates, arguments, reasons were all futile and ridiculous if they could be put aside by an irresponsible body in "another place," who could dictate to the Government what the Government should dictate to the House of Commons. It went to the root of Parliamentary government if they were to be told that it became necessary for the preservation of the Government that certain things should be done, and the Government used its strength to force Parliament to do them rather than face the danger which would be incurred by showing a bold front. It was the duty of the House of Commons to act in such a way that this conduct of Her Majesty's Government should not be drawn into a precedent. His hon. and learned Friend the Member for Oxford had said the other day that they must take what they could find. He would rather say in questions of this kind, relating to the honour of the House of Commons, that they should leave what they found entire. They had received a noble inheritance, and they should take care that they did not encumber it with false precedents, or squander it by base compliances.
MR. GATHORNE HARDYside, he could not help noticing the regret that the right hon. Gentleman must feel for the peculiar kind of conduct of the Government, as it was apparent from his tone and manner throughout his speech. He was not generally without the power of expression for those high constitutional sentiments; but he, on this occasion, adopted such a faltering tone that there was some doubt as to what he was saying, or perhaps he had some suspicion that the House would not altogether agree with him. What was this grievous crime committed by the Government to which the House was called upon to give its condemnation? He did not object to the historical re-
1824
view of past years given by the right hon. Gentleman; but when he came to state what had been done recently—that was, to contemporary history—the right hon. Gentleman seemed not to have made himself acquainted with the facts, or in the most extraordinary manner to have misunderstood them. The right hon. Gentleman said that he should have had no complaint to make against the Government for having dropped the first Bin in the House of Lords, though he afterwards declared that they ought to have taken a vote on it; but towards the end of his speech he blamed them for allowing themselves to be coerced by an influential body in "another place" into bringing in the present Bill. He said that the reason of their doing so was that there was an irresponsible body in the Lords who had controlled them. Now, he would like to know from the right hon. Gentleman in whose speech he found it used as the argument for the passing of the Bill that an influential portion of the House of Lords was in favour of it. [Mr. LOWE: The Attorney General's.] The Attorney General did not say that alone was the reason; what he did say was that there was a great change of feeling on the subject, which was indicated by the change in the House of Lords. Let him for a moment call attention to what passed in the House of Lords. The Government proposed last year that there should be one Final Court of Appeal for the United Kingdom. That was a point to which the Lord Chancellor had always adhered. At present, the object, of course, was that whatever Final Court of Appeal should be adopted should be for the use and advantage of the Three Kingdoms. What had passed? Last year Lord Moncreiff, who might be taken as representing the Bench, if not the Bar of Scotland, spoke reluctantly in favour of doing away with the Appellate Jurisdiction of of the House of Lords. Lord O'Hagan also, speaking for Ireland, with reluctance, accepted with regret the abolition of their Appellate Jurisdiction. But this year both these noble Lords, representing themselves as speaking the sentiments of the Bench and Bar of their respective countries, were entirely opposed to its abolition. Therefore, when the right hon. Gentleman spoke of an influential

1825
party in the House of Lords, he should remember that that party was backed up by a large body of opinion which had accumulated out-of-doors. It would be absurd to suppose that any number of persons in the House of Lords could have exercised this power unless they found a large body out-of-doors to support them. When the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the Denbigh Boroughs (Mr. Watkin Williams) introduced his opposition to this Bill, he protested against dealing with it as a Party question; but his hon. and learned Friend had not been so successful in impressing that view on others as might have been hoped. That was not so carefully done by others as it had been by his hon. and learned Friend, who said that, if there was to be a second Court of Appeal, he was prepared to accept the House of Lords as the Final Court. And his hon. and learned Friend gave very good grounds for it. For what did he say? He said that the Appellate Tribunal of the House of Lords was so admirably constituted that an appeal which had taken him three days before the Exchequer Chamber to do unsatisfactorily he had disposed of satisfactorily in three hours before the House of Lords. It should be borne in mind that the Commission that first reported did not report against the Appellate Jurisdiction of the Lords; and therefore the authority of that Commission could not be cited against them. Further on, no doubt, there was a Report which was, to a certain extent, adverse to that Appellate Jurisdiction; but then the question had not been raised as to a double appeal; and it was supposed that the House of Lords could not deal with First Appeals, because they would be so numerous; but when there came to be a second Court of Appeal the House would, it was thought, have abundance of time for such appeals. These were the reasons which had influenced large bodies of people in reference to what should be the new Appellate Court. He begged to remind the right hon. Gentleman that the Government were not asking the House to recind and repeal that which had been already done. All they were asking it to do was to suspend the operation of that portion of the Bill till next year, when the question would still be open for discussion. He might
1826
have his own opinion as to how that discussion would terminate, but the right hon. Gentleman would not be debarred from stating his views at length. It was clear that in all he said that evening he only wanted to throw discredit on the Government; but he did not give the House any information or suggestion as to what was the best course to be taken: all he thought of was to throw discredit upon the Government with that air of pity and sorrow which so well suited the man who was assuming a high constitutional position. To drop the Bill was an abandonment of principle by the Government. If so, why, he might ask, had the right hon. Gentleman himself abandoned his Savings Banks Bill some time ago? Was it not because of the opinion with regard to it which was expressed out-of-doors? [Several hon. MEMBERS: And the Match Tax.] Yes, and the Match Tax; but the right hon. Gentleman's experience was so great in that way that it seemed to him to be the height of audacity at which he could hardly have supposed that even the right hon. Gentleman could have arrived that he should attack the Government as he had done for the course which they had taken, and call upon them to name any case where such a thing had been done before, when he himself had such experience in abandoning Bills and measures, abandoning them in deference to public opinion out-of-doors, sometimes indeed expressed in a more violent manner than upon the present occasion. And what was the real question before the House? They had to secure a Final Court of Appeal which would be likely to be satisfactory to the country, and if they could not find it in the House of Lords they must look for it elsewhere. But seeing that public opinion in Ireland and Scotland was unanimously in favour of retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of that House, and that an increasing number of persons in England were in favour of it, it was, he thought, probable that when the question came to be decided the Government might, perhaps, in deference to public opinion, and with the assent of the Three Kingdoms, be enabled to constitute such a Final Court of Appeal as would give general satisfaction. In that state of things all the Bill under discussion would do would be to bring into operation as

1827
soon as possible so much as was admitted to be a great reform. The question of the Final Court of Appeal would in the meantime be suspended, and the right hon. Gentleman would next year have ample opportunity of laying before the House his views on the subject. The Government, with that consideration which was due to a matter of such importance as the administration of justice, would not take a step in advance without being sure that they had the feeling of the country with them, and when they had secured that they would submit their proposals to the House without fear of the arguments of the right hon. Gentleman or of those constitutional principles on which he relied.
SIR HENRY JAMESside, it would be seen that there were two questions involved—the first, as to the necessity for the Bill, and the second, as to the value of the propositions made in it. Several speeches that had been made referred principally to the necessity for the Bill, and the causes from which it had sprung. First, the hon. and learned Member for East Surrey (Mr. Grantham) charged the Government of 1873 with having dealt with the Act of that year without consideration, and with having promoted it as an ambitious scheme of reform. That was a charge that had not the slightest foundation, and to show that it was so, he would make some brief quotations for the benefit of the hon. and learned Member, and some of them would be from those who were most desirous of retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords. The first movement that took place in regard to the matter commenced with one whose opinion would be valued by the hon. and learned Gentleman. He referred to the late Lord St. Leonards. So this measure, far from being an ambitious measure of reform, was one suggested by Lord St. Leonards, and in favour of which he spoke and voted. As early as 1841 that noble Lord, in introducing a Bill in the House of Commons, said—
"The reason why he went so much into detail upon this branch of the subject was, that he might show to the House what the general feeling of the country was with respect to the system now in force, and which could not continue much longer, but must inevitably be reformed; and so strongly was the necessity for this reform felt that no professional man would conscientiously recommend an appeal to be carried to the House of Lords from the Lord Chancellor's
1828
decision, if it appeared at all probable that the same individual would preside in the House of Lords at the moment when such an appeal should come on for hearing.…. Such a proceeding amounted, in his opinion, to a denial of justice."—[3 Hansard, Ivi. 196, 197.]
And he introduced a Bill for the purpose of adding legal strength to the House of Lords. Then the present Chief Baron, giving evidence as to the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords before the Committee that had been so often referred to, said—"Its days are numbered, unless some great change takes place in its constitution." The Lord Chief Justice, too, said the fault of the scheme for the creation of a new Court of Appellate Jurisdiction was, that it was founded on the basis of retaining the jurisdiction of the House of Lords, and added that surely the time had come for the House of Lords to give up a jurisdiction which it had only in name. He could quote from others not likely to be prompted by an ambitious desire to reform. In 1873 this matter came before the Lords, and there was, with the exception of some opposition from Lord Redesdale, general concurrence in the principles of the Bill. That measure was referred to a Select Committee. It was not considered hastily; it was not made a Party question. The Committee consisted, he thought, of all the Law Lords that sat in the House, as well as Lord Salisbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and noble Lords of great weight; and the Report of that Committee came back without questioning the desirability of abolishing the Appellate Jurisdiction. Where was the public opinion then? The Bill, as he had side, passed with the concurrence of the Lords, and when it came down to the House of Commons it received no opposition from those who represented the Leadership of the Conservative Party, with the almost single exception of the present Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the Bill passed without their hearing a whisper of that public opinion which was said to have existed. He would not weary the House by giving a history of how it was left imperfect as regarded Ireland and Scotland; but 1874 came, and, as they were often told, great events happened in the beginning of that year. The Conservative Government found itself under the responsibility of bringing in a Bill to complete the legislation of the previous

1829
year, and the Bill was brought in in the course of the Session. And what did the Attorney General say then? Why that, whatever might be his own opinion with respect to the abolition of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, he accepted the decision upon it at which Parliament had already arrived as conclusive. The Lord Chancellor of Ireland, too, who had previously been silent on the subject, while observing that a great opportunity seemed to him to have been lost of surrounding the jurisdiction of the House of Lords with additional authority and power, went on to say that to reverse the decision on the point which had been so solemnly arrived at would be even a greater evil than the abolition of that jurisdiction, inasmuch as uncertainty and confusion would by that means be introduced into the proceedings of Parliament, and that good reason ought to be shown for any such change. Had any such reason been shown either to this House or the other? Public opinion was so silent that at the commencement of this Session the House of Lords again accepted the principle of the abolition of its Appellate Jurisdiction. The Bill was introduced and read a second time on the 23rd of February without opposition. The Government, having gone so far, had thoroughly accepted the responsibility of abolishing the Appellate Jurisdiction of the Lords. What had happened to make them withdraw from their position? The hon. and learned Member for Salford (Mr. Charley) had given the real history of the change of public opinion on this subject. That hon. and learned Member said he had put himself in communication with the hon. Baronet the Member for Wexford (Sir George Bowyer), and they had called on a most estimable gentleman who resided in St. James's Place; an influential committee was formed, including 40 Queen's Counsel, 30 Peers, and 138 Members of Parliament; and so the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords had been preserved. He gave his hon. and learned Friend all credit for his well-known earnestness, which always displayed itself on behalf of those who were unable to protect themselves—females under the age of 16, newly-born babes, and the House of Lords. That sort of protection, however, might go too far. The power of the hon. and learned Member
1830
for Salford appeared to be very great indeed. The House would remember—he would not say a campaign of rhetoric, but, at all events, a celebrated political campaign—when the First Lord of the Treasury visited the county of Lancashire, which had given him great support, and, in answering one of several deputations which waited on him, he did not exactly ejaculate a prayer, but he said—"Oh that there were more Members for Salford at the present time!" He (Sir Henry James) ventured to think, however, it would be an unfortunate thing for the country to have two junior Members for Salford instead of one if that was to be their power—if that was the way in which the legislation of two Parliaments and the policy of two Governments were to be reversed. The Bill which had now been withdrawn was introduced into the House of Lords after having been mentioned in the Speech from the Throne, and was read a second time on the 23rd of February without substantial opposition; but, notice of opposition having been given on the 1st of March, on the 8th of the same month, the Lord Chancellor announced that the Bill would be abandoned. What had happened in the meantime? If those who had introduced the Bill had changed their opinions, ought they not to have said so—ought not their recantation to have been made in public, and in all the responsibility of their position? There had been no discussion or vote in the House of Lords to account for the changed views of the Government, and they were left to the uncertain sound of the words of the hon. and learned Attorney General the other night, when he said there had been a certain Parliamentary opinion in the House of Lords which had been not expressed but felt. He wanted to know if it was an expression of the opinion of noble Lords in that House who had previously voted for the abolition of their Jurisdiction. He did not blame those noble Lords if, under the direction of his hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Charley), they had changed their opinions; but the House had a right to know who they were, and whether they had been influenced by argument or by personal pressure. He was disposed to believe the change of opinion had not extended to Her Majesty's Government; but, if not, why should they change their

