§ EARL GRANVILLE, who was very indistinctly heard, was understood to ask the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack a Question as to a statement which had appeared in the Spectator, representing that on the occasion of two noble Lords rising at the same moment to address the House, and neither of them giving way, the Lord Chancellor had called upon one of them to speak. Having himself been for 40 years a constant attendant in that House, he must say he had never seen that done, either by the present occupant of the Woolsack or by any of his Predecessors. The practice which he had always seen followed in the case supposed was that the House itself decided which of the two Lords rising at the same time should be heard. As the matter appeared to be one which exercised some people's minds, he had been requested to put a Question to the noble and learned Lord as to the facts.
§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR (Lord HALSBURY)said, that the noble Earl had justly anticipated his reply, which was that, so far as he was concerned, nothing had happened in regard to the matter which the most perverted or the most perverse imagination could present in the light in which the writer, not in The Spectator, but in The Saturday Review, had presented it. He wished that he could suppose that the way in which the statement was made arose from simple misapprehension of something that had taken place. But the subtlety of it was in the phrase used by the writer, which referred to no one in particular, but only to the office. Yet no one reading that statement would doubt that it referred to the present occupant of the Woolsack, though it was cited as a recent example. He had a suspicion that if he contradicted the statement the writer of the article would probably say—"Oh, the noble Earl and the Lord Chancellor are very ignorant, because over 40 years ago an incident of that sort did take place." That was in 1846, in the discussion on the Corn Laws. He dared say that the writer would defend himself, if called upon to justify his statement, in that way; but certainly, as far as he himself 1681 was concerned, the writer's statement was utterly and entirely without foundation.