Sitting of 9 May 1851

MINUTES.
PUBLIC BILL. — 1a Universities (Scotland).

THE DANUBIAN PRINCIPALITIES AND THE HUNGARIAN REFUGEES.
MR. URQUHARTbegged to ask the noble Lord the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs a question, of which he had given notice, with respect to the delay in the evacuation of the Danubian Principalities. About six weeks ago, he asked the noble Lord whether any understanding had been come to between the Turkish and Russian Governments with respect to the withdrawal of their troops from the Danubian Principalities. The noble Lord then stated that no conditions had been come to between these two Powers, because a treaty made about two years since provided for the withdrawal of the troops whenever tranquillity should be restored, and that by a convention between these Powers a body of the troops which had occupied the Principalities should remain on their frontiers for a certain time, in order to enter the Danubian Principalities again, if fresh disturbances should break out there. He
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wished to know whether the stipulations to which the noble Lord had referred were a part of the treaty as published to the world, or were secret conditions annexed to it? The noble Lord had also stated on a former occasion that the English Government supported the Porte in a desire to set free the Hungarian refugees; he therefore wished to ask his Lordship whether it was true that after a conference held between the English and French Ministers at Constantinople with the Government of the Porte, it had been decided to prolong still further the confinement of the refugees?
VISCOUNT PALMERSTON: I am not aware of any concert between the Turkish and Russian Governments with regard to the Danubian Principalities, except the treaty to which reference has been made, and the contents of which were published to the world. There has, however, been frequent communications between the Turkish and Russian Governments with regard to the period of the evacuation of the Danubian provinces by the Russian and Turkish troops; and the last account I have received with respect to that evacuation was by a despatch dated 17th of April, which stated that a certain number of Russian troops had already commenced retiring from the territory in question, and it was expected that in about a fortnight from that time the whole or the greater part of the Russian troops would have evacuated Wallachia. It was understood also that the evacuation by the Turkish troops would take place simultaneously with that by the Russians. When I state that the Russian Government proposes to keep a force on the frontier in order to be ready in case of a fresh emergency, of course it must be assumed that any fresh occupation of the provinces will be the subject of a fresh communication between the two Governments. With regard to the liberation of the remaining Hungarian refugees, I am concerned to say that, as yet, the endeavours of the English and French Governments to obtain their liberation has not been successful. It is not true, however, that there has been a meeting between the English and French Ambassadors, and the Turkish Government, which has resulted in the British Government acquiescing in any arrangements for the continued detention of the refugees. By the last accounts from Constantinople, I understand that the Turkish Government had not decided upon the immediate release of the refugees, and that it was proposed that some

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longer period of detention, whatever that might ultimately he, should he enforced, as the result of communications which had passed between the Governments of Turkey and Austria.

THE FRENCH OCCUPATION OF ROME.
MR. T. DUNCOMBEwished to ask the noble Lord the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether Her Majesty's Government concurred in the prolonged occupation of Rome by the French army; and if he could inform the House when the French troops were likely to be withdrawn? The professed object of the French occupation was to prevent a reactionary revolution on the part of Austria, and to secure to the Roman citizens good government. One of the principles of the constitution of the French Republic was that of respect of the nationality of other countries; but very nearly two years had now elapsed since forcible possession of Rome was taken by the French; and he asked the noble Lord whether he considered that good government had been given to the Romish people? The prisons were crowded with political prisoners, and the Inquisition was in full operation. He hoped to hear from Her Majesty's Government that they did not concur in this continued occupation of Rome, and that they washed their hands of this tyrannical intervention.
VISCOUNT PALMERSTON: The occupation of Rome by the French troops was a measure undertaken by France upon her own discretion and upon her own judgment. The British Government was no party to that measure, France having exercised her own independent rights in regard to it, and it not being at all necessary that the previous concurrence of the British Government should be obtained. The British Government, therefore, was no party to that measure, and, consequently, it is not correct to say that we concurred in it. We might have had an opinion upon the subject; but it was a matter in which we had no right to interfere one way or the other. My hon. Friend asks me if it is my opinion that the result of that occupation has been to establish good government in Rome? I am concerned to say that I cannot answer that question in the affirmative; because it is well known that the state of Rome, and the internal condition of that city, and of the Roman States, is such as must be painful to every well wisher to the people
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of that country. With regard to the prolongation of that occupation, there have, undoubtedly, been friendly communications between Her Majesty's Government and that of France. Her Majesty's Government cannot be blind to the consideration that, the French having once occupied Rome, the withdrawal of the French garrison would probably lead to the occupation of the city by other parties; and it does not follow that that would he a change advantageous to the people of Rome, or to those general interests which the British Government must necessarily have at heart, as connected with Italian and European interests. The French Government plead now, as they pleaded then, that they had no intention of a permanent occupation; and they must be left to judge for themselves as to the period at which that occupation may cease consistently with the objects in view—objects which are disinterested ones, as far as France is concerned, for she never professed to have in view any territorial acquisition by that occupation. The French Government have assured us that, as far as any influence goes which they may be at liberty to exercise in Rome and with the Roman Government by reason of that occupation, that influence has been exerted for those objects which the French Government, as well as the English Government, necessarily think most desirable to be attained.

PROPERTY TAX BILL.
Order read for considering the Property Tax Bill, as amended.
The CHANCELLOR OF The EXCHEQUER: Sir, I wish to make a statement which I certainly would have deferred until after the Amendment of the hon. and gallant Member for Lincoln (Colonel Sibthorp) was moved, were it not my intention to propose a clause which I think will render that Amendment unnecessary. I intend to bring up a clause referring to a question which, to a certain extent, was discussed by the House on a former occasion, namely, giving the right of appeal to the occupying tenant in the event of his profits not being equal to the amount for which he was assessed. When I last addressed the House, I certainly thought and felt that when, in concurrence with the general wish of the House, and the proposal of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Montrose (Mr. Hume), the Motion was acceded to limiting the duration of the Bill to a single year, and providing that a

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Committee should be appointed to consider the modifications that might be made in case there was any future renewal of the Bill, that it would be renewed in its present shape for this year, and that no alteration or amendment should be made in the measure in the course of the present Session. That seemed to be the general impression when the subject was first broached on the last occasion, and I thought that it would be adhered to. I have, however, received so many representations on the subject of the tax paid by the occupying tenant, that since the time I last addressed the House I have been in communication with the officers of Inland Revenue, for the purpose of ascertaining whether some right of appeal might not be given to those persons without affecting the general principle of the measure. And what I propose to do at present is, to bring up a clause which I think will carry into effect substantially the object, so far as the occupying tenants are concerned, of the hon. and gallant Member for Lincoln, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. Spooner), and the hon. Gentleman behind me, the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Chaplin). I think the present arrangement for making the assessment is a beneficial arrangement for the tenant-farmers, and that it would be very unwise on their part to ask us to depart from it; but I do not see the same objection to giving them the same right of appeal that has been conceded to parties who are assessed under Schedule D. I don't propose to put them into Schedule D. I propose that they should be assessed as they are at present, but that at the end of the year, they should be at liberty, if they think it worth while, to appeal against the assessment, and appear before the Commissioners; and if they can then satisfactorily prove that their profits are not equal to the amount for which they have been assessed, they will receive relief to whatever extent they can satisfy the Commissioners they are entitled to it. I am not prepared, however, to make this concession in the cases of gentlemen occupying their own farms. There would be no great difficulty, I apprehend, in any gentleman farming his own park to show that he derived no profit from it. I suppose the experience of other gentlemen coincide with my own on this point; and I do not expect to receive profits under such circumstances. They are not the parties for whom relief is sought; but the parties seeking relief are those who earn a livelihood by the
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land. I am prepared to give them relief, but not to extend the relief beyond them. The words of the clause are taken from the 133rd clause of the existing Property Tax Bill, with some words taken from former Acts. The clause is to the effect that, if at the end of the year of the assessment under this Act, any person occupying land for the purposes of husbandry only, and obtaining his livelihood principally by it, and assessed for such year for the duty chargeable under Schedule B, shall prove to the satisfaction of the Commissioners that his profits and gains fall short of the sum on which the assessment was made, it shall be lawful for the Commissioners, on an appeal made in three calendar months after the expiration of the year, of which notice shall be given to the surveyor of taxes, to order an allowance to be made on the amount charged proportionate to the deficiency in the profits. I now move that the clause be read a first time.
COLONEL SIBTHORPsaid, they were told on high authority that there was more joy over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous. He had to express satisfaction that a measure should have been taken on the part of the Government which would tend to allay the feelings of irritation that had arisen among agriculturists with respect to the mode of assessing them to the property tax. He would not then press his Amendment, but would not be debarred of the opportunity of bringing it forward at a future period if necessary.
MR. DISRAELIsaid, that he must congratulate his hon. and gallant Friend (Colonel Sibthorp) on attaining the object he had so ably and indefatigably pursued. The Government had assented to the proposition for the relief of the tenant-farmer with great good sense and great good feeling. So far as he (Mr. Disraeli) could catch the language of the clause, it appeared to him to meet the difficulties of the case; and, therefore, he trusted his hon. and gallant Friend would not have any necessity for again bringing the subject before the House. The present was an additional instance in which his hon. and gallant Friend had shown himself the able and successful champion of the interests of the tenant-farmer.
MR. CHAPLINcould not suffer the matter to pass without acknowledging the condescension of the hon. and gallant Member (Colonel Sibthorp) in adopting his (Mr. Chaplin's) words in his amended pro-

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position. He could not sit down, however, without expressing his entire satisfaction at the manner in which the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer had extricated the subject from the difficulties in which it had been entangled. He hoped the hon. Member for Dorsetshire (Mr. Bankes) would now give him (Mr. Chaplin) credit for sincerity in bringing forward his Motion.
MR. ALDERMAN THOMPSONbegged to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he would allow the persons assessed under Schedule B to compound on the average of the last three years?
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: The proposition is limited to one year, and there can be no composition for one year.
MR. ALDERMAN THOMPSON: The question I ask is this, will you insert a proviso authorising persons who have compounded for three years to exercise the option of being assessed according to the average of the preceding three years?
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: The new assessment will be on the average profits of the last three years.
MR. MASTERMANsaid, that the object of the question was to ascertain whether parties who had compounded would be required to make any fresh returns, or whether they would not be allowed to pay as when last assessed.
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERreplied that a new assessment would be made under the new Act.
MR. SPOONERwished to ask the right hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he could not insert words to bring the class of yeomen occupying small farms of their own, and living entirely thereby, under the operation of the clause he had proposed. There was another obervation he wished to make. The clause, he knew, was taken from an old Act; but he doubted whether the words were quite correct. It was directed that the appeal should be made to the Commissioners by whom the assessment was made; but that was different from another provision of the Bill by which it was directed that no Commissioner who made the assessment should sit on the appeal cases.
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, his hon. Friend would see that a small yeoman could hardly be considered a person having a farm the rental of which would be 300 l. a year. The
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words he (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) had adopted would provide for the case where the party earned his livelihood by farming.
MR. BRIGHTcould not help complimenting the right hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer on the facility with which he had proposed this alteration in the Bill, seeing that within the last few days he had expressed an opinion that the Bill was nearly perfect, and that no valuable alteration could be made in it. He wished to call the attention of the right hon. Gentleman to a point which, he was afraid, was not generally understood. There was a very considerable difference between the mode in which farmers were taxed under this Act, and persons in trade. Both modes were, he believed, somewhat inconvenient to persons who paid the tax; but the difference was this, that farmers were never liable to be surcharged. They were not liable to be charged above a certain sum, which they knew, and which in an ordinary run of years everybody would admit to be a moderate charge upon the ordinary profits of farming. ["No, no!"] He would not go into that question then. But it could be easily shown that, taking the amount of capital a farmer employed on 300 acres of land, he must have made, during thirty years, under the system of protection, a much larger income than that which became chargeable to the income tax. The farmers were not charged on more than 150 l., if the rent was not more than 300 l. But if in addition to that the occupiers of land were to have a right of appeal, their position was better than that of traders under Schedule D. If a farmer paying a rent of 300 l. a year made a profit of 200 l. a year, according to the present system he would not be charged on more than 150 l. He had a right of appeal if he made less than 150 l. a year; but the Government had no appeal against him in case he made more than that sum. He (Mr. Bright), therefore, asked the right hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer to take that matter into his consideration.
MR. CHRISTOPHERsaid, the hon. Member for Manchester was quite mistaken in supposing that tenants were never surcharged. He had met with two instances of surcharge in his own county (Lincolnshire). Tenants were charged higher than the rents which they actually paid, and encountered much trouble and vexation in their efforts to obtain a reduction.
MR. BRIGHTthought the surcharges

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must have arisen from some mistake as to profit.
MR. J. E. DENISONsaid, when this arrangement was originally proposed, as matters then stood it was a favourable one to the occupying tenant; but since that time there had been an interference by law with that state of things. That change had materially interfered with the immediate profits of the occupying tenant, and therefore the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed, for this year, to give this right of appeal under the circumstances which he had stated. He (Mr. J. E. Denison) thought the proposition was a just and equitable one, and that his right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer had not rendered himself liable to the charge of unfair and partial dealing with which he had been taunted by the hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright).
SIR JOHN TROLLOPEwished to explain, that in cases where the tenant-farmer paid less than the Commissioners thought he should be assessed at for income tax, they had the right of putting their own value on those lands, and charging him, not according to his rent, but according to that ascertained value. Such circumstances did occur when the tax was first laid on, because there might be cases in which the tenant paid less for the lands he occupied than they were worth. But, thanks to the hon. Member for Manchester and his friends, the advocates of free trade, such instances were now not only infrequent, but it was to be feared absolutely impossible.
MR. BOOKERsaid, the hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) seemed to think it was still possible for the farmers to make exorbitant profits upon their capital. Take, however, as an example, a farmer with 300 acres of land, and suppose that he employed on an average 8l. on the cultivation of each acre, that would make in the whole 2,400 l. employed by him. At ordinary times a fair rate of interest, namely, five per cent, upon such a capital, ought to yield him 120 l. a year—upon which sum the assessment ought to be made. A tax of 7d. in the pound on that amount would be about 3l.; but the farmer subject to income tax paid about 4l. 10 s. a year. But it was known how the capital of the farmer had been wasted, and few could say that 8l. per acre was the amount of capital invested in their farms. It would be nearer the mark to say 5l., and instead of 5 per cent, to estimate the return at 2½ per cent.
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At that rate a capital of 1,500 l. would yield only 37 l. 10 s. a year, on which the assessment ought to be made.
MR. HENLEYwas sure the hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) would be glad to be put right on this question. If they took the case of a farmer who paid 500 l. a year rent, the Commissioners might be in a position to prove that the land he occupied was worth 600 l. a year. In that event, the farmer was not only called on to pay 3½d. in the pound, under Schedule B, upon 500 l. as his rent, but 7d. in the pound under Schedule A on the additional 100 l. with which he was surcharged. In other words, he paid not only on the excess under Schedule B, but also on the excess under Schedule A.
MR. ALDERMAN SIDNEYwished to press on the consideration of the right hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer the necessity of a more careful mode of collecting the tax, for at present it frequently happened that the taxpayers had to make good the defalcations of collectors.
Clause agreed to.
COLONEL SIBTHORP COLONEL SIBTHORP moved the following as a proviso to Clause 1:—
"Provided also that nothing in this Act contained shall authorise the continuance of so much of the rates and duties granted heretofore under Schedule E of the said first recited Act as relates to the pay and allowances of the officers in Her Majesty's Army or Navy."
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERmust oppose the Motion; he asserted that the officers of the Army and Navy ought to be included with other public officers in the same category.
In reply to a remark by Captain BOLDERO,
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, that officers belonging to the Army permanently resident in Ireland were not obliged to pay the income tax; but that officers who might be quartered there in a temporary manner had to pay it. He now proposed to leave out the two last clauses of the Bill, which were inserted under the supposition that the tax would be continued for three years.
Proviso withdrawn.
SIR HENRY WILLOUGHBYwished to call the attention of the House to the necessity of providing some effectual custody of the papers relating to the property tax returns. The original Property Tax Act provided that official persons should not disclose the particulars which came to their knowledge in reference to the assessment and collection of the tax; but there was

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no provision for the effectual and safe custody of papers. It had come to his knowledge that in some of the towns in the kingdom the papers relating to the property and income tax had been sold for waste paper. In one city in particular a barrowfull of these papers had been so disposed of, and the consequence had been that the affairs of the principal residents had become matters of notoriety, and some most injurious disclosures took place. When the property tax expired in 1815, the papers connected with it were considered of so much importance that they were delivered over to be burnt by persons specially employed for the purpose.
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, it was difficult to make that a matter of enactment; it must be a matter of discretion. He could only say, the strictest instructions had been given to observe all possible secrecy with respect to the contents of the returns. With regard to the cases to which his hon. Friend (Sir Henry Willoughby) had alluded, he did not doubt his hon. Friend's accuracy; but the House did not usually take for granted that all such stories were well founded, for a strict inquiry often proved them to be otherwise. A complaint had been made by Lord Brougham in the House of Lords with respect to the negligent keeping of these papers; but upon inquiry it turned out that there was no ground for the complaint, and that the papers in question contained nothing that might not have been posted at Charing Cross.
MR. REYNOLDSsaid, it was not his intention to interfere in this matter. His object was to call the attention of the House, and particularly the attention of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to a Bill which he held in his hand, which might be considered part and parcel of the income tax—he meant the Stamp Duties Assimilation Bill. The House had decided that the property and income tax for Great Britain should be confined to one year, and it also decided that this Bill, which he called the income tax in Ireland, shall continue for a period of three years. His object in addressing the House was to ask the right hon. Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he considered it fair play towards Ireland to impose a tax of 140,000 l. per annum for three years, in lieu of the property and income tax for one year? It was distinctly stated by the late Sir Robert Peel that this Bill was to be a substitute, as far as Ireland
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was concerned, for the non-extension of the property tax to that country.
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, the Stamp Duties Assimilation Bill, which was limited to three years, had been sent up to the Lords before that House had come to a determination to confine the income tax to one year. It was, however, his intention to assimilate the two Bills in respect to the limitation to one year, though he did not think Ireland had a bad bargain in reference to the income tax.
MR. GRATTANwould tell the Chancellor of the Exchequer and every Member on the Treasury bench, that if he at tempted to impose an income tax on Ireland, he must levy it at the point of the bayonet. He might as well impose such a tax on Siberia as upon Ireland.
Bill to be read 3° on Monday next.

ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES ASSUMPTION BILL.
Order for Committee read.
Motion made and Question proposed, "That Mr. Speaker do now leave the Chair."
MR. URQUHARTthen moved the Amendment of which he had given notice, and said, the conduct of the Government with reference to the way in which they had dealt with this question, had, in his opinion, led to very serious consequences. That conduct had produced in the minds of a large section of the community a morbid feeling of irritation, which would not be soon allayed; enmities, which had called forth corresponding enmities; and expectations, which, whilst they had not been fulfilled on the one hand, imposed on the Government, on the other, restrictions from which there was no possibility of escape. The Resolutions which he had to submit to the consideration of the House contained no enunciation of principles, no conclusions to be arrived at by a series of deduction. They were only and simply descriptive of the acts of the Government. They embodied a modest expression of facts, which were in themselves a vote of censure on the Government. If that was the construction which they bore, it was not his (Mr. Urquhart's) fault, but that of the noble Lord at the head of the Government; and he (Mr. Urquhart) should be sorry to see the Government expelled on such a Motion. His Resolutions only gave expression to sentiments and opinions which had been already affirmed by several im-

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portant sections of that House, distinguished for high intellectual capacity, and their love of religious liberty, who, differing in their opinions on many important subjects, were unanimous in the view they took of this. He defied the noble Lord to deny that he had encouraged the Pope to this act of aggression. That was the charge which he brought against him; and he would prove it by reference to his own speeches in that House, as well as elsewhere. Before he quoted from the noble Lord, he would refer to the terms of a circular sent by Earl Grey to the Governors of our different colonial dependencies. In that document the noble Earl invited those Governors to pay honour to the prelates of the Roman Catholic faith. It was dated 1847; and, in referring to the Charitable Bequests Act, Earl Grey says—
"The Legislature having come to the conclusion of recognising the style and titles of the Roman Catholic prelates, by placing them in the rank after those of the Established Church, the Government had thought fit to give effect to that determination of the Legislature."
Now that was an act of the noble Lord's Government. But still more conclusive were the words of the noble Lord on the 13th of February, 1844. The noble Lord said that we ought to take away every thing which was derogatory to the character and position of the Church of Rome, and repeal those penal enactments which still remained on the Statute-book. Eighteen months later—showing that these words contained no temporary or hasty opinion, in July 1845, the noble Lord said he believed that they must repeal the disallowing clauses of the Act of 1849, by which Roman Catholic bishops were prevented from assuming the style and title of bishops of the Established Church, as he did not see good grounds for the continuance of these restrictions. These, then, were the opinions of the noble Lord on the Bill of 1829, namely, that these, the last securities of the emancipation, should be withdrawn, and that greater facilities ought to be granted to Roman Catholics for the exercise of their religion. In 1846, the noble Lord said—
"Let us suppose, although it would be extravagant to suppose it, that there was any attempt on the part of the Pope to exercise, or even assert, any sovereign power, or in any way to interfere with the Queen's authority, by bull or rescript, or in any other manner; the persons introducing such bull or rescript, or those obeying it, would be punished by the laws of England."
In the assertion of the noble Lord, that
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the restrictions of the Act of 1829 were futile, and that Catholic bishops ought to be placed on the same footing as Protestant bishops, the noble Lord gave a direct encouragement and invitation to the Pope to do what the noble Lord now denounced. In reply to the question of the hon. Member for the University of Oxford, as to the truth of the step taken by the Pope, the noble Lord replied, that he was officially ignorant of the fact; and that, when the hon. Member demanded whether such an act would be tolerated by any other State in Europe, he must recollect that in other countries special authority should he obtained, and an agreement entered into between the Pope and the Sovereign. Now, he put it to the House, could there be any greater encouragement given to the Pope than that which was afforded by the language, the speeches, and indeed the acts of the noble Lord? The noble Lord says that he then thought Rome a friendly Government, but that he now finds out that she is a hostile Government. The difference, in his opinion, was solely caused by the Pope taking the very step which, in 1848, the noble Lord said he had a right to do, namely, that, without an agreement to the contrary, the Pope had a right to exercise the same powers which he now assumes. The noble Lord's method of treating the whole question differed materially from the mode adopted by the learned Attorney General, who was now Master of the Rolls. That Gentleman said he would not enter into the question of insult. And yet he said that the idea of insult had aggravated the desire for legislation in this country—a desire which he showed, he conceived, to be unfounded, since the legislation he proposed tended to effect very different objects from those desired by the public. The right hon. Baronet opposite (Sir G. Grey) considered that the insult had been already met by the noble response of the country, as evinced in public demonstrations. Without expressing any opinion of his own, he would take the view of the case, as on two occasions presented recently by the late Attorney General, and that view of it which the noble Lord (Lord J. Russell) had so gravely, deliberately, and repeatedly expressed, and without now touching on the diplomatic means by which such an act might have been prevented, or even annulled. The Government had, in these opinions, the means of defeating that which was injurious in the act of the Pope. He

