(NO. 133.) SECOND READING. (Hansard, 26 June 1873)

§ VISCOUNT HALIFAX,

in moving that the Bill be now read the second time, said, that he had supposed that, considering that the Bill related solely to the constitution of the other House, and that it had been introduced and fully discussed there, it would not have been necessary for him to say more than a few words in asking their Lordships to give it the second reading. But the Notice which had been placed upon the Paper by the noble and learned Lord opposite (Lord Cairns) made it necessary to go into the details of the measure at greater length than he had proposed. As to the principle of the Bill, no opposition whatever had been raised in the other House. So far both sides were in accord. Why, therefore, the noble and learned Lord should now move its rejection was more than he could understand. If indeed, the noble and learned Lord objected to certain of the clauses, and had given Notice that they should be omitted in Committee, or if he thought that some of the details could be advantageously altered, or that some new propositions could be advantageously added, that could have been easily understood; the noble and learned Lord's objections and wishes could have been considered and, where needful, concessions might have been made; but the noble and learned Lord's proposition to reject the Bill altogether was not, under the circumstances, easily intelligible. The primary object of the Bill was to provide for a single register of Parliamentary and municipal votes; and a second object was the prevention of frivolous objections, and for providing a simpler form of appeal against the decisions of the Revising Barrister that at present existed. For the first of these purposes the Bill provided that where a municipal borough is wholly or partly coincident with a Parliamentary borough, the electors of such Parliamentary borough and the 1398 burgesses of such municipal borough shall be comprised in one register of electors. For this purpose the registration of burgesses was assimilated to the registration of Parliamentary electors, and all the provisions of the Parliamentary Electors Registration Acts were, so far as circumstances would admit, made applicable to the former. As the dates fixed by the present law for qualifications, claims, revision, and so on, in respect of the municipal and Parliamentary franchises were generally dissimilar, it was provided by the 3rd clause that all dates now provided by the Acts relating either to Parliamentary or municipal elections should be altered, and that the dates applicable to the several subjects should be the same for both. The first Schedule appended to the Act set forth in a tabular form the present and the substituted dates. The 5th clause contained a complete scheme for the registration of lodgers. The second section of the Bill was directed to the prevention of frivolous objections. It was enacted that every notice of objection, to be valid, must state specifically the ground or grounds of objection. Each ground of objection was to be treated by the Revising Barrister as a separate objection, and he was directed to award costs to the amount of at least 2s. 6d. on each several objection that might fail, notwithstanding that the claim might be struck out upon some other ground. Where a person who is actually on the list of voters is objected to, and the voter is retained on the list, the Revising Barrister is to order costs to be paid to the person objected to. He thought these penalties would be sufficient to protect persons from the annoyance of frivolous objections. They would probably prevent unscrupulous agents from giving notices of objection on the calculation that the persons objected to might not think it worth while to attend to maintain their claims. The length to which this vexatious practice was sometimes carried might be shown from the fact that in the last registration for Oldham 11,000 objections were made when the total number of electors was about 14,000. The Bill also contained a variety of provisions relating to the Revising Barristers' Courts and the procedure by and before that officer. The only clauses with which he should trouble their Lordships were those 1399 which provided an appeal from the decision of the Revising Barrister, and directed that there should be an evening sitting for the purpose of revising. In the first case it was provided that the Revising Barrister might be compelled by the person aggrieved to state a case for the decision of the Court of Common Pleas, and in the latter it was provided that every barrister appointed to revise the list for any Parliamentary or Municipal borough containing a population exceeding 10,000 shall hold at least one evening sitting of his Court in such borough, for the convenience of those persons who by reason of the nature of their employment, or otherwise, are unable to attend the Court during the day. He thought this provision would confer a great boon upon the poorer classes of voters. These were the principal provisions of this important measure as it was sent up to their Lordships from the other House, after having undergone careful consideration and much alteration in Committee. The Bill could not, he thought, be looked upon with any considerations of party whatever. It had been introduced simply to facilitate the exercise of the franchise by those upon whom it had been recently conferred by the Legislature, and, so far as he could see, must be beneficial to both parties alike. The Act of 1867 had made the Parliamentary and Municipal franchise in boroughs identical, and it was a pure waste of time and expense to have two registrations of the same qualification of the same person. He trusted, therefore, their Lordships would not withhold their assent to the Bill which had been sent up to them by the other House of Parliament. He might add that the Bill was not to extend to Scotland and Ireland.