1831
policy? Those who witnessed the gestures and heard the words of the Lord Chancellor when he abandoned his Bill knew well he had not changed his opinion. When he expressed the deep regret with which he withdrew the Bill, everyone who heard him knew that was an honest avowal. Ought not that noble Lord, who possessed the confidence of the public and the esteem of his profession, to be allowed to know in the open field who were his opponents instead of having to yield to unknown enemies? Members of the legal profession had always been proud of the noble and learned Lord as one who, unaided by those influences which sometimes made a man eminent in his sphere, was enabled almost before middle age to win his way to the high position he occupied; they knew that, whether in the contests of the Courts or in the political debates of Parliament, or in the pleasant pastures of the Vale of Aylesbury, he had always one great attribute, that of pluck; they knew that he would not have deserted his opinions, but would have had the courage to express them. Yet he had been compelled to yield. It was the old story over again. The enterprizing general of division had been sacrificed either to the doubts of the Commander-in-Chief, or, what was worse, to the timidity of a council of war. It was no secret that the Lord Chancellor had had to give way not to public opinion, as expressed in the Press, in Parliamentary discussion, or to any open means or statements that could be met and controverted, but to the stealthy policy of St. James's Place and the pressure it had produced. Such a method of Parliamentary proceeding was without precedent, and would not add to the honour of Parliament. It was now said that 40 Queen's Counselout of 200—no great proportion—were in favour of retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords. Well, after all, he did not know that much reliance was to be placed on the opinion of lawyers in regard to legal reforms. Indeed, they were generally regarded as the very worst judges of the reforms that ought to be introduced. [Mr. M. T. BASS: Hear, hear!] He recollected that during the year 1873, when they were discussing the Judicature Bill, and when numerous divisions occurred, he appealed to the hon. Member for Derby,
1832
hoping that he would vote with the Noes, as every lawyer in the House was going to vote with them. Mr. Bass—he might mention his name, as the incident occurred in a previous Parliament—Mr. Bass asked—"Are you quite sure that every lawyer is going to vote with the Noes?" He replied he was quite sure, upon which Mr. Bass said—"Well, I am quite sure I shall vote with the Ayes," and with a great deal of activity he saw the hon. Member for Derby going to the Lobby on the right hand of the Chair. In that he believed the hon. Member was expressing the general idea of the public as to the value of lawyers' opinions on legal reforms. If their opinions were worth little, their sentiment was worth less, and he maintained that it was sentiment and old associations rather than opinion which led them to favour Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords. Putting aside the opinions of the Queen's Counsel, what other public opinion remained in the matter? He believed there was no public opinion on the question of legal reform. People sometimes complained a little of legal delay and of expense; but, as a rule, a man who got engaged in litigation, and passed through the ordeal of a lawsuit, felt much the same as the man who had submitted to the operation of having a leg cut off—he never expected to have to go through it again, and was perfectly indifferent as to whether the next comer was to be operated upon by a good instrument or a bad one. The right hon. Gentleman opposite had asked them to wait a year till public opinion was clearly expressed; but they would have to wait a very long time before they knew whether public opinion out-of-doors wished the Appellate Jurisdiction of the Lords to be abolished or not. If there had been any strong feeling on the matter in the country, it would have found expression in that House in 1874. The fact was, that legal reform must come from the action of responsible statesmen, such as had borne the responsibility of this measure. Their policy was now to be reversed because his hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Charley) had had too much leisure, and by the merit of his earnestness had been able to bring a number of men together. The Secretary of State for War had argued, to prove that there had been a change in public

1833
opinion—that between 1874 and 1875 Lord O'Hagan and Lord Moncreiff had altered their views on the question; but if his right hon. Friend would refer to the speeches of those noble Lords, he would find that they were equally opposed then to the abolition of the Lords' Jurisdiction. He regretted that the Government had not shown a little courage, and appealed on the question to the votes of the two Houses, on whom the responsibility would then have rested, instead of yielding so submissively to that mysterious influence which the Attorney General said had been felt in the House of Lords. He regarded the present measure not as the Bill of the Government, but as one for which the hon. Members for Salford and Wexford and the committee with whom they acted were responsible. The 4th clause was admittedly bad, and the Attorney General had not found any of the hon. and learned Members behind him to say they could give the slightest adhesion to the principles of this Bill. They were told it was a temporary measure but that was only a stronger reason for not dealing with the matter in such a way. It was not sufficient that, out of circumstances they had themselves created, they should produce a measure evil and inefficient, which they admitted would not be satisfactory, and plead as an excuse that it would only be in existence for a short period until they had ascertained public opinion. It was no pleasing task to contemplate the constitution of the Appellate Tribunal proposed by the Bill. They would be half abolishing the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and taking away the strength of the tribunal to which they compelled their colonists to come. Two of the four Judges constituting the Judicial Committee had for years devoted themselves to Indian affairs, and divide that Committee how they might, they must weaken it, and thus do an injustice to our colonists, whilst it was no undue criticism to say that it would hardly be wise to place Members of the Judicial Committee as Appeal Judges over men whose lives had been devoted to studying the Common Law of England, and who, in that law, had had a much larger amount of practice and experience. It could not be right that such things should be done merely to meet the unfortunate state of things which the want
1834
of courage of the Government had brought about. He appealed to the Government, who certainly had not shown too great a desire to destroy our judicial system for the sake of economy, to say whether the tribunal proposed by the Bill was one which could advantageously receive the sanction of the House. He did not think his hon. and learned Friend the Member for the Denbigh Boroughs had laid himself open to the criticism of the hon. and learned Member for Huntingdon (Sir John Karslake); but he would advise his hon. and learned Friend not to press his Amendment to a division. In conclusion, he would remark that he had ventured to criticize, he hoped not too severely, not so much the personal course of the Government as the want of principle and statesmanship which had been shown in the conduct of public men, and, having done that, he would promise the Government, if they persisted in carrying that Bill through the House, he would give them such assistance as he could in putting it into a better and more efficient form.
MR. GATHORNE HARDYside, his reference had been misunderstood by his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Taunton. It was in 1874 that Lords Moncreiff and O'Hagan accepted, with certain reservations, the proposal of the Government, and in 1873 that they spoke in opposition to the measure then brought forward.
THE SOLICITOR GENERALside, he quite agreed with his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Taunton (Sir Henry James) that the consideration of that great question turned upon the Act of 1873. During the discussion the House had had its attention turned in a particular manner to that Bill and the Bill of 1874 had also been much adverted to. The question before the House was whether there was a necessity for any alteration of the measure of 1873, and if so, whether the provisions of the present Bill would meet that necessity? With regard to the Act of 1873, in his opinion and also in that of the hon. and learned Members, with very few exceptions, who had spoken, that Act did accomplish a most desirable measure of reform. He thought the demand for that legal reform came not from the lawyers, who were benefited by the existing state of things, but from those who experienced the defects of the law—the outside public—and

1835
who had clamoured for the removal of these defects prior to 1873, and the Act of that year was the result of this outside clamour. It seemed to him that the Act of 1873 was a most beneficial measure, for it did away with that disgraceful anomaly by which what was law in one Court was not law in another, and conduced to the more speedy administration of justice. It created a system which was at once consistent, harmonious, and simple; but although it deserved all the credit which he thus attached to it, all who looked back on the measure of 1873 must confess that it was marred by one conspicuous blot. That blot was the Appellate Jurisdiction created by the Bill. That Act proposed a Court of Appeal, and abolished the Appeal to the House of Lords. Now that was found to be a great defect in the Act and very objectionable. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Taunton said that almostevery one agreed with the abolition of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords.
SIR HENRY JAMESside, the hon. and learned Gentleman misunderstood him. The question was thus regarded by the House of Lords.
THE SOLICITOR GENERAL: The question was not one for the House of Lords; it was a question for the public. and if the removal of the jurisdiction of the House of Lords were to meet with general acceptance, it would little matter to him whether they were relieved of it or not. It would, however, be recollected that during the debate which had taken place several eminent Members from the Conservative side of the House had spoken strongly in favour of the retention of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords not, indeed, for all cases but for such as would necessarily flow to the House of Lords in case two Courts of Appeal were retained. The hon. and learned Attorney General, the hon. and learned Gentleman now Member for Frome (Mr. Lopes) the hon. Member for King's Lynn (Mr. Bourke), the hon. and learned Member for Salford (Mr. Charley), and the then Attorney General for Ireland had all spoken to the same effect. For himself he concurred with them; but he distinctly expressed his opinion that there must of necessity be several classes of cases in which a double appeal would be essentially necessary. He quite agreed with the hon. and learned
1836
Member for Oxford that in that portion of his (the Solicitor General's) speech which he had read he said he was averse to a double Court of Appeal; but if the hon. and learned Gentleman had read further—and probably it would have done him some good—he would have found that he had said that in certain cases it was most essential that there should be another Court of Appeal, and he had made bold to suggest to them, as he did now, that the very best Court of Appeal was that tribunal which had given so much satisfaction—the House of Lords. The Tribunal of Appeal formed by the Act of 1873 was for England alone, and it was clear to his mind that in 1873, there existed a distinct necessity for altering in the way of amendment certain provisions of the Act of 1873, in order to provide one and the same Appellate Court for England, Scotland, and Ireland, with, in addition, a second appeal in certain cases. It was not necessary that he should give the reasons for this necessity, for it was only necessary in order to discover them to listen to the speech of his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Taunton. The hon. and learned Member for Oxford had stated that the second appeal would, in fact, be a simple rehearing. If a decision in one Court was to be reviewed in another there must of necessity be a re-hearing of the facts, but it was an appeal notwithstanding. In 1873 the Government carried the Bill which became an Act, although it had its admitted defects. The Bill of 1874 was founded on the principle that there should be the same Appellate Tribunal for England, Scotland, and Ireland, but that in certain cases there should be a second Court of Appeal. But owing to unavoidable circumstances the Bill of 1874 had not passed into an Act, and in 1875 another Bill was introduced to the same effect; but between the years 1873 and 1875 an opinion arose in the country—an opinion which appeared to be growing day by day—that it was not desirable to abolish the jurisdiction of that ancient, noble, dignified tribunal, the House of Lords. The hon. and learned Member for Taunton had referred to the part which he supposed the Amendment of the hon. and learned Member for Salford had played in the matter. What the hon. and learned Member for Salford did was to press his proposal with