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must divide the question, as the late Attorney General had done, into its two branches. The one the so-called insult—that is, the appointment of bishops; the second, the, as he should call, injury—the issuing of the rescript. These had to be dealt with by different processes, because the means of their operation were of a different character. The first operated through the consciences of Roman Catholics; the second through the British courts of law. The first had to be dealt with by treating at Rome; the second by statute. They might pass what laws they liked, and the Roman Catholic bishops "would be bishops still." If they attempted to enforce restrictions, trifling as at first they would seem, they would meet with resistance step by step: coercion and resistance would grow; corresponding animosities arise. The body to be coerced had already forced them to relaxation; now, they had not the ground of right and consistency. They ventured on untried courses with all the chances against them; their antagonists had increased in strength, were admitted to all posts of authority, had seats in that House—in the balanced state of parties could at times dictate to England her measures, and impose upon her her governors. Could they force them down again? If so, the old penal laws would not suffice; they must proceed much farther, they must abrogate the constitution. Penal laws could not be dreamt of against a third of the subjects of Her Majesty, without expelling that body from that House, and excluding them from the jury box. These, doubtless, were the considerations which weighed with the noble Lord, when in his own terse fashion he thus placed the dilemma—and which, it had to be observed, excited at the time no alarms in the mind of the people of this country—"either you must have an agreement with the Pope, or you must not interfere in any arrangements of the kind." The same considerations weighed with Sir Robert Peel, and induced him to place on record a warning against retrocession, the end of which, he said, once entered on, would be incalculable, and lead to the most fearful results in Ireland. As to the second point, of injury that was inflicted on the Roman Catholics, according to the late Attorney General, this constituted the whole case:—
"The bishops, as bishops," said the learned Gentleman, "have authority which the vicars-apostolic had not. In spirituals no difference exists; but as regards the administration of trusts,
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the presentation to benefices, they have higher powers, and therefore, the existing rights of the Roman Catholic clergy and laity are infringed."
He was ready to take that statement of the case as true, for all practical purposes, although he did not refer the change to the territorial character of the bishops, but to the imperious character of the rescript, and considered that vicars-apostolic under that brief would stand exactly in the same position as the bishops. Their new canon law would come to operate, not as the question of titles, through the consciences of Catholics, but through Her Majesty's prerogative of justice, as administered in the courts of law; which courts do enforce any regulation ascertained to be a use, procedure, or by law, of the Roman Catholic body, so long as it is not in violation of the common or statute law of this country. He held it, then, on the showing of the late Attorney General, to be the duty of Government to render the statute law such that every novel pretension contained in the Papal brief should be a violation of the law, and thereby fail to obtain the aid of the secular power for its enforcement. This would have been a course effectual and dignified, free alike from impotence and excess. If these were novel ideas or discoveries, he might entertain the hope that the noble Lord, even at this eleventh hour, would be struck with their importance, and accept this issue from his difficulties. But these were things which the noble Lord knew from the beginning, which, with purpose prepense, he flung away, and aroused a storm of religious alarms to render this or any rational solution impracticable. Had it not been for the conduct and declarations of the noble Lord, the Roman Catholics would have repudiated the rescript. Now, their self-love was enlisted, and their religious feelings insulted. They, like their antagonists, ceased to reason. He had spared nothing that by possibility could exasperate; and the statesman, who had over and over declared that an accommodation on this head could only be had by free consent of and arrangement with the Pope, now stigmatised this act as a violation of the law of nations, and bolstered up the strange assertion by a reference to the practice of certain nations—which again he misrepresented. The law of nations was a word of serious import. Who ever heard of a Government raising a cry of a violation of the law of nations, unless to justify reprisals?—but to raise it to

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vindicate the introduction of a legislative enactment was a confession of weakness, guilt, and crime. The law of nations did not apply. None of their subjects had been seized or imprisoned—none of their vessels had been captured—none of their territories invaded. The noble Lord was not so ignorant as to the law of nations, and the practices of foreign countries. When he referred to them as illustrating his assertion that no other country would endure such a pretension on the part of the Pope, he had afterwards excepted Austria. The noble Lord could not be ignorant of the contents of the blue book recently furnished by the Foreign Office; but he must have supposed the House to be so, when he ventured on such a statement. Such questions noways belonged to the law of nations; they were matters of compact or of legislation; every State was free to do what it pleased, and any State might contract with the Pope if it thought fit. The House had no very exact idea of what a concordat was—it was a treaty with bipartite engagements; he would show them its character by reading the preamble and the chief articles of the concordat between Maximilian of Bavaria and Pius VII. The hon. Member, after quoting the passages, continued to state that one practice was not common to all countries, either Protestant or Catholic, nor even in the same country. As to Austria, there was no uniform law on this subject ruling the whole empire. It was the same in Prussia, where there were different regulations affecting its different provinces, such as Silesia, Posen, and others. But then the noble Lord said that Austria was an exception—that it now submitted without a murmur to the dictation of the Court of Rome. The change effected in Austria was the only one rational change, the consequence of its late revolution, by which the rights of the Church were freed from the Erastian control to which they had previously been subjected. The same might be said of Prussia. He referred to the despatch from Berlin, dated the 19th of September last. The noble Lord would there see that the revolution in Prussia had superseded the restrictions that had previously been laid on the Pope. They then came to the Netherlands, where there were the celebrated Gallican rights, and which were embodied in a compact with the Pope. As to Belgium, it would be seen that since 1830, by the 16th arti-
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cle of the constitution, every religion was free. In fact, the whole of the evidence was against the noble Lord, by which he endeavoured to show that there had been a violation of the law or practice of nations. The noble Lord had encouraged, by his conduct, the Pope to do that which he now denounced as a violation of the law of nations. He said that whoever entertained this opinion could not be content with voting against the Bill; but he must express his censure of that conduct of which the Government had been guilty by its tergiversation. But the measure, not honestly brought forward, it was already clearly not the intention of the Government, if adopted, honestly to carry out. The evil was real, its conseqences frightful; but they were less to be attributed to the Pope than the Premier: the Member for the City of London and Pius IX. were alike but tools, and they who planned the scheme could have succeeded only by being assured of both. England alone would not suffer; Europe would be the field on which the animosities engendered would sow their bitter seeds; and for mankind the prospects of these evil times was opened again, on which the doors of reprobation seemed to have been closed. He felt himself, however, precluded on the present occasion from entering into the merits of the case. He had only to deal with the secondary evils superadded by the conduct of the Government. He dissented from the views of all parties in that House. He did not concur with the Gentlemen on his right (the Peelites) in their position that no legislation was requisite, nor with those around him, in declining to obstruct the use of names, nor with those below (the Roman Catholics) in conceiving that the Pope's act was neither intended as an insult nor conveyed an injury. If the House affirmed his Resolution, it pledged itself to nothing. It merely cleared the field of the wrecks of the past futile debate, and they might take up the case de novo, instructed by past experience. The argument with which he would be met was, that the Government would be shaken and must leave office; as to that he was perfectly indifferent in regard to any sympathies of a political kind, for he had none with any party, indeed the reverse; but he had no wish for changes of Governments, nor did he see why it should occur; he was rejoiced to see the false doctrine exploded of ruling by majorities; and he was sure the logic of

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the noble Lord would find plausible grounds to reconcile, on this as on so many other occasions, defeat with the tenure of office. What he wished was, that measures should be dealt with without reference to who was in power; and, above all, that the censure of this House should fall where it was deserved. In conclusion, he would remark that the measure which had been brought forward by the Government was held by some to be a nullity, and by others a persecution; some could not tell whether it was one or the other. For his part he believed it was both—it would prove a nullity if it were not enforced, and it would prove a persecution if it were carried into effect; but he would not vote for a law which some supported because they deemed it a persecution, and others endured because they called it a nullity. The only way of escaping from this dilemma was to sweep away all that had been done upon the subject. If they did not, they must either reopen the door of religious persecution and intolerance, or they must exhibit this great country as engaged in a futile attempt at legislation, the object of scorn and contumely to the world; and they would in reality grant to the Pope what the noble Lord said they would have granted to him if the House had rejected the second reading of this Bill—they would grant him a great and splendid triumph over and above all his other triumphs—a triumph over the minds of the men of England. The hon. Gentleman concluded by moving—
"To leave out from the word 'That' to the end of the Question, in order to add the words 'the recent act of the Pope in dividing England into dioceses, and appointing Bishops thereto, was encouraged by the conduct and declarations of Her Majesty's Government,' instead thereof."
MR. SADLEIRsecond the Motion.
SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, he had been unable to catch what fell from the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Urquhart) in the earlier portion of his address; but he understood the hon. Gentleman to say, that having failed to attract the eye of the Speaker on the second reading of the Bill, he was anxious to take the present opportunity of stating the objections he entertained against this measure; and he therefore asked the House to reopen the discussion, and to reverse the decision at which the House had arrived after a protracted debate of seven nights, and that by an overwhelming majority of 438 against 95. The hon. Gentleman more distinctly asserted in
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the latter part of his speech, that the object of the present Motion was to get rid altogether of this Bill, to undo all that had been done in regard to what had been termed the Papal Aggression, with a view to relieve the great excitement and strong feeling which existed throughout the country by reason of that aggression, and to leave the act of the Pope to take its course unchecked by that House, whether by resolution or by legislative enactment. The hon. Gentleman proposed still more. He not only opposed Mr. Speaker leaving the Chair, in order that the House might consider the provisions of the Bill, but he proposed to substitute a distinct Motion, to the effect that the House should pass a direct vote of censure upon Her Majesty's Government. Strangely misconceiving, and therefore misrepresenting, what fell from his (Sir George Grey's) noble Friend (Lord John Russell) the other night, in reply to the hon. and learned Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck), as to what he regarded to be a vote of want of confidence and a vote of censure, the hon. Gentleman said that the Resolution he now proposed, was not a vote of want of confidence, but only a vote of censure, and that it might be quietly submitted to by the Government without involving that dangerous consequence which he anticipated, namely, a general convulsion throughout the country by a change of the Government and a general election. The hon. Gentleman totally misconceived the observations made by the noble Lord (Lord John Russell). His noble Friend drew a distinction between the Government being in a minority on four recent occasions, and a vote of want of confidence, or a vote of censure on the part of the House; and he expressly stated, that if either a vote of want of confidence, or a vote of censure were passed, Ministers could not continue to carry on the Government of the country. He (Sir George Grey) would not enter into the general argument which the hon. Gentleman had adduced against the principle of the present measure. He would, however, call the attention of the House to the fact that the Resolution now proposed by way of a vote of censure, was essentially different from those of which the hon. Member originally gave notice. He now proposed not to go into Committee at all, but to substitute a vote of censure upon the Government, founded partly on the conduct of the Government, partly on the letter of his (Sir George Grey's) noble

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Friend, and partly on the inadequacy of the Bill to meet the case of aggression which it was sought to redress. What was the first notice given by the hon. Gentleman? The Resolutions ran thus:—

"1. That, in the opinion of this House, the act of the Pope in dividing England into dioceses, and appointing Bishops thereto, was invited by the express declarations of the First Lord of the Treasury.

"2. That the source of this measure is not to be sought in the spiritual pretension of the Papal Government, but in its temporal prostration: that the independence of the Pope has been subverted by revolution and intervention, the first prompted, the second sanctioned, by the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

"3. That by the change thus effected, through the instrumentality of British diplomacy, in the character and position of the Papal Government, the Pope, from a dangerous enemy to the Emperor of Russia and the head of the Greek Church, has sunk into an instrument in his hands, by which he will be now enabled to convulse the East and the West, destroy the internal peace of this realm, paralyse its action abroad for all useful purposes, and rekindle religious warfare throughout the world.

"4. That legislation can neither reach the source nor remedy the consequences of this evil, nor have other effect save the promotion of the results for which this measure has been devised."

The first Resolution was in fact the same as the present one; but then the hon. Gentleman wont on to propose a direct censure, not on the First Lord of the Treasury, but, with his old reminiscences about him, he pointed a vote of censure against the noble Lord the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and proposed to take the opportunity of bringing a charge of complicity against the noble Lord with foreign Powers, in order to destroy the independence of the Pope of Rome. Such were the opinions entertained by the hon. Gentleman on the 4th of April. He did not then propose a censure upon the noble Lord at the head of the Treasury only, but also upon the noble Lord at the head of Foreign Affairs, dividing that censure with great impartiality with his Holiness the Pope himself. He (Sir George Grey) only adverted to this in order to show that the hon. Gentleman was not a safe guide to follow on this occasion, when he asked the House to undo all that had been done—to stultify themselves, and to take no steps with regard to a measure, the second reading of which had been carried by an overwhelming majority—and to guard the House against being led by the hon. Gentleman until they saw to what he was leading them. He would only say, after the full discussion of the Bill on the second
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reading, that in his opinion the hon. Gentleman had failed to show one single instance in which the authority of the Pope to interfere with the internal affairs of any Foreign State had been shown to exist, without the express consent of that State, by virtue of some legislative enactment, or by the sovereign authority of the State. Among all the instances adduced by the hon. Gentleman where a similar interference was contemplated by the Pope in this country, the hon. Gentleman had not mentioned one in which that interference was attempted to be made by the Pope's sole authority, and without previous communication with the Government of this country, to carry out the measures which he proposed to be effected by such a brief or rescript as that which formed the foundation of this Bill. With regard to the conduct of the Government, he could not collect any other charge made against them than that of having conferred titles of honour on Roman Catholic ecclesiastics. On a former occasion he had observed that, looking at the position in which the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics stood in Ireland, it was a wise and liberal policy to pay a deference to the feelings and sentiments of the great body of the people of Ireland, by showing outward marks of honour and respect to the heads of their Church. In conferring those honours, and showing those marks of respect, the Government transgressed no law, and violated none of the statutes of this realm. He considered the Government who pursued that line of conduct were actuated by a liberal and wise policy, though some might think they erred on the side of generosity. But when the hon. Gentleman made this accusation, he should be reminded that these titles of honour were conferred at least a year and a half previously to the accession of the present Government. That those titles were so conferred appeared by the records of meetings of the Commissioners under the Bequests Act, in which Roman Catholic archbishops and bishops were designated by those very titles which it was made a charge against the present Government of having conferred. The arguments which had been used by the hon. Gentleman to-night were precisely similar to those which had been used for the last twenty years against every successive Government. It was used when the Catholic Relief Bill was brought forward; it was used when the College of Maynooth was endowed, and also when the

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Bequests Act was introduced. The Government of those days thought it their duty, and he (Sir George Grey) considered that it was a wise policy, to propose those several measures; and though his noble Friend (Lord John Russell) had no connexion with that Government, yet he willingly took his full share of the unpopularity of those measures, and supported them in a spirit of wisdom, justice, and liberality towards his Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. But it certainly was never conceived by those who proposed or who supported those measures, that they were afterwards to be debarred from vindicating the honour of the Crown, and the independence of the Sovereign of these realms, by legislating against any act of aggression contemplated by any foreign Power, whether it were the Pope or any other Power, contrary to the law of nations, and the universal practice of Europe. The hon. Gentleman, after adverting to the conduct of the Government then proceeded to produce out of Hansard, declarations which, some years ago, were made by his (Sir George Grey's) noble Friend (Lord John Russell) on the subject of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He adverted to the reply to a question put to him by the hon. Member for the University of Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis), as to whether he would sanction the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. In the first place, the question had no reference whatever to any such measure as that now under the consideration of the House. But the hon. Gentleman, in selecting these statements, had passed very lightly over the distinct and explicit answer of his noble Friend to the question that was put to him, whether he had given his assent to the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England which was then talked of; when his noble Friend distinctly stated that his assent had not been asked, and that if it were asked it would be refused. [Mr. URQUHART: I quoted that.] If he had, he could not help expressing his extreme surprise that with such an explicit declaration on the part of the First Minister of the Crown, there could possibly have been such an impression created in the mind of the Pope and his advisers as the hon. Gentleman said there was, that the Government would be willing parties to the measures recently adopted. If such an impression had at any time been created, why was not some communication made by the Court of Rome to
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the English Government on the subject? Why was such secrecy thought necessary to be observed with regard to the act of the Pope? The hon. Gentleman had fairly and candidly abstained from making any charge against the Government of any notice having been given to them of the intentions of the Pope. He (Sir George Grey) would here take occasion to say that, since he last addressed the House in reference to what passed at Rome when the Earl of Minto was there, and to a statement made by the hon. and learned Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck), as to a conversation between the Earl of Minto and the Abbé Hamilton, he (Sir George Grey) had seen a letter written by the Abbé to a friend, who was authorised to place it in his (Sir George Grey's) hands, in which the Abbœ Hamilton said that he would bear willing testimony to the accuracy of every word of the statement which he (Sir George Grey) on that occasion made, and that there was no foundation whatever for the assertions of the hon. and learned Member for Sheffield, who had been misinformed altogether. Then the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Urquhart) came to the letter of his (Sir George Grey's) noble Friend. He asked the House to join in a vote of censure upon that letter on account of the following passage, which the hon. Gentleman quoted:—
"There is an assumption of power in all the documents which have come from Rome, a pretension to supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen's supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual independence of the nation, as asserted even in Roman Catholic times."
He was not now going into an argument on that question; but the hon. Gentleman asked the House to pass a vote of censure upon the Government and upon his noble Friend (Lord John Russell) for the sentiment contained in this paragraph, after the House had already shown by a large majority that it coincided with his noble Friend in opinion; and the only complaint was that the Bill now before the House did not go far enough to repress the assumption here described. But the hon. Gentleman founded his vote of censure upon this paragraph on the ground that it led to the expectation of extensive measures being about to be proposed, which had been disappointed in the result. For his part, he could see no expectation of legislative measures being held out in this paragraph at all. It was clear that hon. Gentlemen who took as

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strong a view of the measures of the Pope as did his noble Friend, were of opinion that they might be met by a Resolution of this House, without having recourse to any legislative measure at all; while others who did not differ from his noble Friend as to the character of the acts of the Pope, were of opinion that a proclamation from the Crown would be sufficient to satisfy the urgency of the case. But the hon. Gentleman might have quoted the following paragraph, which directly pointed to legislation, while it certainly did not hold out any such large expectation as the hon. Gentleman assumed:—
"Upon this subject, then, I will only say that the present state of the law shall be carefully examined, and the propriety of adopting any proceedings with reference to the recent assumptions of power deliberately considered."
But the hon. Gentleman now thought there should be no legislation on the subject at all, but that the act of the Pope should be left unchecked, while at the same time he asked the House to censure the Government for the alleged inadequacy of the measure which they had proposed, and which they considered sufficient for the purpose of vindicating the dignity of the Crown, by embodying in a statute a legislative protest against the act of the Pope, and denying the right which he had assumed to exercise authority within this realm. All he now asked the House to do was, after having affirmed the principle of the Bill, not now to turn round and say they would take no further steps in the matter, but remain passive and quiescent under the authority assumed by the Pope to confer titles and dignities by virtue of his rescript within these realms. He hoped the House would not adopt such a course, but would at once consent to go into Committee, in order to consider the provisions of the Bill.
MR. FRESHFIELDsaid, he could not accord to the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart) his acknowledgments for the course he had taken on the present occasion. It seemed to him that the hon. Gentleman stood between the House and the wishes of the public that some effectual measure should pass for repressing the aggression of which they justly complained, and with which, but for the speech of the hon. Gentleman, the House would now be making some progress. He saw no end that the Resolution could have. In short, it tended to nothing; and, feeling the Motion, to be an impediment to that legisla-
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tion which the House had determined on pursuing, he should give it his decided opposition. He did not inquire whether the Government had or had not courted the aggression. Suppose by their conduct they had invited this aggression of the Pope; what then? Was that to prevent the country from having the benefit of that legislation which the case required? Let them go into Committee, consider what measure the occasion might require, and endeavour to make that measure as effectual as possible.
LORD JOHN MANNERSsaid, that under the peculiar circumstances of the case the House must come to the discussion and consideration of the hon. Member for Stafford's (Mr. Urquhart's) Amendment upon its own merits, and apart from all extraneous matter. Now, to his mind, the proposition of the hon. Gentleman was something very tantamount to the assertion that two and two made four; and, placed as it then was, the House was obliged to assert either that two and two made four, or made something else. As an honest man, he (Lord John Manners) could not refuse to vote for the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman. The cui bono, which was often put to them, would not apply here; for when he considered what the Amendment was based upon, he must say that considerable public good would result from the plain declaration of the truth upon this subject, in the most formal way that that truth could be proclaimed—viz., by a Vote registered on the journals of the House of Commons. More than that, it was important that this declaration should be made, because the noble Lord (Lord John Russell), in his memorable letter, took especial pains to prevent the people of England from seeing the truth which they were now called upon to assert. According to his admissions the other day, the noble Lord was almost willing to run the risk of the disruption of the Church of England in order to prevent the people of England arriving at the truth with respect to the causes of the Papal aggression. It was in vain that fair and candid men, like Mr. Dudley Percival and the Earl of Powis, placed the truth before the country. Twice had the noble Lord, as leader of the Opposition, publicly and in his place, encouraged and invited this very act of the Pope, against which his puny and illusive legislation was now directed. Again, twice as Prime Minister, he had successfully resisted the modest attempts of the Church

