§ SIR R. WEBSTER (Isle of Wight)I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the 12th edition of the Index to the Statutes printed for Her Majesty's Stationery Office, and recently issued, differs from all previous editions of the same work in the entire omission of the first part of the 1476 volume in which was given a chronological table of all the Statutes, showing how they have been repealed or otherwise affected; on what ground has this most useful portion of the volume been omitted; and whether the Stationery Office will take steps to rectify the omission, by publishing the omitted portion as a separate volume, and by including it in future editions?
§ SIR J. T. HIBBERTThe chief purchasers of the Index have hitherto been the Council of Law Reporting, they having subscribed for over 5,000 copies of the 9th, 10th, and 11th editions. They declined, however, to subscribe for the 12th edition on the ground that three years was too short an interval for successive editions, and, in view of the probable heavy loss which would in the circumstances be involved by the publication, it became a question whether the 12th edition should be brought out at the end of the three years or delayed; and it was finally decided, with the concurrence of the Treasury, that the subject-matter Index, which was believed to be of wider and more general interest to the public, should be brought out at once without the chronological table. I shall be glad to confer with the Statute Law Committee as to the desirability of bringing out the chronological table, in a separate form or otherwise.