4 DECEMBER 1841, Page 16

DEBATES OT THE UNREPORTED HOUSE OF COMMONS.

THE Parliament which met in May 1768 and was dissolved in June 1774 has been called the Unreported Parliament ; the standing order for the exclusion of strangers having been enforced so strictly that very few of the speeches have reached the public. Yet during this period many events occurred and subjects were discussed of a deeply important or highly curious nature. By the Unreported Parliament the foundations of the American War were laid ; it had to deal with the earlier arrangements of the East India Company's affairs, and was the scene of the first home triumphs and subsequent persecution of Cure; its opening was preceded and attended by London riots, ending in the "Wilkes and Liberty" mobs ; the three expulsions of WILKES himself, and the different topics which the Letters of Jesting have made familiar to political readers, were continually debated, even to the exclusion of regular affairs ; the great strtiggle for the power of reporting and publishing the debates took place during this House of Commons, though the effects were not produced till the next election; and there were in lesser but more practical matters, Mr. GRENVILLE'S Act for trying disputed Elections, and the bill by which the claim of the Crown upon the property of the subject was limited.

Seventy years after tbe event, this blank in our Parliamentary history is to be filled up, through the indefatigable zeal and in- dustry of a contemporary, and the enterprise of Mr. WRIGHT. Mr. HENRY CAVENDISH (afterwards Sir HENRY) sat during the whole of this Parliament for the borough of Lostwithiel; and, with a feeling which in these days of mechanical reporting cannot be comprehended, though in his own time the practice on a smaller scale was not uncommon, determined to report the proceedings, from " a desire," says Mr. WRIGHT, " to possess a faithful account of them." His mode of proceeding has been told by himself- . My original design," says Sir Henry, a was to take down the heads only of the several speeches; but finding, by practice, even my inferior skill ade- quate to something rather more extensive, in the subsequent sessions of this Parliament the debates will be found more at large, except in the case of a few Members whose rapid delivery outran my ability to keep up with them. I am conscious of the many imperfections that will be found in them ; some most certainly from inability ; some from my peculiar and inconvenient situation at the time of writing them ; and some, I am sorry to say, from the disorder that now and then used to prevail in the House, where sometimes Members, from an eagerness to hear others or themselves, made so much noise as to drown the voice of the person speaking ; sometimes premature applause for a former part of a sentence prevented the House from hearing the latter ; and sometimes those favourite words ' Hear, hear I ' so frequently echoed through the House, forbade all hearing. Many gaps,'many broken sentences, will be found ; but even many of the broken sentences will, I believe, not be altogether useless. Several speeches of the most able Members are very imperfect; many sublime and beautiful passages are lost, I fear, for ever : the only comfort I have is, that I believe I have preserved more than the memory of any individual has. I have not in the smallest degree, certainly not wilfully, altered or mis- represented the sentiments of any one Member." This stupendous monument of attentive and punctual industry is to be comprised in four volumes ; of which only one is completed. That one contains the debates of three sessions ; and the leading subjects debated are the Riots and WILKES'S business, together with the Ministerial conduct in connexion with them ; the affairs of America at length, and of India superficially ; the Civil List Debts, which that model Monarch GEORGE the Third was always con- tracting; the Grenville Act, and Limitation Bill, with various routine business. The principal speakers are Lord NORTH, Colonel BARRE, Mr. GRENVILLE, Alderman BECKFORD, Mr. DOWDESWELL the friend of BURKE, the "blushing" RIGBY of Jumus, a single speech of CLrve's, and a good many of BURKE'S—the entire col- lection contains upwards of "two hundred and fifty of his speeches which have never seen the light."