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of England to increase her episcopate, and by that successful refusal had presented to the Pope those great towns of England which otherwise by this time had been the sees of English prelates. By the act of his own Government the noble Lord had granted precedence throughout the whole of Her Majesty's vast colonial empire to the archiepiscopal nominees of the Pope over the whole suffragan prelacy of the Colonies, and over the whole of the Australasian community; and precedence, not to bishops selected for that honour individually by Her Majesty, but by virtue of their very appointment by the Pope. The noble Lord also, with an excess of courtesy, granted similar precedence to the titular archbishops in Ireland. Further, upon the all-important matter of education, year after year, and last year especially, the noble Lord had pertinaciously resisted the fair and just claim of the Church of Ireland to a grant towards the support of her scriptural schools. In short, the whole course of policy of the noble Lord had been one long concession to the claims of the Church of Rome, and one of constant insult and wrong to the Church of England, the only real and effectual barrier against the encroachments of the Church of Rome. And yet the noble Lord had succeeded, by a magic stroke of his pen, in placing himself before the country as the champion of English Protestantism, and the only real opponent of the encroachments of the Church of Rome. It was now, however, reserved for the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart) to give expression to that opinion which, in his (Lord John Manners') conscience, he believed would be ratified by the verdict of an impartial posterity. Even if the subsequent conduct of the noble Lord had been in consonance with the uttered tone of his letter, and had the Bill, which after careful preparation, and with such a flourish of trumpets had since been introduced—even had that Bill realised the effects which were expected from it, and been calculated to repel the Papal aggression, instead of being, as it was described by the last legal addition—and here he begged to congratulate the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) and the House on the return of the hon. and learned Member for Cork (Mr. Serjeant Murphy)—instead of the Bill being, as described in the last legal addition to the noble Lord's party, a sham, a fraud, and a delusion—still he would say that the past acts of the noble Lord warranted, justified, and compelled him (Lord John Manners)
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to vote for the Amendment of the hon. Member for Stafford. He considered, moreover, that the subsequent acts of the noble Lord's policy had been, as the former acts were, favourable to the Church of Rome, and discouraging to the Church of England. He owned he could not see on what ground the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman could be resisted. A few days before the Easter recess, he (Lord John Manners) took the liberty of asking the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) if it was his intention to retract or to modify that circular letter of Earl Grey, by which, to say the least of it, the Pope was admitted to a partnership of honour with Her Majesty throughout the whole of her colonies; and the noble Lord answered, with the frankness which always characterised him, that it was not his intention either to retract or to modify it. What were the facts of the case of the colonies? Every man, woman, and child now knew that the circular to which he referred was based upon an admitted misconception of fact. He had Earl Grey's own admission for that; and it was notorious that his construction of the Charitable Bequests Act, on which the circular was founded, was not the true construction which ought to be put upon that Act. And if this circular was still to be the rule in every colonial dependency of the Crown, then he asked the House, did it not stand to reason, and was it not consonant with every dictate of common sense and justice, that similar orders ought to be issued to every lord lieutenant of an English county, commanding due precedence to be given to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster over every suffragan bishop of the English Church, and over the whole body of Her Majesty's subjects, with an exception, perhaps, in favour of the illustrious Consort of Her Majesty, and possibly, also, in favour of the Archbishop of Canterbury. What were the facts of the case? Dr. Polding was nominated by the Pope to the archbishopric of Sidney—a see already granted by Her Majesty to Dr. Broughton; and according to the orders of the noble Earl (Earl Grey), Dr. Polding was to have precedence granted to him over all the suffragans of the Australian Church, and over all lay persons in the Australian colonies; Dr. Wiseman, nominated by the Pope to the archbishopric of Westminster—a see not occupied by anybody—was denounced by the noble Lord at the head of the Government as an infringer upon the prerogatives of the Crown, and a violator of the

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rights of the nation. What was the conclusion, then, they must come to on such a state of facts? Why, either that the noble Lord was persecuting Dr. Wiseman, or that he was betraying the rights of his Sovereign and the independence of his country at the Antipodes. The latter, he believed, to be the just and true conclusion to draw; and he, therefore, asked the House, by voting for the Motion of the hon. Member for Stafford, to brand that act of Her Majesty's Government as inconsistent with their duty to the Crown, with the rights of the Colonial Church, and with a due regard to the independence of the empire. Another question which he (Lord John Manners) had touched on was the increase of the English episcopacy. When the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) came into office, he admitted, as frankly and fully as any man could, that the number of English bishops was miserably insufficient to discharge the weighty duties which devolved upon them; and he went so far as to specify some additional bishoprics which he proposed to create. If that intention had been followed up by action, it was more than likely some at least of those great towns to which the Pope had now presumed to nominate bishops, and which had excited just indignation, would have been filled by prelates of the Established Church, and Liverpool, Nottingham, and Birmingham might have been free from the indignity offered by the Pope. Before the Papal aggression was made, negotiations on the subject of education were opened between the Government of the noble Lord and the Wesleyans, which terminated in the Government conceding the just and reasonable claims of the Wesleyans. He rejoiced that they had had justice done them in the matter; and he congratulated them on their success against the pedantic bigotry of the noble Lord. The same question was pending shortly afterwards between the Roman Catholics of England and the Government, and those negotiations had also ended in the concession of the claims of the Roman Catholics, and that, too, subsequently to the Papal aggression, and in a manner which painfully contrasted with that in which the Church of England was dealt with at the hands of the Government. Negotiations had been also pending with the Church of England, and her claims (last year admitted, by almost every Gentleman on both sides of the House, excepting those who were Members of Her Majesty's Government, to be just and equit-
798
able) were met by a most sturdy and determined resistance—a resistance still continued. And thus we see Her Majesty's Ministers will grant to Roman Catholics, in the matter of education, even since this aggression, that which they refuse the Church of England. He might multiply instances in point. But those points were sufficient to prove that the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman was based upon the letter and bare facts of the case. The hon. Gentleman was right in assuming that the Pope must have felt satisfied that any attack he could make on the Church of England would meet with no discouragement, and possibly with countenance, from Her Majesty's Government. He was not disposed to think the Pope would have erred very much in arriving at that conclusion. He believed if the people and the Sovereign of England had not felt themselves aggrieved by the act of the Pope, they would have heard very little of the noble Lord's indignation. He would not now enter into the inconsistencies which marked the noble Lord's measure by which he expected to meet that aggression—inconsistencies which characterised it from the moment it was introduced to the House up to the present time. They could not forget how the noble Lord at the head of the Government said, the measure would do one thing; and the hon. and learned Attorney General said it would do another; while the hon. and learned Solicitor General promised it would do everything; and common sense and public opinion proclaimed it would do nothing. However, he would not enter into the merits or demerits of the Bill—whether it contained all of the former, which an enthusiastic Solicitor General attributed to it, or all of the latter, which the gentlemen who met the other day at Dublin ascribed to it. The question at present was, had the Motion of the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Urquhart), truth with it or not? If it had truth, let them vote for it; if not, against it. He believed it to have truth, and for that reason he should vote for it; because he thought it of public importance to place on record—upon the Journals of that House—a deliberate condemnation of the past policy of the Government, which had led to that aggression; and because he regarded it as important to hold up the conduct of the Government as a beacon to their successors in the Administration, to warn them against following the course pursued by the noble Lord and his Colleagues. He would vote for it, because he

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believed it necessary for the vindication of truth and justice; and because no reasoning adduced by the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary had in the least degree shaken the arguments which compelled him to believe that the Amendment of the hon. Gentleman was strictly and entirely true.
MR. SADLEIRsaid, the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary had appealed to the House, whether they would sanction a course which would have the effect of undoing all that had been done with reference to the Papal aggression; but he should like to know what the House had effected in that respect, which there was danger of risking by affirming the truism embodied in the Amendment? The Government had encouraged the Pope in acts which eventuated in the establishment of a hierarchy in England, similar to that which bad for centuries existed in Ireland. He believed every Irish Member, in the course of these debates, had expressed his readiness to repel any act of a Pope, or other foreign potentate, which could be termed an aggression on the independence of the country, or an insult to their Protestant fellow-subjects. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir George Grey) seemed to infer that every Member who supported the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart) was prepared to condemn the Government for the acts by which they had encouraged the establishment of the English Roman Catholic hierarchy. He (Mr. Sadleir) was not prepared to condemn the Government for those govermental acts; at the same time he could not withhold his sanction, or decline to affirm the proposition expressed by the Amendment? He maintained that the plain inference to be drawn from the declarations of the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) was, that he paid no respect to those apprehensions—that he partook of none of those fears, which prompted the introduction of the 24th section in the Act of 1829, by which obstacles were thrown in the way of the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy. That was the plain and obvious meaning of the noble Lord's declarations; and, possessing a knowledge of the Roman Catholics, no doubt he thought it of great practical importance to have those his fellow-subjects, lay and clerical, under the control of a hierarchy. If the noble Lord perceived the importance of it to the Roman Catholics in every social and political point of view, he must have been as
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anxious as any Roman Catholic to see the establishment of the hierarchy in this country. It was impossible any Roman Catholic could not desire to see the discipline of their Church, not under the agency of vicars-apostolic, but under the government, control, and supervision of a regularly-constituted and established hierarchy. It was by that means alone that Roman Catholics in England could have the same securities which the Roman Catholics in Ireland enjoyed against any unjustifiable interference on the part of an ill-disposed Pope. The vicars-apostolic were literally the nominees of the Pope of Rome, and the Roman Catholic subjects of England were at their mercy in a great degree. That state of things, which had existed since the Reformation, was only tolerated as an unfortunate necessity; the existence of vicars-apostolic was only a temporary arrangement until the number of Roman Catholics, their property and their position in the country in which vicars-apostolic were appointed, became of such an important character as to justify the creation of a regularly-established hierarchy, and, as a necessary consequence, the creation and constitution of parochial clergy. He held that the present attempt to put down the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Roman Catholics throughout the United Kingdom was as oppressive as any of the penal statutes which remained on the Statute-book. He knew not whether it was intended to put down the hierarchy; but a more dangerous, more unjust, more impolitic, more intolerant cry could not be raised than the cry which had been raised to put down the Roman Catholic bishops. In the archives of Dublin they possessed records of the conduct of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland in times of the greatest excitement and the greatest danger, which demonstrated that they had invariably exercised their authority to preserve order and prevent disturbance, and that they had directed their influence to counteract the efforts of the ill-disposed and disaffected. In the troublous times of 1848 the reports of the stipendiary magistrates throughout Ireland afforded incontestable proofs that the bishops and clergy had united in urging the people to be faithful and steady in their allegiance to the Sovereign, and to hold aloof from those who sought to disturb the peace and order of the country. How could any one, then, justify the attempt

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to deprive a great branch of Christ's Church of the free exercise and full enjoyment of all the advantages which followed the establishment of a hierarchy, on the plea that such an establishment would be inconsistent with the prerogatives of the Crown, and the independence of the nation? He could collect nothing from the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary to induce him to think that the Government were prepared to expunge that mass of falsehoods which was concentrated in a few lines in the shape of a preamble to this Bill; it was difficult to find a preamble so brief and so full of falsehood. It was unbecoming the Government to palm that false preamble on the House, and it was alike unbecoming the Parliament to endeavour, between false recitals and persecuting clauses, to raise up such a state of the law as, if enforced, would extinguish the Roman Catholic hierarchy throughout the United Kingdom. Was it the intention of Englishmen on that side of the House and on this, who would support the Bill, to subject every Roman Catholic archbishop and bishop doing any act involving an exercise of diocesan jurisdiction, or the use of spiritual functions, to a penalty of 100 l.? He challenged the Government to show that that would not be the effect of the Bill, even in its altered shape; and he asked, was that not persecution? Was not that penal legislation? The right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland was in his place, and the House would expect to receive from him a lucid explanation of the penal bearings of the Bill. It was the duty of the right hon. and learned Gentleman to state what acts Roman Catholic archbishops and bishops could do without incurring the penalty of 100 l.?. He was not one of those who, with loyalty on his lips, had endeavoured to excite a spirit of insubordination and religious discord in Ireland; but he now felt imperatively called upon to entreat all those who valued the peace of the empire to pause before they passed a measure which would render the government of Ireland more difficult and expensive, and weaken those ties which should naturally combine all classes of the population in resistance to a hostile aggression, from whatever quarter it might proceed. He wished to know how the legislation which the Government had proposed would influence the people of Ireland. In that country the people were prepared to resist any attempt to restrict their religious rights from whatever
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quarter it proceeded. The noble Lord at the head of the Government had been much praised for the services he had rendered to the promotion of civil and religious liberty, and in particular for the active part he had taken in attempting to remove the disabilities affecting the Jews; but his conduct inyersisting with the Bill under the consideration of the House showed that, however much the noble Lord might be in favour of Jewish Emancipation, he was not in favour of carrying out the principles of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. The supporters of the present measure said that they also were the friends of civil and religious liberty, although the Bill before the House would most unfairly restrict the development of the Roman Catholic faith. It was idle to say that the Catholics would continue to enjoy the privileges guaranteed to them by the Act of 1829 if the action of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England was to be restricted by a penal statute. At the present time especially it was most injudicious and unwise to bring such a measure forward. There had been thousands of Irish Roman Catholics pressing into England for the last few years, who, by their industry, perseverance, and enterprise, and the encouragement which was given to them in this country, supported themselves and their families in comfort. If the Bill before the House passed, many of the good effects of that encouragement given in England to Irish workmen and their families would be done away with. Would English Gentlemen deny to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects the spiritual advantages which could be derived from the establishment of an hierarchy, and the consequent establishment of a parochial clergy? When the noble Lord at the head of the Government introduced the Bill, he pretended that some of its provisions had been framed in compliance with the urgent appeal of Roman Catholics. [Lord JOHN RUSSELL dissented.] The noble Lord seemed to intimate that this was not the case, but he could produce the noble Lord's words in support of his statement. The noble Lord assured the House that the Roman Catholic laity were anxious to be protected; and, if he were not mistaken, the noble Lord also said that the second order of clergy wished for protection. The right hon. and learned Master of the Rolls, too, told the House that he knew better than Roman Catholic Members what the Roman Catholics wanted, and was kind

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enough to inform them that the establishment of the hierarchy in England was intended by the Pope to cover his design of acquiring a supreme power in Ireland, and destroying the ecclesiastical and spiritual independence of the bishops, clergy, and laity of that country. The noble Lord at the head of the Government said that a hierarchy and a parochial clergy were not required by the spiritual wants of the Roman Catholics. What would the noble Lord think if he were to tell him, a Protestant, that, although he was a member of an Episcopal Church, the Protestants of England did not need a hierarchy or parochial clergy? The assertion was too absurd to require further notice. Again he entreated the House to pause before trying the dangerous experiment of interfering with the religion of the millions in Ireland. Let no man who supported the measure endeavour to salve over his conscience by the plea that the Bill was of too persecuting a character to allow of Ministers enforcing it. Some of the Parliamentary camp followers of the Government were whispering that the Bill, if passed, was to be allowed to remain a dead letter; and the new Member for Cork had announced that it was merely a brutum fulmen. Such a course of proceeding was only calculated to bring legislation into contempt, especially in Ireland, where, above all places, it was desirable to inspire the people with respect for the law. He had no hesitation in declaring that the Bill would be more than a repeal of the Act of 1829. He wished to know if the right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland was prepared to prosecute the Archbishop of Cashel for using the title he had ever used, and which he (Mr. Sadleir) promised the right hon. Gentleman the right rev. Prelate would continue to use, in the exercise of his ecclesiastical functions? If he was so prepared, it would demonstrate to the world that this was a persecuting and penal act of legislation; and he would venture to predict that the attempt would bring the right hon. Gentlemen into official disrepute, and that it would have no better or other effect than that of creating a habit of contempt for the law and for the tribunals of justice in Ireland.
MR. STANFORDsaid, that he was anxious to avoid saying anything which could be deemed offensive to any section of that House, and that he was satisfied that the House would never deliberately consent to pass any measure the possible
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effect of which would be the infliction of an injustice upon any class of the community. The course which some hon. Members would take on this occasion might be regarded as offensive to other hon. Members; but he, for one, was obeying the dictates of paramount duty; and, at least, he would guard himself against the use of offensive language, but could not suffer himself to be prevented by any too sensitive feelings of delicacy from doing that which he considered that he was called upon to do. He looked at each question according to its real bearings, and never referred to the issue which another man might tell him was inevitable; for if he believed others, and did not judge for himself, he would be perpetually falling into mistakes. In this respect he might describe himself as the political Pariah of the House. He could not surrender his right of judging the merit or demerit of each question as it came before the House. If, on the contrary, he bound himself over to a leader, and acted like an humble follower, he thought that it would be just as well to send his footman into the House instead of himself. The proposal at present under consideration, he examined, with a reference to its real meaning; and he found that it led to nothing. It was the mere enunciation of inconsequent truisms. Probably the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck), whom he saw smiling, differed from him. The hon. and learned Gentleman was also in a peculiar position. He sympathised with the hon. and learned Gentleman as little as he did with the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) on this question. The noble Lord and the hon. and learned Gentleman had both taken to letter-writing about the Pope. The consequences, however, were very different. The noble Lord had done the most popular thing which he had ever accomplished in his career; and the hon. and learned Gentleman had done the most unpopular thing he had ever succeeded in doing—which was saying a great deal. He (Mr. Stanford) took no mere party view in regard to this question. He considered that the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) was a great tactician and a perfect Parliamentary fencer, although he thought no man had ever been so handled as the noble Lord was by the philippic of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Athlone (Mr. Keogh) on a recent occasion; and not desiring to oust any Go-

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vernment until he was certain that a stable Government was ready to succeed, he came to the conclusion that the noble Lord was the best man they could possibly get under the circumstances. He also wished the House to understand that be was not influenced by any bigoted feelings against the Pope. He could inform hon. Gentlemen that he had gone to the expense of 25 l. in publishing a pamphlet on the "Patriots of Italy," the tendency of which was in favour of the Pope; and be regretted to add that be had never sold more than six copies; but he trusted the House would not measure its merits by its sale. Up to the period of the Roman revolution, he had believed that the Pope was honestly anxious for such a reform as would have abolished the strictly ecclesiastical government of the States of the Church; and, believing this, he was sorry that the revolution had taken place. As respected the question between the Pope and the Government, it would have to be admitted that there were faults on both sides. The Government bad never behaved in a straightforward manner to the Pope. The Earl of Minto had never ascertained the facts with which it was his business to have made himself acquainted. The noble Lord (Lord John Russell) had on a former occasion stated that he saw no reason why the Prelates of the Roman Catholic Church should not assume dignities the same as those of the Church of England. How, under such circumstances, the noble Lord could propose his Bill, was to him (Mr. Stanford) unaccountable. He thought some steps might have been taken to resist that invasion of the prerogative of England, if the noble Lord had been sincere, more effective than what the hon. Member for Middlesex called the "postprandial resolutions of mock-turtle Protestants." [Mr. B. OSBORNE: I never said anything of the kind.] Then the hon. and gallant Member has enjoyed the credit of a smart saying to which he is not entitled. But when the noble Lord was questioned upon the subject, he said—
"After all due consultation with the law officers of the Crown, we came to the conclusion that it would not be wise for Her Majesty's Government to institute any legal proceedings against the agents of the Pope for the assumption of ecclesiastical titles, because if we had it would have been based upon ancient and obsolete statutes, which it is always unpleasant and disagreeable to the people of this country to invoke; and the issue would be doubtful; the jury would probably give no verdict."
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If that had been the real state of affairs, the noble Lord had a strong case to go to the country with. But there was, he would not say a suggestio falsi, but a suppressio veri in the matter; for, though the 9th and 10th of Victoria took away the penalties of the ancient statute of the 13th of Elizabeth, it still left the treason. Now, the noble Lord knew that when a statute was deprived of a penalty, the infringement of it was a misdemeanour, to which both fine and imprisonment were attachable. But the noble Lord did not think fit to instruct the Attorney General to file an indictment against those parties for misdemeanour. But the course which the noble Lord ought to have taken, the course which all lawyers in the country would say he should have taken had he been in earnest about the Papal aggression, which he (Mr. Stanford) was afraid he was not, was this—if he thought the Bishop of Rome bad invaded the prerogative of the Sovereign, and assumed that which he was not entitled to do by the law of nations, he could have avoided the unpleasantness of reviving an obsolete statute, or even the Attorney General's being forced to frame an indictment under the 9th and 10th of Victoria, which was certainly not very obsolete. Notwithstanding the opinion which had been given by the law officers of the Crown on the subject, he insisted that all who made themselves parties to the late act of the Pope, committed a misdemeanour at common law, although the penalties had been taken away by statute. The proper course, then, for the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) to have followed was to have issued a proclamation, warning Her Majesty's subjects from assuming any titles, ecclesiastical or otherwise, without the sanction of the Sovereign, and declaring that those who assumed such titles without Her Majesty's sanction would be held guilty of a misdemeanour. In place of following this course, the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) had allowed six months to elapse without doing anything, and now he had introduced a Bill. What necessity had there been for the introduction of such a measure when a proclamation could have answered all the purposes which the Bill was calculated to attain? The second part of the proposition was equally clear and undeniable with the first. He agreed that the letter of the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) was calculated "to wound the religious feelings of many of Her Ma-

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jesty's subjects," and that the expression "superstitious mummeries" was a most unwise and unkind phrase to be used on the part of the noble Lord. He hoped that the noble Lord had done himself the justice to explain away that phrase. No man had a right to insult the religious feelings of another. Religious truth must be left to prevail by argument, by discussion, and also by charity. The Roman Catholics were Christians. They were our fellow-countrymen and our fellow-subjects, and he believed loyal subjects too; and it was certainly matter of regret that the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) should have made use of such an offensive expression. Under these circumstances, therefore, and considering that the proposition submitted was unquestionably true, he felt he must support the Motion of the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart),
SIR R. H. INGLIShad listened with some degree of attention to the speech of the hon. Member for Reading (Mr. Stanford), and had not been able, until he had heard the last sentence, to discover how the hon. Member intended to vote. The hon. Member bad told them that he had expended 25 l. in publishing a book, and such was the bad taste of the people of England, that he had only sold sixty copies. [Laughter, and cries of "Only six copies!"] Only six copies! That was more lamentable still. He (Sir Robert Inglis) did not intend to address himself at any length to the remarks which had fallen from the hon. Member (Mr. Stanford); but there was one sentence in his speech on which he would offer one or two observations. The hon. Member had said that if the Motion of the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart) were carried, no evil consequences would accrue. What was the matter really at issue? The question which Mr. Speaker would put from the chair was, "That the Speaker leave the Chair;" and the Amendment was to leave out the words after "that," in order to introduce the proposition of the hon. Member (Mr. Urquhart). He (Sir Robert Inglis) would assume for the moment that the Amendment would, unhappily, be carried. What would be the practical result? Was it a matter of indifference? On the contrary, if the Amendment were successful, it would destroy the Bill. In other words Mr. Speaker would not leave the chair, and the House would not go into Committee on the subject. That was the issue which the people of England
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would recognise in the proceedings of their representatives that evening. The Bill was certainly better than no Bill, although better still it might be made; but, whether it were good or bad, when he had merely the choice of the two questions, whether he should go into Committee to see how far he could amend the Bill, or resist all proceedings in the matter, he could have no hesitation in voting for the Motion to go into Committee. That Motion was to the effect that they should proceed to further legislation. There was no man so ill-informed regarding the state of feeling in this country as not to know that the resistance of the House to legislation on this subject, would be distasteful to the feelings, opposed to the principles, and abhorrent to the judgment of the largest portion of the people of England who ever took part in any public question. The issue was not as to whether the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) had met in the proper way the requirements of the case, but whether that House should say "we shall have nothing to do with the matter," after having passed the Bill by such majorities as 395 on the first occasion, 414 on the second, and 438 on the last. The minority, too, they would observe, had on these occasions never exceeded 95. Yes, the united forces of those who generally acted with the right hon. Member for Ripon (Sir James Graham) the Irish brigade, and all the ultramontane and montane parties, had never exceeded 95 individuals. Were the people of England, after such repeated majorities, to yield, and submit to have their proceeding nullified, and themselves stultified? He would not discuss the question on any abstract proposition that, carried or unearned, it would leave them where it found them; but if it should not be carried, then they would be thrown back in all they had done since the 14th of February last. He could not help reminding some of his hon. Friends that they should not permit themselves to be misled by the Amendment of the hon. Member for Stafford. Those who voted in support of the Amendment, considering the Bill in the light in which Roman Catholics regarded it, a Bill of pains and penalties, gave the weight of their character and talent to undo all that had been previously done. He could understand the principle that the Prime Minister had not done that which he ought to have done, and what he almost promised the country he would do. He (Sir Robert Inglis) should be prepared to support a