1837
his usual energy; but did he convince, against their will, lawyers in Lincoln's Inn and Westminster Hall, and hon. Members who had expressed their opinions on the subject? At any rate he would not convince the hon. and learned Member for Wexford against his will. The opinion of the vast majority of the lawyers of Lincoln's Inn and Westminster Hall was in favour of retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, and it must be admitted that lawyers knew something about it, although they might not be "strenuous advocates of law reform." That opinion was shared by commercial men, who had to pay for litigation, and by Members of Parliament, who represented constituents. There was also a strong feeling through out the country that the House of Lords was an excellent tribunal, and that better could not be found. If that opinion had been really formed, and had been brought to the attention of the Government, were the Government to be charged with desertion of their principles, because they did something to give effect to that opinion? He should think that the Government would be open to the charge of not acting up to their principles, if they chose to disregard an opinion of this kind. The Government, therefore, had thought that, as this opinion had been formed by the country, it would be well to let a little time go by, and see whether some more positive and certain opinions were not formed in the interval. If at the end of a year it was thought that the jurisdiction of the House of Lords as an Appellate Tribunal should be retained, then it would be competent to do so. His hon. and learned Friend the Member for Oxford had said—"Do not touch the appeal clauses of the Act; let the Bill of 1873 remain, but keep the Exchequer Chamber as that Court of Appeal for Common Law, and the Lords Justices for Chancery." But if that were carried into effect they would have the dissatisfaction or the gratification, whichever it might be, of having no Appeal Court at all. He thought, therefore, it was essential that there should be a Court of Intermediate Appeal of a fresh character, in lieu of the Court of Exchequer Chamber and the Lords Justices. He would now come to the objections of his hon. Friend the Member for the Denbigh Boroughs (Mr. Watkin
1838
Williams). His hon. and learned Friend said he had a great opinion of the Act of 1873; that it was one of the greatest measures of reform ever introduced. He also said he would rather have a final tribunal such as that created by the Act of 1873 than have an Intermediate Court of Appeal. "But," said the hon. and learned Member, "if we are to have a second tribunal, I object to such a second tribunal as is proposed by the Bill, because it is not a good one; because the Judges will not be composed of the ablest men that could be selected; among them will be the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, and the three Chiefs of the Common Law Courts, and each of these may have attained his position, not so much because of his eminence as a lawyer as for some other reason." He (the Solicitor General) confessed he was surprised at that objection. Both the hon. and learned Member himself and the hon. and learned Member for Taunton in 1873 spoke in favour of a tribunal the elements of which would not differ much from that which was proposed by the Bill. This Bill proposed that exactly the same class of Judges should form a Court of Appeal as was provided by the Act of 1873, but it proposed that not so many Judges should sit in that tribunal. In a Court of Appeal there must be men of the soundest intellect; and who, being untrammelled by an excess of business, would be able to deal with the cases that came before them as the House of Lords did. In conclusion, he considered that the suggestions which had been made by his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Oxford were not feasible, and he hoped that very few of the malcontent party would think it right to follow him and his hon. and learned Friend the Member for the Denbigh Boroughs into the Lobby, should the Amendment be pressed to a division.
MR. HERSCHELLside, Her Majesty's Government seemed to admit that the House was in some embarrassment with regard to the matter, because it was dealing with a proposition for the creation of a Court of Appeal without knowing whether that Court of Appeal was to be permanent or merely temporary, and also without the knowing whether it was to be a final Court of Appeal or an Intermediate Court of Appeal, for both of those questions, he

1839
understood, were to be left open. He thought, therefore, that what the House had to consider was how to get out of that embarrassment. The opinion of the public and of the legal profession after the passing of the Judicature Act, began to form itself on two questions in no doubtful manner, the prevalent belief being—first, that all cases ought not to be sent to a Court of last resort without passing through an Intermediate Court of Appeal; and secondly, that in abolishing the Appellate Jurisdiction of the Lords, they were running the risk of abolishing a very efficient and excellent Court of Appeal on the chance of forming a Court its equal, or possibly only its inferior. It was a significant circumstance that these opinions were expressed after the passing of the Act of 1873, and that the more people talked about the proposals it embodied with reference to those two subjects, the less they seemed to like them. For himself, he confessed he shared the opinions of those who desired the retention of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, not because he was actuated by any feeling of sentiment, or by the idea that the Appellate Jurisdiction could prop up the House of Lords as a Legislative Body, but because he did not like to part with a tribunal until a better one was substituted for it. Consequently he could not regret that the subject had been re-considered, but at the same time he agreed with much that had been said by the hon. and learned Member for Taunton. As both Houses so plainly expressed their opinion in 1873 that the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords ought to be abolished, it was unwise for the Government to withdraw the first Bill. They introduced this discussion without having the matter fully discussed in the Upper House. The Government need not have forced that Bill to a division, but they ought to have had it publicly discussed, for next year they would not be in half so good a position to pass the Bill as they would have been if they had allowed that course to have been taken. That course, however, not having been pursued, it was now proposed only to deal with the question temporarily. It was impossible to suggest any course which would not carry with it certain evils, and all we could do, therefore, was to choose the least. He
1840
was desirous that the Act of 1873 should come into operation as speedily as possible, seeing the manner in which law reform was hung up by the delay which had already occurred, and so far as this measure was directed to that—so far as it expressed the desire of the Government that the Act should come into operation without further delay—he was heartily and thoroughly with them. That Act, although delusive as to some of the advantages expected of it, had many practical and useful provisions; for example, those which improved the present absurd mode of taking evidence in the Court of Chancery, and others that relieved Courts which were clogged with business, by sending cases to other Courts which were not so pressed. It not only amended the law now, but it provided the machinery for future Amendments. Objecting to the statement that the Appellate portion of the Act was its backbone, he thought the other beneficial changes contained in it might be adopted at once, the Appellate Court remaining substantially as at present. As to the Appellate Tribunal constituted by the Bill, no lawyer in the House of Commons excepting the Attorney and Solicitor Generals had approved it. That Appellate Tribunal might consist of three members—two transferred from the Judicial Committee, which heard few English cases, and one new Member; but imagine such a Court overruling the decisions of one of the primary Courts, consisting of three Judges of the highest weight and authority! Surely, it would be better to leave things as they were until you knew what you were going to do; but if this course were impossible, the Bill would be a very unsatisfactory one, unless it were altered materially. He feared that the secret unavowed cause of such a Court being proposed was the desire for an unwise economy in the administration of justice. In his opinion, counting the circuits and the Judges required for town business, the number of Judges proposed under the Judicature Act would be found lamentably insufficient. No doubt, judicial time might be economized, but the proposed reduction would cripple the operation of the Act in the most serious way, and the Act itself would not have that fair chance which every law reform should have. He could not agree with the Solicitor General that the number of

1841
heads in an Appellate Court made no matter. No doubt the quality of the heads was of more importance; but it would not be well to have judgments of a Court in which there were three heads of good quality overruled by a Court of inferior numbers. He would urge on Her Majesty's Government to do one of two things, either to let this Appellate question stand over until next year, when it could be satisfactorily dealt with, or if they were to constitute a Court of Appeal under this Bill let it be one which would be acceptable to the profession and the public. If they took either of these courses, he could assure them that all on that (the Opposition) side would assist in making the measure as perfect as possible.
LORD ELCHOside, with the exception of the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Lowe) that debate had hitherto been carried on by the lawyers, and he should not have ventured to intrude himself on the notice of the House, if it had not been for the fact that the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords was, as it had been justly described, a momentous question, and that a Committee which sat on this subject, and on which he served, had been spoken of in not very complimentary terms. In the outset he could not help asking himself this (question—how the taking away of the Appellate Jurisdiction from the House of Lords would affect their position as a branch of the Legislature? It appeared to him that if the House of Lords were no longer looked to as the Supreme Court of Appeal, their position would be lowered and their prestige seriously impaired. No doubt, if the House of Lords was inefficient as a Court of Appeal, and there were no means of improving it, no one for the sake of its legislative position alone would insist on retaining its Appellate Jurisdiction. But everyone in the course of the debate who spoke of its efficiency as a Court of Appeal was cheered. The hon. and learned Member for the Denbigh Boroughs, in moving the rejection of the Bill, stated that for weight, patience, and attention there was no Court of Appeal equal to the House of Lords, and the hon. and learned Member for Wexford said that their decisions formed a body of law unsurpassed in any country in the world. Looking to the expression of opinions from Liberal and hon. and
1842
learned Members, and out-of doors, his hon. and learned Friend was justified in saying that opinion had been revolutionized on this subject. Speaking as a Scotch Member, he would point out that the feeling of that country was almost unanimously in favour of its retention, while in Ireland such men as Sir Joseph Napier, Lord O'Hagan, Lord Chief Justice Whiteside, and Lord Justice Christian, and in England, Lord Penzance and others were in favour of its retention. They had thus a general consensus of opinion in favour of retaining that Appellate Jurisdiction. Do not let them, therefore, sweep away an old institution which had done good service in the past. Further, when Lord Cairns brought in this Bill, he stated that they had worked off most of the cases before them, and that at the end of the Session there would be no arrears. By appointing Committees of the House of Lords to sit during the Recess a great deal of difficulty that was now felt would be removed. All great reforms went on this basis—they took what they found and improved on the old ground. We all knew that the eloquence of lawyers occasionally succeeded in getting wrong verdicts, and so the eloquence of Lord Selborne and Lord Cairns obtained a wrong verdict from the House of Lords in 1873. There was then a mania for change. Nothing was settled in Church, in land, in Army, or in law. Their Lordships, like every one else, were carried away, for it was impossible at the time to resist the force of the Government. It was the custom to praise that Parliament, but it was the worst Parliament he had ever seen. It was not so much a Legislative Assembly as a Parliament to register the decrees of an imperious Minister. An hon. and learned Gentleman opposite (Sergeant Simon) had admitted that the Bill of 1873 came down to the House of Commons with orders that it should be passed én bloc. There had now, however, been a reaction, not only in the House of Lords, but in the country itself; the feeling had changed, and it was felt that a great mistake had been committed, which must be rectified. How the House of Lords came to surrender its Appellate Jurisdiction, which was not a privilege, but a part of its constitution, he did not know; but if it found it made a mistake in doing so, he could not see

1843
why it should not endeavour to retrace that mistake now. It would, it seemed to him, be cowardly if, perceiving it had committed an error, it should be ashamed to say 80, and refuse to take back that which the public wished it to retain. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Oxford talked of janissaries and of mutes passing round the Woolsack with the view of causing the Government to change their views on the subject. There was, however, in the matter nothing to conceal. It was the Duke of Buccleuch, representing Scotland, who had placed a Notice on the Books of the House of Lords, and it was the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of Cambridge—a very safe Constitutional Member of the House of Commons—who gave Notice of an Amendment in respect to the Bill as it then stood. In the whole proceedings, therefore, there was nothing of conspiracy or anything which could fairly be described as "hole and corner." And if a committee did meet which was interested in the question, he should like to ask whether there were no meetings ever held at Lord Granville's? Was there never any such thing as the Lichfield House compact; and had not meetings taken place in the Tea-room of that house, and also at Carlton House Terrace? It was idle, he contended, to speak of the committee which met in St. James's Place as unconstitutional, or as composed of persons having no legal or official position, or as being a coalition, or confederation, or cabal. In abusing the committee, however, those who used such language were only following the example of Lord Selborne himself, who, in addressing a number of his friends at Fishmonger's Hall in the course of the spring, said it seemed to him unendurable that measures of great importance to the community, introduced by the Government, should be frustrated, not by mature public opinion, but by the action of cliques and intrigues. Now, when he read that language he, as a member of the committee, could not help feeling that it was to be regretted that Lord Selborne had infused all his Christianity into his Psalmody, and had not reserved a little for his prose. Mr. J. Stuart Wortley, than whom no one was more respected when he was in the House, or would probably have attained a higher position in his
1844
profession had it not been for the state of his health, wrote a letter in reply to these remarks of Lord Selborne, in which he pointed out that the committee numbered among its members Peers, eminent Noblemen professing various political opinions, Members of the House of Commons, and men of high position both on the Bench and at the Bar, and that their proceedings had nothing in common with those of a coterie or a cabal. Mr. Wortley, in his letter, further showed that Lord Selborne was not always favourable to the views on the question which he now advocated, for he well remembered that when sitting with him on the Conservative benches as a supporter of Sir Robert Peel, he had vindicated the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, and had expressed a doubt whether any substitute for it which might be created would be so satisfactory to the country. When, therefore. Lord Selborne used such hard words in reference to the committee which met in St. James's Place, he would remind him that it was a spot remarkable for caves. A cave had once assembled on the other side of the street from that on which the committee held its meetings, whose members Lord Russell had politely called brigands, and who succeeded in throwing out a Bill which had been brought in by the Government of the day. Now, he did not pretend to say that the committee to which he belonged had the slightest influence on the House of Lords or the Government; but if it had, those who endeavoured to show that it was composed of very mean materials cut the ground from under themselves, for it must be apparent that they were powerfully backed by public opinion. It was somewhat extraordinary, he might add, that those who used such language should have forgotten that there were such associations as the Birmingham Reform League, the Anti-Corn Law League, the modern Electoral Reform Association, and such institutions as the Reform and Devonshire Clubs. It was quite true, indeed, that when he walked down St. James's Street he never saw more than one member in the last-named club, and some persons went even so far as to say that he was stuffed; but it was, nevertheless, intended to exercise a powerful influence by uniting under the wing of the House of Devonshire all