As regards the reports, we have scarcely yet the means of judg- ing, having only one-fourth of the work before us. So far as they go,- however, they confirm the description of the author; the com- mencement containing little more than the "heads" of the speech, and becoming ampler as practice imparted skill. The allusion of Sir HENRY CAVENDISH to the Sublime and Beautiful of BURKE is also indicative of the truth. BURKE seems the worst- reported of any ; not from less pains or less length being bestowed upon him, but from the difficulty of doing him justice. Here -and there is a pregnant sentence, whose weight impressed itself on the memory ; but the bulk of his speeches are somewhat indigesta; wearing indeed the impress of his genius, but of the more singular parts of his genius, such as in manners a mimic would seize upon— the domination of imagination over logic, without that fulness'and cohesion which in his own works give consistency and often carry conviction though the rigorous connexion between the premises and conclusion should not be made out. This defect may perhaps be less visible in the ensuing volumes.

Of the other speakers, Lord Now= is longo internallo the most pleasant and flowing—the beau ideal of a managing Minis- ter, who, whilst excusing or protecting his own people, does it with as little offence as may be to anybody else, and is never other than suasive. His orations, however, have this peculiar property, that they leave scarcely any impression behind them : unless his words were connected with some action which gave them permanence, it must have been difficult to quote him against himself. BARRE is keen in his invective, and supports the character given him for sarcasm by a master of the art ;* but his speeches, though powerful and telling, are rather made so by the skilful and condensed manner in which be presents the prejudices of the day, or the constitutional axioms of a "truly British" kind, than from any justness of view or of argument. Alderman BECKFORD is spirited and bold—the type of the sturdy burgher—especially in his avowal and defence of the celebrated Remonstrance of the City of London to the King, which his Majesty in his reply had declared "disrespectful to himself, injurious to his Parliament, and irreconcileable to the principles of the constitution," and which the House had been moved to notice. " I was not present," said the Lord Mayor on rising, "when the question was first moved'; but I beg leave in the face of the House to declare, that there was a remonstrance to the King, and that I was the man who presented it. As First Magistrate of the City, I have the power of putting a negative on every question that is offered, either in the Court of Aldermen or the Common Hall : a question was put on the re- monstrance—I thought it a proper one." DOWDESWELL is argus. mentative, and displays great knowledge of business : but he is excelled in both these respects by GRENVILLE, who adds to those qualities a larger view, rising somewhat above party ; and whose speeches, measured in tone and sober in their suggestions, are the most likely to have influenced an unbiassed assembly of sen- sible and practical men. The maiden speech of Ouva, though vitiated by the received economical notions of the age, is almost the only one that wears an air of thorough knowledge of what he is speaking about, and exhibits the certainty and confidence which such knowledge always gives. It is, moreover, remarkable as dis- tinctly tracing out the line of policy that future events might render it necessary for the Company to follow ; one of which, the spoliation of the Mogul, was afterwards a leading article in the im- peachment of HASTINGS; and the other, the reduction of the Nabob's allowance, was charged upon him as a crime. And, what is odder still, this speech and its author were highly praised by BURKE.

• "I will accept of a sarcasm from Colonel Barre, or a simile from Mr Burke."—Junins.

