NEWS OF THE WEEK.
Bnront adjourning for the Whitsuntide recess, the House of Commons has been treated to .a four-nights debate on the English
Poor-law. The motion to go into Committee on the bill to re- model the Poor-law Commission was seized by Mr. Ferrand as the occasion for pouring out a long harangue, full of old matter, from the suppressed passage in Malthus's first edition, to the Keighley Union and Mr. Ferrand's personal wrongs. This traditional fana- ticism against the amended Poor-law is obsolete : as a reality it expired with the retreat of Joseph Rayner Stephens, and Mr. Fer- rand's farrago belongs as little to 1847 as one of Dr. Sacheverell's sermons. The eccentric Member for Knaresborough undertook to declare the act of 1834 null and void, as being in excess of the powers of Parliament and oppugnant to the " constitution "; a position which he supported by citing Locke, Paley, Puffendorf and Grotius, and a host of other moralists and le fists, whose works seem to form Mr. Ferrand's light reading. He found a too formidable antagonist in Mr. Roebuck ; who "showed up" his facts, his philanthropy, and even his law learning. There is only one fault in Mr. Roebuck's speech—his victim was scarcely worth the sacrifice.
The agitator, in fact, was serving the Ministers whom he thought he was assailing, by leading the House away from the real question before it. To that Mr. Christie recurred, when he asked whether this Administration Bill was all the answer that Ministers intended to make to the report of the Andover Commit- tee and its incrimination of the Commissioners? Mr. Manners Sutton attempted an answer, by trying to show that the Andover Committee did not succeed in fastening blame on the Commis- sioners; the responsibility attaching solely to the subordinates and local officers. But among the unanswered charges against the Commissioners was the discouragement of reports on abuses ; and this very case of Andover was one that had been obstinately overlooked. Lord John Russell takes a strange position : he doggedly chooses to assume that some charges against the Com- missioners are untrue, dismisses the rest as unimportant, defends the necessity of central authority, which scarcely any one ques- tions, and deprecates a return to the abuses of the old law, which nobody desires. To talk in this way is not to settle the real question; which goes even beyond Mr. Christie's statement of it. The Commissioners were clearly convicted of very gross irregularities; the chief tendency of which was to save labour to themselves, and virtually to repeal the act which they were ap- pointed to administer, by mitigating its force. The charges continue, in their main drift, wholly without contradiction or defence. A sort of defence was indeed hinted at, of a very re- markable kind : it was, that the demands made upon the Com- missioners to enforce the law invited resistance, because obedience to the law would have involved an impracticable amount of la- bour and a dangerous degree of severity. In effect, that was the apology of the Commissioners. Now Ministers are placed in this dilemma : either the law is impracticable and dangerously severe, or the Commissioners who so flagrantly disregarded it betrayed their duty ; and in either case the bill to remodel the Commission is totally unsatisfactory as an answer to the Andover Report. The Ministerial answer to that report ought to dispose either of the law or of the administrators. Ministers endeavour to evade the difficulty by overlooking it, and doing something' else in a manner as f they were complying with the duty incumbent upon them. This evasion is one of the many signs of their weakness.
The administration of the Poor-law in Ireland has been strangely impugned : those whose business it is to administer the statute are accused of shamelessly evading their duty ; Relief Committees cOlourably expending a whole six weeks in preparing a list of the destitute for relief, and so on I The experience of the temporary Relief Act does not encourage any strong hopes of advantage from the permanent bill ; and certainly any hope what- ever must have yielded had Lord Monteagle succeeded in making the bill also a temporary measure.
The Commons, at the instance of Sir Charles Wood, have re- ferred to a Select Committee the question whether a restriction should be put upon the absorption of capital in railway specula- tions. Sir Charles has thrown out a hint much like an instruc- tion to the Committee, that any measure of restriction should be merely "permissive." Speculation having become dangerously in- ordinate, Sir Charles invokes the interference of Parliament but then, with the consistent timidity of the Whig Cabinet, he
shrinks from anything so effective as a compulsory measure : the inordinate speculators are to be permitted, if it so please them, to put on the virtue of self-restraint I Were the Criminal Code first Indited by the mild Russell Ministry, the lairs would simply allow creditors to pay their debts, thieves would enjoy the privilege of a free admission to the prisons, and death-warrants would assume the polite form of invitations. Some favour to old schemes ap- pears to lurk in Sir Charles's terms. An explanation of this singularly inopportune fact may be found in the constitution of the Committee : it includes the foremost representatives of the largest railway interests. The money influences are stronger than Whigscourage. It was expected of the Peers—the wish probably being father to the thought—that their conservative tendencies would induce them to throw out the Short Time. Bill ; but they have not done so. We do not know how Lord Landsdowne contrives to let so "perilous and hazardous an experiment" pass. Among some ex- cellent arguments against the measure, Lord Brour,hain men- tioned, as one that had never been questioned, the calculation that all the profit on a mill is derived from the work of the last two out of the twelve hours : we showed the excessive fallacy of this calculation three years ago.
In Committee on the Army Service Bill, the Duke of Welling- ton expressed, in more positive terms than he had yet used, his hope that the new plan of limited enlistment will have the de- sirable effect of converting discharge from the Army into a punishment.