§ LORD CAIRNS

said, the noble Viscount (the Lord Privy Seal) was unable to see on what grounds any opposition would be offered to the second reading of the Bill; and, having heard the objections which had occurred to the noble Viscount as being the only objections that could be raised to it, he (Lord Cairns) perhaps must not be surprised at his surprise. He knew so well the candour of the noble Viscount that, when he ventured to state some of the 1400 objections which had not yet occurred to his noble Friend's mind, he did not altogether despair that he would be disposed to agree that under the guise of a very simple character the Bill, when it came to be understood, embraced changes of very great gravity and very great danger. Before dealing with the objects of the Bill as stated by the noble Viscount, he solicited particular attention to the manner in which as a piece of legislation it proposed to deal with the registration law of the country. There were at present some 10 or 12 statutes — doubtless of a complicated character—provided for the borough and county registration of England; but those statutes had by degrees come to be so well understood that during last year there were scarcely any appeals, and perhaps he might say no appeal involving any question of importance. They abounded in minute details of dates, times, and periods at which and during which certain steps must be taken in boroughs and counties, and with those dates all the official bodies and individuals in the boroughs and counties were now perfectly well acquainted. He did not know whether their Lordships were disposed to attend to what might be termed "a Chinese puzzle;" but he could direct attention to a number of Chinese puzzles of a most intricate kind which might rise out of the Bill. The first Schedule gave about 20 or 30 dates in one column, and about 20 or 30 other dates in another column; the dates in the later column being the dates to be substituted for the dates in the earlier column. He demurred to the idea that it was the business, the duty, or the privilege of Parliament to set Chinese puzzles for the people of this country, and for the Judges who had to decide what the law of the country was. Their Lordships were supposed to have a little more leisure than the other House of Parliament, And that they could therefore supervise the legislation of the other House, and see that it was expressed in a proper manner; and that that was necessary in this case he could show, for of all the Bills brought up from the other House, or, indeed, presented to Parliament for consideration within his experience, that was the worst. In fact, he never before saw anything like the way in which the Bill proposed to deal with the whole series of Acts of Parliament, sprinkling 1401 new dates over old ones, and introducing new names to be substituted for others. The 5th section provided that every person claiming to be a Parliamentary elector for any borough in respect of the occupation of lodgings shall send his claim to the overseers "after the day substituted by this Act for the last day of July, and on or before the day substituted by this Act for the twenty-fifth day of August;" so that the intended claimant must study his almanac carefully to see to what the dates referred. Part of the Bill was to come into operation immediately after it passed, and the residue was not to take effect till January 1874. Would their Lordships desire to have a metaphysical puzzle? If they did, they had only to look at the 44th section, which specified certain clauses that were to come into operation on the passing of the Act, and the remainder of the Bill, which included that very section, was not to come into operation till the 2nd of January, 1874. The section, which was to make the other sections come into operation immediately, was not itself to come into operation till January, 1874. The repealing clause, too, which was to repeal existing provisions as to registration, was not to take effect till next year, and therefore, if they passed the Bill, there would be two sets of provisions as to registration in force at the same time. The Bill was positively disgraceful in point of drawing; and it was useless to go into Committee upon it; for it could not be amended so as to provide a Code of Municipal and Parliamentary Registration Law. The Select Committee of the House of Commons, though they differed on ninny points, united in the recommendation that a Consolidation Bill should be introduced without delay, dealing with the borough registration. This Bill, however, was not to affect the list of voters for this year, either Parliamentary or municipal. It could not affect any municipal list except that which came into operation in November, 1874; and it could not affect any list of Parliamentary voters, which would come into operation till after, in all probability, there had been a new