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Motion calling upon the noble Lord to do more; but, to call upon him, as the hon. Member for Stafford now proposed to undo all that he had done, and to forego all the advantages he had obtained by the large majorities which had marked the progress of this measure, was what he was not prepared to do. In any case the course which he would pursue was clear. He saw a proposition before the House, which if successful would frustrate, if not annihilate, the prospects of the Bill, and destroy the hopes and expectations of the country; and therefore he earnestly hoped that the general body of those who supported the Protestant feeling of the country heretofore would not shrink from doing the same on the present occasion. He would not vote for the Motion before the House; and if not rejected by as large a majority as heretofore supported the noble Lord, he hoped the majority would at least be such as to ensure the House against further futile opposition.
LORD DUDLEY STUARTsaid, the hon. Baronet who had just sat down had almost convinced him that he ought to give his vote in favour of the Amendment of the hon. Member for Stafford. Unlike the hon. Baronet, he (Lord Dudley Stuart) was opposed to the Bill. The Amendment of the hon. Member for Stafford was nothing more than a truism; and he should say if it had no object but that which it appeared to have it, would be mere childishness to move it. The hon. Gentleman stated that "the Government, by their conduct, had encouraged the Pope to act as he had acted." No doubt some of the acts of the Government would allow of such a construction. But might not the same be said of other Governments, or was it peculiar to the Government in power? After the lengthened discussion that heretofore had taken place on the Bill, he could not hope to add any new argument or advance any reason that had not been previously used. But not having had an opportunity of previously addressing the House on the subject, he hoped then to be permitted to explain his views on the measure. He had from the very first felt a great objection to this Bill, and very early in the Session he declared his decided repugnance to any legislation on the subject. He was, therefore, anxious that his motives should not be in this respect misunderstood; and that no man should suppose that he had been guided to his conclusions by any feeling towards Romanism, or by
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any kindly feeling to those whom he regarded: as no other than Romanists in disguise, namely, the Puseyites. He hated all persons in disguise, and would prefer an open and avowed enemy to one clothed in the garb of a friend. In the same way he regarded the Resolution of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Stafford, then before the House; and he should tell the hon. Gentleman, that had he come forward in a straightforward manner, and moved that, instead of Mr. Speaker leaving the chair then, he should leave it that day six; months; if the hon. Gentleman had taken that straightforward course, he would have had his vote. Though he was in favour of getting rid of the Bill altogether, yet he objected to do so by a side wind. As he before said, his opposition to the Bill, as well as to all legislation on the subject, arose not from any feeling towards Romanism, as towards that pseudo-Romanism, Puseyism, but because it was an interference with the principles of civil and religious liberty. He had never been able to understand, if they interfered with the internal government or control of religion, how they could say they acted in conformity with the principle of religious liberty. His opinion was that the greatest benefit that could be conferred on mankind would be to convert them all to Protestantism; but he asserted that by their legislation they could do nothing whatever, and did not advance one step towards that consummation. On the contrary, they made it with many a point of honour not to be converted by enlisting their passions and prejudices against truth. Let every man be free in his opinions. He claimed the right of being so; and, acting on the true Christian principle of "doing as he would be I done by," he wished to see every man enjoy to the full the same liberty as himself. A great deal had been said about the insult offered by the Pope. He (Lord Dudley Stuart) felt it. He did think that the manner in which the hierarchy was introduced was an insult to the nation and to the Sovereign; and it was his belief that the Pope had been instigated to that course by some of the worst enemies of the country, whose desire, and in which they had succeeded, was to throw an apple of discord amongst the various religious denominations of the community. History showed that Austria had always exercised great influence at Rome; and it was remarkable that that personage whose presence in this country had excited so much

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indignation, when, invested with the purple and cardinal's hat, he left Rome for London, did not come by the straight route, but went round by Vienna; and it was from Vienna that he addressed his celebrated letter to the noble Lord at the head of the Government. There were also indications of a leaning towards Austria in the pastoral letters and public addresses of that eminent personage, who betrayed in his writings an evident partiality for some of the creatures and tools of Austria, whose inhumanity had made them peculiarly obnoxious to the censure and detestation of the British people. He (Lord Dudley Stuart) was impressed with the conviction that the Pope, in the course he had taken so offensive to this country, had been influenced by Austria; and it was well known that Austria was guided in all her proceedings by another Power stronger than herself, and whom she obeyed with a submission which made her nothing but the tool and the slave of Russia. If the feelings with which he had ever regarded those Governments were recollected, and the earnestness with which he had denounced them on all occasions, both in this House and out of it, it might well be supposed that his political as well as religious prejudices would have led him to a course opposite to that which, in regard to this Bill, he had thought it his duty to pursue. But his attachment to the great principle of religious liberty was stronger than all these prejudices. When he was told of the insult offered to the country, he was glad to think that the people were prepared to rise as one man to resent any insult to their beloved Queen, and to defend their free institutions. If the insult were such a one as it was represented—if it were, as it had been described, not only at public meetings, but by Ministers of the Crown in this House, an invasion of the prerogatives of the Crown, and subversive of the constitution of the country—then he (Lord Dudley Stuart) should be for meeting it by measures very different from this paltry Bill, which, when it was passed, would prove inoperative for its purpose. If the insult were really of this important character, it would afford a complete justification of a resort to arms. It might be argued that the Pope driven from Rome would still be Pope, and might issue his bulls and edicts as well from a palace or a cottage at Naples, as from the Vatican. That was quite true; still the pages of history showed the Popes always ready to sacrifice spiritual for
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the acquirements or retention of temporal power; and the Pope, who was only maintained at Rome by foreign bayonets, and not in any degree by the good will of his own people, would, if he saw us resort to coercive means, gladly agree to any conditions. In order to enforce our own rights, we interfered by force of arms with Greece. Why should we not with Rome? Because it would be inconvenient in consequence of other armed Powers being concerned? Surely the position of England was not that of being ready to coerce the weak, but afraid to interfere with the strong. He (Lord Dudley Stuart) was for maintaining the rights of England at all times; and though we had done right in enforcing them with those who were weak; as justice was on our side, he hoped we should never submit to wrong from any quarter whatever. There was, however, no necessity for any violent measures in this case. The insult came from a weak and impotent enemy; it related only to names, and there was more dignity and propriety in treating it with contempt than in resenting it. The only way to treat such proceedings was to laugh at them; if they did not, they might be assured that they would be laughed at. Legislation would not succeed. They might prevent a few ecclesiastics assuming territorial titles; but they could not prevent their exercising spiritual authority over those who wished to recognise it; and all the edicts of the Pope were powerless to enforce that authority on those who did not choose to submit to it. He was aware the course he had pursued on this subject was one disagreeable to the greater number of his constituents. He deplored it; but he had a very strong opinion on the subject. On the second day of the Session, when the report on the Address was brought up, he had declared the great objection he entertained to any legislation whatever on the question. That was before any of the great speeches on this side had been made—before the speeches of the right hon. Baronet the Member for Ripon, of the right hon. Member for the University of Oxford, or of the hon. and learned Member for Plymouth had been delivered, and before the opinions of other eminent persons out of that House, corroborative of his own, had been proclaimed. He had since that given a close attention to all that had been urged on either side; and had he been able to discover any valid reason for altering the course on which he had entered, he should have been most

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happy to do so. It was most painful to him to take a course unpleasant to his constituents; but he thought it was the duty of a Member of that House to conduct himself as a representative and not as a delegate, and, on a question in which a great principle was involved, to act in accordance with his own convictions, without regard to any other considerations whatever. For these reasons he had voted against the Bill in its first stage; and though he had given no vote upon the second reading, that was only because he had been prevented by serious illness from coming down to the House. If he could by legitimate means prevent the passing of the Bill, most gladly would he seize the opportunity. But, judging from the immense majorities which upheld the measure in its earlier stages in that House, he thought it a waste of time to contest the matter any longer; and if he could hope to influence his friends who were opposed to it, his advice to them would be, now that they had put their opinions on record, not to persevere in an opposition which it was clear must be unavailing, and which would have no other effect than to prevent the House from directing its attention to other measures of importance to the country.
MR. BANKESsaid, that the noble Lord who had just sat down, and the hon. Baronet the Member for the University of Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis) had, upon the most opposite grounds, come to the same conclusion to give their votes in opposition to this Resolution. His (Mr. Bankes's) vote would be different from theirs. By voting for the Amendment, he did nothing to risk the Bill. He was called upon to say "aye" or "no," upon a Resolution (whether submitted to the House with his wish or not was no matter to the present question). He found "aye" to be the truth, and he should give his vote in favour of it. Although he had been one of the large majorities by whom this measure had been sanctioned, he nevertheless confessed that he agreed with the noble Lord (Lord Dudley Stuart) that it was most paltry and inoperative; and he also agreed with the noble Lord, that the present Government were not alone censurable for having, by their conduct and declarations, given encouragement to the whole proceedings of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but that preceding Governments had taken the same course. That was, however, the reason why he voted for a Resolution
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which was a declaration, that the House of Commons censured such encouragement by whatever Government it might have been given. If the Members of former Governments were amenable to this censure, let them bear it; and he would have future Governments learn that the House of Commons were not indifferent to this negligence—to treat it in the lightest manner—by which the interests of the Protestant faith had been sacrificed and brought into this jeopardy. The hon. Member for the University of Oxford had referred to a number of Members of that House, whom he was pleased to call the "Irish brigade;" and they having been mentioned, he might say that he did not care whether this Amendment was brought forward at their instigation or not. ["No, no!"] Well, if it were, he was equally ready to vote for it if it was true. He felt that those hon. Gentlemen had been hardly treated by this Bill, for that with respect to them it was an ex post facto law. He had hoped, when he found the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Beaumont, and another nobleman of an exalted name and talents assenting to this Bill, that they might have passed through these discussions without ever considering this as a question between Catholics and Protestants. It was, in fact, a political question of a high and important character, and one which he considered as essential to the maintenance of that Established Church which he had sworn to uphold by every means in his power. But that did not drive him to do a very great injury—he bad almost said injustice—to his Irish fellow-subjects, when he was called upon to vote against them an ex post facto law. It was perfectly true that their hierarchy had been acknowledged not only by collusion, but by the acts of those highest in power under the eye of the Sovereign Herself; and they were thus encouraged, and had a right to believe that what their hierarchy aspired to was not distasteful to the Government. This was one of the many difficulties which beset them throughout the whole of the painful transaction—a transaction for which he must say that the noble Lord at the head of the Government had much to answer. The noble Lord wrote his famous letter so far back as November last; Parliament did not meet for three months afterwards; and during that time they must conclude that the noble Lord and his Colleagues were anxiously and sedulously employed in pre-

815
paring the measure which he should submit to Parliament, and to which he had so carefully directed the attention of the whole nation; he called for the co-operation of the people; and Parliament not being then sitting, loyal and dutiful addresses were presented to the Crown in greater numbers than on any other recent occasion. The Sovereign responded to this feeling, and Parliament was opened by a Speech, in which the feelings of the Sovereign, as sanctioned by Her Ministers, were fully and firmly expressed; the measure which was submitted to Parliament by the Cabinet, was warmly opposed by the Irish Members, joined by a large portion of their English Roman Catholic fellow-subjects; but their numbers amounted in the first instance to, comparatively speaking, a very small minority, and there was scarcely ever an occasion when the majority was so large as that which first sanctioned the proposition of the noble Lord. Notwithstanding this, however, before the end of February, the noble Lord resigned office, for causes which had never been fully explained, but of which he had understood the noble Lord to explain that the difficulties of this Bill formed a portion; indeed, if they did not, we were still utterly in the dark as to the causes of that resignation. He (Mr. Bankes) did not think that, by his vote that evening, in favour of the Resolution of the hon. Member for Stafford, he should be at all perilling the Bill, for even if its effect should be to induce the noble Lord again to abandon the Bill, could he believe that with the feeling on this subject which still prevailed in the country as strongly as ever, that any other Ministry who should occupy the place of the noble Lord and his Colleagues would dare to abandon that Bill without propounding a better one. He felt bound by the oaths he had taken (however painful it might be to him to join in a vote that was distasteful to his Roman Catholic fellow-subjects) to support the Bill, mutilated as it had been since the noble Lord's return to office. When he abandoned office he left the Bill in its original form, and it was since his return that the mutilation had taken place: this was one of the circumstances which induced him to think that it formed a main portion of the noble Lord's difficulties. The alteration of the Bill would be a subject for consideration in Committee, and it would then be for the noble Lord to vote against two-thirds of the provisions of his own mea-
816
sure. It would be for those who thought that there were advantages in the Bill as first propounded over the present Bill, to vote that those clauses should not be removed; and unless the noble Lord had stronger reasons than he had yet shown for their removal, he (Mr. Bankes) should object to it, believing that they would act most consistently with the general feeling throughout the country, and most beneficially with regard to the operation of the Bill, by retaining at least the larger part of those clauses. It was, indeed, an unhappy circumstance, that after deliberating upon it for three months, the authors of the Bill should have found it necessary to cut out two-thirds of it, when it came before the House; for this had not been done in consequence of adverse divisions, since it was admitted on all sides that in the whole recorded course of Parliamentary history there never was a measure which had met with such a preponderating support.
MR. PLUMPTREwould vote for going into Committee, and against the Resolution of the hon. Member for Stafford. He thought time enough had been wasted in the early part of the Session in crimination and recrimination, and that the period for action had now arrived. That, he was convinced, was the opinion of the Protestant people of this country, who had exercised a long patience on this subject, and whose strong feeling on the question had not abated one jot. If the people believed that Members of that House were acting more from party than from patriotic motives, the greatest offence would be given to, and the greatest distrust excited among, the Protestant community. He conceived that though the Resolution of the hon. Member for Stafford might contain some truth, it did not contain the whole truth: he would, therefore, give it his opposition, and trusted it would be rejected by the House.
MR. REYNOLDSsaid, that the hon. Member who had last sat down had used a phrase which had excited his (Mr. Reynolds') surprise, although the hon. Member was cheered at the time by the Treasury benches. Have those who were anxious to pass this Bill of pains and penalties against his country exhibited great patience? What does that patience mean? Does it mean that the people were becoming impatient of all control? Were they so anxious to forge the chains for 10,000,000 of our fellow-subjects that they have lost their

817
patience at the delay? He must be allowed to remind the hon. Member that although three months had elapsed since this Bill had been introduced by the noble Lord, it was yet very likely that his patience would be further put to the test; for, if he was not very much mistaken, he and those with whom he co-operated, feeling that this was an aggression upon their creed, had made a declaration of war against it, and were determined to protract the passing of the Bill by every means in their power. He had heard the speech of the noble Lord the Member for Marylebone (Lord Dudley Stuart) with a mixed feeling of pleasure and of pain—pleasure at hearing him enunciate those sentiments for which he was remarkable, but pain because the noble Lord said it was hopeless for them to fight the battle any longer. He expected a different sentiment from that patriot who had never given up the cause of the Poles—who had always stood by the standard of Poland, even when she was trampled in the gutter by the tyrant of Russia. The hon. Baronet the Member for the University of Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis) had spoken of the large majorities that had divided against them on all occasions. Now, although he (Mr. Reynolds) was willing to admit that majorities were entitled to respect and attention, he had, nevertheless, known cases in which majorities were wrong, and minorities right. He was not surprised at the majorities in that House against his creed, when he referred to the Ministerial edict from Downing-street, on the 4th of November, 1850, and the speeches of the noble Lord and his supporters, circulated through the columns of the public press and posted on the walls of this metropolis. It was enough that the Times should have encouraged this cry of intolerance to get it re-echoed, for every thing that appeared in that paper was believed to be true, particularly when it attacked the Pope and Popery. Many of those who listened to him condemned the Bill as much as he did; but, as they admitted, they were pushed forward by their constituents, who would deprive them of their seats if they did not support it. There were, however, two hon. Members who had both voted and spoken against this Bill, and they deserved, as they had received, the thanks of their constituents; he referred them to the hon. Members for Manchester. They had been told that they dared not show their faces to their constituents, as they would be pelted with
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missiles. But what did they do? They went during the Easter recess into the, centre of Manchester, and called their constituents together. They told them that they had voted against this Bill again and again, and that they would rather resign their seats than disgrace themselves by becoming parties to this atrocious encroachment upon the glorious principles of civil and religious liberty. And what did the Protestant constituency of Manchester say? Why, they passed a resolution approving of their conduct, and giving a unanimous vote of thanks to them, requesting them to return back to that House and to oppose the Bill in all its stages. He would recommend some of the free-traders, who boasted of their love of civil and religious liberty, to follow this example. They had been told that a majority of 400 Members of that House were in favour of the measure; but was that House to respect the opinions of none but the ignorant, bigoted, and fanatical portion of the population of this kingdom? Were not the people of his (Mr. Reynolds') own country to be respected? The right hon. Baronet the Secretary for the Home Department stated that the cases of England and Ireland were not analogous, for, in the latter country, the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy had existed together side by side. And how did the right hon. Baronet propose to legislate for the two countries? Why, he applied the same Bill to both. He (Mr. Reynolds) supposed that he did so from his peculiar love of uniformity. The right hon. Gentleman said that if we passed this Resolution of the hon. Member for Stafford, it would be a vote of censure upon the Government, and we must be prepared to abide the consequence. It would not require a telescope to tell what he meant by "the consequence," namely, that the nation would in such a case lose the benefit of his official services. Now, he (Mr. Reynolds) was fully prepared for that national calamity, and he would endeavour to sustain his health under the awful affliction. The noble Member for Colchester (Lord John Manners) appeared to him to have interpreted the Resolution very properly. The noble Lord said, "This is a two-and-two-make-four question; you cannot make five out of it." Then, if it was a truism, how was it that Gentlemen were so shocked at affirming the proposition? Something had been said about voting that black was white; and an Irish patriot recently ob-

819
served that he (Mr. Reynolds) had had the effrontery to avow that he would vote against the Government, whether he thought they were right or wrong. Now, he confessed that from the time of the publication of the noble Lord's (Lord John Russell's) letter, and of the introduction of this Bill, he would vote on all occasions against the Government, having no confidence in them. The Catholics of Ireland had endorsed that sentiment, and had recently passed resolutions, at an immense aggregate meeting held in Dublin, to the same effect. There were 1,400 signatures to the requisition convening that meeting, the first of which were those of the four Roman Catholic archbishops, then the twenty-three suffragan bishops, one vicar capitular representing a see at present vacant, and then came the signatures of all the Catholic Peers of Ireland, and of nearly all the Catholic Members of that House. There were also 1,250 of the clergy and laity of all orders. There were 7,000,000 of the people of Ireland combined against your Bill and yourselves, so long as you continued this kind of legislation. It was a dangerous thing to alienate their feelings; to set them mad, as legislation like this was about to set them. He had heard it said that there was an insult to the Queen: he denied it. There was no part of the United Kingdom where Her Majesty's name was held in more affectionate reverence than in Ireland. The Catholics of Ireland had always looked upon Her as their friend and protector. It was a cold expression to say, that they cherished an affectionate loyalty. The noble Lord (Lord John Russell) was running the risk of breaking that affection. Insult the Queen! They would lay down their lives first; but they were determined to sacrifice their lives before they would permit their ancient creed to be interfered with by any of our Algerine legislation. The great meeting to which he had referred, passed a resolution, thanking those Irish Members who, regardless of party ties, had offered a strenuous and uncompromising opposition not only to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, but also to the Administration by whom it was introduced. Then, if he was to blush for his avowal, 7,000,000 of Irish people must blush also. The hon. Member for the University of Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis) had dignified a body of the Irish Members in that House by the title of "the Irish Brigade," and called him (Mr. Reynolds)
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one of the leaders. Though he was not presumptuous enough to consider himself a leader, he felt proud at being a Member of that brigade, which had combined for no other purpose than to defend themselves against aggression, whilst they were ever willing to concede to all what they claimed for themselves—the right to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. We would not take a present of your 10,000,000 l. of tithes and church rates. [Sir WILLIAM MOLESWORTH: Oh, oh!] The hon. Baronet the Member for Southwark cries "Oh!" He (Mr. Reynolds) was speaking as an Irish Catholic, when he asserted most sincerely that we would not take a present of your money—we would not contaminate our bishops and clergy by allowing them—if even they were willing, which they were not—to accept it. We shall offer every opposition to any State provision being offered to them, because we think it most unjust to compel any person to support a creed from which he conscientiously dissents. But a State religion was maintained in Ireland amongst a population of 8,000,000–7,000,000 of whom were Roman Catholics. Nothing, however, would satisfy the noble Lord at the head of the Government but the passing of a Bill, by which it was declared, that if the Most Rev. Dr. Murray signed his name as Catholic Archbishop of Dublin he would be, fined 100 l., and in default of the payment of that sum, he was to be sent to a felons' gaol. He should be glad to know, then, if they were to be blamed for combining against so atrocious a measure. He had been informed, that in the first instance it had been intended that the Bill should apply to England only, and that it had been extended to Ireland on the principle of uniformity. It could not be justified on any other principle. If it had not been so extended, the Act of Union would have been quoted against Ministers, for there was a clause in that Act declaring that the Established Church was the United Church of England and Ireland, and that it should remain so. Ministers had respected that clause; but had they been consistent? There was another Act, the Act of Union with Scotland, which declared that the Presbyterian religion should remain for ever the established religion of Scotland; and yet a clause had been proposed virtually repealing that Act, and permitting Protestant bishops in Scotland to take their titles from Edinburgh, Aberdeen,