1845
the scattered elements of the Liberal Party. Then there was the Law Amendment Society, the Church Liberation Society, the Education League, and the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Association, to which a late Cabinet Minister had given up his life, and the action of which seemed to be to deluge the houses of respectable people with filthy literature. Let them have no more abuse of the St. James's Place committee when they remembered such institutions as those to which he had referred, and which, as long as they were a free country, must exist. With reference to the general principle of the Bill, that, he felt, was a question to be dealt with by gentlemen of the legal profession: and, for his part, he would only say that he had the utmost confidence in the Government as to their dealing with the matter. The action of the Government had at least given time for the consideration of the question of the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords; and he believed that, so far as they had gone, they had acted carefully, cautiously, and wisely.
MR. LAWside, he must express his regret that the noble Lord who had just spoken should have used language towards Lord Selborne which was hardly called for in the present discussion. Lord Selborne's character, however, required no vindication, and the injudicious sneer which the House had just heard might, therefore, pass without further notice. Much had been said of a change of public opinion having taken place as to retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords; but he might perhaps be permitted to say that he failed to recognize any such change. Although Conservative principles had triumphed at the General Election, the present Government deliberately introduced a Bill last Session to substitute an Imperial Court of Appeal for the House of Lords. That measure received the assent of both Houses, and when had public opinion been expressed since? Indeed, there was very little doubt that if it had not been for the attention of the House being somewhat suddenly directed to the Public Worship Bill, the Judicature Bill abolishing the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords would have passed into law last year. He could not help feeling that the Government was responsible for the present difficulty.
1846
When the Judicature Bill of 1873 was being passed, it was felt by many hon. Members on both sides of the House that it was not desirable that there should be a separate Appellate Tribunal for England, while the House of Lords should remain as a separate Appellate Court for Ireland and Scotland. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Greenwich and his Colleagues proposed to modify their Bill so as to carry out this view—providing at the same time that there should always be some Scotch and Irish Judges members of the new Imperial Court. That proposal, however, was defeated in "another place." A question of privilege as between the two Houses of Parliament was very needlessly raised, and the result was the confusion in which the subject still remained. Had the clauses proposed by the late Government been accepted, there would never have arisen any of the difficulty they had since had to deplore. For it must be remembered that the present Government fully approved of the withdrawal of their Appellate Jurisdiction from the House of Lords. To effect this they brought in their Bill at the commencement of last, and again at the commencement of the present, Session. But to make some change in the proposals of their Predecessors, they refused to provide that there should be a Scotch or an Irish Judge in the new Court. This must in any case have excited suspicions and jealousies; but the reason given for it was particularly unfortunate—namely, that it might not be possible to get an Irish lawyer or a Scotch lawyer fit for the office. It only needed this to raise a feeling against the whole scheme amongst the members of the Bar in Scotland and Ireland, and thus to mar what it was hoped would be a great legal reform. It was, however, a mistake to suppose that the members of the Irish Bar were all in favour of retaining the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords. A considerable number of them, of whom he (Mr. Law) was one, believed that the House of Lords could not be regarded as a satisfactory Appellate Tribunal. It might be so at the present moment, because it contained some very eminent and able Law Lords; but several of those eminent men had already passed the average number of years allotted to man, and whatever the ability and the despatch

1847
with which business was now conducted there, it was not probable that it would long continue to be so. Indeed, he might say that when hon. Members spoke of the judicial ability now displayed by the Lords, they were thinking of the present Lord Chancellor and his two Predecessors, Lord Selborne and Lord Hatherley, all of whom had alike pronounced against the continuance of the House as the Final Court of Appeal. A very serious objection to the House of Lords as an Appellate Tribunal was the great cost at which business was transacted there; and, again, it was impossible they could be sure of having the best men to sit on that tribunal, for it was well known there had been lawyers of the greatest eminence in their profession, who from family or other reasons would not accept Peerages. The Lords, in short, at least with existing arrangements, could not fulfil the requirements of a permanently satisfactory Court of Appeal. It was desirable, however, that they should hear from the Government what they proposed doing as to the Final Court of Appeal. It might be that they intended to create life peerages, but if this was so, why could not the fact be stated? It might be that the Government intended to use up in the creation of the Intermediate Court all the available legal material, and then to come down next year and tell the House that all the other material having been exhausted, it must, as a matter of necessity, accept the House of Lords as the Pinal Court. The Government ought to make some clear and explicit statement on this important subject. He was anxious that the Bill of 1873, which was undoubtedly a great advance in legal reform, should be brought into operation at once. He would with that object recommend that the rest of the present Bill be passed reserving the portions which related to the Final and Intermediate Courts of Appeal, and following it up as speedily as practicable with the necessary supplemental measures for Ireland and Scotland.
MR. ALFRED MARTENside, the whole object of the Bill was to bring into operation all matters in relation to the Supreme Court of Judicature, on which their was no disagreement, and to allow that part to stand over to which objection had been taken, and the whole tone
1848
of the debate was a justification of the course taken by the Government. Every hon. Member had addressed his remarks more or less to an Ultimate Court of Appeal, showing that there still existed a great question that should be the subject of further consideration. The right hon. Member for the London University (Mr. Lowe) had treated the question as a Party one, and had made several caustic remarks on the conduct of Her Majesty's Government in introducing this measure; but he had refrained from stating his views as to the preservation of the House of Lords as a Court of Ultimate Appeal. It had been urged against the Government that, having such a large majority at their backs, they ought to adopt a strong policy, and force the House to yield to their views in this matter; but it was because the late Government had adopted that course that they had offended their supporters. The speech of the hon. and learned Member for Taunton was rather of an oratorial than an argumentative character, and he had endeavoured to insist upon the finality of the Act of 1873, which, he side, was passed without any resistance. The hon. and learned Member, however, appeared to have forgotten that on the 3rd of July, 1873, a division was taken on the question whether the clause which abolished the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords should stand part of the Bill, and that the clause was only carried by 154 to 93, no fewer than 13 Members of the present Government voting in the minority. Under these circumstances, it must not be assumed that the Bill of 1873 passed without opposition and with the general consent of both Houses. The present Bill proceeded upon a very plain principle of allowing that part of the measure of 1873 which gave general satisfaction to come into operation, and postponed the consideration of that part of it with regard to which it was desirable that public opinion should be allowed to ripen. In ameliorating our Judicature it was of the first importance that we should proceed step by step, and avail ourselves of changes made from time to time in the administration of the law, and which were found to work satisfactorily. In that way it would be found that the more slowly we introduced changes into it the more surely we should be advancing towards perfec-

1849
tion. The Bill dealt with two most important branches—first, the clause which referred to the constitution of a Supreme Court which should come into operation at once; and the second, to create a Court of Appeal, either Final or Intermediate, as Parliament should ultimately determine. It would proceed upon the principle of reforms which had been for many years in force in Chancery, with the beneficial result that the time of the Court of Chancery was now largely occupied in disposing of questions which involved both Law and Equity. The legislation of a long series of years fully suppported his contention that so much of the Acts of Parliament as related to the constitution of the Supreme Court of Appeal should be kept in active operation, thereby welding together the Courts of Law and Equity into one great Court. The House was invited to postpone the consideration of the constitution of an Intermediate Court of Appeal for another year. In his opinion, no sufficient reason had been given for the taking of such a step, and the Government had exercised a wide discretion in adopting an opposite conclusion. In Equity many important questions were decided by a single Judge, and the working of an Intermediate Court of Appeal, consisting of the Lord Chancellor and two Lords Justices, had proved eminently satisfactory. That Court of Appeal was the model of the Court for Intermediate Appeal proposed to be constituted under the Bill by Her Majesty's Government, and 20 years' experience had proved its excellence; while, on the other hand, they had the opinion expressed by the Common Law Bar, that the Court of Exchequer Chamber was not a satisfactory Intermediate Court of Appeal. Then, as to the ultimate appeal to the House of Lords, all that was asked by the Government was, that that question should be allowed to remain over unprejudiced for further consideration, and that course would be in accordance with the recommendation of the Commissioners in their first Re-port in 1869. The general opinion of the House was in favour of the second reading of the Bill, and it would be well to defer the consideration of details to the Committee.
MR. EARLEY LEITHside, it was not his intention to occupy the time of the House by going into the details of the Act
1850
of 1873. He had voted for that Bill, and should deeply regret if, even though somewhat defaced, it should not come into operation as early as possible. Neither did he intend to discuss the propriety or otherwise of postponing the question of what should be the Supreme Court of Ultimate Appeal. He meant to confine his few observations to the proposals in the Bill which affected the constitution of the Court of Privy Council; and he thought one of these would have a most injurious effect by withdrawing from that tribunal into the new Intermediate Appellate Court two of its salaried Members, which must have the effect of weakening a Supreme Appellate Court with a wide and varied jurisdiction, and lowering the dignity of that tribunal. At present the Privy Council was a Supreme Court of Appeal in all cases brought before it from the Supreme Courts in India, the Colonies, the Ecclelesiastical Court, and the Court of Admiralty in this country. It was therefore placed, as respected these appeals, in the same high position as the House of Lords with regard to appeals from the Courts in the United Kingdom. In, and previous to, 1851 the Court consisted of two ordinary unsalaried Members, with a large number of ex officio Members, including the Lord Chancellor, ex-Chancellors, the Master of the Rolls, the Chiefs of the other Courts—10 in all. In the last-mentioned year the difficulty was so great to obtain the requisite number of ex officio Members, that Act 14 & 15 Vict. c. 83, was passed to reduce the quorum of Members from four to three. This even proved ineffectual to obtain a quorum, and, in 1871, the whole system completely broke down; business came to a dead lock. The ex officio Members had the work of their Courts to attend to, and could evade the summons of the Registrar of the Privy Council to attend. The result was, that remedy was applied by the Legislature in passing Act 34 & 35 Vict. c. 91, which had completely answered its purpose. Four salaried Members were appointed who were able to carry on the business of the Court independently of ex officio Members, and ever since the business of the Court had been despatched without delay, alike to the satisfaction of the suitors from all parts of the Empire and to the members of the legal Profession who practised in that Court. It was now

1851
proposed to weaken the Court by taking away from it two of these salaried Members—a course which was condemned by their past experience, and would shake the confidence of Her Majesty's Indian and Colonial subjects in this their Ultimate Court of Appeal; and he earnestly hoped the proposal would not be persisted in. If that measure were carried into law, the suitors would have great cause to regret it. He appealed most earnestly to the Attorney General not to reduce the Judges of the Judicial Committee. With regard to the Intermediate Court of Appeal, there would be a great increase of business in that Court beyond what was now transacted in the Court of the Exchequer Chamber, from the increased powers of appeals and the new procedures and practice introduced by the Judicature Bill; and nothing could compensate for the injury that would be inflicted upon the Court of the Judicial Committee if two of the Judges of that Court were withdrawn. It was perfectly clear that the Judges of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, under the former Judicature Bill, were only liable to be transferred into the Supreme Court of Apellate Jurisdiction, to be constituted on the abolition of the House of Lords as a Court of Ultimate Appeal; but this Bill would lower the two Judges of the Judicial Committee, and in doing so would inflict great injury on the suitors in that Court, and would bring back the miserable state of things previous to passing the Act of 1871. That injury was, so far, admitted, as appeared by an Amendment introduced into the Bill by the Lord Chancellor with the object of meeting it, and which provided that any two of the Lords Justices, so far as necessary and so far as the state of business might admit, should sit upon the Judicial Committee. The necessity would be clearer than the possibility; but, were it otherwise, the arrangement was contrary to the intention of the Judicature Act which contemplated these Judges sitting, not in a subordinate Court, but in the Superior Court of Appeal which was now suspended. The only practicable remedy was the appointment of two additional Judges at a cost of £ 10,000, which was a small amount compared with the advantage to be derived by the public, or the injury they would suffer if the present proposal was persisted in. He en-
1852
treated the Attorney General to pause before he took such a step as that proposed in the Bill.
THE ATTORNEY GENERALhoped he should be excused if he did not reply to all the adverse criticisms upon the Bill, because the arguments of some answered the arguments of others, while many criticisms referred to matters of detail which had better be discussed in Committee. He did not complain of, or object to, the many suggestions which had been offered, for which he had to express his thanks, and all of which should have full consideration. He wished, however, to recall the attention of the House to the purport and object of the Bill. It would call into operation those portions of the Act of 1873 which were based upon the recommendations of the Judicial Commission, and it would suspend the operation of those portions of the Act which were not recommended by the Commission, but which were in excess of what was recommended by the Commission, and which almost ran counter to the views of the Commission, for the passage of their Report which had just been referred to seemed to indicate that, in their opinion, it was desirable to retain the jurisdiction of the House of Lords until such time as it could be ascertained what would be the working of the Court of Appeal which they recommended. With respect to the remarks made by the hon. Member who had just addressed the House (Mr. J. F. Leith), in disapproval of the provision in the Bill to take two of the Judges from the number constituting the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, he might state that the power of that Court would not be impaired by the arrangement; but this would be fully discussed in Committee; he might here remark, that the Bill, if passed, would not come into operation until November next, and by that time a large number of the Indian and Colonial Appeals would have been disposed of. As to what had been said about general concurrence in the Act of 1873, no doubt there was general concurrence of opinion as far as regarded the principles of those portions of the measure which were based upon the recommendations of the Commissioners, and the discussion upon those portions of the Act related mainly to matters of detail; but there was not the same amount of con-