Election. The objects of the Bill as described by the noble Viscount were to have one list of voters both for Parliamentary boroughs and municipal boroughs; to provide a practical appeal, which there had not been hitherto, against improper 1402 rejection of claims; to make provision with regard to frivolous objections against the claims of voters. That was what the Bill aimed at, and what it failed to secure. The noble Viscount said it was desirable there should be only one register and one revision of Parliamentary and municipal voters, and all that he stated about the saving of expense was connected with that revision. What the Bill aimed at in regard to the saving of expense it signally failed in effecting, and he hoped to convince the noble Viscount himself that it was impossible to have one list for Parliamentary and municipal electors. The Bill, in fact, admitted upon the face of it, that there could not be one list. Iii sub-section 4 of Clause 4 it was provided that— Where a Parliamentary borough is wholly or partly coincident with a municipal borough, the list, for the purpose of claims and objections, and (if and so far as the revising barrister so directs) for the purpose of the revision thereof, shall he deemed to be composed of two separate lists, of which one (omitting part B. of the first column and everything exclusively relating thereto) relates only to Parliamentary electors, and the other (omitting part A. of the first column and everything exclusively relating thereto) relates only to burgesses. Thus having gone through the operation of printing upon one and the same paper a list of the burgesses and the Parliamentary electors, it was necessary to declare that this was to be read not as one, but as two lists. If their Lordships would look at this list in the Schedule, they would find that any man in the country might be misled, and that there would be people coming forward to vote at Parliamentary elections because their names were in this list, whereas they were only entitled to vote at municipal elections. And the saving of expense would be effected by burdening these districts with the expense of preparing and printing this double list when they only wanted one list. he now came to the question of revision. The obscurity with which this Bill was drawn was so great that it had almost passed the House of Commons before its effect upon the counties of England came to be known, and the counties were now only awaking to that knowledge. He could state from communications addressed to Himself—and other noble Lords had received similar representations — that the effect of the Bill was regarded in the counties with positive alarm. 1403 Their Lordships would remember that the measure was not brought forward for the purpose of giving to the counties any advantage whatever, or of saving the counties a single shilling; yet it overthrew the whole system of county registration in England for the purpose of conferring some supposed advantage upon the boroughs. The present Parliamentary revision in counties was fixed at the most convenient period—namely, between the 20th of September and the last day of October. The harvest was then over, the agricultural classes had a little leisure, and when the revision was concluded, there was a period of two months between the 31st of October and the 1st of January, when the county list came into operation. In 1867, it was found that one month was insufficient, and arrangements were made to give two months for this purpose. But in order to get the Revising Barristers to work earlier and to have the list out in time for the municipal elections in November, this Bill proposed that the dates should be altered. The county revision was now to be carried on between the 9th of August and the 20th of September. In the northern counties this was the period of the harvest; many of the circuits were settled for this period, and the Revising Barristers were engaged; so that for no purpose or advantage connected with counties, and for the mere object of getting out certain burgess lists with which the counties had nothing to do, the Bill proposed to subvert and overturn all the county arrangements, and to throw the county revision to a period when the claimants could not attend, when the legal profession could not attend, and when it was doubtful whether the Revising Barristers could be present. The Bill also shortened the period during which the clerks of the peace were to deliver the register. At present, the register was to be delivered between the 30th of November and the 31st of December. Under the Bill the 21st of October was to be the date of delivery of the register. He had received a communication from the clerk of the peace of a county in which there were 17,000 voters who assured him that it would be utterly impossible for him to see to the printing and revision of the lists for which he was responsible, and