The Lords have agreed to a new Committee on the
absurd Ecclesiastical Titles' Act, passed in 1852, and never yet put in force. The idea seems to be that that Act is a sort of protest against the right of the Pope to interfere with English territorial titles,—and it seems to be asserted that if the Emperor of the French had affected to make a Duke of Hampshire (say), we should have been obliged to pass some such inoperative law to protest against his right to do so. We, for our parts, don't see it at all. The way to make a foreign potentate feel that he has power in England is to undertake abortive legislation for the sake of recording a protest. Why not simply ignore the titles as legal titles altogether, but accord them, as in fact we do, the descriptive value which alone the Pope wishes to claim for them ?
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