1853
currence in respect of the principles of those portions of the measure which were not based upon those recommendations of the Commissioners. He was not open to the charge advanced by the right hon. Member for London University, that he had offered no justification for the Bill, for, in moving its second reading, he stated distinctly that one of its principles was that there should be one Final Court of Appeal for all parts of the Empire; he had also strongly urged that there should be an Intermediate Court of Appeal. He believed that the Court which was proposed by the Bill would be the best for the purpose; but that was a matter for the consideration of the Committee. The main principles of the Bill were admitted to be right by those Members who had criticized it, and its provisions would carry into effect the recommendations of the Judicature Commissioners. In these circumstances he appealed to the hon. and learned Member for the Denbigh Boroughs not to ask for a division on his Amendment.
MR. WATKIN WILLIAMS, in asking the leave of the House to withdraw the Amendment, side, the general opinion of the House seemed to be that the Bill should be read a second time; and, therefore, no useful object would be attained by dividing. Moreover, his real object, as hon. Members were aware, in putting his Amendment on the Paper, was to elicit the opinions of hon. Members upon this subject, and that object had been fully accomplished by a long and exhaustive debate. Those opinions would be very valuable in Committee.
Amendment, by leave, wihdrawn.
Main Question put, and agreed to.
Bill read a second time, and committed for Monday next.

OFFENCES AGAINST THE PERSON ACT AMENDMENT BILL.

  [BILL 155.] SECOND READING.
  (Mr. Charley, Mr. Whitwell.)
  Order for Second Reading read. Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read a second time."—(Mr. Charley.)
  MR. P. A. TAYLOR, in rising to move, as an Amendment, that the Bill be read a second time that day three months,
  1854
  said:* Sir, if the Bill proposed by Her Majesty's Government be fairly and sufficiently described as a Bill designed to meet the evil of violent personal assaults by means of stronger, more certain, and more efficient measures of repression, I think no one who sits in this House would be disposed to challenge the second reading. But it is not so. Mr. Herbert Spencer, I think, has said—
  "In the treatment of our criminals there alternate or co-exist an unreasoning severity with an unreasoning lenity. Now we punish, in a spirit of vengeance, now we pamper with a maudlin sympathy."
  The Bill of Her Majesty's Government, then, is based on this principle—namely, that it is wise and politic to attempt to counteract and to stamp out crimes of violence by violence, to meet brutality by a spirit of vengeance, by the brutality of the law; in fact, although euphemistically termed Offences Against the Person Bill, it is known more commonly in the Lobbies and in the House as "the Flogging Bill." It is for this reason that I oppose it. The experience and wisdom of our fathers, after a very long course of experiments in, and experience of, violent punishments, had, as one thought, finally determined that brutal and brutalizing punishments—punishments of torture—were altogether out of date. Those punishments certainly did one thing well—they brutalized society; but they did not by any means stamp out any one particular crime. The Flogging Bill of the right hon. Gentleman is, I am bound to admit, not a very violent or severe measure—for a Flogging Bill; but it does this—it organizes and it further extends the punishment of flogging. It will be in the recollection of the House that some 12 or 14 years ago there arose a sudden panic in this country about a particular description of crime, known as garotting. I suppose there never was a greater amount of panic with a less amount of reality. Under the influence of that sudden panic this House rushed into what might be called experimental legislation. We had at that time given up, it was hoped for ever, the practice of torturing our criminals; but as a remedy for this particular crime, and to stop the panic at this particular time, flogging was introduced, rather as an experiment than otherwise. That experiment has

  1855
  failed as signally as did all the punishments of torture employed by our fathers before us. Yet when the Government might be expected to redress the error made at that time, and to go back to the more wholesome scheme of punishment, finding that the Act had proved an entire failure, they come forward instead and propose to recognize, organize, and complete the system of punishment by flogging. It is hardly necessary for me. Sir, to answer the assertion that we who are opposed to this punishment by torture, are friends of the garotters; that we have a kind of sentimental pity for them, and feel much more compassion for them than for their victims. I deny that entirely. There is nothing I hate more than needless torture for man or beast, but I cannot plead guilty to the soft impeachment. It is not the suffering of the garotter that moves me in this matter so much as the demoralization of society. Our sentiment and passion are rather aroused for our civilization, for our good repute among the nations, for our Christianity. And when I say our Christianity, I am not speaking of any particular dogmatic form of Christianity, but of that inner spiritual life which has done more than anything else to give Christianity its hold upon the world for the past 2,000 years. When we are charged with taking up the sentimental side of this question, I beg most respectfully to throw back the imputation upon those who make it. We are not the sentimentalists. Reason and experience are the groundwork of what we support. The hon. and gallant Member for Mid-Cheshire (Colonel Egerton Leigh) and the other hon. Members who hold the same views are the sentimentalists, if to be sentimental is to disregard the dictates of reason and the lessons of experience, and to be carried away by the temporary panic of the moment. That hon. and gallant Gentleman, forgetful of the lessons our parents learned, has his mind so filled and his ears so stuffed with the sufferings and the cries of the victims of personal violence, that he calls upon the Government to take some steps in the matter, and they reply by an attempt to stamp out by torture and blood these acts of violence. When I first entered this House, some 14 or 15 years ago, I moved year after year for the omission from the Mutiny Bill of the
  1856
  flogging clauses; and, at last, upon the Motion of a Member who I regret no longer sits in this House, my Friend, Mr. Otway, flogging was entirely abolished in the Army. We little thought in those days when we were fighting flogging in the Army that we should have the whole question opened up later on, not merely in regard to the Army, but in regard to the punishment of crime. I well remember the anger hon. and gallant Members used to express against myself and others when we proposed that alteration of the law. They asked whether we thought them less tenderhearted—whether we considered them as disliking torture less than we did—or whether we thought that they were any more likely to desire to return to torture for civilian offences than we were? There were especial reasons, we were told, why flogging was essential for the Army. It was necessary to maintain discipline, without which the Army would be a mob, taken as it was from the refuse of the population. Little did we think then, when we believed we were destroying the last links of the system of punishment by torture, by getting rid of it in the Army, that the time would actually come when Her Majesty's Government would deliberately ask this House to revert to torture for civilian offences. Flogging in the Army came to an end. Why? Because the universal opinion of the country declared that it should exist no longer, because the opinion expressed by the hon. and learned Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck) was the opinion of all cultivated men of the day, when he said he was sure "that no man after being flogged was an equal man to what he was before." The late Mr. Buxton, the representative of moderate and sensible men, said—
  "It has been the great blunder which shortsighted rulers in every ago have made, and which has been attended with invariable failure, to suppose that it is by fierce and appalling punishments that crime is befit prevented."
  Well, Sir, and how was it that flogging was done away with? It was never proved that discipline could be maintained without it: it was not competent to be proved that the Army could exist in its then condition if flogging was abolished—it was done away with by the sentiment of the British people, by a burst of indignation which declared

  1857
  that they would not endure this abomination any longer, that this wrong should not be done any person on the bare chance of there being some necessity for it, or of some good possibly resulting from it. The right hon. Gentleman who brought in this Bill (Mr. Cross) appears to think it of no great consequence. It has been kept before us days and weeks, but it is not a Bill to bring forward at an early stage of the evening, and it is not one in whose defence it is worth while to say a word. I venture to differ from him with regard to the importance he attaches to this measure. It is, I think, much more important than some others which we are to be detained here till Christmas, if necessary, to pass. It is for England, practically, a renewal and re-establishment of the principle of punishment by torture, and for Scotland it is absolutely so. ["No, no!"] That is the fact. The Act passed in 1863 did not apply to Scotland, and flogging there was abolished in 1862, after it had for 40 years previously passed into utter and deserved disuse. It had, as Alison side, writing in 1833, gone out of use by the change of manners. Some hon. Members seem to think that they have found a heaven-born remedy for crime, and that the "cat" has descended direct from the skies, as something entirely new in the history of our country. Let me read them a few words of graphic description as to how we have experimented in regard to flogging, contained in The Law Mgazine. The writer says—
  "We flogged men before hanging them; we flogged libellers regularly and mercilessly, we even went so low down in the list of offenders as to flog beggars. The practice grew into one of the arts, and culminated about the reign of James I. The last half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th, deserve, I think, to be regarded as the golden age of flogging in England. During this period the cat was continually going. In prison and out of it, the warder always had his hand in. We flogged at the cart-tail in the street, almost as often as we flogged in prison. Our fathers were logical, and on the sound principle that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, they flogged women as well as men. 'They warmed her shoulders,' is the expression of one of our facetious Judges. No one, who knows the fact, can deny that they gave flogging a long trial in England; and yet in spite of this trial, and of a fervent instinctive, and as to its origin brutal and barbarous prejudice in its favour, with the firmest conviction that it was a heaven-appointed remedy, our fathers found that it did not answer. Crime did not diminish, brutality rather increased, and the same people
  1858
  were often obdurate enough to be 'warmed' several times without beneficial effect. Reluctantly and with that sorrow with which men always part from long cherished belief, clinging indeed to shreds and fragments of it, they diminished the use of the cat. Something else had to be tried; and not having yet hit upon the right track for the diminution of crime, as we have done in more recent times, they substituted last century wholesale hanging for flogging. They very properly argued that hanging, being a more dreadful punishment than flogging, would be a more powerful deterrent. It had too the additional advantage, no slight one, of not requiring a second application. Accordingly they hanged for almost every offence,"
  Now, Sir, I am no advocate for hanging, but I do think hanging is preferable to torture. Well, to put a man out of existence is a poor and contemptible admission on the part of society, that with all its powers of administration, of restraint, and reformation, we cannot deal with this unhappy criminal, and so perhaps there is nothing for it but to put him out of existence. But it is infinitely worse to brutalize and torture him. I find there are some hon. Members of this House who do not know, or have forgotten, what this really means, and who doubt the justice of the word I use. They tell me—"We were boxed when we were babes, we were beaten when we were boys, we were thrashed when we were students, and to call it torture is altogether absurd." But these are not the punishments against which I am speaking. I may have—I have—my own opinion of the advantage of physical force. We have already discovered that we break in our horses and our dogs better by kindness and by rewards, than by the old system of cruel brutality, we may, perhaps, soon discover that we can do without it altogether with regard to children and boys. I am speaking rather of the punishment of the cat, the most painful instrument of torture the world has ever known. [The hon. Member having read a horrifying description of flogging from The Medical Review, and the opinion of the late Mr. Wakley, proprietor of The Lancet, proceeded.] The Saturday Review puts it thus—
  "The simple question is whether a man who knows that if he commits an assault he will be flogged, is less likely to commit one, than a man who knows that he will only be imprisoned."
  And The Review certainly carries out its principle to the fullest extent, for it says—
  "There can be very little doubt that what is wanted is a periodical flogging—say, once a fort-