821
Glasgow, and other places in that country. Now the Catholics had just as good a right to have a similar clause introduced for them. He was not given to boasting; but he told them that if they passed this Bill it would remain a dead letter, and that they would not dare to put it into execution in Ireland. The noble Lord had been more than once told from that side, that this Bill was sham legislation—that he never intended to put it into operation in Ireland; and the noble Lord had never noticed the charge. The right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland, whom he did not see in his place, had been again and again called on to explain the law; but the moment he was called on he took shelter behind the Chair, or in some of the passages, and there they were in the dark, with not one legal difficulty explained by the functionary whose duty it was to do so. ["Oh, oh!"] Why, what was the right hon. and learned Gentleman in the House for, but to give them the benefit of his opinion in such matters? Not a single legal doubt had been solved by the right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland. ["Oh!"] The meaning of "Oh" was, "Don't ask the Attorney General for Ireland to explain anything." Now he had great doubts whether they intended, after all, to pass this Bill. Some on that side did not think it sufficiently stringent. Others on the Ministerial side thought it severe enough. A certain noble Lord, whose name he might mention in confidence in that House (Lord Stanley), had been held up as the raw head and bloody bones to the hon. Gentlemen opposite, and between them there was a contention—he would not say for office—for that would be a vulgar insinuation, but he would say for the interests of religion. But that noble Lord had declared, that if he were in power he would proceed, by resolutions of the two Houses condemnatory of the aggression, and by the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the whole relations of the Catholic religion with the institutions of this country. He thought hon. Members would agree with him when he said, that when a question was to be shelved, no better mode of doing it could be found than a Select Committee. But the noble Lord at the head of the Government said he must do something. Some hon. Members said that he was doing nothing by this Bill. The hon. Member for the University of Oxford (Sir Robert Inglis), however, said that the Bill was a
822
good Bill, though not so good as he could wish. In his opinion it was a very bad Bill for the Catholics of England and Ireland, otherwise it would never have received so good a character from the Protestant watchdog of the University of Oxford. The people of Ireland were possessed with the idea that those hon. Members who made such violent speeches on this question must be mad. He had told them, on the contrary, that they were very staid, sensible, quiet-looking Gentlemen. He was answered, that the Tudors were mad who burned people in Smithfield for their religion—that those who engaged in the South Sea scheme were mad—that Lord George Gordon and his mob were mad—that those senators were mad who shed the blood of the country and incurred a debt of 800,000,000 l. to replace a rotten dynasty on the Throne of France against the wishes of the French people. These arguments had had weight with him; and he had replied that certainly the senators they had been talking of must be mad also. Suppose the Bill were passed—that they indicted a bishop and packed a jury—for without a packed jury they would never get a verdict of guilty—that they got, he would not say a corrupt Judge, for there was no such thing as a corrupt Judge—but suppose they got a pliable Judge, would they dare to send the bishop to gaol: they dare not lay a finger on a Catholic mitre? They would not dare to do that, and if they dared not do that, why attempt to pass this Bill? They might say that they had a standing Army; but the whole British Army would not keep the peace in Ireland if the religion of the people were touched. He was no advocate for encroaching on the rights and privileges of the Established Church in both countries. Government had a great deal to answer for in throwing the brand of discord amongst the people of Ireland at a time when Protestants and Catholics were living in harmony with, each other. He would entreat the noble Lord, even at the eleventh hour, to pause before he proceeded with this Bill. He had no wish to deprive the noble Lord of the seals of office. Quite the contrary. Believing, however, the present proceedings to be a declaration of war against his creed and his country, he was determined, no matter what might be the consequence, both in that House and out of it, to offer this most atrocious Bill of pains and penalties all the opposition in his power.
MR. SPOONERsaid, that he was un-

823
willing to give a silent vote on this occasion. The Motion they were called on to affirm was, that the conduct not only of the present Government, but of other Governments, for some time, had been such as to induce the Pope to make that aggression of which the people had so much right to complain. He could not refuse to affirm that proposition, for it was true. He believed that by affirming it they would do more to support the Bill than hon. Members were aware of. They would thereby read a lesson to the Government, and let them know that they would only be supported when pursuing aright course. Hitherto their course had been to endeavour to conciliate those who were not to be conciliated, and by yielding to the Roman Catholics, to court their approbation and support. Toleration was what they asked. Toleration they had got; but they were not satisfied; nor would they be satisfied with anything short of supremacy. Believing the time had come to make a firm stand against their encroachments, he was determined to vote for the Motion. The declaration of a noble Lord in another place, high in the councils of Her Majesty, too plainly showed that the policy which had been adopted towards Roman Catholics at home and in the colonies, would not be changed. He did not think that Ministers were aware of the evils which their policy was producing. If they looked to the majority in that House, they need not be alarmed; for no Minister dared do otherwise than go on with a measure much better than the present. If the result of the division should be such as to induce the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) to resign, there would still be those who would take up the question. He had no hesitation in saying that no Government could stand for more than a few weeks unless they gave an assurance that they meant to bring forward a much stronger measure than this. The Protestant feeling was too deeply rooted to make him at all apprehensive of this Bill being altogether lost; and seeing no danger in delay, but great danger in refusing to affirm the Motion, he should give it his vote.
LORD JOHN RUSSELL: Mr. Speaker, I should hardly have thought it necessary to speak at this stage of the debate; but it is possible that some part of the House at least may be misled by the statement which fell from so distinguished a Member of the House as the hon. and learned Member for Dorsetshire (Mr. Bankes).
824
The hon. Member said, "Here is a proposition laid before the House, and I am obliged to say 'aye or no' to that proposition." Now, nothing can be a more mistaken view of the question. The real question is one of a totally different nature. The real question is this—A Bill is introduced by the Members of the Government, and which, upon its second reading, met with the support of a very large majority—438 Members voting in favour of the second reading, while only 95 Members opposed it. The House having thus approved of the second reading of this Bill, it is now proposed, in the usual course of our proceedings, to go into Committee upon the Bill, and the regular question is proposed "That Mr. Speaker do now leave the Chair;" upon which an hon. Member gets up and moves a vote of censure upon the Government, which, as he says, will sweep away the Bill and the Government; and hon. Gentlemen who supported the Bill on the second reading take advantage of this paltry and shabby proceeding to vote against a Bill which on the second reading they had supported. Sir, the bare technical question will not be to affirm or to deny the proposition of the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart). The regular Motion is, that you now leave the Chair; and the question you will have to put is, that those words stand part of the question, so that there is not the least foundation for saying that the hon. Member is obliged, if he approves of that proposition, and thinks it true, to vote against the Motion. It is the reverse of accurate, and it is quite astonishing that an hon. and learned Member of his experience should be thus misled. Well, then with less authority, at an earlier part of the evening, the noble Lord the Member for Colchester (Lord John Manners) says that it is quite impossible that he can refuse his assent to that proposition—that it is merely a proposition that two and two make four—and that be cannot possibly deny it. I really think that the noble Lord is not in such a dilemma as he seems to suppose he is, because, with regard to any other Bill that he was favourable to, supposing that identical proposition to be made, and an hon. Member were to rise and were to say, "Before Mr. Speaker leaves the chair I have a curious arithmetical proposition to lay before the House, that two and two make four," would the noble Lord say, "I shall not think it necessary to discuss that proposi-

825
tion. If anybody can bring any arguments against it, let him do so, but that arithmetical proposition must be discussed before we can possibly think of going into Committee." Such, Sir, I say, is the unfounded excuse for giving a vote for this Amendment; but the hon. and learned Member for Dorsetshire (Mr. Bankes), and, lastly, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. Spooner) gave an explanation which must be highly edifying to those Members who think they are going to get rid of the Bill by means of this proposition. They say, "To be sure this is a vote of censure upon the Government, and no Government can remain in office with such a vote of censure; but then you'll have a better Government and a better Bill." You'll get a bettor Bill—and the hon. Member for North Warwickshire delights in that anticipation—[Mr. SPOONER; Hear, hear!]—a better Bill, in his sense of the word, being of course what those hon. Gentlemen on the other side of the House would regard as more stringent, more penal, and more persecuting. Well, then, what is the proposition which they say is so valuable that it is quite impossible to pass it by? It is this—"That the recent act of the Pope in dividing England into dioceses, and appointing bishops thereto, was encouraged by the conduct and declarations of Her Majesty's Government." Now, Sir, the hon. Gentleman who spoke last (Mr. Reynolds) said that those words—and I suppose he has some authority for that interpretation—apply indeed to the present Government, and also to preceding Governments. Then I think I understand a little better what it is that it is now proposed to affirm. It is, that all the conduct of recent Governments with respect to Roman Catholics has been erroneous; that those measures of fairness, of liberality, of justice, as I think them, were totally erroneous, and have led to this aggression Now, Sir, I totally deny that proposition, and I totally deny also that the conduct of recent Governments, or of the present Government, has been legitimately the cause of the present Papal aggression; for, Sir, I should say, according to all the usual motives of action (unless you suppose that there was some peculiar meanness and unworthiness in those who advised the See of Rome upon this occasion), that if a Government treated the Roman Catholics with indulgence—if they were disposed to listen to any of their grievances,
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and to obtain, if possible, a remedy for those grievances—that, so far from that being a reason for throwing every insult upon the Crown of the country—so far from its being a reason for attempting, against the consent of the Government, to establish titles and dominion in this country, it would, on the contrary, be a reason for the head of a body which was thus treated to pay some deference to the Government which had been thus liberal towards them, to consult them, if necessary, and, at all events, not wantonly to insult and exasperate the country, the Government of which had behaved to them in a friendly manner. Now, Sir, I believe that I should be casting a very unjust imputation upon the Pope if I were to say that his conduct had been actuated by motives different from this, and that every act of indulgence and liberality had only tended to provoke him to aggression and insult. I think I should be accusing him of most unworthy motives were I to say so. What I do believe is, that the acts of the present and of former Governments have not been at all the cause of the present aggression. I am ready to defend the conduct of those with whom I have acted during the time I have been in Parliament, and of those who preceded me, and who acted in a manner to restore to the Roman Catholics rights of which they were deprived at that time without justice. All that conduct of twenty-four years, from 1805 to 1829, and of twenty-two years, from 1829 to the present time—all that policy of conciliation towards the Roman Catholics has been, I believe, a wise policy, and I am not disposed to depart in any degree from the defence of that policy. But, Sir, I do believe that this aggression has been part and parcel of a great plan which is aimed against civil and religious liberty in every country in Europe. I believe that, whether the Government of this country had been favourable to Roman Catholics or unfavourable to them, in the present circumstanees of the world this attempt would have been made; and I feel the more secure in resisting this aggression, because I can say that there was nothing in the conduct of the Government to which I belong, or in the conduct of the Government which immediately preceded us, and nothing in our conduct as a party out of office, which tended in any way to provoke or to make us justly liable to this aggression. The hon. Member for the city of Dublin (Mr. Reynolds) speaks as if everything were perfectly quiet and

827
undisturbed, and all persons were living in harmony, until we provoked an outcry and introduced the present Bill. The hon. Member must recollect that we on our side were totally guiltless of any act which could be styled persecution or enmity against Roman Catholics. On the contrary, the only political attacks which were made upon us were on account of too much favour shown by us to Roman Catholics; and at that period there arrived that famous rescript, not excited or invited by us, but which came into this country, and was thus the cause of the exasperation that ensued. It was not, therefore, any aggression or any act upon our part. It was the act of those who advised that aggression; and we know now, by testimony which is to be believed in this matter, by the testimony of the Earl of Shrewsbury, that those who were in the habit of advising the Pope were known enemies of England. We know, likewise, from other information, that about the time when that rescript was promulgated, it was said, and said by persons who had, I suppose, good reason for saying so, that a measure was being adopted which would set all England in a flame, and create great disturbance among the people of the United Kingdom. Well, I believe that was the object, and I believe it was to counteract the liberal influence of this country in Europe, and to enforce the views and plans of those who cannot bear the progress of constitutional freedom. I believe it was for that purpose that an aggression was framed which might disturb the mind of England, and excite a difference between the people of England and the people of Ireland. I am unwilling to enter into the details of the Bill; but the hon. Member for the city of Dublin has made representations so much at variance with the fact that I cannot but take some notice of them, for he says that we prohibit Irish bishops from taking their titles, that they have a right to take their titles, and that we now propose by a Bill to prohibit them. Now, is it not the case—I certainly believe it is—that most of the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, in their relations with the clergy, assume the same sees which are likewise the sees and dioceses of the Prelates of the Protestant Established Church. If that be the case, here is an Act which was passed in the 10th Geo. IV., which says—
"That every archbishop, bishop, or other person who shall assume any ecclesiastical title derived from any existing see in Ireland, other than the
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persons authorised so to do, shall forfeit for every such offence the sum of 100 l."
There is an Act which applies to Ireland, not a Bill introduced for the first time, but which is now on our Statute-book. And yet the hon. Member for the city of Dublin, and almost every one who speaks on that side of the House, talk as if this was a measure of legislation introduced now for the first time! Why, they have been living under it since 1829, and yet they come forward now and characterise the Bill we have introduced as one of persecution and penalty such as never had been thought of before! What we attempt to meet, and what I think we are bound to attempt to meet, is the assumption of titles; and the assumption of power to govern certain districts of England, in consequence of a certain rescript from the Pope of Rome; and, had it not been for that rescript, I myself should have been perfectly satisfied with the existing state of the law of Ireland. I do not think it doubtful that and question as to the case of the Archbishop of Tuam, or the Bishop of Galway, that could have been raised, would have been met by the justice of the case, and that the administration of the law might have been safely left in the same manner in which it has been left since 1829. But it was the attempt to assume titles in England—to assume to rule and govern certain districts in England, and virtually to assume a temporal sovereignty that cannot be carried into effect without the consent of the Sovereign of the realm—it was this that made legislation necessary. Now, I wish to explain the reason why I think the House cannot vote on the assumption of the hon. and learned Member for Dorsetshire (Mr. Bankes), that there is a proposition before them that they must either affirm or deny. It is not, as I apprehend, necessary either to affirm or deny that proposition. If they choose to act in conformity with their former vote, they will go into the consideration of this Bill, discuss its clauses, and examine its provisions; but if, on the contrary, they wish to take this opportunity of coming to a vote of censure against the Government, let them take that opportunity if they will; but do not let them say they are under any obligation to do so in consequence of the Motion of the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart). On the contrary, I should have said that the fairer course would have been, if they thought it necessary to move a vote of censure, which, according to the

829
hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. Spooner), includes all the measures with regard to Roman Catholics that have for many years been carried into execution by successive Governments—if that be their intention, their better course would have been to bring forward a substantive proposition for the consideration of the House. As it is at present, all those who are opposed to this Bill will vote with them to get rid of the Bill—they themselves, at the same time, wishing to make the Bill more stringent, or to introduce another Bill with severer provisions. If they choose to take that course, undoubtedly it is in their power to do so; but I do not think that that is such a course as the people of England expect them to take. I think they expect that, whatever may be our party differences, the proceeding with this Bill is not the proper occasion to exhibit those differences; but that we ought rather to turn our attention, after the second reading of the measure, to devise those measures that may be necessary for the security of the Crown and the security of the nation. Whether or not the present provisions are sufficient or insufficient, is another question. All we can do is to introduce such a measure as we think will be sufficient for the purpose. I would not go one inch beyond the necessity of the case, because I wish, while resisting aggression, to maintain that religious liberty which I hope will never be lost in this country.
MR. DISRAELI: The noble Lord at the head of the Government has accurately placed before the House the circumstances under which the question will be put before us; and the noble Lord has said there is no necessity to give an opinion on the Amendment proposed by the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Urquhart). The accuracy of the statement of the noble Lord, as regards the form of the question, cannot be controverted; but let me look at the Amendment which is proposed. That Amendment, to state it shortly, is to the effect that the recent act of the Pope was encouraged by Her Majesty's Government—a very important statement—a Statement which I had virtually made myself often and often in this House—a statement which, months ago, when that act of the Pope occurred, I expressed in a letter to my constituents. And now, when an hon. Gentleman not associated with myself, nor my Friends near me, in any political connection, places that statement before the House—if I mean to take ad-
830
vantage of the plea suggested by the noble Lord, and say, that by the forms of the House I can avoid giving an opinion on this question, then indeed I think I should be taking a mean and shabby course. Now, if this issue is placed before me, I cannot avoid giving an opinion on the subject; I cannot shrink from expressing an opinion on this occasion which I have attempted to maintain and establish on others during the course of this Session, and which I am bound to say, after all that I have heard from Her Majesty's Government on many occasions, and after giving that opinion, statement, and argument the maturest consideration, I cannot in my conscience find any reason to doubt the accuracy of. Is it, then, true or not, that the aggression of the Pope has been encouraged by the conduct and declaration of Her Majesty's Government? Is it a fact, or not, that the First Minister of the Crown has himself in this House expressed an opinion that he saw no harm in a Roman, Catholic bishop assuming territorial titles in the realm of England? Is that a fact, or is it not? Is it not in the experience of every Member of this House, and still in the throbbing memory of the country? Is it a fact, or is it not, that the Secretary of State in another place, expressed his hope that the Roman Catholic bishops of the United Kingdom should take their seats as Peers of Parliament in the House of Lords? Is that a fact, or is it not? Is that a circumstance of which there is any doubt? Is it not an opinion that still echoes in the indignant ears of the people of England? Is it a fact, or is it not, that a Member of the Government, sent as a Plenipotentiary into Italy, held frequent and encouraging conversations with his Holiness the Pope? Is it a fact, or is it not, that, influenced by his counsels, and animated by his presence, the Pope himself condescendingly intimated that he was about to interfere in the domestic concerns of this country? ["No, no!"] According to the account of the noble Earl, his Holiness said, "Here is something that touches England," and yet the Plenipotentiary never inquired what it was. I remember myself at the time expressing surprise that the Plenipotentiary did not inquire what it was—
LORD JOHN RUSSELL: I wish to state what I did say; I said that the Earl of Minto certainly did not remember that any such statement had been made by the Pope as that he was about to interfere in

831
the domestic concerns of England, though such a version of what had fallen from the Pope had been given by other parties present on that occasion.
MR. DISRAELI: That shows, then, that the Viceroy of Ireland was in direct communication with the Pope. If this be the fact, I ask you whether, in the language of this Resolution, the conduct of the Pope may not be fairly described to have been encouraged by the conduct and declaration of the Government? I do not enter now into the question of the policy of the Government in this respect—whether it was politic, legal, constitutional, or religious. What I ask this House is—are these statements facts or not? And, if they be facts, how can we avoid giving our assent to the Amendment which is placed before us? Its object is certainly not to destroy the Government, but their Bill. But the highest authority in this House will tell us that it is not in the power of any Gentleman who moves an Amendment like the present one to injure the Bill one jot. Is there any person in this House that really believes its legislation against Papal aggression is in any danger or jeopardy by asserting these truths? No person for a moment believes that a legislative act of that kind is injured. Then what is the danger, what is the peril of the House of Commons declaring that to be true, the accuracy of which no one disputes? But is there no advantage in it? I do not want to narrow the question to that issue, though I content myself with keeping to it. My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. Spooner) says he looks to the legislation and the Government of England with respect to the Pope. I have opposed the measures of the Government on this subject myself; and I might widen the issue, but I will not take refuge in such a line of policy. I have before expressed my opinion, founded not on theory or phantasy, or vain presumption, but on facts that no one has denied or controverted. I have expressed my opinion that the conduct of the existing Government in this notorious instance has encouraged this aggressive conduct on the part of the Pope of Rome. I believe that opinion will be the verdict of the country. It has been from the first the opinion of the country. The noble Lord boasts of his large majority in favour of legislation on this subject; but the greatness of the majority has not accelerated the movements of the Legislature
832
itself. I ask the House now whether a declaration of this kind may not be of very great advantage? There has been great delay and waste of time since the aggressive act complained of occurred; there has been considerable controversy in different parts of the country, and a vast majority of this House, as well as of the country, are of opinion that it is wise, expedient, and necessary to have some legislative act which shall express our opinion of the conduct of the Pope. Still I think that nothing can be more salutary than that by a Resolution of this kind we shall give what I believe to be an accurate and dispassionate summary of public opinion with respect to the course of events, which we all of us lament. That is the practical result of the Amendment. We give an historical opinion upon all that has been done in preceding months and years. We say that the Government encouraged the conduct of the Pope, while, at the same time, we are prepared to support even that Government in the steps which may be necessary to punish and check the usurpation which has been attempted. I see nothing in such a course but what is calculated to raise the House of Commons in public estimation; and, for my own part, I believe that in acceding to the Resolution I am performing a public duty.
MR. ROEBUCKsaid, he agreed in the Amendment, so far as to say that the conduct on the part of the Catholics and of the Pope had been the result of the previous conduct of the Government. He did not call it aggression, inasmuch as he believed it to have been brought about by the conduct of the Government. In the belief on the part of those who had voted that they were not about to offend the Government of this country, he could not call it aggression. These acts to which he had referred as having given great offence to the people of England, were, he believed, brought about by the conduct of Her Majesty's Government. Up to a certain point of time every act of theirs tended to bring about this result. He would go one step further, and say that in every one of those acts of the Government, if he had been called upon to give an opinion, he should have coincided. He thought they were exceedingly wise acts. He thought that up to the time of that unfortunate letter of the noble Lord the First Minister of the Crown, the conduct of the Government was wise—was in the highest degree generous—was a large-

833
minded policy, begun in 1829. That being his opinion as regarded a matter of fact, he acceded—guarding himself against that one word aggression—he acceded to the proposition of the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Urquhart). And now let him address himself to hon. Gentlemen who were going to vote on this proposition. What they were about to affirm was, that it was not generous to the Catholics of England and Ireland that they should support the Bill after they had thus characterised it. Because the Catholics of England and Ireland did not intend to give offence—because he believed they were led on step by step to the proceeding which took place—he supported this proposition, and he would upon every occasion; and he believed that hereafter the country would support him in his opinion. He would take every opportunity of putting an end to this Bill.
MR. DEEDESsaid, that having the misfortune to differ from the hon. Gentleman the Member for Buckinghamshire (Mr. Disraeli), and many other Gentlemen on his side of the House, with whom he was in the habit of acting, he wished to explain in a few words the reasons for the vote which he was about to give. He had bad the honour that day of presenting a petition from 10,000 inhabitants of the county of Kent, a portion of which he had the honour to represent, and although not approving entirely of the Bill which was under discussion, yet for the progress of that Bill, and with the view of rendering it more efficient, he thought he should not be acting up to the wishes of those who entrusted him with that petition if he supported this Amendment. He was not there for one moment to deny that there was some truth in the proposition of the hon. Member for Stafford; but notwithstanding what had been said, he must take upon himself to judge for himself, and he denied that the proposition was such that he was called upon to affirm it; and he maintained that if he did not vote against it, he refused, in point of fact, to go on with the Bill. He was not prepared to refuse to go on with the Bill. Amendments were to be proposed by an hon. and learned Friend of his, which would make the Bill much more efficient, and with that view he felt it his duty to vote against this Amendment.
SIR THOMAS ACLANDdid not rise to explain a vote which he thought required
834
no explanation, but to point out to hon. Gentlemen near him what the observations of the hon. and learned Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck) could scarcely have failed to show them. The hon. and learned Gentleman told them that by agreeing to this proposition they were damaging the Bill; and he held it to be the duty of every Member of Parliament not to be parties to any such delusion.
Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."
The House divided:—Ayes 280; Noes 201: Majority 79.

List of the AYES.

Abdy, Sir T. N.

Clerk, rt. hon. Sir G.

Acland, Sir T. D.

Clifford, H. M.

Adair, H. E.

Cockburn, Sir A. J. E.

Adair, R. A. S.

Cocks, T. S.

Aglionby, H. A.

Collins, W.

Alcock, T.

Copeland, Aid.

Anderson, A.

Cowper, hon. W. F.

Anson, hon. Col.

Craig, Sir W.

Anson, Visct.

Crowder, R. B.

Anstey, T. C.

Cubitt, W.

Armstrong, Sir A.

Currie, R.

Armstrong, R. B.

Curteis, H. M.

Ashley, Lord

Dalrymple, J.

Bagshaw, J.

Dashwood, Sir G. H.

Bailey, J.

Davie, Sir H. R. F.

Baines, rt. hon. M. T.

Dawson, hon. T. V.

Baring, H. B.

Deedes, W.

Baring, rt. hon. Sir F. T.

D'Eyncourt, rt. hon. C.T.

Barrow, W. H.

Douglas, Sir C. E.

Bass, M. T.

Drumlanrig, Visct.

Bell, J.

Drummond, H.

Benbow, J.

Duckworth, Sir J. T. B.

Berkeley, Adm.

