23 MAY 1846, Page 1

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

THE battle of Free Trade is at length fairly carried from the House of Commons to the House of Lords ; where the Protec- tionists have taken their stand. They have done so with a more complete array of their forces, though not under the most favour- able auspices. Their-last combat in the Lower House was not waged with credit. To be consistent, they should have stood their ground, and contested it inch by inch ; but in place of a great closing fight, they laid down their arms, and suffered the third reading o the Customs Bill to be affirmed without a divi- sion. If their object was to avoid an overwhelming exposure in the division-list, they should have bethought them of that discretion sooner. As it is, they have sent up the bill to the Peers, with the tacit admission that further dispute was hopeless. The Lords are their last hope ; and, taught by ill success in the Commons, they have used strenuous endeavours to organize their guard ; so that they appear more distinctly as a separate political party, with leader and officers. Lord Stanley is understood to be the leader, though he has not yet stepped forward. Whether he really has consented to take the lead, and, if he did, what course he would adopt, are still matters of conjecture. Meanwhile, the Duke of Richmond has tilled the gap as leader ad interim. When the Corn Bill was introduced on bresiday, and again when the Customs Bill was introduced on Tuesday,-he vehemently assailed both them and their author ; pouring forth personal invectives on the absent Premier. If the Duke wanted a responsible Minister to assail, one Was before him, in the person of the Duke of Wellington. Was he:afraid of one of the Iron Duke's downright speeches in reply, or of the effect which it might have before the country if the party were seen in direct opposition to the Great Captain? In either case, his choice of an object for attack was more discreet than generous. The Duke of Richmond offered some defence, indeed, by say- ing, that he addressed himself at once to the personalities, in order to get rid of them early in the debate, so that the main subject might be discussed without them. A good idea! It would greatly have relieved the debates in the Commons. An improve- ment on it would be, to relieve all subjects of those disfigure- ments, which, however necessary to the practice of Parliament, are not only irrelevant but very detrimental in discussions of im- portance and real interest. Not a bad way of commencing the change might be, to set apart one night in the week for person- alities. On such a night should it be lawful for Members, as Mr. Bankes did, publicly to repeat private conversations ; to attack absent people out of doors, as Mr. Bankes attacked the Reverend Sidney Godolphin Osborne—setting the clergyman's Bishop at him, because he writes letters inconveniently exposing the wretched state of the poor in Mr. Bankes's neighbourhood; to twit their fellow legislators, as Colonel Sibthorp twitted Dr. Bowring, with drinking champagne and having received remu- neration and reimbursement of expenses as a public Commis- sioner ; or for idle Members to fire off flashy speeches long pre- pared, in order to harrass overworked statesmen against whom the idle Members aforesaid have a private grudge, just as Mr. Disraeli fired off his great speech of Friday last. On such a night, of course, the House would be very full ; for never is greater delight shown than in listening to these personal scur- rilities : the House always cheers forward the bravoes of de- bate, on whatever side, just as the Romans cheered on the gladiators, or Spaniards, the bull-fighters. At the last agony of the long struggle for the Corn Bill, the Liberal leader, Lord John Russell, was among the active abettors, compli- menting Mr. Disraeli for his tirade, and jocundly saying of himself that he was " only a spectator "—one of the surround- ing ring ! Perhaps if the unseemly stuff were all brought together on one night, Parliament would begin to grow ashamed of its tastes, and might carry the improvement out by quite get- ting rid of the personalities. Such a notion, however, is as yet evidently in advance of Richmond and his times.

With the Duke of Richmond's declaration of war, the two mea- sures, the Corn Bill and the Customs Bill, stand over for discus- sion in the Lords till next week.

Meanwhile, rather a curious move has been made by one of the Protectionist party in the Commons. Mr. Milner Gibson and other Free-traders have often endeavoured to establish a system of yearly statistical returns to show the state of agriculture : this week, Mr. Stafford O'Brien is urging the same demand. Very, good : let the Protectionists go ingenuously to school, and they will soon discover that their fears of free trade were baseless. A. beginning, it appears, hits been made by Ministers in procuring such returns ; but they are as yet most imperfect.

