NEWS OF THE WEEK.
PARLIAMENT is summoned to meet on the 1st of February for the despatch of business ; and many signs foretoken a busy session. PARLIAMENT is summoned to meet on the 1st of February for the despatch of business ; and many signs foretoken a busy session.
An organized agitation is got up to press for " financial re- form " : at the recent and pending elections, candidates have been obliged to fall in with that demand ; a great meeting is to be held at Manchester to initiate the movement; and Mr. Cobden has contributed towards it a paper project which he calls " the Na- tional Budget." The project is plausible, and calculated to invite support from almost every " interest " in the country ; for it pro- poses to remit 10,000,0001. of taxes, including some on articles of the most extensive consumption. Its popular character will enable its supporters to give the Ministers immense trouble. They cannot accept it ; flatly to oppose it will be odiously unpopular ; to discuss it with Mr. Cobden and his well- drilled coadjutors excessively irksome. Yet it will have to be discussed, closely and vigorously ; and, apart from the fate of the particular measure, that activity of discussion, we be- lieve, will be very beneficial. Other subjects also stand for immediate attention,—" Ireland," that starving hydra ; the Poor-law, with its amendments and its new President ; the Navigation-laws, deferred from last session ; Emigration, agitated by organized agents for New South \Vales, by the poor impatient of hopeless poverty ; and questions of Colo- nial policy and government, urged by Colonies whom Lord Grey and his connexions wrong and insult. All these and other topics will be brought before Parliament with a clamour of hostile im- portunity. Ministers would do well to lose no time in completing the amendments in the conduct of public business, suggested by their own experience and the sanction of able men in the Select Com- mittee of last session. It would be diligence well bestowed. Ac- cording to rule, the blue hook on the subject should be its tomb ; but, luckily, the book was too short to be forgotten. If Mem- bers desire to separate in July, or even in August, without leaving a disgraceful mass of arrears for 1850, they will enable or force the Government to adopt, at the very outset of the session, all ne- cessary means of working the legislative machinery with orderly smoothness and to better purpose.