Duff, G. S.

Berkeley, hon. H. F.

Duff, J.

Berkeley, C. L. G.

Duke, Sir J.

Bernal, R.

Duncan, Visct.

Bethell, R.

Duncan, G.

Birch, Sir T. B.

Duncuft, J.

Blackstone, W. S.

Dundas, Adm.

Bouverie, hon. E. P.

Dundas, rt. hon. Sir D.

Bowles, Adm.

East, Sir J. B.

Boyle, hon. Col.

Egerton, Sir P.

Broadley, H.

Ellice, E.

Brocklehurst, J.

Elliott, hon. J. E.

Brockman, E. D.

Emlyn, Visct.

Brotherton, J.

Enfield, Visct.

Brown, H.

Estcourt, J. B. B.

Brown, W.

Euston, Earl of

Bulkeley, Sir R. B. W.

Evans, J.

Bunbury, E. H.

Evans, W.

Buxton, Sir E. N.

Ewart, W.

Carter, J. B.

Fergus, J.

Caulfield, J. M.

Ferguson, Col.

Cavendish, hon. C. C.

Ferguson, Sir R. A.

Cavendish, hon. G. H.

Fitzpatrick, rt. hon. J.W.

Cavendish, W. G.

Fitzroy, hon. H.

Cayley, E. S.

Fitzwilliam, hon. G. W.

Chaplin, W. J.

Foley, J. H. H.

Childers, J. W.

Fordyce, A. D.

Clay, J.

Forster, M.

Clay, Sir W.

Fortescue, hon. J. W.

835

Freshfield, J. W.

Melgund, Visct.

Glyn, G. C.

Milner, W. M. E.

Goddard, A. L.

Milnes, R. M.

Gordon, Adm.

Milton, Visct.

Granger, T. C.

Moffatt, G.

Greene, T.

Molesworth, Sir W.

Grenfell, C. P.

Moncrieff, J.

Grenfell, C. W.

Moody, C. A.

Grey, rt. hon. Sir G.

Morris, D.

Grey, R. W.

Mostyn, hon. E. M. L.

Grosvenor, Lord R.

Mulgrave, Earl of

Guest, Sir J.

Muntz, G. F.

Hale, R. B.

Nicholl, rt. hon. J.

Halford, Sir H.

Norreys, Lord

Hall, Sir B.

Norreys, Sir D. J.

Hallyburton, Ld. J. F. G

Ogle, S. C. H.

Hanmer, Sir J.

Ord, W.

Harcourt, G. G.

Osborne, R.

Hardcastle, J. A.

Owen, Sir J.

Hastie, A.

Paget, Lord A.

Hastie, A.

Paget, Lord C.

Hatchell, rt. hon. J.

Paget, Lord G.

Hawes, B.

Pakington, Sir J.

Hayes, Sir E.

Palmerston, Visct.

Headlam, T. E.

Parker, J.

Heald, J.

Pechell, Sir G. B.

Heathcoat, J.

Peel, Sir R.

Heathcote, Sir G. J.

Perfect, R.

Heneage, G. H. W.

Peto, S. M.

Heneage, E.

Pigott, F.

Hervey, Lord A.

Pilkington, J.

Heywood, J.

Pinney, W.

Hindley, C.

Plowden, W. H. C.

Hobhouse, T. B.

Plumptre, J. P.

Hollond, R.

Powlett, Lord W.

Hotham, Lord

Pusey, P.

Howard, hon. C. W. G.

Rawdon, Col.

Howard, hon. E. G. G.

Reid, Col.

Howard, Sir R.

Rendlesham, Lord

Hughes, W. B.

Ricardo, O.

Hutt, W.

Rice, E. R.

Inglis, Sir R. H.

Rich, H.

Jermyn, Earl

Romilly, Col.

Johnstone, Sir J.

Romilly, Sir J.

Kershaw, J.

Rumbold, C. E.

King, hon. P. J. L.

Russell, Lord J.

Labouchere, rt. hon. H.

Russell, hon. E. S.

Langston, J. H.

Russell, F. C. H.

Lawley, hon. B.R.

Sandars, G.

Legh, G. C.

Sandars, J.

Lemon, Sir C.

Scrope, G. P.

Lennard, T. B.

Seymer, H. K.

Lewis, rt. hon. Sir T. F.

Seymour, H. D.

Lewis, G. C.

Seymour, Lord

Lindsay, hon. Col.

Shelburne, Earl of

Littleton, hon. E. R.

Sheridan, R. B.

Locke, J.

Sidney, Ald.

Lockhart, A. E.

Smith, M. T.

Loveden, P.

Smollett, A.

Lygon, hon. G.

Somerville, rt. hon. Sir W.

Mackinnon, W. A.

Sotheron, T. H. S.

Macnaghten, Sir E.

Spearman, H. J.

M'Gregor, J.

Stanley, hon. W. O.

M'Taggart, Sir J.

Stansfield, W. R. C.

Mangles, R. D.

Stanton, W. H.

Marshall, W.

Staunton, Sir G. T.

Martin, C. W.

Stuart, Lord J.

Masterman, J.

Stuart, H.

Matheson, A.

Talbot, C. R. M.

Matheson, Sir J.

Thicknesse, R. A.

Matheson, Col.

Thompson, Col.

Maule, rt. hon. F.

Thornely, T.

836

Tollemache, hon. F. G.

Wigram, L. T.

Tollemache, J.

Willcox, B. M.

Townley, R. G.

Williams, J.

Townshend, Capt.

Williams, W.

Traill, G.

Willyams, H.

Trevor, hon. G. R.

Williamson, Sir H.

Trevor, hon. T.

Willoughby, Sir H.

Tufnell, rt. hon. H.

Wilson, J.

Verney, Sir H.

Wilson, M.

Vesey, hon. T.

Wodehouse, E.

Villiers, Visct.

Wood, rt. hon. Sir C.

Vivian, J. H.

Wood, Sir W. P.

Wakley, T.

Wortley, rt. hon. J. S.

Walter, J.

Wrightson, W. B.

Watkins, Col. L.

Wyvill, M.

Wawn, J. T.

Wellesley, Lord C.

TELLERS.

West, F. R.

Hayter, W. G.

Westhead, J. P. B.

Hill, Lord M.

List of the NOES.

Adderley, C. B.

Conolly, T.

Archdall, Capt. M.

Cotton, hon. W. H. S.

Arkwright, G.

Crawford, W. S.

Arundel and Surrey, Earl of

Devereux, J. T.

Dick, Q.

Bagge, W.

Disraeli, B.

Bagot, hon. W.

Dod, J. W.

Baillie, H. J.

Dodd, G.

Baird, J.

Drax, J. S. W. S. E.

Baldock, E. H.

Duncombe, hon. A.

Baldwin, C. B.

Duncombe, hon. O.

Bankes, G.

Dundas, G.

Barron, Sir H. W.

Dunne, Col.

Bateson, T.

Du Pre, C. G.

Bennet, P.

Edwards, H.

Bentinck, Lord H.

Evelyn, W. J.

Beresford, W.

Fagan, J.

Berkeley, hon. G. F.

Farnham, E. B.

Bernard, Visct.

Farrer, J.

Best, J.

Fellowes, E.

Blair, S.

Floyer, J.

Blake, M. J.

Forbes, W.

Blakemore, R.

Forester, hon. G. C. W.

Blandford, Marq. of

Fox, R. M.

Blewitt, R. J.

Fox, S. W. L.

Boldero, H. G.

Fox, W. J.

Booker, T. W.

Frewen, C. H.

Booth, Sir R. G.

Fuller, A. E.

Bremridge, R.

Gallwey, Sir W. P.

Brisco, M.

Galway, Visct.

Broadwood, H.

Gaskell, J. M.

Brooke, Lord

Gilpin, Col.

Bruce, Lord E.

Gooch, E. S.

Bruen, Col.

Goold, W.

Buck, L. W.

Grace, O. D. J.

Buller, Sir J. Y.

Grattan, H.

Bunbury, W. M.

Greene, J.

Burghley, Lord

Grogan, E.

Burrell, Sir C. M.

Guernsey, Lord

Butler, P. S.

Hall, Col.

Cabbell, B. B.

Halsey, T. P.

Carew, W. H. P.

Hamilton, G. A.

Castlereagh, Visct.

Hamilton, J. H.

Christopher, R. A.

Harris, hon. Capt.

Christy, S.

Henley, J. W.

Clive, H. B.

Herries, rt. hon. J. C.

Cobbold, J. C.

Higgins, G. G. O.

Cochrane, A.D.R.W.B.

Hildyard, R. C.

Colville, C. R.

Hildyard, T. B. T.

Compton, H. C.

Hill, Lord E.

837

Hodgson, W. N.

Power, Dr.

Hope, H. T.

Power, N.

Hope, A.

Renton, J. C.

Hornby, J.

Repton, G. W. J.

Howard, P. H.

Reynolds, J.

Jolliffe, Sir W. G. H.

Richards, R.

Keating, R.

Roche, E. B.

Keogh, W.

Roebuck, J. A.

Kerrison, Sir E.

Rufford, F.

Knightley, Sir C.

Rushout, Capt.

Knox, Col.

Sadleir, J.

Knox, hon. W. S.

Scholefield, W.

Langton, W. H. P. G.

Scott, hon. F.

Lawless, hon. C.

Scully, F.

Lennox, Lord A. G.

Seaham, Visct.

Lennox, Lord H. G.

Sibthorp, Col.

Lewisham, Visct.

Smythe, hon. G.

Long, W.

Somers, J. P.

Lopes, Sir R.

Somerset, Capt.

Lowther, hon. Col.

Spooner, R.

Lowther, H.

Stafford, A.

Mackenzie, W. F.

Stanford, J. F.

M'Cullagh, W. T.

Stanley, E.

Maher, N. V.

Stanley, hon. E. H.

Meagher, T.

Stuart, J.

Mandeville, Visct.

Sturt, H. G.

Manners, Lord G.

Sullivan, M.

Manners, Lord J.

Talbot, J. H.

March, Earl of

Taylor, T. E.

Maunsell, T. P.

Tenison, E. K.

Maxwell, hon. J. P.

Thesiger, Sir F.

Meux, Sir H.

Thompson, Ald.

Miles, P. W. S.

Towneley, J.

Miles, W.

Trelawny, J. S.

Monsell, W.

Trollope, Sir J.

Moore, G. H.

Tyler, Sir G.

Mullings, J. R.

Tyrell, Sir J. T.

Mundy, W.

Verner, Sir W.

Murphy, F. S.

Villiers, hon. F. W. C.

Napier, J.

Vyse, R. H. R. H.

Neeld, J.

Waddington, H. S.

Newport, Visct.

Wegg-Prosser, F. R.

Noel, hon. G. J.

Welby, G. E.

O'Brien, Sir T.

Whiteside, J.

O'Connell, J.

Williams, T. P.

O'Connell, M. J.

Worcester, Marq. of

O'Flaherty, A.

Wynn, H. W. W.

Ossulston, Lord

Wynn, Sir W. W.

Oswald, A.

Yorke, hon. E. T.

Packe, C. W.

Pigot, Sir R.

TELLERS.

Ponsonby, hon. C. F. A.

Urquhart, D.

Portal, M.

Naas, Lord

Main Question again proposed.
Debate adjourned till Monday next.

KAFFIR TRIBES COMMITTEE.
On Question that this Committee consist of seventeen Members,
MR. KEOGH MR. KEOGH moved that the name of Mr. Reynolds be added to the Committee.
SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, that he had no objection to the name of Mr. Reynolds. His noble Friend (Lord John Russell) had stated that he would add three Irish Members to the Committee, and that he would propose their names on Monday. Under these circumstances he hoped the hon.
838
and learned Gentleman would not press his Motion now.
COLONEL DUNNEsaid, his object in calling the attention of the House to the subject was not that any particular Irishman should be placed on the Committee. His own name had been mentioned, but he had no personal wish to serve on it.
MR. HINDLEYsaid, that there were not a sufficient number of Members connected with the great missionary societies on the Committee. He thought that the number of Members ought to be increased to twenty.
Motion agreed to.
MR. KEOGHthen moved that the name of Mr. Reynolds should be added to the Committee.
SIR GEORGE GREYrepeated that he had no objection to Mr. Reynolds, but he must ask the House to suspend its judgment until Monday, when the noble Lord at the head of the Government would propose the names of three hon. Gentlemen.
SIR BENJAMIN HALLsaid, he must most decidedly oppose the nomination of the hon. Member for the city of Dublin, and he would state the reasons which induced him to come to that conclusion. He did not think that the hon. Gentleman the Member for the city of Dublin was a sufficiently impartial person to be placed on the Committee; and for this reason, he had declared in that House—publicly, deliberately, and solemnly—that he would oppose any proposition whatever of Her Majesty's Government; and he gave the' House to understand that he would do so whether the proposition was right or wrong. The present proposition was one which had originated with the Government; and if the hon. Member for the city of Dublin were consistent with his own pledges, he would have to go into the Committee-room with the "foregone conclusion" of voting against the Government, be the merits of the question what they might. He (Sir Benjamin Hall) could not, therefore, consider the hon. Member to be a person sufficiently impartial to be included in the Committee. If the hon. Member had not made that avowal, he should, have regarded him in other respects as a man of talent and eloquence—a proper person to be placed upon the Committee. He did not speak from any personal feeling towards the hon. Member, but only judged from his own words that he was not an impartial person.
MR. REYNOLDSdenied that there was the least analogy between a vote in that House and a vote in Committee. The former might have the effect of dislodging the present occupauts of the Treasury bench—his (Mr. Reynolds') political enemies; but the latter, unfortunately, could have no such happy result. The hon. Baronet the Member for Marylebone must be fully aware of this fact, and yet he had, he would not say the audacity, for that would be unparliamentary, but the boldness to affirm that he (Mr. Reynolds) would go into a Committee-room predetermined to disregard the claims of justice in a case in which he was solemnly pledged to do justice as between party and party. The hon. Baronet had taken his seat to-night in the spot usually occupied by the Nestor of Reform (Mr. Hume); but his position there reminded him (Mr. Reynolds) of a saying of their immortal bard—Shakspere—that a certain place would have been "bettor filled had it been empty." The hon. Member for Montrose (Mr. Hume) had declared that he would vote black white; and yet that hon. Gentleman was a Member almost of every Committee. And yet he was to be told by the thick and thin, the black and white supporter of the Government, the hon. Baronet the Member for Marylebone, that he (Mr. Reynolds) was disqualified from serving on a Committee. In this conduct the hon. Baronet would be supported by the Government. What was this but a declaration of war to death on the part of the Government against Members who were conscientiously opposed to their policy? The right hon. Baronet the Home Secretary had admitted that there could be no objection to his (Mr. Reynolds') name being put upon the list.
SIR GEORGE GREY: I said I could not then state any objection.
MR. REYNOLDS: The House will excuse me for correcting the right hon. Baronet's observation. He said there was no objection, and now he is correcting not me but himself. He (Mr. Reynolds) protested against the Government making their opponents marked men, and denouncing them as not worthy of credit. Such conduct was certainly neither magnanimous nor manly; but it was not unworthy of the hon. Baronet (Sir Benjamin Hall) as showing with what fidelity he did the bidding—he would not say of his masters, for that would be unparliamentary—but of his leaders,
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and with what despatch and devotion he adhered to his colours.
MR. J. WILLIAMSsaid, that on this Committee there did not appear the name of a single Welshman. He could not help expressing his deep indignation at the insult offered to his countrymen by the exclusion. He did not at all see why hon. Gentlemen representing Welsh constituencies should not be thought of as well as hon. Gentlemen from across the Channel. No man, for instance, could more conscientiously discharge the duties connected with Committees than the hon. Gentleman the Member for the county of Flint (Mr. Mostyn); and when the information reached the Principality that Welshmen had been excluded from this Committee, he (Mr. Williams) was quite sure that they would feel equally indignant with their Irish friends, A short time ago a countryman of his had returned from Kafirland, and had told him (Mr. Williams) that there was a great similarity between the Welsh and Kafir language. If, therefore, there existed any disposition on the part of Government to appoint a Committee to go to Kafirland, Welshmen would certainly be the most competent parties.
MR. PRICEsaid, he was another Welshman, and he could not avoid expressing his burning indignation at the exclusion of Welshmen from the Committee: he considered that there should be at least three Members Welshmen.
MR. KEOGHsaid, that as it appeared three Welshmen were to be added to the Committee, that was just another reason why the House should agree to his Motion.
MR. LAWLESSwould have advised his hon. and learned Friend (Mr. Keogh) not to divide the House on his Motion that night, had it not been for the attack which had been made on the hon. Member for the city of Dublin (Mr. Reynolds) by the hon. Baronet (Sir Benjamin Hall). He (Mr. Lawless) had made the same declaration as the hon. Member for the city of Dublin—he would give no support to the Government so long as they had charge of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The attack on the hon. Member (Mr. Reynolds) had been dictated by a feeling of bitter enmity towards Ireland; and if on the part of the Government there was any disposition to evince such enmity to Ireland; the Irish Members would conduct an opposition of which they had now no idea. He advised the Government to repudiate the language

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used by the hon. Baronet (Sir Benjamin Hall).
MR. CHRISTOPHERadvised the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) to withdraw his Motion, seeing that Government was pledged to support three Irish Members.
SIR JOHN BULLERthought that when the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) had undertaken to name three Irish Members on Monday, he (Lord John Russell) should be allowed to do so. If the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) persisted in his Motion, he (Sir John Buller) should move that the House do now adjourn.
SIR GEORGE GREYsaid, the names of three Irish Members would be proposed by his noble Friend (Lord John Russell); and if hon. Members were not satisfied with these names, they might then propose others. Seeing that this was the case, he did not see the necessity of the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) then persisting in his Motion.
LORD NAASinsisted that the debate ought to be adjourned.
The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, it had been understood last night that his noble Friend (Lord John Russell) would put upon the paper the names of three Irish Members to be proposed on Monday. This being the case, he thought the fair way was for the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) to reserve his notice for Monday night.
MR. GROGANsaid, that if the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) gave a second notice, he would not be in so favourable a position, for he would then have to propose his names as an amendment. The wisest and fairest course in his opinion was that the debate should be now adjourned.
MR. FOX MAULEcould not agree to the adjournment of the debate, although he had no objection that the House should now adjourn. The adjournment of the debate would alter the position of his noble Friend (Lord John Russell), who hod proposed the Committee.
MR. SCULLYhoped that the hon. and learned Member (Mr. Keogh) would persist in retaining the advantage which he now possessed.
Motion made and Question put, "That the Debate be now adjourned."
The House divided:—Ayes 25; Noes 87: Majority 62.
The House adjourned at a quarter before Two o'clock.

MINUTES.
PUBLIC BILLS.—1a Arrest of Absconding Debtors; Compound Householders.
Reported.—Exchequer Bills; Indemnity.

TRANSPORTATION OF CONVICTS.
LORD LYTTELTONpresented two petitions, of which he had given notice, from the colonists of Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania, as they themselves preferred to have it called, praying for the cessation of transportation of criminals to that island. The one was from the colonists in public meeting assembled, and the other from colonists of the Northern Division of the colony; and the two petitions together were signed by many thousands of persons. (Minutes of Proceedings, 46.) He had also been entrusted with a memorial to Her Majesty the Queen on the same subject, which he hoped shortly to be able to present, signed by many thousands of the women of that colony. The noble Lord said, the importance of these petitions, and the subject to which they referred, would, he hoped, be his excuse, if he troubled their Lordships with some remarks upon them, notwithstanding that a short debate on the same question had taken place upon it a few weeks ago, at which he was not present. But there was a special reason why those who concurred with him in that subject were induced at once to bring it under the notice of the House. The subject of transportation to our colonies was one on which public opinion in this country was weak, and did not press upon the Government; and it was no wonder that it should be so, the subject being a painful and a disagreeable, as well as a complex and difficult one. Of the Members of that House, for example, probably there were not many who knew or cared about the subject of transportation; but those who did know it, knew that it was a very serious matter. They would know, although to many of their Lordships it might be a disagreeable piece of news, that at this moment there was in the course of formation in all our Australian colonies, an anti-

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convict league, to resist and oppose the transportation of convicts to any one of those colonies—not only to Van Diemen's Land, to which it was at present nominally confined, but to any one of the Australasian colonies, including New Zealand. And as to what was the immediate origin of this Australasian combination, which would probably produce a petition to the Parliament of this country before the end of the present Session, signed by 40,000 or 50,000 persons out of a population of British origin and of all ages, little exceeding 300,000. No doubt the immediate incentive of this combination was the successful example of the colony of the Cape, than which he had heard it stated that since the transactions in Boston Harbour, New England, in the last century, no more alarming events of a similar character had ever oscurred. Whether this Australasian Anti-Convict League would lead to results of equal gravity could not now be predicted—he trusted that it would not—but, at all events, it was one of the first fruits of the successful resistance of the Cape to the reception of convicts. This circumstance showed the feeling of the colonists on the subject, and he would urge upon the attention of the House then, as he had done before, to consider whether the necessity of getting rid of the inconvenience suffered at home from the difficulty of dealing with our criminal population, was sufficient to counterbalance the dissatisfaction and discontent engendered in these young and growing colonies, by their being compelled to receive the demoralised population we landed on their shores. No doubt the Government—and especially his noble Friend the Secretary for the Colonies (Earl Grey)—deserved the greatest credit for their attempts to reform the system of transportation; and doubtless if the system was to be carried on at all, it could not be carried into effect in a better manner than it was at present, or under a better agency. For the appointment of the present Governor of Van Die-men's Land, Sir William Denison, and Mr. Hampton, the Comptroller-General of convicts, under the existing system, he (Lord Lyttelton) was himself in some degree responsible; but he would call their Lordships' attention for a short time to the evidence of the Parliamentary Papers now on their Lordships' table, as to the manner in which the reformed system of transportation had worked. No one doubted that the present Government's reformed
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system was only to be regarded in the light of an experiment; and the question was, how far had that experiment answered as a reformatory system? The main feature of that system was that the whole of the strictly penal part of the punishment for convicts sentenced to transportation should be inflicted at home, and that, after the termination of that portion of their punishment, they should be deported to one of the colonies. Now, as had before been pointed out, everything depended, as regarded the operation of this system, on the effect which it would have on the criminally disposed population at home; for, whatever differences there might be in detail, the system of removing convicts with tickets of leave was nothing in principle but the assignment system revived. How far the system had been satisfactory at home, there could not, at this period, be any doubt, for in this country crime had been on the increase, while the convicts who had been sent to the colonies arrived there with extravagant expectations of high wages and certain prosperity. What had their Governor in the colony of Van Die-men's Land said as to the circumstance of having the restrictive and reformatory punishment inflicted at home, and not in the colony? The Governor of that colony (Sir W. Denison), who had a great desire that the experiment should succeed, said—
"Upon the supposition, therefore, that it is still the intention of Her Majesty's Government to carry out the principle of a gradual remission of punishment, allotting to the convict, first, a period of separate confinement; secondly, a term of compulsory labour; and, thirdly, a series of indulgences, closed at last by a conditional pardon, I am prepared to submit and to recommend most earnestly that all the convicts whom it is intended to transmit to this colony should be sent here after having undergone the first portion of these punishments, and that they should pass their period of compulsory labour, and of the various modifications of indulgence, in accordance with the rules now in force here, and which have been found to work very well when properly administered."
The Governor again repeated this opinion in still stronger terms:—
"I have submitted to your Lordship the propriety of sending the convicts out to this colony as soon as they have passed through the first stage of their punishment, namely, the separate confinement, and of allowing the colony to benefit by the labour of the men when undergoing the second stage of compulsory labour. The documents which I now forward are sufficient, I submit, to prove the absolute necessity of the adoption of some rule of the kind, with regard to, at all events, the Irish convicts."