'The Great Mogul—de jure Mogul, de facto nobody at all—it is no dis- credit to the nation it is no dishonour to the Company that we have sup- ported him when nobody else would ; it is no dishonour to the nation that we have put him in possession of 150,00W. a year ; it is no dishonour to the na- tion that we have paid him a tribute of 300,000/. a year, when his own subjects would not pay him a farthing. The Mogul may become hostile to us—in that case there will be no necessity that this tribute should be continued: he may die— in that ease there will be no necessity to give it to another : so that that sum, sooner or later, will fall into the hands of the East India Company. The Nabob—de jure Nabob, de ,facto the East India Company's most humble ser- vant—he and his Ministers have 600,000/. a year : but he likewise may die— the luxury of that country and his gross habit of body make it very possible that he may not live a great while ; and in that case 150,00W. a year is as much as ought to be given." Making allowances for different styles of thinking and the different tests by which questions are at present tried, the general cast of the debates was superior then to what they arc now. Original genius, a mind that forms an independent judgment upon matters submitted to it, and stamps upon its statements a character of its own, must always be rare. The herd of speakers will do little more than reflect the notions of their constituents, castes, and coteries, with occasionally a good remark upon a matter of which they have some practical knowledge, or to which they have given some thought, or upon a point that strikes them forcibly at the moment. It is by judgment and labour, not by genius, that the 'et vroAXot of Parliamentary speakers must be distinguished ; and in this sense our ancestors had greatly the advantage. If a man had little to say, he said little, and that little he took pains to present as well as he could. If more artificial, the age was more polished, and persons spoke habitually with greater care : they fulfilled the maxim "think before you speak " ; and though great boldness was displayed in substance, much attention was paid to appearances— their thoughts were presented in full dress, as it were. Of the whole mass of speeches, it is curious to see how little is other than perfectly plain ; no obscurity, no involution. And though it may be truly said that this is owing to the selection of the reporter, who would not attempt to report what he could not follow, some- thing must be allowed for the absence of reporters. When a man spoke to his audience and not to constituents, he was obliged to become broad and brief enough for the mass of his audience, who would experience none of that conventional sympathy which pow-a-days Induces Parliament to bear with men who are speaking not to them but to voters a long way off. Formerly inferior men do not seem to have been silenced, but short- ened. The present mechanical mode of reporting, which gives many words but loses the spirit and the pith, is not only an evil in itself, but encourages the evil it creates, till the debates bid fair to become useless to the world, and only read by persons who take an interest in particular speeches. The columns of empty verbosity that daily emanate from the press during the session, is not a ques- tion of criticism, but of measurement. The world is overwhelmed by miles of mediocrity. Annexed t9 the debates, are three papers on subjects connected with the Parliaments or the politics of the period. The first is a sketch by Sir Joint CALDwELL (also an amateur reporter' and gifted with a wonderful memory) of several speeches in both Houses of Parliament during the session of 1762, written off in letters to Lord CHATHAM, and rather conveying impressions of the general effect than making an attempt to follow the words. The second paper consists of passages from the political life of Mr. DOWDESWELL, between 1765, when he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer under the firsellocKniorrAm Administration, till his death in 1774. It deals principally with the political intrigues of the period, and contains a good many extracts from correspondence, admitting the reader to glimpses behind the curtain, and exhibiting Lord CHATHAM in a smaller point of view than he has yet been regarded in, as some- what of a manager about places. The third illustration is the most curious of the whole for its subject—extracts from the private journal of JOHN the fourth Duke of Bedford, whom Jumus so mauled in his celebrated letter. It commences in October 1766, and ends in Decem- ber 1770, not long before the journalist's death. From the notes by which it is attended, it is evidently published to remove the sting which is yet rankling in the house of RUSSELL ; but, to any one acquainted with the letter, and capable of analyzing evidence, it will have no such effect. The animus of Jurvins is one thing, the facts on which he grounds his invective another. No one would expect from him that absolute and mere truth which is the province of a judge, any more than they would receive implicitly the charges of a political partisan, like Lord JOHN RUSSELL, or be- lieve the statements of an advocate—BROUGHAM, for example, on the Queen's trial, (though Lord BROUGHAM calls JUNIUS a "- libeller.") The character of HANNIBAL in the Tenth Satire of JUVENAL is not a true one according to the views of the historian or philosopher ; but it is sufficiently true for the object of the satirist. The picture of the Duke of BEDFORD is not true or just in a general view ; but JUNIUS was an avowed political opponent, and it would not be difficult to show from the Duke's own journal that the charges of JuNtus had a substratum of truth, let the friends and flatterers of the house of BEDFORD, from BaouGuArd and MACKINTOSH downwards, strive as they will. Of the authenticity of the papers in this valuable addenda to Parliamentary history, there is evidence of every thing except- ing the Debates. The CALDWELL Reports were communicated by Lord CHATHAM'S executors ; the Memoirs of Mr. DOWDES- WELL by his son : the Journal of the Duke of BEDFORD "came accidentally into the editor's hands," he says ; but let it have reached him how it may, we imagine it came from the archives at Woburn : the history of the CAVENDISH Manuscript is to be told in the fourth volume. We should have thought it the first thing to set about telling; though we have no doubt of its authenticity.