  1859
  night—in addition to imprisonment and hard labour."
  All honour to the consistency of that illustrious print; but I do not think the House is prepared to adopt the views of The Saturday Review. Now, Sir, I will ask the House to look at the matter in this point of view. If there is one thing more cruel, more brutal, and more without excuse than the brutality of the individual criminal, is it not the act of society when it gets that criminal within its grasp? Society takes that friendless scoundrel by the throat. It has it in its power to do whatever it will with him; it can restrain him, it can shut him up for life, or until he has proved that he has some right by good behaviour to go out again; it can make him work for his living; it can moderate his rations if he shows too much strength; it can do all that is reasonable in the way of restraint:—and yet what does it do,—it imitates upon him the brutality which the garotter inflicted upon his victim. The lesson that society ought to teach him is that he has committed a crime against humanity. But what it does say is, that it is right and just to do to him all and more than all that he did to his victim, and it teaches him not that cruelty is an infamy, but that the motive, the object which he had in view, was wrong. Mark the lesson this teaches the brutal father who has disobedient children. Society cannot say obedience is not a good thing. How, then, shall he attain this good thing? The right hon. Gentleman teaches him—"Let him boat them until he has forced them into submission." Or the brutal husband has a drunken wife. Assuredly it is a good object to reclaim her, and prevent her from ruining herself and her family. How shall the brutal husband effect this? The right hon. Gentleman teaches him—"Let him beat her till she cannot raise her hand to her head." There is something, to my mind, infinitely mean and contemptible in this way of punishing our lowest class of criminals by brutal violence. Think of what their lives and chances are They are born, literally and morally, in an atmosphere of crime; they have no chance of raising themselves from what they are; they live in the midst of a public opinion that surrounds them and teaches them and educates them in crime. Our system of laissez-faire government, the maintenance
  1860
  of individual freedom, prevents any intercourse between ourselves and these the lowest branch of society. They may live in dens or garrets, but the philosopher or the missionary has no access to them; in fact, we are as much separated from them as though they lived in Central Africa. When a man offends against the law, we have legally and morally all power to deal with him. We can restrain him, we can punish him, we can make him work; we can, in fact, bring our culture, our civilization, our religion to bear upon him, and, if possible, to help to reform him. Yet the first time we come in contact with this wretch we show the excellence of our religion, the beauty of our culture, the charm of our refinement, by tearing his back with the cat. It is upon the demoralization of society produced by the infliction of such punishments as flogging that I lay most stress. Two or three years ago we even had a "torture literature" in the papers, and illustrations of flogging—and the Sheriff of London complained to The Times that when it was known that criminals were about to be flogged he received applications from persons of every degree desirous of witnessing this miserable spectacle. Sir George Grey, in the debate on the Bill of 1863, asked if flogging was so effectual, where was the line to be drawn? I repeat his question. If once you establish the principle that you are ready to attempt to stamp out a particular form of crime by violence, where indeed is the line to be drawn? A distinguished Member of this House, the present Chairman of Committees (Mr. Raikes), in Ms consistency of feeling proposed in two flogging Bills which he had before this House three or four years ago, and which came to nothing, to administer it for certain forms of libel. Why not stamp that out by flogging? What is there in these particular crimes of personal violence that makes flogging or other torture particularly applicable to them? On the contrary an equally good argument can be adduced to show that these are not the crimes most fitly punished by torture, if torture is to be used at all. Other crimes argue at least as much selfishness in their perpetration, and their consequences are a thousandfold worse than individual attacks upon a particular man. Will you flog the fraudulent bank director who takes ruin

  1861
  into hundreds of peaceful homes? Will you flog the debaucher of children under 10 years old? ["Hear, hear!"] There are thousands of such cases, but though hon. Members cry "hear, hear," I tell them that the House of Commons will never flog for such offences, because on the first cut of the lash touching the tender back of a gentleman the punishment will be swept away for ever. There is no limit to the extension of this principle, as the right hon. Gentleman who proposes this Bill will probably find. Will you flog women; and if not, why not? Barbarity, brutality, is not confined to one sex. Our fathers flogged women at the cart's tail. Are you going to do the same? If not, you have not faith in your opinions. Will you flog at the cart's tail; and if not, why not? The very advantage of these punishments is that they are deterrent, and if you really desire their full advantage, let it be known everywhere what suffering they create. It is not enough that the criminal classes should hear that suffering is occasioned by flogging. Let them see for themselves the streaming backs and hear the agonizing groans, or you do not do your duty by society. You inflict pain and cruelty upon the man you flog, because your object is not so much to punish him and prevent him from committing the same crime again as it is to prevent his class from doing the same thing. The poor sophism that because we do not hang in public that therefore we are consistent in not flogging in public is too glaring to need exposure. It is not the agony of death that acts as a deterrent, but the fact that death is inflicted, and this fact is sufficiently known by the announcements in the newspapers. But in flogging a man your principal object is that his class may know the agony he is suffering, and if you do not flog at the cart's tail, in the sight of all the world, as our forefathers did, you do not believe in your principles. I am almost ashamed to argue with a British House of Commons the economical side of this question, but if you flog a man you must imprison him afterwards, or else you turn a tiger out upon society. Further, is it nothing to say that we stand alone at this moment as the retainers or rather the returners to the punishment of flogging? At a Prison Congress, held in London some two or three years
  1862
  ago, this fact came out with the most marked effect. The gentlemen who attended came from every civilized country—they were not doctrinaire prison reformers, but men who had spent years in practically dealing with prisoners. Severity rather than sympathy with scoundrels was the general impression which a visitor would have gathered—but when the subject of corporal punishment came on for discussion, one foreign speaker after another arose and denounced flogging in the strongest terms. We found that England stood alone; that flogging had been abolished in every other civilized nation; and that the prison officials who had been deprived of its use—doubtless parting with their cats with many regrets—had everywhere come to the conclusion that to inflict it was a blunder. Every one Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, Danes, Italians, have given up the cat. Russia even has thrown down the knout, and Her Majesty's Government stoops to pick it up! The whole authority gathered from every quarter was against the policy of the Government—against punishment by torture [and the hon. Member read the opinions of Mr. Hill, formerly Inspector of Prisons, and of Mr. Sheppard, Governor of Wakefield Gaol]. I could go on giving authorities for ever, but that I am afraid of wearying the House. I will just, however, quote two distinguished ones from America. The Governor of Massachusetts State Prison, which contains about 650 inmates, says—
  "I have never known an instance where I thought that a man would he made bettor by the infliction of blows;"
  and the Governor of Wisconsin State Prison, one of the largest and best of American gaols, writes—"Corporal punishment is in no case inflicted." But it is said—"All this is very fair reasoning, but it must give way to the great law of fact. We had a terrible outbreak of garrotting some years ago, we established flogging as a punishment, and it was put down—so all your reasoning must go to the wall." I shall show by, statements and official statistics, which I think hon. Members will not be able either to deny or disprove, that there never was a more utter fallacy than that. I shall first show that garrotting was a panic rather than a wide-spread crime, that whatever it was it had entirely dis-

  1863
  appeared from London months before the Act was passed, and I shall then show that comparing previous and subsequent years to 1863 that the only crimes which have increased are precisely those which are rendered floggable by the Act passed in that year, and that all the other crimes have diminished. I will first call as a witness Lord Aberdare, who says—
  "There was no idea more profoundly fixed in the English mind than that the punishment of flogging had put an end to garrotting. He happened to be appointed to the Home Office, as Under Secretary, in November, 1862, and the outbreak had taken place in the previous July. The streets were filled with police in plain clothes, and in an hour the whole of these garrotters were in custody. In some 26 oases which had been reported, there was only one genuine case, when they came to be examined into, and that was a case of an old woman on Primrose Hill, who was robbed with a certain amount of violence. Every woman who was found drunk in a gutter had been garrotted; every footman who had got a black eye had been garrotted, and there was a great deal of alarm about it. That Act had the credit of having put an end to those offences, which had been entirely stopped by the action taken some eight or nine months before. Robberies with violence had gone on decreasing in number. He did not, therefore, attribute any success in that instance to the punishment of flogging."
  So much for the existence of garrotting as a wide-spread form of violence. The hon. Member then proceeded to read at great length statistics and figures to show that antecedent to the passing of the Flogging Act and Baron Bramwell's "wise severity" crimes of violence had continuously decreased, and that the same diminution had followed that period though the infliction of sentences of flogging were rare; and also reports of local authorities of great centres of population, brutal assaults, wife-beating, and crimes of violence had undergone a continual diminution compared with 20 or 30 years ago. Referring to the effect of flogging upon crimes of violence the figures showed that those very offences of robbery and assaulting to rob, which the Garotters Act of 1862 was passed to put down, increased and not decreased during seven years subsequent to the passing of that Act, whereas of those offences accompanied by violence which were not floggable the numbers of which in 1862 were 2,321, had decreased in 1869 to 2,155. Therefore the only crimes with violence that increased in the year subsequent to the Flogging Act were precisely that
  1864
  form of crime which was made floggable under that Act. And the result of that further is that, taking the 10 years before 1863 and the 10 years after, there were in the former period 3,261 floggable offences, and in the latter 3,380; while, on the other hand, the total number of offences against property with violence was 800 less in the latter period than in the former period. Again, taking the five years before 1863 and the five years after, the floggable offences increased from 1,450 in the former period to 1,910 in the latter. The right hon. Gentleman has not prefaced his Motion to-day with any observations, and it is therefore impossible for me to tell upon what he relies. Perhaps he relies upon the Report of the Judges. Now I do not hesitate to say—and I ask the House to be good enough to follow me in this—that the Report of the Judges is alone amply sufficient to condemn this Bill. If the people of this country are to return to the brutal punishment of their forefathers, and if we are again to go back to punishment by torture, the least we can ask is that there shall at least be something approaching to unanimity upon the bench of Judges. All men must know that, and, most of all, they who have to deal with and sanction by their moral influence, this change if it be necessary. Another ground for opposition to this Bill which I would urge is, that if there be one rule more universally held than another in regard to punishments, it is whether they be severe or not, at all events they must be certain. Yet there can be no doubt that if you have this great diversity of opinion among the Judges, the gambling element enters into the question, and whether a criminal is to be flogged or not will depend upon the accident of a circuit. What are the Judges' opinions? Lord Coleridge, Mr. Justice Brett, and Mr. Justice Denman declared emphatically against flogging. Mr. Justice Keating said that the Act not having made the sentence of flogging compulsory he had himself never passed it; and that the late Mr. Justice Willes, who thought much on such subjects, was wholly opposed to it. The diversity of the Judges in regard to the crimes they would punish by flogging, is yet more marked. Some would inflict it for indecent assaults and rapes upon children, and one Judge would punish stack firing with it.

