Mr. Fawcett on Monday opened a grand but very useless
debate on the constitutional propriety of abolishing Purchase by Royal
Warrant. His point was that the Premier, the head of " an inefficient administration," had overridden Parliament by preroga- tive, which might hereafter be employed to override it in a Tory sense. lie denied that the House of! Commons had sanctioned the Act, but even if it had the House Slidenottrepresont the country, but only the majority in the wintry, and had morally no right to act alone. The Attorney-General, who auswered him, went much too far in asserting that Parliament had nothing to do with the Army, as if. the Mutiny Bill were an Order in Council, or as if Mr. Cardwell were irresponsible for promotions, and laid himself .open to Mr. Vernon Harcourt's reply that the Bill of Rights declared that an army to be legal must be assented to by Parliament. Mr. Gladstone terminated an instructive but slightly wearisome debate by a speech in which he endeavoured to show, and as we think showed, that it was the duty of Ministers to use their legal power in order to put down an illegal practice, and maintained that in so using it he carried with him the opinion of the country.
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