NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE Parliamentary business of the week was commenced in the manner most agreeable to Ministers of State—that is, by placing at their disposal a large amount of the public money. The Army Estimates were brought forward on Monday, by Mr. ELLICE: and a short time sufficed to vote away three,inillions and a half sterling. The House of Commons waegood-humouredi and accommodating. Even Mr. Houk seemed to consider thatit would be too bad to treat Ewen to the same lectures with which he tried the temper of Lord PALMERSTON in days of yore. The present Secretary at War has got the knack of managing the Economical section of the Opposition. • Whenever a vote is denounced as exorbitant or ,unnecessary; he makes a sort of confidential communication to them; such as—" You've no notion what trouble I have taken to meet your views in this matter "— "I have written and spoken to Lord -HILL about it, but he will not agree to any thing of the sort"—" You had-better leave it all in my hands, and you will see what I will do' for you next session." Now, with all due respect for Mrs. ELL:idles powers of management, we think that when he bring i forward a motion which he is obliged to apologize for in this fashion, the duty of the House of Commons is to negative it—to refuse him the money; a certain and most proper method of bringing the haughty spirits at the Horse Guards to submit to economical reforms in the Army. We do not see the propriety of bringing Lord HILL forward to bear the blame of a transaction for which the Secretary at War is answerable to the House of Cominons; Of course Lord HILL will be glad of as much money for the Army as the' House of Commons can be prevailed upon to vote ; but it is paltry in Mr. ELLICE to put Lord HILL forward as hiShhield, and blameable in the Members of the House to suffer him to squander the public money from behind it. Of the Estimates themselves we have already spoken, and also of the creditable manner in which the accounts of the Army have been presented to the House of Commons. A subject of great public interest and importance—that of impressment of seamen—was discussed on Tuesday. Mr. BUCKINGHAM, in a speech which has been justly characterized as able and persuasive; moved for a Committee to consider of devisingj
some means of manning our ships without having recourse t pressgangs. Public opinion runs strongly against this cruel an
Impolitic practice of impressment. Ministers dare no longer offe any direct defence of it. Their tone has changed since las session; and the only way in which Sir JAMES GRAHAM venturedi to meet Mr. BUCKINGHAM'S motion, was by moving for leave t bring in a bill, the express object of which is to provide seame for the fleet without having recourse to impressment. Mr. Bums/muses motion was rejected by 218 to 1311. This is not surprising ; for Mr. BUCKINGHAM himself committed the mistake of admitting the right of the Crown to press seamen upon an emergency. He thus backed out of the grand principle of Ins own proposal. It became a question with many foes to impressment, whether the mover or the Minister had the best of it. Sir JAMES GRAHAM declared (and we have no right or reason to believe him insinCere in the declaration), that impressment should never be used except in the last resort ; and Mr. BuciciNcit Am in point of fact did not propose to deprive Sir JAMES of one tittle of the power to press seamen in cases of emergency. For who are to be judges of the necessity of the case ? According to Mr. BUCKINGHAM, the Privy Council. And from Thom will the Privy Council in such cases seek for advice and information ? Why, from the Admiralty, to be sure ; and thus, according to the principle which Mr. BUCKINGHAM con cedes, the seamen would have little more protection than they nave at present.
Impressment ought to be declared illegal in all cases; it ought to be utterly abolished by act of Parliament. Should "an emergency" occur in which it should be found absolutely necessary, an act of Parliament, authorizing impressment for a limited period, might be passed in an extremely short time. The dearest rights of freemen are not to be placed at the mercy of any set of persons who may happen to form his Majesty's Council. But there never was a more palpable failure than the attempt to prove that impressment ever could be necessity, under a judicious sys tem of naval discipline. Why, even now, in time of peace, with no prospect whatever of a war, we keep 27,000 seamen and ma rines in pay. Yet Sir JAMES GRAHAM and Lord ALTHORP talk as if every vessel in our Navy was deserted, and as if our coasts might be blockaded in six days by some unknown and unexpected
enemy. For a sudden emergency, we are, or ought to be, better prepared than any other nation in the world; and if our seamen were well paid, not merely for the exercise of their brute force and bravery, but for the skill which they have acquired as seamen, and for which they have as good a right to charge the nation that uses it as one tradesman has to charge another for the merchandise he sells, then there would be no difficulty at any time in cramming our vessels of war with picked seamen. Has Sir JAMES GRAHAM ever gone on board of an American frigate? If he has, he must have seen the deck crowded with line athletic fellows—no old inn, and scarcely a boy among them—all first-rate seamen, picked out of a mercantile navy of seventy or eighty thousand sailors, eager to obtain the pay and provisions of a vessel of war. There was no pressgang used to force such men to fight the battles of their country. They were well treated, and well paid; and when our rulers shall learn to treat British seamen in the same manner, they will find no lack of naval volunteers. Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S scheme is to register all the seamen of the country, and take those required for the naval service by ballot. It was truly remarked by Mr. HUME, that this plan must fail : the seamen will only-regard it as a plot to catch them more securely. Registration may be resorted to with success after the formal abolition of impressment, but not before.
