TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD MORPETH'S IRISH REGISTRATION BILL.
OUR anticipation regarding the fate of this bill has proved true to the letter. Ministers are devising excuses for not pushing it through the House, and Lord STANLEY is keeping his own bill hanging over their heads. On the evening on which Lord MOB.- PETH'S bill was to have been committed pro forma, Lord Joint RUSSELL came forward with two discoveries. One was, that fur- ther information is necessary to enable the Legislature to fix the amount of the franchise : the other, " that they had now arrived at the 1st day of March ; that the Estimates had yet to be con- sidered, and the Supplies of the present year were open to con- siderable debate ; that it was impossible to say how long the dis- cussions on going into Committee of Supply and the debate on the Estimates might occupy the time of the House." On these grounds, Lord Jolts proposed to postpone the Committee on the bill till after the Easter holydays—till Friday the 23d April. Lord STANLEY, on the other hand, pointed out the suspicions attaching to such delay ; announced his intention to take the sense of the House upon the two leading principles of the bill as soon as it went into Committee ; and postponed the order of the day for the second reading of his own bill to the 24th of March, promising to give information, ten days previous to that time, whether or not he should press the second reading.
The consequence of all this is very clear. Lord STANLEY'S bill cannot be carried this session. There will not be time to do it if he postpone its second reading till after Lord MORPETH'S has been committed ; and there seems good reason to suspect that the post- ponement till the 24th March, with ten days previous notice, is merely meant to harass the Ministerialists—that the bill will be withdrawn. On the other hand, Ministers seem to-have given up their nominal five-pound franchise. Members were invited to vote for the second reading of the bill on the principle of adopting the rating to the poor as the test of the value of the holding claimed upon : Lord JOHN makes the necessity of procuring more informa- tion regarding the amount of the franchise one of his reasons for postponing the Committee : it is very improbable that the House of Commons will sanction the five-pound franchise. Ministers cannot— though some of their confiding adherents promised they would—go out upon the five-pound franchise, for they have admitted that it is an open question. There remains at stake, therefore, only the adoption of the rating to the poor as the test of value in the Registration Court ; which, with a constituency so limited as by the admission of all parties the honest enforcement of the present qualification in Ireland would give, will only have the effect of rendering the pro- cess of manufacturing bad votes a little more complicated. It will at the same time render it more easy ; for let the present Re- gistration Courts in Ireland be what they may, they can produce nothing equal to the cool, unscrupulous manner in which the docu- ments laid on the table of the House of Commons by Government show the will of the valuators to have been made a substitute for any thing like a tangible principle in fixing the amount at which individuals have been rated to the poor.
The question of the Irish registration, then, is utterly devoid of practical interest. It is merely a game of skill kept up by the two rival parties in order to divert attention from other questions. For any substantial interest the empire or any portion of the empire has in it, the question whether RUSSELL or PEEL is to occupy the Treasury bench might as well be decided by a match at cricket between the best hats and bowlers of the Whig and Tory parties. Some of the Whigs seem pretty confident that they have the innings : at least one of their friends triumphantly announced, on Saturday last, that for another year the most lucrative appoint- ments under Government would be given to what are commonly called " right men." But the querulous tone of their morning organ, yesterday, renders it probable that the whole party are not quite so confident—that some of them cannot feel quite at ease so long as Lord STANLEY'S bill hangs suspended over their heads.
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