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But this recommendation went to uproot the whole reforms in the system introduced by the Colonial Secretary, because it was the very keystone of his improvements that the convicts should pass the two first stages of their sentence in this country, and not in the colony. His noble Friend opposite could not be expected to accede to this; and in consequence he said in his reply, dated the 25th of July, 1850:—
"I do not consider that an experiment tried under such unfavourable circumstances ought to set aside the conclusion adopted upon general grounds, and from a much wider experience, as to the advantage of subjecting convicts to compulsory labour more immediately under the eyes of the Government, where any errors in the system of management may be more easily and promptly detected, and where the services of efficient officers can more easily be secured than in a distant colony. In Ireland, indeed, there have not yet been the requisite opportunities for introducing an efficient system of discipline for the whole of the greatly increased number of convicts in that island; and I think that it will probably be very desirable to take advantage of the means which you describe to exist of inflicting the second stage of punishment, or that of compulsory labour, in the colony for some of these Irish convicts."
Now, observe, the noble Lord (Lord Grey) had made two important modifications in his expression of opinion. He stated that, in the first place, with regard to all Irish convicts—not the most welcome in the colony—as there was no efficient system of discipline in Ireland, it was probably desirable to take advantage of the means of inflicting the second stage of punishment—compulsory labour—in the colony in the case of some, and probably the whole of the Irish convicts. Well, as to the beneficial effect of the system, Sir William Denison wrote an honest statement declaring that he would be belieing his own convictions, and misleading the Colonial Office, if he said that he believed in the probability of any marked change in the moral principles of a convict through the operation of secondary punishments. The statistical tables showed that the number of male convicts at a given time under the operation of that system in Van Die-men's Land was 18,000 of all sorts, and out of these 1,700 were under magisterial sentence. Then, as to the condition of the female convicts in Van Diemen's Land, there was not much evidence on that point in the Parliamentary papers, and that little was not favourable; for he had heard, and he believed that many of their Lordships might also have heard, the most deplorable accounts regarding these female con-
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victs. Indeed, their condition was such, that notwithstanding the lamentable disproportion of the sexes in the colony, hardly any of them were ever disposed of in marriage. But if there could be any doubt entertained whether the experiment had worked well in the colony up to the present time, he apprehended that the feelings of the people of Van Diemen's Land on the subject could hardly be doubted. The feeling of the inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land was evidently against our system of transportation under any shape whatever. He hardly thought the Government themselves would dispute that the great majority of the colonists were opposed to transportation; and he believed that the Government sympathised with them, and would be glad, if they knew how it could be done, to relieve the colony from the obnoxious system. Evidence might be produced which on the first blush might lead to the belief that there was a feeling in favour of the convict system, and such a feeling had even been represented through the colonial newspapers. But in fact that was the most serious part of the case; because there was a convict interest in the colony, composed of convicts and emancipists, who wished to set up on their own account, and who carried on an open war against the interests of the free colonists. But it was the interest of the free colonists that was the important consideration; and doubtless the Government were anxious to relieve them from the convict system. But how was that to be done? The question had been referred to the Legislatures of some of the Australian Colonies; and with regard to New Zealand, South Australia, and Port Phillip, or Victoria, no one could doubt that the unanimous feeling was against transportation in any shape. The noble Earl opposite had submitted it also to the Legislature of New South Wales; and a resolution, came to without a division, represented the final decision of that body to be hostile to the renewal of transportation, accompanied by a request that the Order in Council might be abrogated which constituted them a settlement liable to receive convicts; and, as far as they could judge of the feeling of a scattered population, which could not be easily arrived at, as distinguished from the feeling of the Legislative Council, petitions had been presented to the Legislative Council against transportation, signed by upwards of 36,000 persons, while petitions signed by only 525 persons had been

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presented in favour of the system. With regard to the district of Western Australia, which was the strongest case of the Government last year, it was impossible to read the reports of the Governor of the colony without seeing that it was impossible to inflict the convict system much longer upon the colonists except by force. It was only an experiment which they were willing to endure from the dire necessity and need of labour for a certain time. They had repeated their request to have the convict system combined with an equal amount of free emigrants— a scheme which had failed in Van Diemen's Land; and the Governor even doubted how the system would work as regarded the boys sent out from Parkhurst Prison, for he declared that, in his judgment, many of the boys who had been deemed the best conducted while in the prison at Parkhurst, had turned out the worst conducted when they arrived in the Colony. With regard to the district upon which the noble Earl opposite relied—the district of Moreton Bay—it could not be denied that from the great want of labour, there was some chance that the colonists would be willing to receive convicts. But that was a most precarious tenure upon which to place the system. At present the Moreton Bay district was a part of New South Wales, and being subject to its Legislature, would therefore be unable to have convicts against its consent. But even if it was made independent of New South Wales in future, the convict system could only last for a time; you would be only staving off the evil day; the colonists of Moreton Bay would not be able to resist the tide of feeling in all the neighbouring colonies; and doubtless when they had attained a sufficient supply of labour, and a state of prosperity, they would refuse to receive convicts any longer. The real question to be considered in a case like the present was this—" What sort of a community do you wish your Colonies to become?" He took it for granted that we wished them to consist of good and useful and virtuous citizens. Now, in a moral point of view, the presence of these convicts must lead to the temporal and spiritual pollution of the Colonies, although it might forward their material interests; and yet we were bribing them, by a measure which seemed beneficial to their material interests, to consent to that which must tend to the degradation and ruin of their future social and spiritual interests. It could not be
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otherwise but that the presence of shoals of convicts would be detrimental to the morals of a Colony. The arguments advanced in favour of the present system was that the convicts at home, after passing through their punishment, could not find employment because they were shunned and dreaded by everybody. On what was that feeling founded? Was it not on something good? Was it not the dread of the contamination which they might spread among our children and families? And because the Colonies could not resist the pressure which we brought to bear against them, were we justified in forcing upon them a lower standard of morality than that by which we regulated our own society at home? His belief was that the present experiment in the convict system was not going on much better than the former experiments; and he believed that the Government would yet find themselves inevitably bound to reconsider the whole question, and abolish penal settlements altogether in the Australasian Colonies. This brought him to another important point—a point to which he had adverted last year, and to which he must advert again now. Last year, as now, every petition, every memorial, and every discussion that had taken place on this subject in Van Diemen's Land, had upbraided the Government in the strongest manner with the non-performance of the alleged promise which the colonists said they had received from the Secretary of State, in 1846, that transportation to Van Diemen's Land should cease. Probably a promise to that effect would not affect the convict system now pursued there; nevertheless, great aggravation of feeling had existed in consequence on the part of the colonists; and therefore it was that the subject had been so frequently before Parliament. But the Secretary of State had only given one answer to that alleged promise; he denied that he had ever made it. He said there might be a few expressions in an isolated despatch which might bear that construction; but no one could read the whole set of despatches without seeing that the intention of the Government was to maintain transportation in some form or other, and especially to Van Diemen's Land. But this was a fallacious mode of putting the case. There was no such set of despatches as the noble Lord referred to, and the question was as simple as possible. When the present Government came into office, they found the question of transportation

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in a painful and oppressive shape, and they immediately had to consider it. On the 30th of September, 1846, the noble Lord opposite (Earl Grey) wrote a despatch to Sir W. Denison, containing several very commendable modifications and improvements in the transportation system then enforced—the probation system, as it was called; and he prefaced his remarks by stating that a more fit occasion for taking a general retrospect of the whole question would have arrived whenever he should he able to explain the views of the Government and the decision of Parliament as to the entire system of transportation, and that that time, he trusted, was not remote. Till then (the noble Lord wrote) he should confine the instructions he addressed to the Governor to the course to be pursued in regard to the convicts who were then in the colony, and who might hereafter arrive. Several months after the date of that letter, Sir G. Grey, Secretary of State for the Home Department, who was equally concerned in this question, addressed a long, deliberate, and complete despatch to his noble Friend the Secretary of the Colonies, containing a matured exposition of the views of Her Majesty's Government. This was the statement. After recapitulating the evils of the former system, he wrote on the 20th of January, 1847—
"The transportation of male convicts to Van Diemen's Land, as hitherto carried on, should not be resumed. Should your Lordship concur in this opinion, it should be intimated to the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land that it is not the present intention of Her Majesty's Government to resume the transportation of male convicts to that colony."
Sir George then proceeded to describe the system about to be adopted. He gave an account of the separate system of confinement to be adopted at Pentonville and elsewhere, observing that "employment on works should be followed up in ordinary cases by exile or banishment from their country." The system, therefore, which the Government had determined to act upon was this—employment at home, after a period of seclusion at Pentonville, to be followed by exile or banishment abroad. Now, what did that mean? It certainly did not mean banishment to a colony, because Sir G. Grey's letter went on to say—
"That the condition of the pardon to follow the punishment was to be that they should quit this country and not return to it during their term, and that, on obtaining this conditional par-
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don, the only restriction on their liberty should be the prohibition of remaining in this country."
Now, he would ask their Lordships whether there was in this description anything like transportation to Van Diemen's Land mentioned? No such thing; the sentence was to be, not transportation or deportation at all. It was merely to be banishment to any part of the world which the exile might select, with the single proviso that he should not return to this country. Whether the despatch which he had just quoted had been communicated to the Governor of the colony he could not tell, for the acknowledgment of the next despatch from Sir W. Denison was very short, and merely stated his determination to adopt the decision of the Home Government. His noble Friend opposite subsequently told Sir W. Denison, and Sir W. Denison repeated his noble Friend's words to the Legislative Council, that "it was not the intention of Her Majesty's Government that transportation to Van Diemen's Land should be resumed at the expiration of the two years for which it was to be discontinued." The colonists of Van Diemen's Land were thus left in a reasonable reliance on the faith of Government that transportation to their settlement was not to be resumed. Some months afterwards his noble Friend sent out another despatch to that colony, in which he stated that he had found it impossible to act upon the determination which he had announced. After that, transportation to Van Diemen's Land was resumed and continued, and carried on in its main features as before. His noble Friend had also promised that in two years the probation gangs should cease to exist; but not withstanding such a promise, they still continued in existence. But it should be remembered, that the Governor of the colony had announced in unqualified terms that transportation should not be renewed after two years, and that the noble Earl had never found fault with him for making that announcement. In point of fact, it was impossible that Government should censure him for an annunciation which it had authorised him to make. That, however, was a grievance of which the colonists had a right to complain, and which bitterly aggravated their feelings on this question. He did not blame the Government for what it had done; for the question in this country was so urgent, that it could not be waited for; it was one which every assize and gaol delivery would increase and complicate.

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That which he thought that the Government ought to have done was this—they ought to have acknowledged with a good grace that they had undertaken to do more than they could perform, and that they must limit their efforts in future to the mitigation of the system. He had alluded to this part of the subject for the purpose of asking why they did not now act on the plan originally proposed by the Secretary of State for the Home Department? It was proposed in that plan that the punishment should be inflicted on the convict at home; that he should be allowed to earn money during his punishment; that with those earnings he should be allowed to leave the country; and that it should be penal for him to be afterwards found within its boundaries. If such a system were in force, the Australian colonies would not be the only places to which he could go, for the world would be before him free to choose. After repeating his conviction that it would soon be found impossible to carry the present system out, the noble Lord concluded by placing his two petitions on the table.
The ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLINsaid, that as his sentiments on this question had been communicated long since both to their Lordships and the country, he should not have addressed the House at present, did he not think himself called upon to bear testimony to the excellent working of the penal system recently introduced into Ireland for the reformation of criminals. He would bear his personal testimony to the results of the system he had witnessed in the Mountjoy Depôt recently established in the city of Dublin, partly because it was in his own diocese, and partly because he had occasion to pay it two visits of some duration, when he had instituted a very careful examination into the system pursued there, and the circumstances of which he would briefly mention to their Lordships. He had been invited to visit that depot with a view of holding a confirmation upon some of the convicts who were confined within its walls—a matter not of very frequent occurrence. He was forced to go to the prisoners, because they could not go to any of the churches in the city of Dublin. Mr. Blacker, the able and excellent chaplain of the depot, had informed him that there were a certain number of convicts ready to sail for the colonies, who were willing and anxious to receive the rite of confirmation before they sailed. There were thirty or forty of
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such persons, less than 1/10th and not more than 1/15th of the whole number of convicts, the remainder being, as was most likely, in a country like Ireland, Roman Catholics. He was inclined to think from the examination which he had made—and his opinion was corroborated by the report of the chaplain, who was a most trustworthy man—that many of these convicts seeking confirmation had received great benefit from the moral and religious instruction which they had received in the prison. He had examined the whole of the prison on another occasion at a later period; and it then appeared to him that the working of the system pursued in that prison had solved many problems which up to that time had appeared to him to be incapable of solution. The discipline to which the convicts had been subjected appeared to him to have improved their moral and social condition, and not to have interfered injuriously with either their bodily health or with their intellectual sanity. There had been enforced among them a system of continued labour in silence and in solitude; and religious instruction, or at least an opportunity for religious instruction, had been afforded to them all without distinction. The greater part of them left the prison able to read and write, although they did not know a letter when they first entered it. And yet the restrictions had been so complete, that the punishment which the parties underwent, appeared to be a very sharp and severe and intimidatory punishment. Upon the whole the disposition of mind in which the Protestant prisoners were leaving the prison for the colony was such as to lead the chaplain to entertain hopes that the greater part of them would continue in the path of reformation which they had begun to tread—at the same time, that excellent and rev. person regretted— as he (the Archbishop of Dublin) also regretted—that they were going to mix in such society as they were likely to meet in our penal colonies; they were going to a country in which the general mass of the inhabitants were so contaminated that they would have to undergo a more fiery trial than that which the average mass of mankind could stand. The rev. chaplain had, therefore, expressed to him great alarm lest all his labours should prove vain and nugatory. From what he had himself seen of the discipline of this penitentiary, the punishment was sufficient to deter, and sufficiently reformatory as to be

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the sole punishment requisite to be inflicted on the prisoner, except so far as his subsequent exile was concerned. He should be most gratified were he able to declare that his former expectations on this subject had been falsified, or that his most gloomy predictions had not been fulfilled. Everything which he had heard of late respecting the penal colonies had confirmed his most dismal apprehensions that in such society the convict could not be permanently reclaimed. He should have been happy to be contradicted by the experience of facts, but no such facts had yet come within his knowledge. He could bear witness to the fairness of the examination which had taken place on this subject before their Lordships, and to the total absence of exaggeration in the Reports agreed on by the Committees. He had indeed heard those reports styled "one-sided;" and, in one sense of the word, they were undoubtedly so—for they were one and all unfavourable to the system now enforced in our penal colonies. But if the reports were one-sided, how was it that the witnesses on the other side had not either come forward themselves, or been brought forward by others? The real state of the case was this: the evidence was one-sided, because the facts were one-sided. He had been present at the examination of many of the witnesses; and he must say that from many of them who had come forward to support the present system, evidence had been wrung, manifestly against their will, in utter condemnation of it. In conclusion, he observed, that so far as the Mountjoy Depot was concerned, the difficulty of finding a substitute for transportation had been overcome.
EARL GREYsaid, that he should not enter into the general question of convict discipline, but should confine his remarks to three or four points which had been touched on in the speech of his noble Friend opposite, and to which he thought the attention of their Lordships ought to be drawn. Let him remind the House that on this most important and difficult subject neither his noble Friend opposite, nor the right rev. Prelate who had just addressed them, had attempted to set aside the conclusion as to the necessity of continuing to remove convicts from this country to which their Lordships had come upon this subject a short time ago, with a very general concurrence of opinion. Let him also remind their Lordships that
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this conclusion was founded on the acknowledged fact that the convict, under whatever system of punishment was adopted, must, if left in England when his punishment was over, be placed in circumstances which led to his relapse into crime almost as a necessary result. The noble Lord who had been his predecessor in office had called the attention of their Lordships to this fact, that there had been repeated instances of convicts discharged from the penitentiaries who had been anxious to lead a reformed life, who had gone to some distance from their former haunts, and had there worked honestly and industriously without crime—who after some time had been found out by their former associates in crime—who had been threatened with discovery and exposure by those associates, if they did not co-operate in their designs of plunder—who had been driven by such threats to steal money from their employers—and who had been thus driven back, in spite of themselves, into the vortex from which they had escaped. Instances like these must repeatedly happen in a country like ours, where the market of labour was generally full, and where the preference, therefore, in the general competition for employment would always be given to those who had never fallen under the sentence of the law, over a man who had once been convicted of crime, so that the latter was placed under a disadvantage which made it scarcely possible for him to retrieve his character and gain an honest subsistence. He would next call the attention of their Lordships to the theory of the present system of convict discipline. That theory was to inflict a severe amount of punishment on the convict at home, in the first instance; and, in the next, removal or banishment to a colony abroad, where he was placed in a position in which a new career was open before him. Now, how had that theory been carried into practice? The most rev. Prelate had just told them that the prisoners in the Mountjoy Depôt had found the system both penal and reformatory. Now, the system enforced in that depôt was founded on the model of the Penitentiary at Pentonville. All the experience which they had yet had of that establishment showed that it had produced this effect. He believed that the system of separate confinement was greatly dreaded by the convict—he believed that it produced a strong impression on his mind—he believed that, to a certain extent, it softened his mind, and produced a disposition to

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receive the moral and religious instruction which they had opportunities of gaining. But there was one circumstance connected with that system which must never be kept out of view. Experience showed that it had, when long continued, a serious effect on the health of the convict. Dr. Fergusson and Sir Benjamin Brodie, who had both watched with great attention the progress of the experiment, had concurred in reporting that eighteen months was the utmost period during which human nature could stand up against the stern and severe system of separate confinement. During those eighteen months it was necessary that the convict should be watched closely, both by the chaplain and by the surgeon of the prison, lest his mind or body should break down under the discipline to which he was exposed. Twelve months, in the majority of cases, was as long a period as human nature could support it. Now, their Lordships must be aware that there were many crimes approximating very closely to capital crimes in extent and enormity, in which it was quite impossible to let off those who had committed them with merely twelve or eighteen months' imprisonment. Something more was necessary to be inflicted to support the authority of the law, and for the general order of society. What you are now doing is the best that can be done under such circumstances. When the system of separate imprisonment came to an end, the mind of the convict was generally softened. He was then removed, either to Portland, or Gibraltar, or Bermuda, and was employed in what was called "associated labour." He did not know whether many of their Lordships had visited the establishment at Portland. He had visited that establishment himself, and, though the inspection was painful, since it was always painful to see a number of men suffering severe punishment brought upon them by their crimes, it was at the same time, in another point of view, gratifying. The good conduct of the men, the discipline carried out with little severity, the amount of useful labour performed under such circumstances, was highly satisfactory. The convicts in that establishment were trained up to labour of the most useful description. By the expectation of shortening the period of their labour, a great stimulus to exertion was given them; and it was found in consequence that when the convicts were ill they were most anxious to go out as usual with the working gangs, instead of
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shirking from work, as was usual in the ordinary prison hospitals. He would give their Lordships a striking instance:— When he was at Portland, he saw a man who had been seriously injured by the falling of a stone where he was working, and who had been obliged to go into the hospital in consequence; and yet that man, instead of skulking from his work, showed the greatest anxiety to resume it as soon as possible, and was, at his own desire, and before he was perfectly recovered, permitted to go out and resume labour. What, after that, was the next step? They were then removed to the colony with tickets of leave. The noble Lord had objected to that step, and said, "Why not let them go out as exiles free from all restraint, and divested of the character of convicts? Such had been the original view of the subject adopted by Her Majesty's Government; but experience had shown that it could not be acted upon with advantage. It had been found not only that there were practical difficulties in removing convicts from this country in the character of free emigrants, but also that when this could be accomplished, the result with regard to the conduct of the men was unfavourable—that, after having been under a strict system of discipline for so long a time in this country, when they were at once made their own masters, and were freed from all control, they were unable to withstand the temptation of their altered circumstances, and which liberty and the renewed association with their old companions threw in their way, and many who had formed the best resolutions relapsed into their old courses. They were sent out, therefore, with tickets of leave; and the effect of that was that they might be dispersed to remote parts of the colonies. In many parts there was a great demand for shepherds and stock keepers, who would be scattered over a wide extent of country. The free emigrants did not generally like that employment, because it removed them from the neighbourhood of the towns; but to the convicts it was particularly well adapted. His noble Friend said that he had seen no reason in the reports sent home for believing that the system worked well. The reports were not of a very favourable character; but he thought this might be explained, that the convicts to whom these reports applied had been sent out before the system of punishment had been matured and properly carried into effect. At first, undoubtedly, the means

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did not exist for carrying out the punishment properly in this country—separate cells were not to be had, nor were there establishments like Portland to send the convicts to. Originally, therefore, the convicts sent out did not succeed so well as those who had gone since; and it was the want of these disciplinary establishments in Ireland which explained the passage which had been referred to in a despatch which he had written, in which it was stated that with the Irish convicts the system had not succeeded; but he hoped that the establishments at Mountjoy and at Spike Island would remedy this for the future as far as Irish convicts were concerned. There were two points of which the noble Lord specially complained. In the first place, the noble Lord said that a promise had been made by the Government to Van Diemen's Land, which had been broken. He (Earl Grey) had already explained that once; but after the observations of the noble Lord, he felt it his duty to do so a little more fully than he had done upon a former occasion. And, in the first place, he asked their Lordships whether, upon the showing of the noble Lord himself, it was not quite evident, as he had before stated, that no promise whatever had been made to Van Diemen's Land that had been violated? In September, 1846, shortly after he had accepted office, he made known (as the noble Lord had said) to the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land that he could give him no information as to the system to be finally adopted until the decision of Her Majesty's Government and of Parliament should have been pronounced. Well, a few months after that, the noble Lord said, the views of the Government were embodied in a most elaborate official letter, written by his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and addressed to him (Earl Grey). That letter contained the views of the Government, and it said, it is not the present intention of the Government that at the expiration of two years, transportation to Van Diemen's Land, as hitherto carried on, should be resumed. Certainly these words seemed to him very carefully to exclude the notion for a promise for the future; and the letter in which they occured was laid before Parliament, and transmitted to the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land as an authentic explanation of the views of the Government. What he (Earl Grey) com-
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plained of was, that isolated passages were taken apart from the context; and their Lordships would see from what followed, and from the whole letter, that it formed an essential part of the system of punishment then proposed to be adopted, that ultimately convicts were to be removed from this country to the colonies, and, amongst other colonies, to Van Diemen's Land, though it is true it was then intended they should go as exiles, and not under coercion. The Government were most desirous that of these persons a few only should be sent to Van Diemen's Land; but that they should go to any other country that was willing to receive them. But this it had been found practically impossible to accomplish; and this reminded him how greatly the noble Lord was in error when he said that Government might do what they pleased in the matter, as so few persons took any interest in it that Parliament did not interfere. Why, if there were one subject more than another in which the Executive Government carried out the views of Parliament, and was controlled and overruled in the measures it proposed, it was this very subject of transportation; and the very change of plan now adverted to was an instance of the kind. Their Lordships might remember that when the plans of Her Majesty's Government were made known in 1847, much objection to them was expressed in both Houses of Parliament, and a Committee of that House had been appointed, which, after a full inquiry, reported strongly against the discontinuance of transportation as a punishment. Shortly afterwards representations came from the colonies that convicts ought not to go there as exiles, but rather under some species of modified control. Difficulties also arose in sending them, as had been intended originally by the Government, to as many different colonies as possible, and not in the character of convicts. As to this difficulty the House might remember an amusing speech made by a noble and learned Lord, who was now abroad (Lord Brougham) in which he described the manner in which a convict who attempted to go to the United States would be "nosed out," and rejected from the company of free emigrants. There had recently been an illustration of this fact. In Bermuda it had been the practice to give the convict a free pardon after a certain time if he behaved well, upon condition that he should leave the country; he might go where he pleased,