  1865
  The belief of the Judges in its efficacy is also very varied. One did not believe in it, three declined to express an opinion, and two or three inferred that it did good because offences diminished—that is to say, they took the reports in the newspapers and believed them—while Chief Baron Kelly says it put down garrotting. Mr. Justice Lush says that he flogged everybody convicted of these offences, and so put them down; but Mr. Justice Keating, who toot the circuit next time, said he was obliged to have recourse to very severe punishments, so terrible was the amount of crime which had sprung up. When the Lord Chief Justice pronounces an opinion ex cathedra, it behoves those who are not professional men to regard it with the greatest respect and reverence; but when he gives reasons for the faith that is in him, then even non-professional men may venture to criticize them. Thus, when he says that he is in favour of flogging because it has put down garrotting, "as they saw in the newspapers," we know so far as that reason is concerned that his conclusions are false. The Lord Chief Justice says—
  "In recommending the infliction of corporal punishment in such cases, I assume that the punishment in its infliction will be kept within due bounds of moderation and humanity; and while it carries with it such an amount of bodily pain as shall operate to deter offenders from acts of brutal violence, shall not be unnecessarily severe, or calculated to cause prolonged suffering to the party undergoing it. I presume that the degree of severity with which the punishment is to be inflicted will not be left to the discretion of those who are to inflict it, but will always be under the regulation and direction of the Executive Government."
  The first part of this reminds one of the recommendation of Elizabeth, that the rack shall be used "as gently as such a thing may" How it is to be "always under the regulation and direction of the Executive Committee "I fail to see, unless the right hon. Gentleman proposes to be himself present at every ceremony of the kind, and I have no doubt if he were it would be very much for the advantage of the criminal. It will be seen that this condition of the Lord Chief Justice invalidates and renders worthless the judgment already given, because the punishment will depend for its severity, not upon the Judge or jury, but upon the thews and sinews of the warder who has to administer it, and upon the bodily vigour and strength of the victim. And
  1866
  we know from the testimony of Mr. Wakley that no surgeon can estimate the effect of a flogging. So far as the Judges are concerned, then, there is no justification for the Bill of Her Majesty's Government. Whether the right hon. Gentleman relies upon the Reports of Chairmen of Quarter Sessions and other officials, I really am unable to say, but what strikes me in going over this Return is how skin-deep appear to be the reforms we thought most assured. Our law and punishment reformers, our Romillys and our Frys, and all those others thought they had mitigated the severity of our punishments, and that they had effected a real anchorage in the thought and knowledge of the nation, and yet here we have numberless officials, Chairmen of Quarter Sessions and others, not even impressed with horror that it is necessary to go back to these punishments, but entering into the subject with all the gaieté de caur with which a French Marshal entered the late War. You will find that in a large number of answers the writers know nothing about flogging, because it is limited to crimes of violence, although they approve of it. There are many honourable exceptions, who decline to be made the official reporters of the Government, or to base their knowledge on newspaper paragraphs. For instance, Mr. Philip Sillard, Chairman of the Huntingdon Quarter Sessions—I name his name with all honour—writes—
  "Although opinions have been expressed to me in the affirmative, they seem to me to be based upon reports of what has occurred elsewhere, rather than from any personal knowledge. I can only state that I do not know of a single case that has occurred within my experience in this county."
  The report from Essex is-"I believe from hearsay evidence that flogging has been very efficacious." Hereford says—"No offence under this section has occurred in this district, but we are of opinion that it has worked well." Radnor—"I do not doubt that flogging has been highly efficacious, but I only speak from reports in the papers." Warwick —"I have not seen returns, but I have no doubt," & c., while Kent and Wiltshire write—"Garrotting unknown, but flogging excellent." I am sorry to see that in Scotland—although there they can have had no experience, because flogging was abolished by statute in

  1867
  1862—that these official Returns, based upon paragraphs in the London newspapers, with some honourable exceptions, all go to support the right hon. Gentleman and his flogging measure. Now, Sir, I know we are very apt to deceive ourselves, but I do deceive myself if I have not made out a strong case against this Bill. I have shown that the proposed re-enactment and return to brutal, brutalizing, and exploded punishments has no excuse in the condition of crime in this country, and has still less excuse after the failure of the experiment of 1863. I appeal, therefore, upon these grounds, to Her Majesty's Government to reconsider their decision; failing that, I appeal to the House of Commons to save the country from this abomination, and failing that, one other appeal I make which I know will not fail, I appeal to the honest sentiments and generous intelligence of the British people.
  Amendment proposed, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day three months."—(Mr. P. A. Taylor.)
  Question proposed, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."
  MR. WADDYside, that according to the speech which they had just heard, all those Judges who did not entirely agree with the hon. Member for Leicester (Mr. P. A. Taylor) did not know anything about the subject; while everybody was entirely misinformed who did not base his opinions solely on the statistics which that hon. Gentleman adduced. Having himself the misfortune to differ from the hon. Member on pretty nearly everything he had side, he was afraid he should be told that he had gone into the subject of flogging with great gaiety of heart. It was impossible to expose all the hon. Gentleman's fallacies, because they were so numerous; but, at the outset, he protested against the attempt to prejudice the whole question by describing what was meant solely for punishment as "torture." When torture was used, it was used for the purpose of extracting the truth, and was altogether different from that which was inflicted as a punishment. He protested also against having a picture drawn to them of the way in which some of their unfortunate countrymen were born upon dung-hills, brought up without educa-
  1868
  tion, and then taken by the throat. Did the hon. Gentleman mean to say, because they had been raised upon dunghills they were not to be punished at all? Were they to tell criminals—"You are ignorant, and therefore do not understand the nature of your crimes. You have been accustomed to look on felony almost as a trade; and therefore we cannot think of thrashing you, although you may have thrashed an innocent person within an inch of his life." Might they not, according to that reasoning, go further and say—"Because you do not understand the difference between meum and tuum, we cannot think of putting you in prison." Let the House not be led away from the real point before them by the tall talk which had been addressed to them. Of course, it was not pleasant to be flogged; and it was because it was not pleasant and they did not like it that men were subjected to that punishment. It was a gross fallacy to compare the infliction of two dozen strokes at the outside on men who had been guilty of the greatest brutality and the infliction in former days of 200 or 300 strokes—which was next door to murder—on soldiers of the Army, who had done nothing but run away to their wives or their sweethearts. Some of them had had experience of what had been the result of the punishments inflicted in consequence of the judgments of Mr. Justice Lush, whose name had been mentioned not altogether in a kindly way that evening. For himself, he could state that in a district where that experiment had been extensively tried, he had observed over and over again at the Assizes that after what was roughly called a "flogging Judge" had been sent round there was a remarkable diminution next time of offences of that character; while, on the other hand, when a Judge of exceeding tenderness of disposition went round, the result had been a wonderful crop of those crimes. He entirely agreed with the general principle of the Bill, which was that where men had committed crimes indicating great brutality, they must be men of an exceptional character, and must be punished in an exceptional way; that they were men so thoroughly hardened that you could only get at them by making them feel corporally what they would never feel in any other manner. In his experience at the criminal bar he

  1869
  had found prisoners curious not as to whether there was any hope of an acquittal, but as to whether they would be likely to "have their backs warmed," showing that this was what they most dreaded. There was no use in being very tender and almost poetical on such a question. Something had been said about periodical flogging. He was quite disposed to think that a very good thing. He believed it had been tried with eminently good effect, and he thought it might be well that the flogging should not be given all at once, but should be carefully distributed over the length of time that the man remained in prison. He would not let them have it all at once, if letting them know that more was coming would do them good. He was bound to say that he felt a very great amount of sympathy with the victims; he could not give all his sympathy to a man who had knocked down a fellow-creature, and nearly kicked him to death; he must give some of his sympathy to the man who had been kicked. A man who deliberately went out with a life-preserver to catch some decent man going home, knock him down, half murder him, and then stamp upon him—such a man would not altogether have his (Mr. Waddy's) sympathy, because, when caught, he would got a good thrashing; but some of his sympathy was with that unfortunate man who was so brutally treated. He had risen to protest against the entirely false air with which this matter had been presented to the House and the glamour which had been thrown over it. As to its being said that we were to flog women, or to flog men at the cart's tail—these things answered themselves. It was not true that they wanted to frighten men by their seeing the blood run down the back; if they knew that the man got a good flogging in prison, that would be enough for them. Criminals of the character he had mentioned should know distinctly that when they were starting off on a dark night, armed with life-preservers or other weapons, they would get a good flogging, as sure as they were born, if they used violence; and such knowledge would have a wonderful effect upon them.
  COLONEL EGERTON LEIGHside, that if speaking up for the rights of women was sentimentalism, he might own the soft impeachment at once. He had been very much suprised to observe
  1870
  that during his speech the hon. Member for Leicester (Mr. P. A. Taylor) never mentioned a word about the sufferings of women. The hon. Member jeered at the Press, and said that its accounts of those outrages were not true. When they saw the trials that took place, and noted the convictions in which they resulted, and the places to which the offenders were sent, he thought it right, he admitted, that even a newspaper might sometimes toll the truth. Moreover, if lies were at one time the food of newspapers, they were not so now. In many of these cases the attacks on women amounted almost to "deferred murder." A man, for example, would jump on a woman, though she might be in the family-way; or would kick her in the face; or sometimes would work upon her feelings through her child by putting hot ashes on her baby's head. When he read of such cases he was sorry there should be such brutes in the world; but he felt no sympathy for them. He agreed with the last speaker in denying that there was any just comparison to be drawn between flogging in the Army and as it was proposed to be administered under the provisions of the Bill under discussion. He, for one, deprecated flogging in the Army; but he supported the punishment when it was intended only to be used as the reward of brutal violence, and as a means of protecting women and children, who could not protect themselves. There was no occasion that one man should be punished for an offence of this kind, if he only knew the punishment that awaited him if he did commit it. If a man kicked his wife, put her on the fire, or threw her downstairs, he owned he could not feel the sympathy for the brute which the hon. Member for Leicester felt. It was of no use to urge that cases of this sort were so few. Many of these cases were never heard, because it was in the nature of women to forgive and forget, and many a brute had been saved from punishment by his wife at the last moment telling a lie in his favour. Women themselves could not be trusted to deal with this question. He had a Women's Eights paper sent him the other day, in which they said—"Educate the men," and reasoned in this way, that if they could spell "cat" they would never require to feel it. He really had hoped that there would have been a general

  1871
  feeling in the House in favour of this Bill. In his opinion, we had been at fault in not dealing energetically with these crimes of violence. If the Bill was passed he believed they would in future have very few cases of such brutality, because a man would think once, if not twice, before he brutally assaulted his wife or his children, for it was well known that the greatest bullies were the most arrant cowards. As to the talk of the hon. Member about flogging at a cart tail, and the other exaggerations in which he had indulged for the purpose of arousing the sympathies of the House, all he could say was that he believed their duty was to protect women, children, and weakly persons from such outrageous assaults, and, for his own part, he had not the slightest sympathy with the spurious sentimentality which would let off the ruffians who committed such brutal assaults without condign punishment. The fact that violent assaults were allowed to go without adequate punishment was more likely to brutalize a whole population than the other fact, that the commission of such assaults was certain to be followed by punishment in kind. The measure was purely of a preventive character, and as such it would have his cordial support.
  MR. SHAW-LEFEVRE, in supporting the Amendment of the hon. Member for Leicester (Mr. P. A. Taylor), remarked that in the course he was taking he was not impelled by any feeling of spurious sentimentality as it had been called by the hon. and gallant Member who had just sat down. The object of punishment was to deter crime, and if it could be proved to his satisfaction that flogging would have that effect, he would support the Bill; but it was because he was convinced that corporal punishment of a severe kind had always increased instead of diminished those crimes of violence and brutality that he opposed it. For nearly three centuries flogging prevailed both in England and on the Continent, but at the present moment England was the only country in which it was retained. He found that at one time ladies of honour were flogged for breaches of etiquette by the masters of ceremonies at some Continental Courts, and Peter the Great, when he was young, flogged his Court ladies, and when he was older he flogged his generals. Where it had been aban-
  1872
  doned the reason for the abandonment had been that it was found impossible to tame a brutal man by inflicting a brutalizing punishment upon him, or permanently to decrease the number of the criminal classes by retaliatory punishments. He would ask the House whether the amelioration of our criminal law had not produced a great improvement in this respect. In 1842, when our population was 16,000,000, the number of persons convicted and sentenced to transportation or penal servitude was 4,718. In 1872, during which interval great ameliorations had been introduced, and when the population had increased to 23,000,000, the number of convictions had fallen 1,514, or less than one-third in 30 years. It was strange, however, that the Judges had always been the most strenuous opponents of every attempt to humanize our law. ["No, no!"] He said that and repeated it. In 1820, when it was proposed to abolish capital punishment for the offence of stealing goods of the value of 5s., Lord Ellenborough, in the House of Lords, said the Judges were unanimously against the proposal, and he added, if it was agreed to, "we shall not know whether we are standing on our head or our feet." He confessed, therefore, that he was not surprised to find the Judges in favour of flogging. There was something in the position of a Judge which led him to favour retaliatory punishments. ["No, no!"] He repeated there was something in the position of a Judge which inclined him to favour retaliatory punishment—he would not call it "torture." ["No, no!"] Why, he was just reminded by his hon. and learned Friend the Member for the City of Oxford (Sir William Harcourt) that Baron Bramwell had made use of the expression that there ought to be a power of retaliation on offenders—of causing them to suffer pain similar to what they had inflicted, and the same opinion was given by many others of the Judges. It had been said that this Bill was justified by the result of the Bill of 1863, which was brought in to put down the offence of garotting and crimes of robbery with violence. It was true that the brutal crime of garotting was put down in a short time, but the brutality and violence was only turned into another direction. Crimes of violence,

