LORD BROUGHAMproceeded to make some remarks on the report recently made by a Select Committee of the House of Commons on official salaries. There were imperfections in every line of it. The savings which it recommended were utterly insignificant in a financial point of view, while it trampled upon all considerations of justice at home, and destroyed all our diplomatic representation abroad. What information the Committee had got, where they had got it, to what witnesses they had resorted to enlighten the darkness of their understandings, he could not by any possibility conceive. With regard to the reductions to be made in the salaries of the Judges of the High Court of Chancery, they had neither examined Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Cottenham, nor himself. They had passed over all the abuses of that court, and had made no reference to the salaries paid to its subordinate officers. He particularly objected to the reduction of the salary of the Lord Chancellor to 8,000l. a year, and of the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas to 6,000l. a year. Such a mass of contradiction, absurdity, and ignorance, he had never seen comprised in a single report. They recommended that the salary of the Judge Advocate should be reduced on the next appointment from 2,000l. to 1,500l. a year; but, as a makeweight, they recommended 956 that the future holder of that office should not be debarred from the practice of his profession. Why, he was not debarred from it at present. The late holder of the office practised before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; and if Mr. Stuart Wortley had given up practising before the Judicial Privy Council whilst he held it, it was only because he was himself a Privy Councillor. That gentleman, as Judge Advocate, had as much right as any of his professional brethren to practise in the Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, and Chancery. He (Lord Brougham) objected to many other reductions recommended by the Committee, and especially to the reduction of the salaries of the Masters in Chancery to 2,000l. a year. He had himself reduced them from 5,000l. a year, to which their salaries, with fees, in some instances formerly amounted, to 2,500l. a year; and below that sum he was not prepared to go. Some three or four years ago their number had been reduced by not filling up two vacancies which occurred; but now, owing to the Winding-up Act, they were overwhelmed with work, and their numbers ought to be increased. He had by means of a connexion of his own some insight into the amount of labour they performed; and he would say that eighteen hours a day would not enable them to get through it. He would revert once more to the miserable saving proposed in the reduction of the salaries of the Lord Chancellor and the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. His noble and learned Friend on the woolsack was, he supposed, to have only 8,000l. a year. Considering that he was entitled to that amount of salary as Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, he was surprised to find that his noble and learned Friend had given up that salary, which he might have retained for life, for the same amount of salary in an office far more laborious, and from which he might be removed, perhaps in the course of the next four or five months, it might be with, and it might be without, a retiring pension. Then, did the ignorant men who formed this Committee know the difference in the amount of the labour performed by the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and the puisne Judges of that court? The Chief Justice was to have 6,000l. a year; the puisne Judges 5,000l. All the Judges of that court, the Chief Justice as well as the puisne, had to go circuit. But the Chief Justice, besides that 957 labour, had on the close of every term to go to the Guildhall and Westminster sittings, which generally lasted two or three weeks after each term. Anything more ignorant than this arrangement he could not conceive. Then how utterly ridiculous was the plan of cutting down all the diplomatic salaries and offices to the same size. All of them were to he abolished, and a single mission at some central point in Germany was to be substituted for the several missions now existing at Hanover, Dresden, Stuttgard, Munich, and Frankfort. Nay, more, the mission at Florence was to be united with one of the Italian missions. He supposed that the next proposal of this Committee would be, that a mission should be sent to one of the peaks of the Andes, to superintend all our diplomatic relations with the States of South America. It was one of the grossest of all possible delusions, to suppose that these reductions could be defended by the example of the United States. The Government of the United States, considered as a whole, might be a cheap Government; but then it should be considered that, besides its expenditure, there was a heavy expenditure incurred in and defrayed by each State for its own domestic government and administration. America was not a cheaply governed country, for each of the States swarmed with myriads of placeholders. He had been all his life long an advocate for wise and well-considered measures of retrenchment and reform; but he could not allow their Lordships to part without entering his protest against the unwise, nay, he must say, the absurd propositions of this Committee on official salaries. He hoped that he should never see the administration of justice poisoned at its source by measures which would render a seat on the bench unworthy the acceptance of the best and ablest and most experienced advocates at the bar, nor the diplomatic appointments of the country stripped of their due influence by being filled either by men of great qualifications without fortune, or by men of great fortune without any qualifications for the posts to which they were appointed.