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but he must not remain in Bermuda. Some of these men lately worked their passage in a ship to America; but on arriving at Boston or New York they found themselves met by a law that any shipowner taking men to that country who could be proved to have been under punishment as convicts should be subjected to a very heavy fine, unless he took them back again. These men were brought back to Bermuda, and a claim had even been preferred to have their passage paid. Though he agreed, then, with the noble Lord to a great extent that it would be most desirable to disperse these men, and to send them all over the world, so as to get rid as far as possible of their convict character, yet that had been impracticable for two reasons: first, because Parliament did not approve of it; and, secondly, because neither in the United States, nor in our own Colonies, nor elsewhere, would they be received. Then the question arose what were they to do? It was obvious that it was the duty of Her Majesty's Government to defer to the wishes of Parliament, and continue to remove convicts to the only colonies which wore open for their reception; hence the necessity, which he greatly regretted, of sending of late so many to Van Diemen's Land; but his firm belief was that this difficulty was only of a temporary character, and that in a very few years, if we were as careful as we ought to be in improving penal discipline at home, we should have those very Australian Colonies, which were now so averse to receiving convicts, contending with each other which should have the great advantage of possessing them. The opinion of the colonists themselves had not been very consistent or settled upon the subject. Some of the principal names which were now appended to the petition which the noble Lord presented had been also signed to a petition presented to Parliament in 1839, when the discontinuance of transportation was proposed, stating that it would be the ruin of Van Diemen's Laud. Nor was that all. He had received lately from a gentleman in Moreton Bay copies of newspapers of a very recent date, from which he found that there had been a great public meeting held there at which an almost unanimous opinion was expressed upon the part of the "squatters," as they were called, or great sheep farmers of that country, in favour of the resumption of transportation; and they were going to petition Her Majesty to divide the co-
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lony, that they might again have the advantage of those labourers; and it was most remarkable that one of the gentlemen who took part in the proceedings of the meeting declared, that, having formerly been opposed to the settlement of convicts, his views had been altered by the very good conduct of the men recently sent with tickets of leave to that part of New South Wales, after having gone through the system of penal discipline now established. He had within the last few days been shown a most interesting private letter from Western Australia, describing the manner in which the commencement of the experiment of removing convicts to that colony had succeeded. In the first place, upon the material interests of the colony it had produced a most extraordinary effect. Western Australia, owing to the errors of the system on which it had been founded, had being going down, year after year, and had arrived at last at so low a state of depression that the writer of the letter referred to stated that he believed that in another year, had it not been for the arrival of the convicts, the colony would have been altogether abandoned. Instead of that being the case now, however, he was told that the barren sand at Free-mantle—the water frontage—was actually selling at the rate of one guinea per foot to persons who were going to take advantage of the supply of convict labour which had been brought there by the system of transportation. Those men upon their arrival had excited the astonishment of the colonists by their correct behaviour. They had been sent out to pass a very short period of punishment under the Government, and then they were to obtain tickets of leave, and he understood that those who had obtained tickets of leave had conducted themselves in the most satisfactory manner. He believed that this system would give important new outlets for convicts from this country, and that it would also have the effect of establishing in a very few years a thriving and flourishing community in a place singularly favoured by nature, but which from the want of labour and other disadvantages was in an exceedingly languishing state. The report which he hoped soon to lay upon the table of the House would show the progress of this measure; and he was sure that their Lordships would not read that report without the greatest satisfaction. While he stated these reasons in favour of the course that had been taken by the Government, he

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was bound to add that he did deeply lament the necessity which had been imposed upon them of sending so large a number of convicts to Van Diemen's Land. He felt that the success of the policy determined upon did in a great degree depend upon the dispersion of the convicts as widely as possible; and he greatly lamented that, under what he thought a misconception as to their own true interests, the other Australian Colonies had compelled the Government to send a larger proportion than was desirable to Van Diemen's Land. At the same time, there were no measures which it was in the power of the Government to adopt that had been neglected, with the view of reducing, as far as possible, the number sent to Van Diemen's Land, and of making the sending even of that number as little injurious as possible to the colony. He was happy to inform the House, that in the next six months the number to be sent out would not, he hoped, exceed half those sent out in the last six months of 1850; and if the progress in Western Australia should be as favourable as he anticipated, he believed that there would be an increasing field in that very extensive colony for the employment of a large number of convicts. Measures had also been adopted at a very considerable expense to the country (which in this case he thought they were bound not to judge), which he had already had occasion to explain, calculated, as he believed, to counteract the evils which might otherwise, arise from sending convicts to the colonies which received them. At the same time he was bound to express his strong opinion that Van Diemen's Land had no right to expect that sending convicts thither should be discontinued until it could be done without serious inconvenience to the mother country; for, let their Lordships consider the state of the case. Van Diemen's Land was a colony which owed its creation to the penal system. With its inferiority in many respects to Port Phillip and the adjoining territories, the much greater expense of clearing land, and other difficulties in the way, it could never have made any considerable progress for many years to come but for the convict system. It had been the establishment of the convict system which had created the whole wealth and material prosperity which now existed in the colony. Van Diemen's Land possessed what scarcely any other colony possessed—roads equal to the roads in this country. He need not tell them that facility of com-
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munication was, perhaps, of all the instruments of civilisation the most powerful. It possessed, also, advantages in the supply of skilled labour, of which, in the great building that ornamented Hyde Park, their Lordships might see the proof, for, considering its population, it made a better show in that Exhibition than any other colony that we possessed. Some of the specimens of work in wood from Van Diemen's Land reflected the greatest possible credit on so young a community. He believed that that colony was likely to make very great progress; but, having had all the advantages of the penal system, the inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land were not entitled to turn round upon the mother country and say, "This system shall be discontinued precisely at the moment that shall suit us, without any reference to your convenience." That appeared to be a pretension upon the part of Van Diemen's Land which was utterly unwarrantable; for while it was the duty of the Government and of Parliament to consult the interests and advantages of Van Diemen's Land as far as possible, at the same time it was only justice to the people of this country that their interests also should not be lost sight of.
The BISHOP OF SALISBURYsaid, his object in rising was to answer the question of the noble Earl the Secretary for the Colonies, who had asked whether any of their Lordships had had an opportunity of visiting the convict establishment in the isle of Portland. He (the Bishop of Salisbury) had been there, and he was happy to give his testimony in accordance with that which the most rev. Prelate (the Archbishop of Dublin) had given with respect to the prison establishment in Ireland, in which it was intended, in like manner as at Portland, to carry on the second part of that reformatory process of which the first part was intended to be effected at Pentonville, and other prisons of that kind. At the time that he visited the establishment at Portland there were about 800 men there, many of whom had been guilty of very grave offences, and it was impossible to see them engaged as they were in works of industry without being led to hope for their future reformation, which everything in that establishment seemed calculated to foster and promote. At the time of his visit they were returning from their outdoor labour, in excellent order, with cheerful countenances, and with a general appearance which

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showed that proper care was taken of their bodily condition. He saw them at their evening meal, and enjoyed the pleasure of being present at their evening devotions, at which, at the request of the chaplain, he addressed to them some words of exhortation. Their demeanour was that of a well-behaved Christian congregation, and such that he could not but hope they were in some measure sensible of the improving influences under which they had been placed. Nevertheless, he should belie his own convictions if he were to say that he himself entertained any very sanguine hopes of a general reformation of criminals of mature years. He believed that their permanent improvement would always be comparatively slight—it was upon young and tender minds that they might expect to operate with the greatest success; but if a blessed change should take place only to a comparatively small extent, he thought they ought to be thankful for it, and consider all the pains by which it had been brought about well bestowed. The great danger attaching to the establishment at Portland appeared to him to be that (unless, indeed, care was taken to make the convicts first pass through a severe discipline at Pentonville) it was not sufficiently penal to act as a terror to the evil-doer. And this, no doubt, was a great difficulty; for it was hard to combine such treatment as would make the prison a real punishment, with the means best calculated to bring about a reformation of the criminal; for he thought that gentle means were best adapted for working a Christian reformation in a criminal, by calling forth a feeling of hope and of resignation to his situation. He had no doubt that the plan on which the Government were now acting on the subject of secondary punishment would meet with much opposition, on account of the strong feeling which had been excited in the Colonies on the subject of transportation; and there were undoubtedly evils connected with it; but their Lordships should remember that the whole condition of humanity lay in the choice of evils. He thought, therefore, that the noble Lord, who had dwelt so strongly on the evils of the present system, was bound to point out a remedy by which the difficulties that had been experienced could be more satisfactorily dealt with. To point out the former was comparatively an easy task; but the latter was one surrounded by many and great difficulties.
The BISHOP of OXFORDwished to say a few words upon that very important and difficult subject, which was one that had for a long time greatly interested him, and upon which he had been permitted on a former occasion to address their Lordships. He, for one, felt great gratitude to the noble Earl, and to those who acted with him, for the great exertions they had used in dealing with this difficulty. Four or five years ago, he (the Bishop of Oxford) took the liberty of pressing upon their Lordships, in the then state of the question, the importance of making the punitive part of convict treatment take place, as far as possible, at home, rather than administering it abroad. He thanked the noble Earl for having, to a considerable degree, carried out that suggestion, and for having made the strict and severe part of the punishment be felt at home rather than in the Colonies. But much of what the noble Earl had said to-night had given him (the Bishop of Oxford) the deepest pain, because he seemed to have drawn back from the high view of this question he had taken formerly, until he had been led to shut his eyes to the great and prominent objections to the present system, and to look only at the minor objections, and then, smoothing down those minor objections, to end at length by giving the support of his name, and of his strong sense, to a system the evils of which he had so long condemned. The great and prominent evil of the system of transportation so conducted as to found by it penal colonies, was, that it violated the greatest responsibility which a civilised nation could have entrusted to it—that of planting the earth. For it adopted the plan, wicked and corrupt to the very core, of founding colonies with the basest portion of mankind. No advantage to the material wealth of a new settlement could possibly justify the mother country in shutting her eyes to the enormity of this evil, which fostered temptation, nor could she ever be justified in tempting a colony, by affording it such aid, to be its own future destroyer. The noble Earl had quoted an instance of a meeting in one of the great Australasian colonies, at which it was stated that by the help of transported convicts the material wealth of the colony had been increased. But that feeling was not peculiar to the colony alluded to; it had been the characteristic of the Australian colonies from the beginning; and there was a time when those colonies were ready to contest with one an-

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other for the first shipload of the spoils of our gaols, and when they actually scrambled for convicts. And why? Because the strong temptation of having the command of immediate labour had made them willing to barter the future evil of moral pollution and degradation of their country for the advantage of present gain. We gave way to their wishes; and what was the result? As soon as their gains were obtained, their roads formed, and, at the same time, the stigma of moral degradation stamped upon the colony, the colonists began to cry out, because they began to perceive that there was an evil greater than could be atoned for by the acquisition of material wealth. And so it would be again. If we founded colonies in which the convict element was strong enough to colour the whole tone of society, and then ministered to the vicious desire of the colonists for convict labour, the result would be the same, because it was not the result of accident, but proceeded upon the deep unchanging necessities of man and of his nature. The noble Earl stated that convicts of good character would be selected to go out to the Colonies, and that they would be sent to places where they could maintain their good character. But no one had better depicted the mischief of sending such convicts to places where they would meet old companions, and be certain to be drawn back into evil habits, than the noble Earl himself. The main mischief of the proposed system was this—if the convict was useful to his master, his master winked at any kind of evil on the part of the convict, as it was convenient to keep him. Therefore, if a convict were sent out with a good character, it was not his good character that would serve him, but his faculty of making himself of use to his master. That would be his real and his only recommendation. The noble Earl said, that Van Diemen's Land had been the creation of the penal system—that it derived its present material prosperity from the penal system—and that, therefore, the inhabitants had now no right to protest against the introduction of convict labour without reference to the interests of the mother country. Now, if it had been right in the mother country originally to found colonies which consisted in their main element of convicts, the noble Earl's argument would have been perfect; but what he (the Bishop of Oxford) complained of was, that the noble Earl left out
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of sight the great principle that to create penal colonies was a great sin in an enlightened country. And therefore, when a colony appealed to us, and said—"I have at length learned that by deluging me with the worst of your population you are making me degraded—no longer inflict this evil upon me," then, he said, the noble Earl's argument did not apply in the least, for the colony had a perfect right in that case to turn round and say, "You have committed this evil too long, and now I beseech you to commit the evil no longer." To plant colonies composed of the worst men in the community was to set a seed of evil in the earth, which no great nation could be justified in sowing. Be the difficulties what they might in the way of a remedy for the evils of the present system, they must be faced and overcome, and England, once enlightened to what she had been doing, must no longer be led on to perpetrate the wrong.
LORD MONTEAGLEalways listened with interest and pleasure to the right rev. Prelate, not only on account of the great name he bore, but because his remarks were always characterised by eloquence and ability. But though he had heard with his usual satisfaction the speech of the right rev. Prelate, he could not entirely agree with all the propositions which he had advanced. If, indeed, all the evils depicted by the right rev. Prelate as resulting from the existing convict system were matters of fact, he should almost despair of society itself. He could not bring himself to believe that what he believed to be made inevitable rather than merely necessary, could be stigmatized as sinful. He would not condescend to argue the question of transportation on so low a ground as that of the increase of material wealth; but he thought they ought not to regard it with sole reference to the Colonies, but in relation to the whole empire, of which the Colonies were a part. Viewed in that light, then, he was prepared to establish upon the reason of the case, as well as upon experience, that transportation when properly conducted was a benefit to the empire at large, to the convicts, and to the Colonies themselves. The right rev. Prelate, in considering the case of a convict, after the expiration of his sentence, had entirely forgotten the distinction which was to be drawn between a country where the labour market was overloaded, and one which was ready to absorb labour to any

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extent. If transportation were discontinued, what system of secondary punishments would they adopt? They must rely on the imprisonment in Portland and similar establishments—which would then require to be multiplied to an indefinite extent—or else they must provide employment elsewhere for every one of the prisoners whose term of sentence should have expired. Now, the former of these alternatives he supposed was impracticable, and therefore entirely out of the question; and as for the latter he would only ask if any of their Lordships knew a neighbourhood where these extremely well-reformed convicts would find a farmer that would take them into his house? There would always be a suspicion of crime attaching to them, and that undoubtedly led to a very grievous result. It was true that the convicts might probably meet their evil companions in a convict settlement; but at home that probability was changed into a certainty. The machinery by which stolen goods might be disposed of was at hand; that by which juvenile offenders might fall into the clutches of the Fagins—those "funny old gentlemen," as they have been described—who were always ready to turn their attention to their young friends as often as the term of their imprisonment should end, was at hand likewise; and both rendered it extremely unlikely that the unfortunate released prisoners should escape from temptation. In the colonies, however, the circumstances were widely different. Here the labour market was over-supplied by honest workmen; but abroad, labour was sought for with avidity, and hence nothing was more common than to find the sons of convicts—aye, and sometimes the convicts themselves—rising to a high degree of respectability and moral conduct. He knew the case of a man of whom both the clergy and the magistracy spoke in the most flattering terms, and who had filled respectable offices with credit and respect, who had been transported not many years ago. Nothing could in truth be more different than the present system of qualified freedom and the old plan of assignment. The convict used formerly to be assigned to a kind of domestic slavery; but now he was a free labourer, and that, he apprehended, made a very wide distinction. With regard to the prospects of the penal colonies, and more especially of Van Diemen's Land, he admitted that there were many difficulties in the way; but we had brought them all on ourselves by our own recklessness and sel-
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fishness. We had neglected the convict, we had disregarded the colonist. We had sought our own interests only, and we are punished, and deservedly. Nevertheless, he maintained that the country had no other alternative; and in proof of his assertion he referred to the astonishing and interesting monument of skill and industry contained in the building recently opened in Hydepark. Did they think that if they had turned loose upon society 30,000 convicts, even as carefully reformed and trained as they were twenty-five years ago, when the chaplain of the hulks stated regularly in his yearly report to the House of Commons as a moral test of progress, the number of convicts who had learned to repeat the Thirty-nine Articles—did they think it would have been possible to witness the spectacle of calm order at the opening of the Crystal Palace, when there were assembled 500,000 spectators, if they had included 30,000 forçats? In fact, it would be impossible to carry on the Government of England unless the Executive authorities retained the power of expatriation. This was no justification, however, for our present vicious system. The condition of Van Diemen's Land, left as the exclusive receptacle of all our convict population, was not to be defended. It was a crime, and it had led to a spirit of resistance that was inevitable. The excitement produced in the Colonies had been very great—as great, perhaps, as that produced at home by Catholic Emancipation, Reform, or even Papal Aggression; and it had been produced chiefly by the despatches of Lord Grey, the letter of Sir George Grey, and the speech of Sir William Denison, who had been acting under the supposition that they had the means of abolishing transportation. The result, however, had been to produce in the minds of the colonists a feeling that it was degrading to receive convicts, and hence the agitation which had taken place. The fearful events at the Cape, the successful results of a resistance amounting to insurrection, had increased all this mischief; and the whole was exaggerated by the over-coloured picture of the social condition of New South Wales. From evidence of the best possible character—he spoke of the Bishop and of the late Governor of Sydney—that colony would stand a competition with any other colony with regard to moral character. It began with convicts, it is true, and h ad every disadvantage to struggle against that Van Diemen's Land had to complain

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of; and yet, from the vigour and expansive force of the British character, the people of Sydney had cast off that state of degradation, and could now stand in competition in moral character with any other colony. The noble Lord concluded by asking if it was intended to resume the hulk system?
The DUKE of ARGYLLexpressed his satisfaction at the argument with which the noble Lord who had just sat down commenced his speech. He could not quite agree with the right rev. Prelate in the very strong and extreme ground which he took, that we had no right to export our criminals at all. But although he could not agree with the right rev. Prelate, he disagreed still more with the noble Lord, when he stated that the system of transportation was inevitable, and because inevitable that it must be right. In the first place, that was a false argument; and, in the second place, it was not true that transportation was inevitable. The arguments of the noble Lord—he did not mean in a personal or invidious sense—were of a selfish kind. They related to the inconvenience, he would rather say the moral evils, which we should suffer by keeping the convicts in this country. We could keep these convicts at home if we chose. He contended that it was on a balance of the convenience and inconvenience which must result to us and to the Colonies, that they must decide this question. He considered that the objections to sending the convicts to the Colonies, notwithstanding any reformatory discipline to which they might be subject, were some of them as strong almost as the objections to keeping them at home. He was not himself so thoroughly convinced of the high moral state of these Colonies. He happened to be intimately acquainted with a rev. gentleman, Mr. Lilly, the Presbyterian clergyman of St. Andrews, Hobart Town, who a few years ago wrote to him, stating that he was on the point of leaving that colony on account of its immoral character. The arguments in favour of transportation began with stating the conveniences to the mother country, and then went to the advantages it conferred upon the colony. The colonists themselves, however, were the best judges of the advantages to them; and, except where they could not otherwise procure labour, they had unanimously repudiated it; and in all those colonies where they had strength enough to resist it, Government dare not attempt to follow it up. The consequence was, they would soon be
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able only to send convicts to those colonies who could not resist their arbitrary power. The Cape was a case in point. As transportation thither was only for a temporary purpose, he thought Government ought to have carried it out with a high hand, and have supported it even by military force if necessary. At the same time he admitted there were strong objections to it; and as the Colonies rose in power and influence, we should be unable to continue the system.
The BISHOP of OXFORDexplained that the whole of his argument was based on the idea of a given colony to which their convicts were to be transported in such numbers as that they formed the greatest portion of the people. When he described the system of transportation as a wicked system, he was quoting from Lord Bacon, who said "that it was a wicked thing to plant the earth with the basest of mankind."
LORD WODEHOUSEsaid, according to the last returns, the state of Van Diemen's Land was this—there were 70,000 persons altogether, of whom nearly 23,000 were actually convicts, besides emancipatists and expirees. It was to that state of things that the objection applied. He hoped that Government would consider the state of feeling in Van Diemen's Land, and the state of feeling which was growing up in our Australian Colonies, and that they would take measures to put an end to the system.
EARL GREYsaid, his noble Friend (Lord Monteagle) asked whether the system of hulks was to be resumed. It had never been discontinued. He wished it was possible, as a floating prison was necessarily a bad one; but they could not create a substitute for the hulks in a day. They had hitherto had them at the dockyards and at Bermuda, but they wished to got rid of them as fast as they could. There was a very large prison in the course of erection in Bermuda, to which the convicts would be transferred as soon as it was completed. In this country the associate labour which he had described as the secondary punishment would always be performed by convicts; but until the prisons were prepared, it was absolutely necessary to continue the hulks. No prisoners now went straight to the hulks. All prisoners who were able to undergo punitive treatment were made to undergo it for a shorter or a longer time; then they went to the associate labour which he had described. The noble Duke stated that the accounts

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he received from Van Diemen's Land five or six years ago were most distressing. He entirely agreed with him, and that state was a proof that Parliament should not interfere. The evils in Van Diemen's Land mainly arose from the Address in the House of Commons not to send convicts to Australia; and then convicts were sent in immense numbers to Van Diemen's Land, without proper arrangements being made. He must still repeat the opinion he had before expressed that this was a question of comparison, of comparative amount of moral evil which would be created by one system or another. He was firmly persuaded that the system now in operation was that which led to the least evils, because they knew that in the Colonies the great majority of those who were sent out as convicts, though they might not be improved in heart, were, at all events, improved in conduct; and a very large proportion of these men were now, instead of resorting to dishonest practices, honestly earning their subsistence.
Petitions ordered to lie on the table.
House adjourned to Monday next.