SECOND READING. (Hansard, 18 February 1880)

§ MR. MUNDELLA
, in moving that the Bill be now read a second time, said, he hoped it would meet with the same good fortune as the one which had just been read a second time. It was not often that he troubled the House with Bills; but this Session he happened to have two, and they were both small and useful ones. The Bill he had now to lay before the House was a Bill that proposed to amend the Commons Act of 1876, in one particular only, and in accordance with the recommendation of the Select Committee of the Commons that sat last year. Sheffield nearly lost one of its most beautiful open spaces through a defect in the Commons Act, and the Committee made a recommendation that the limit of the area should be extended. His Bill went to remove the defect in the Act, and proposed that the limit should be extended in the case of large manufacturing towns; and the 1st section of the Bill provided that the Act should apply to any common situate within 10 miles, instead of six, of any town with a population of 25,000, or within 15 miles of any town not having a population of less than 100,000, and that any such common should be considered a suburban common, within the meaning of the Act. London had had the power of bringing all the commons within 20 miles of the Metropolis into the suburban area; and he could not conceive that any provision was ever better conferred upon the Corporation of London, or had been exercised with a greater beneficence than that had by the Corporation of London. By the exercise of that provision the Corporation of London had saved to the people of the Metropolis many commons, and last year they had saved Burnham Beeches, 900 one of the most sylvan scenes in the land. That was saved entirely to this country by the operation of that single clause. That clause had just brought Burnham Beeches within its area by half-a-mile. If it had been half-a-mile further out, Burnham Beeches would have been destroyed. When it was proposed to inclose Maltby Common, which was within 12 miles of Sheffield and six of Rotherham, the Mayor, Master Cutler, and others, several of whom were Conservatives, gave evidence against the enclosure, and nothing could have been stronger than the protest then made against the state of the law which would have deprived the inhabitants of the district of the common, and 31 naturalists' societies of Yorkshire petitioned against it; and the common was only saved by the exercise of the half-past 12 o'clock Rule, and his playing the part of an Obstructionist for three months. He begged to move that the Bill be read a second time.

§ SIR WALTER B. BARTTELOT
said, looking at the state of the House, he should not oppose the Second Reading of the Bill, but reserved to himself the right of opposing it on going into Committee. He asked that it should be remembered that there were other interests besides those of the populations of large towns to be considered. The limits to be conceded must be carefully guarded, and he thought those proposed were far too extensive, especially with regard to towns of 25,000 inhabitants. The matter would be complicated in cases where there were minerals and such like things. He would also remark that, as a Member of the Committee to which the hon. Gentleman had referred, he had treated the evidence which had been brought before them entirely according to its worth, regardless of whether it was given by Conservative or Liberal witnesses, and that it was only a small portion of the common more immediately in question, on which scarcely a single person went in the course of the year, that it was sought to enclose.

SIR MATTHEW WHITE-RIDLEY
said, he was not prepared, on the part of the Government, to object to the 901 Second Reading of the Bill, though he reserved to himself the right of opposing it on its subsequent stages, inasmuch as the 3rd clause seemed to him to go beyond that which was the intention of the Committee to recommend.