4 JULY 1868, Page 2

The Lord Chancellor sent the House to sleep,—we mean in

a literal sense—by an immensely long discourse of the special-pleader kind. One of his points, for instance, was that the Church was wrongly described in the Suspensory Bill, as the "Church of Ireland," whereas the only Church recognizable in Parliamentary language was the "United Church of England and Ireland ;" and another, that if the creed of the Crown was a local question, Ireland might ask that the Crown should be Catholic. About half the speech was an attack upon the clauses of the Suspensory Bill, in which Lord Cairns picked a great many holes,—as he could in any Bill ever written—and the other half a furious answer to Lord Carnarvon, whom he accused of believing, ever since he resigned office, that virtue and honour had retired from the Cabinet into private life. His Lordship also denied that the Government intended to destroy the West Indian Church, and descended to an argument of which an Old Bailey attorney would be ashamed. It was proposed, he said, to withdraw the State grant, and permit the local legislatures

to renew it for themselves. The whole change was "a transfer of charge from the British to the Colonial Exchequer." Just so, but as the Colonial legislatures have not announced the slightest inten- tion of taking up the burden, and as the Government knew that, and as Lord Cairns must know that they knew it, his argument is very like a shuffle.