LORD BROUGHAMrose for the purpose of laying upon the table a Bill upon a subject which he thought would have been better taken up in the House of Commons 56 —he meant a Bill for better securing the true independence of Parliament, by extending Mr. John Smith's Act, commonly called the 52nd of Geo. III, to all insolvent Members, which now only applied to such as were traders. He had hoped that a measure of this kind would have been made, as indeed it ought to have been made, a Government measure. However, as there appeared to be an objection to that course, he would, in case no Member of the Government took the measure up, proceed with the Bill himself, although he would rather surrender it into the hands of Government. What he had expected to take place in the House of Commons on this subject had actually taken place. A Bill had been brought in upon it two months ago. From respect to the individual who introduced it, and to the House in which it was introduced, he would make no comments upon the manner in which that Bill had been dealt with in another place. This, however, he might be permitted to remark—that it had been so treated, that if it had passed in the same shape as it was passed in the Committee, it would not have recommended itself much to their Lordships; for it was neither more nor less than a Bill for the better recovery of debts from such persons as happened to be Members of Parliament. He was, as were also many Peers who then heard him, a Member of the Committee now sitting on the Bankruptcy Laws; but they would all of them have been much surprised, if, in addition to the 375 articles already referred to them, they had found another article of the digest which placed Members of Parliament in a worse situation than any other members of society. On no account ought the Legislature to say that debts were to be recovered against Members of Parliament either in a worse way, or in a better way, or even in a different way, from that in which they were recovered against other men. His Bill was founded on the principle that the same process should be used in all cases; and only the power of continuing in Parliament, clothed with privileges and refusing to obey the laws, should be taken away. He did not mean in any way to deal with Peers of Parliament in this Bill, for Mr. John Smith's Act made no provision for the case of Peers who might unfortunately become bankrupts, and who sat in that House upon a very different tenure from that upon which Members of Parliament 57 held their scats in the other House. If a constituency chose to he represented by a solvent rather than an insolvent man, Mr. John Smith's Act permitted it to be so represented; for the loss of a Member's qualification was, as everybody knew, not in practice a shutting of the doors of the House of Commons to an insolvent. It was a fault in Mr. Smith's Act that it permitted a bankrupt Member to remain a representative of the people so long as twelve months after his bankruptcy, although it would not permit him to take his scat in the House. But it was one of the greatest scandals and stigmas on the privilege of Parliament which existed in the law of privilege at this moment; and he hoped that we were now fast approaching the period, ay, and even the very day, when that scandal and that stigma would be put an end to. He trusted that it would not be long before we remedied the evil system by which those who had broken the law, and were under the ban of the law, were permitted to make the law. He now moved that this Bill be read a first time; but he should postpone the second reading of it until he saw what became of the similar Bill which was now under consideration in the House of Commons.
§ Bill read 1a.