A new branch of the Short-time question has been before the House of Commons, in the shape of a bill propounded by Mr. Thomas Duncombe, to restrict the daily duration of labour in the lace manufacture. On the face of it the proposal was a modest one—namely, to restrict the working of lace-factories to sixteen hours a day ; for, it seems, at present the poor wretches—women and children and all—work for longer times ; and in other re-. spects their condition is most miserable. But the trade is a precarious one ; it can scarcely bear up against foreign com- petition; and any restraint upon it might seriously injure if not destroy it : so that the effort to relieve the poor creatures from over-work might simply hand them over to starvation. Besides, a great portion of the manufacture is carried on in sepa- rate families at their homes, or in very small factories attached to the dwellings ; so that, to enforce the provisions of the bill, it Would be necessary to employ a system_of domiciliary visits and to encourage informers. Altogether, the bill seems unworkable ; and its defeat was inevitable. The evils incident to our system of industry are not to be counteracted in that way, by separate re- medies applied to separate symptoms. Something is wrong at the bottom: but, without going into profound speculations on the structure of industrial society, the most obvious and ready remedy is, to put in action such measures as tend generally to better the condition of the whole people—to make them easier in circum- stances, less dependent on the receipts of the moment however paltry ; and such as help to educate them, to make them know their own interests, and teach them how to act on broader prin- ciples. Another bill rejected has been the measure so long pending in the House of Lords to reform the administration a Charitable Trusts. The object of the bill, introduced by the Lord Chan- cellor, was to establish a body at once a board for the control of such trusts and a court to decide questions of litigation concern- ing them. The measure was indeed open to very grave objec- tions. A strong resistance had been made to it out of doors ; and among its opponents were two very influential classes—Mu- nicipal Corporations, including the City of London, and country lawyers. Lord Lyndhurst well knew what he ad to face : to save part of his bill, he voluntarily sacrificed the rest—a most important portion—and altered it so as to exempt from its opera- tion the great City Companies and other powerful incorporations. In some of those incorporations the most excessive abuses had' existed ; and thus, by its exemptions, the bill positively extended a virtual sanction to abuse ! And while professing to abolish one sort of abuse, say its opponents, it would have established another, in the shape of excessive patronage to be placed at the disposal of the Lord Chancellor. The new patronage was, said Lord Cottenham, superfluous ; for all that was needed could be done by the Court of Chancery, so renovated as to be fitted for its legitimate duties. This assertion must appear incredible to the lay sceptic in the perfectibility. of Chancery. There are in Eng- land multitudes—thousands of charities, so small that their an- nual funds range from 1/. to 20/. ; of course, in order to adminis- ter those charities in such a way as not to eat up the whole fund with the expenses of -management, it would be desirable to have some controlling body at once possessing full dignity and author- ity, yet cheap in its process. Is it possible that the Court of Chan- cery can be rendered cheap ? Incredible. Is it not true, that among its functions is the investigation of obscure and intricate questions; involving the largest values of property, the most momentous interests, and requiring for thorough search, even with the greatest diligence, weeks and months of time I If so, must not the Court require an official staff and a numerous bar of the highest order, and ample funds in the suitors' hands to pay for those great abilities? It seems clearly impossible to convert the Court into that ubiquitous, cheap, accessible, handy board, as much ministerial as judicial, which is needed for the administra-

ticks of charitable trusts. Towards the establishment of such a board, with all its faults, Lord Lyndhurst's bill seemed to be a step. His careless treatment of hia.own measure caused its loss. But that was not truly ties Gossembent Aeseat " svkisk some have affected to consider fit: Tory csaservatsati of "vested inte- rests" joined with Liberal objective Sr shortcomings of the bill in frustrating the measure.

Another division has been twisted into a " virtual " defeat— the even vote on Mr. Christie's motion for inquiry into the Mid- port election; turned against the motion solely by the casting- vote of the quasi-Ministerial Speaker. There was nothing ap- proaching to Ministerial defeat. The seat is contested by a Whig, now sitting, and a Young Englander; the question was entirely one of privilege and election law ; and if some voted on party

i views, it is all but certain that many, the Speaker among them, voted upon the merits of the case, as one concerning, not Minis- ters, but the House.