to have the register in operation by the 22nd October. That, 1404 however, was the whole principle of the Bill. He believed that that had only been known lately in the counties, where it was expected that the Bill would be withdrawn when these defects were pointed out, and that a Consolidation Bill would be brought in. It was now found that the authors of the measure refused to make these alterations, and it was felt that the rejection of the Bill was absolutely necessary. The next object was to improve the right of appeal; but the appeal provided under the Bill was the purest mockery. The appeals from the revision under this Bill were to the Court of Common Pleas. The revision was to be carried out between the 9th of August and the 20th of September. The Court of Common Pleas sat on the 2nd of November; but the municipal elections were held on the 1st of November, so that all the voters who ought not to have been on the list would have voted, and all those who ought to have been on the register would lose their votes before the Court of Common Pleas could be appealed to, and next year another list would be made out. And that was the appeal provided by the present Bill. The next object of the Bill was to do away with frivolous objections. Well, they were bad things, but frivolous claims were just as bad, and he should say that that was really a Bill to turn frivolous claims into votes, and its machinery might be worked with unerring precision to accomplish this object. The effect of the Bill was, in the first place, to make the overseers of the poor the absolute masters of the registration of voters; secondly, to throw every possible obstacle in the way of making objections to bad claims; and, thirdly, to give every possible facility to the making of bad claims. Now, when an objection was made to a claim, the objector could be examined as to the validity of it, and if it turned out that the objection was frivolous, the Revising Barrister had full power to mulct the objector in costs. It did not, in the long run, suit the purpose of a political agent to make what were called frivolous objections, which were very irritating to the men objected to; and, besides being an impolitic course, it was a costly one. And on that point he should like to quote a Report of a Committee of the other House. They said that, as the Revising Barrister could not refuse to place on the 1405 register a claimant to whom there was no objection, and as unqualified persons came on with undue facility—an evil which would prevail more largely but for the existence of party registration societies, by whom the register was purified and a check placed upon unqualified claims—they deprecated the very change proposed by this Bill—the throwing of the onus probandi on the objector; the Committee, therefore, were unwilling to cast unnecessary obstacles in the way of objectors, or to make the law more stringent and severe than it was in the matter of costs. Their Lordships, therefore, would not be led away by the term "frivolous objections." It was essential to the purification of the register that there should be proper facilities for the making of objections. It was proposed by the Bill that an objector, even if the claimant did not appear, should give primaâ facie evidence of the validity of the objection—that was, evidence which would be conclusive if it were not met on the other side. Why, in many cases such evidence could be obtained only from the mouth of the claimant himself, and the objector could not state what he had simply heard or had reason to believe. Under such a requirement many would remain on the register who had no right to be there. It seemed as if the object of that part of the Bill was really to facilitate improper claims. Previously it was required that the successive occupations in one borough which constituted the qualification should be stated, but now only the last was to be named, and therefore it would be impossible for objectors to make the necessary investigations beforehand. Under the Bill objections might be made without primaâ facie evidence, without cost, without risk or liability, by the overseers, who, where politics ran high, were chosen as party men, and even if not now, certainly would be under the operation of this Bill, because the overseer would be master of the situation and proprietor of the register. But where objections were made by persons "other than the overseer," primaâ facie proof was to be required. He was told that in some cases now party objections were made through overseers; but, at present, the other side had equal liberty of objection. This Bill would alter the footing of one party in each place, and so make at 1406 each place the appointment of the overseer a party question. The Select Committee of the other House refused to entrust overseers with this duty and recommended the creation of a new officer for the