  1873
  instead of diminishing, increased, and the figures of the hon. Member for Leicester he regarded as conclusive on this point. From judicial statistics it appeared that for the five years previous to 1863, when the Act was passed, the number of robberies with violence was 290 a-year, while for the five years subsequent to that date the number was no less than 383—nearly 100 a-year more. As to garotting itself, all the evidence pointed to this, that there was a sudden outbreak in 1862, and that only about 90 persons altogether were concerned in it. Sir George Grey, who was Home Secretary at the time, admitted that the outbreak had entirely ceased before the Bill was brought in, and it was also testified by Lord Aberdare that it had ceased by November, 1862. The fact was, that within a few weeks after the outbreak the offenders were all in prison. Lord Aberdare had assured him that the Home Office in December, 1862, was pestered by people who complained of having been the victims of garotting, but that on investigation not one of them proved to be a genuine case. Among the cases which proved not to be founded in truth was one of a young lady who said she had got a black eye and had her hair pulled out by garotters; but it turned out that she did not lose her hair by garotters, but that she had actually sold it. ["Oh, oh!"] He had the fact, and others that he had stated, from Lord Aberdare, who was then Under Secretary for the Home Department. The fact was, that the "panic" from the fear of garotting continued long in the public mind after the crime of garotting had ceased, and in many instances persons who alleged that they had been garotted and treated with great violence were found on inquiry by the police to have fabricated their complaints. It was alleged that brutal assaults had greatly increased during the last few years. The Blue Book contained Returns from the chief constables of the number of such cases, but no total for the whole country was given. Adding them up, he found that the numbers of brutal offences for which offenders were tried and convicted were—in 1870, 371; in 1871, 311; in 1872, 311; in 1873, 312; and in 1874, 351, showing no substantial increase of brutal assaults. The assaults summarily convicted were as follows:—
  1874
  in 1870, 3,076; in 1871, 2,566; in 1872, 3,164; in 1873, 3,212; and in 1874,3,777; and the increase was confined to Lancashire, the West Riding, Stafford, and Durham, where there had been a great rise of wages and a proportionate increase of drinking; but the increase of crimes of violence caused thereby was not necessarily of so permanent a character as to justify a change in our legislation, and now that wages were lower these crimes would probably diminish. Again, certainty was an essential element in criminal jurisprudence, and the Bill would fail in this respect. If there was any class of offences to which the promoters of the Bill would wish it to apply, it was to wife-beaters. He was by no means sure that the Bill was so worded as to apply to them; but supposing that it did, he would remind the House that greater powers had been given to magistrates to punish aggravated assaults upon women than upon men. A magistrate might send an offender of this kind to prison for six months with hard labour, while in ordinary assaults the limit was two months without hardlabour. It was found that if wife-beaters were to be punished at all they must be dealt with summarily, for if the investigation were deferred, the wife would not appear and give evidence against her husband. If the Bill gave power to the magistrates to send these oases to the Assizes, what chance would there be that the wife would give evidence against the husband? And if she did, would any Judge flog the husband and then send him back to the arms of his unloved, but, perhaps, loving wife? After such a punishment the husband could never regard his wife again with affection or respect; and he (Mr. Shaw-Lefevre) put it to the right hon. and learned Recorder whether, after such a degrading punishment, a divorce between the parties would not be advisable as the best course that could be adopted, for they could never be expected to live in peace. He, however, saw no clause in the Bill to that effect. Another element of uncertainty was this—that there were flogging and non-flogging Judges. It was well known that some Judges would not administer flogging—it would depend, therefore, upon what Judge went the circuit whether such punishment were awarded

  1875
  or not. Another element of uncertainty was this—As magistrates might commit either to Assizes or sessions, and as flogging was to be ordered only by Judges, non-flogging magistrates would commit to sessions. Again, juries often refused to convict of offences which carried certain punishments, non-flogging jurors would not find verdicts for the serious offence which was to be punished by flogging. These elements of uncertainty would very seriously affect the administration of the Bill if it became law. The increase of crime was in the less serious class of cases which were dealt with summarily, and to which, therefore, this Bill would not apply. The Judges themselves complained that magistrates dealt with cases they ought to send for trial; and it was a question whether, in the case of wife-beaters, greater power should be given to the justices of dealing with this class of offence. In conclusion, he objected to the extension of flogging as impotent to prevent crime, tending to perpetuate and create a brutal class in the community, and to increase those very crimes it was intended to diminish.
  MR. HENLEYside, when the Bill was introduced he asked himself these two questions—first, whether there had been any increase of the crime it was intended to meet, and, what was more material, how far the existing law had been put in force; for unless the present law was put in force they were acting mischievously if they attempted to meet any spasmodic outbreak of crime by fresh legislation, inasmuch as they were only tempting those who had in their hands the administration of justice to be lax and careless in carrying out their duty. It had been pointed out, and he could confirm the statement, that up to 1873, there had been no increase of this kind of crime in the previous 10 years, cither relatively to the increase of the population or positively in the number of offences sent for trial in the Courts of Record, where they could receive more serious punishment than magistrates could administer summarily. In the live years from 1864 to 1869 the number of cases in Class I., which ranged from murders down to common assaults, was 12,300, and in the five following years the number was 10,797. Assaults attended with bodily harm numbered 3,383 in the first five years and 3,274 in
  1876
  the second. Common assaults fell from 1,231 in the first five years to 929 in the second. Assaults on police-officers fell from 1,100 to 460. Clearly up to 1873 there was no great necessity for legislation. In the Blue Book recently circulated, certain crimes were classified under the head of "Brutal Assaults," but he could not institute a comparison with regard to these, because it was faulty in this respect—that in the areas formerly given were the counties including the large towns, whereas in the Blue Book just referred to, the counties proper, exclusive of the borough jurisdictions, were taken as the areas. The number of aggravated assaults on women and children was 3,203 in 1864 and 2,713 in 1873. These figures again showed a remarkable diminution. There might have been a spasmodic increase in the last year; but it would be better to wait and see whether the law had been fairly put in force within the last 18 months by sending the severe cases for trial, when they would receive proper punishment. They could not shut their eyes to the fact that, during the reign of Her present Majesty, a most remarkable relaxation of punishment had taken place, which, perhaps, had never before occurred in the history of this country. Of the class of offences under consideration, notwithstanding an increase of population of 50 per cent. the number of cases were, in the period of 1834–37, as nearly as possible identical with what they were now. He did not think the House had sufficient evidence fairly to induce them to legislate; because if they did legislate without full knowledge and persuasion, that the law was not, at present, fairly enforced, it would tend to lead to a lax and careless administration of the law. He could not, therefore, vote for the second reading of the Bill.
  MR. HOPWOOD, in opposing the Bill, side, that under the present law 50 lashes might be inflicted, and the punishment might be repeated, whereas the present Bill limited the punishment to 25 lashes. That, he thought, was an indication that the Home Secretary himself did not like the Bill. His hon. and learned Friend the Member for Barnstaple (Mr. Waddy) said that he had considerable experience in criminal cases; but so had others who did not agree with his hon. and learned Friend. The Judges themselves were not agreed. Mr. Jus-

  1877
  tice Keating wrote to the effect that, so far as his experience went, he had not observed the law to be deterrent. That learned Judge remarked of an Assize which had come after a flogging Assize, that he had been obliged to inflict larger and heavier sentences. Mr. Justice Denman had also said that a man came back to him who had been flogged, and he had to give him a heavier sentence and penal servitude, and that, so far as he could judge, flogging was not successful. No doubt there were other Judges who did not take this view, but took that which was almost universal among officials. Flogging was substituted for burning in the hand by the 19th of Geo. III., and by the 7th and 8th of Geo. IV. it was reserved for certain offences. But that statute had never been repealed unless by implication in the Consolidation Statute. In the case of women, whipping was abolished, but not in the case of men. But everybody grew sick of it, and with one consent it was given up. So disused had it become that every one thought it had been abolished by statute. As the punishment had thus been voluntarily given up he trusted the House would never lend itself to re-enact it in the smallest degree.
  MR. PAGETside, he recognized with regret the stern necessity of some legislation in the direction of the leading principle of the Bill. It was necessary, however, and he had no option but to accept the measure. One reason why he did not hesitate to accept the Bill was because he thought that punishments under it would be of very rare occurrence. Only in exceptional cases and to punish exceptional brutality would the lash be resorted to. He believed that the infliction of an exceptional punishment in cases of exceptionally brutal offences would put an end to the practice of brutality, for the reason that men's minds would naturally revolt alike against the crime and the punishment, and both alike would lessen in frequency. He could not for a moment admit that the measure was drawn in a spirit of retaliation. Its framers recognized the principle that the sole end and aim of punishment was to deter from the commission of crime, and had drawn their Bill accordingly. One principle in the Bill, he thought, required further consideration. The principle on which our legal reforms had been framed was that
  1878
  of expediting the administration of justice, and so lessening the expense attendant thereon. If a man were committed in August to the Assizes and there was no Winter Assize he might have to remain in gaol six months before he was tried. There was no reason why courts of quarter sessions should not be empowered to deal with offences of this sort. He therefore hoped the Home Secretary would consent to these eases being dealt with by them.
  MR. MUNDELLAside, that as many hon. Gentlemen desired to speak on this highly important subject, and as the debate had not commenced until half-past 9 o'clock, he would move the adjournment of the debate.
  MR. DISRAELI: The hon. Member for Sheffield has not done justice to his own case in saying that the debate did not begin until half-past 9. I trust he was engaged in a more agreeable manner in another place. Considering that the debate did not begin until half-past 10, I think he is justified in moving the adjournment of the debate.
  SIR WILLIAM HARCOURTside, that they had heard the weighty opinions of his right hon. Friend the Member for Oxfordshire (Mr. Henley), who always spoke with an authority which was acknowledged by the House, and he (Sir William Harcourt) was surprised at the absolute silence of the Government. They did not attempt to answer the statements made against the Bill. If it were necessary, it was the greatest public slander ever inflicted upon the English people. ["Oh, oh!"] Neither France, Germany, nor America inflicted such punishments. What would they think of England if such a Bill were allowed to pass without discussion?
  MR. ASSHETON CROSShad supposed that the Motion for the adjournment of the debate was intended for purposes of discussion. It was not the fault of the Government that neither he nor the Solicitor General had addressed the House in this debate. He had explained the object of the Bill when he brought it in, and he was quite ready, when he had an opportunity, to defend it.
  SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT: I spoke under an entire delusion. I thought that the First Lord of the Treasury opposed the adjournment of the debate.
  Motion agreed to.
  Debate adjourned till Thursday.

  SUPPLY—REPORT.
  Resolutions [June 11th] reported.
  First Six Resolutions agreed to.
  Seventh. Resolution read a second time.
  MR. DILLWYN MR. DILLWYN moved that it be reduced by £ 2,000, the amount for scientific investigations.
  Amendment proposed, to leave out "£ 29,252," in order to insert "£ 27,262,"—(Mr. Dillwyn,)—instead thereof.
  VISCOUNT SANDONdefended the Vote, and explained that it was fully discussed on a former occasion, and he was sorry the hon. Gentleman again brought it forward. There was every reason to suppose that these investigations, from which great advantage might be expected to medical science and thereby eventually to the health of the nation, could not be undertaken by private individuals. The Government, therefore, considered that there could not be a more legitimate expenditure of the public money, and he trusted that, as on the previous occasion, the House would support the Government in this matter of public interest.
  MR. WATKIN WILLIAMSobjected to the Vote, because there was no control over the manner in which it was expended.
  MR. HERSCHELLthought the Government were justified in proposing an expenditure which was so beneficial to society.
  MR. HOPWOOD, in opposing the Vote, side, that the objection was that the work should be undertaken by the Government.
  Question put, "That '£ 29,252' stand part of the said Resolution."
  The House divided:—Ayes 185; Noes 18: Majority 167.
  Resolution agreed to.
  Subsequent Resolutions agreed to.

HOUSE OCCUPIERS DISQUALIFICATION

  REMOVAL (SCOTLAND) bill.
  On Motion of Dr. CAMERON, Bill to relieve certain Occupiers of Dwelling Houses in Scotland from being disqualified from the right of voting in the Election of Members to serve in Parliament by reason of their underletting such Dwelling Houses for short terms, ordered to be brought in by Dr. CAMERON, Sir HENRY WOLFF, Mr. VANS AGNEW, and Mr. MACKINTOSH.
  Bill presented, and read the first time. [Bill 210.]
  House adjourned at a quarter after One o'clock.