There was an unusually full attendance of Members at the morning sitting on Tuesday, when Lord EBRINGTON presented the Devonshire petition for a commutation of Tithes. Mr. PARROTT, Member for Totness, explained, that the intentions of the petitioners were different from what they have been generally supposed to be. They did not wish that a tenth of the rent should be substitutedlor a tenth of the produce; but that the whole of the land liable to tithe should be fairly valued, as if it were free of burden of every kind ; that a tenth part of that should be set aside as the titheowner's share, subject to all the charges to which the other parts are liable. The amount of gain or loss to the titheowner would vary according to the circumstances. That he would generally be a loser by the arrangement, however, is the expectation of the petitioners. Supposing this to be the case, let us glance at its mode of operation on the rentals of landed proprietors.
Were all land now tithable, the gain to the landowners, on a general abolition of tithe, would be tolerably equal. But there is a considerable portion of the land tithe-free, and which on that account yields an increased rent to the landlord. Why should it yield an increased rent? Plainly because the cultivator is not so heavily burdened as his neighbour who has to pay the tithe. . But if the latter is relieved from payment of tithe, the advantage possessed by the farmer who was tithe-free before, disappears. Either, therefore, his rent must be lowered, or that of his competitor will be raised, or the one will fall while the other rises, till a sort of average is struck; and a portion of the property of the owner of the land which was tithe-free before, passes into that of the person whose land the Legislature has only lately freed from tithe altogether,—or a portion of it only, as the Devonshire petitioners -require; that is merely a question of degree. Would this be equitable?
A bill for the Repeal of the stupid and hateful Foreign Enlistment Act has been again introduced by Mr. J. A. MURRAY. We hope that, this session, Lord BROUGHAM will not go out of his way to cushion it, as he did the last.
The House of Commons has so far done its duty as regards the Boroughs—emphatically Rotten—of Carrickfergus, Stafford, and Warwick. There was a hardy band of five members who opposed the second reading of the bill for disfranchising Stafford : but the majority numbered 167, and what were five among so many ?
Lord ALTHORP brought in his promised bill for the repeal of the House-tax on Thursday. The householders will be in luck if they get this tax abolished after all ; for that most unfortunate Chancellor . of the Exchequer has, we fear, reckoned without his host in calculating upon so large an increase in the tea-duties. The proceedings at the India House during the week must have blighted his financial prospects.
The Landed Interest triumphed in the House of Commons last night. On Thursday, Mr. HUME moved for a emulate ta ir4 (Piro into tie Corn-laws, with the view to subs*_oje a flzel -fig the present fluctuating duty, and to grant i. fixed equivalent bounty on the export of corn. The debate occupied almost the whole of Thursday and Friday, and terminated in a division of 312 to 155 against the motion. The majority, though a large one, is not larger than was expected. The Ministers have been earnestly and successfully exerting themselves in favour of the monopolists. They made a point of securing not merely a majority, but as large a majority as possible ; and with this view, they applied to Lord DARLINGTON to withdraw an amendment of which he had given notice, fearing that it might divide the opponents of the ifnotion : this was expressly stated, last night, by Lord DARLINGTON himself. The opposition seems to have been, from first to last, adroitly got up. Sir JAMES GRAHAM, who has avowed himself the author of the Report of the Agricultural Committee of last session, seems to have drawn it up with a view to its bearing on the expected attack on the Corn-laws. Then came the allusion in the King's Speech to the distress of the landed interest; and next the refusal of Ministers to repeal any tax of importance that bore hardly upon that interest. All this appears to have been done with the express intention of strengthening the claim of the landlords to the continuance of their monopoly. Taking these circumstances into account, the majority is not after all alarming.
Mr. Hums was not very successful in his manner of bringing the question forward. There was a want of simplicity and comprehensiveness in his views. In common with every other speaker in the debate, he appeared to lose sight of the grand telling argument in favour of a free trade in corn—that it would tend to produce a universal increase of things useful and desirable to mankind, or in other words, a vast accession to the wealth and comfort of all classes in all nations. This great point was not well brought out by any of the supporters of the motion. Colonel TORRENS, arguing on scientific principles, made the most effective speech. Mr. POULETT Titomsort was too lengthy; and overlaid his argument with quotations, which, however well they might serve to demolish Sir JAMES GRAHAM, were both stupid and old. Besides, as long as Mr. Tnontsorr continues the member of a Government, to the heads of which he is opposed on the most important of all questions, he will labour under the suspicion of insincerity. Lords MGR PETH and Howlett delivered brief, manly, and honest speeches in favour of the motion. Indeed, it appears from the list of the division, that almost every member of the Government, not in the Cabinet—including Mr.LITTLETON, Mr. ELLICE, Mr. CH ARLESWOOD, and Lord DurgeaNsroN—voted for the motion. These Members, in fact, had no choice : they all represent manufacturing or commercial constituencies,—except Lord Howlett, who on all questions chooses to take his own way. Sir JAMES GRAHAM stood forward as the champion of the landed interest, and unsaid almost all that he had ever uttered on the subject of debate. Mr. BARING was happy in catching the tone of the House, and in speaking to the breeches-pockets of the landowners. His speech is principally remarkable for its tone of triumphant insolence, which was peculiarly acceptable to the landed majority. Poor Lord ALTHORP said a few words very much to the point—that all the Cabinet Ministers would divide against Mr. HUME. As for himself, he could not make a speech on the occasion; because, as he avowed, he agreed with the mover, and yet was going to vote against him. Most candid of Ministers!