purpose. An expiring Parliament ought not to make a fundamental change of the kind proposed by this Bill—a change, too, which could not come into operation before, to a moral certainty, we should have a new Parliament. An expiring Parliament would have been more usefully occupied in consolidating the law rather than in making fundamental changes in it, and discounting the proposals which must come before the new Parliament. He was anxious to facilitate tilt registration of lodgers as enfranchised by the Bill of 1867, but a clause of this Bill subverted the conditions on which the lodger franchise was granted. By the Bill of 1867 this franchise was carefully guarded by different considerations connected with the character of the house, of the tenure of the lodger, and the relations which existed between landlord and tenant, and it was further insisted that the claim of the lodger should be renewed every year. Those were the conditions on which it was deemed wise and safe to establish the lodger franchise. Curiously enough, this subverting clause was not in the Bill as originally introduced by the Government, and it had nothing whatever to do with the main object of the measure, which was to assimilate Parliamentary and Municipal elections. A very respectable Gentleman—Mr. Rathbone, the hon. Member for Liverpool — brought in a Bill containing this clause about lodgers, and the Government accepted it and introduced it into their own Bill. He had heard it said—he knew not with how much truth—that a great political effect would be produced in the borough of Liverpool by any measure which would place 2,000 more lodgers on the list, without a narrow scrutiny as to their right to be there. In regard to lodgers, objectors were required by the present Bill to give primaâ facie evidence of the ground of their objections, but that it would be almost always impossible to do in the case of lodgers. Again, the 5th clause of the Bill provided that the overseers should— Enter the particulars of each lodger claim in a separate list, with the claimants in alpha- 1407 betical order, and should add objected to 'against any claimant whom they might have reasonable cause to believe to be not entitled to be registered. Now it was clear that an overseer, with a strong political bias, might object to a great many claimants, and if they did not appeal against the overseer's objection they would, as a matter of course, be struck off the list. In that way, the overseers might weed the lodger-roll from one end to the other; and it would be comparatively easy to succeed in doing this, because many of the lodgers were persons whom it was difficult to get to appear in Court. Besides, he would remark that these provisions as to the lodger franchise could not take effect except in reference to the list, which was not to come into force until the end of the year 1874; and he maintained that a change of such vast importance ought to be made in a new, and not in a moribund Parliament. He would suggest that the measure should be withdrawn, and that the Government should introduce a Consolidation Bill. As it now stood, he must repeat that it seemed to him to have three objects:—First, to make the overseers of the poor absolute masters of the registration of the country; second, to place every possible obstacle in the way of making objections to bad claims; and thirdly, to give every possible facility for turning bad claims into votes. For those reasons he should ask their Lordships to reject it.

CONTENTS.
Selborne, L. (L. Chan-	Boyle, L. (E. Cork and
cellor.)	Orrery.) [Teller.]
York, Archp.	Calthorpe, L.
	Camoys, L.
Saint Albans, D.	Foley, L.
	Gwydir, L.
Ailesbury, M.	Hanmer, L.
Lansdowne, M.	Hatherley, L.
Ripon, M.	Kenmare, L. (E. Ken-
	mare.)
Camperdown, E.	Methuen, L.
Chichester, E.	Monson, L.
Fortescue, E.	O'Hagan, L.
Kimberley, E.	Poltimore, L. [Teller.]
	Sundridge, L. (D. Ar-
Canterbury, V.	gyll.)
Halifax, V.	Wrottesley, L.

NOT-CONTENTS.
Buckingham and Chan	Brodrick, L. (V. Midle-
dos, D.	ton.)
Leeds, D.	Bateman, L.
Northumberland, D.	Blayney, L.
Richmond, D.	Cairns, L.
	Colonsay, L.
Bath, M.	Colville of Culross, L.
Bute, M.	Conyers, L.
Exeter, M.	Crofton, L.
Salisbury, M.	Denman, L.
Winchester, M.	De Saumarez, L.
	Ellenborough, L.
Abergavenny, E.	Gifford, L.
Amherst, E.	Hartismere, L.(L. Hen-
Bantry, E.	niker.)
Beauchamp, E.	Hawke, L.
Belmore, E.	Howard de Walden, L.
Carnarvon, E.	Hylton, L.
Derby, E.	Kesteven, L.
Feversham, E.	Ormonde, L. (M. Or-
Lanesborough, E.	monde.)
Lauderdale, E.	Plunket, L.
Mount Edgcumbe, E.	Raglan, L.
Powis, E.	Ravensworth, L.
Shaftesbury, E.	Redesdale, L.
Strabroke, E.	Skelmersdale, L.
	[Teller.]
De Vesci, V.	Sondes, L.
Doneraile, V.	St. John of Bletso, L.
Hardinge, V.	Templemore, L.
Hawarden, V.[Teller.]	Thurlow, L.
Hereford, V.	Tredegar, L.
Sidmouth, V.	Ventry, L.
Strathallan, V.	Vivian, L.
Templetown, V.	Wigan, L.(E. Crawford
	and Balcarres.)