LORD BROUGHAMpresented a Bill for the further relief of Dissenters. He said it was the one referred to by the Bishop of Oxford in the debate at the last meeting of the House on the Church Discipline and other Bills of the Lord Chancellor, and was the same with the one he had presented the Session before the last, only that a clause was added on the right rev. Prelate's suggestion, whose absence, he was sorry to say, was owing to a great 513 domestic calamity. That proviso was intended to prevent the possibility of the Bill being supposed to affect in any way the indelible character of holy orders. The only operation of the proposed law would be to free Dissenters who had once been Clergymen of the Church, and now were united to dissenting congregations either as ministers or otherwise from Church censure, and from all civil or temporal disabilities, while it also deprived them of all clerical rights or immunities. He hoped the Bill, being very short and simple, and having been carefully drawn, would not be found to fall within the scope of his noble and learned Friend's objections, so well founded in general, to the manner in which Acts of Parliament are framed. Of the course proposed, the having an examiner to prepare and superintend the passing of Bills, he approved, so far as to say that it was a step in the right direction. But he conceived it to be insufficient; first, for the reason he had so often assigned, that a single person is wholly inadequate to the task, not on account of the labour being so great, but because a single mind applied to detect errors or note oversights is insufficient; there must be several, in order to afford good security against such slips. Therefore a Board is required as he had proposed in his Resolutions of 1847. But here, as on every other question connected with legal improvement, we are led to one and the same conclusion—the necessity of a Minister of Justice, or department charged with the whole of that great subject. He understood from the Votes that his right hon. Friend (Mr. Napier) was to bring the question again before the other House this evening, and he heartily wished him success. He had so often urged the matter on the attention of their Lordships that he should not detain them with further remarks upon it at present than to mention the fact that when, as President of the Law Amendment Society, he had communicated to Sir R. Peel, then at the head of the Government, the memorial of the Society, strongly recommending the appointment of a Minister of Justice, the answer returned was not merely courteous but it indicated that the proposal would forthwith be taken into favourable consideration, and that the memorial was, or would immediately be, communicated to Lord Lyndhurst, then Chancellor.
§ Bill, for the further relief of Dissenters, read la.