Sir Henty James, with all his astuteness, is hardly a
good manager of the Bills of which he has the charge. In the Gra,nd Committee on Law he first disseminated the impression that he' would report the conduct of particular obstructors to the House, as a good reason for not proceeding with the Criminal Code Bill,. —indeed, what he said in the House itself was equivalent to a, charge against Mr. Warton for trying on one occasion to prevent. the Committee from getting a quorum,—and then he dropped all such criticisms, and simply reported that the progress made with the Bill warranted no hope of finishing it this Session.
• Either Sir Henry James should not have threatened to report the conduct of special Members at all, or he should have persevered with it. The consequence, of course, was an angry wrangle at the last meeting of the Grand Committee on Law, and a general impression on the part of the public less favour, able to the work of these Grand Committees than is justified by the facts. The result was that the Committee reported thiit,• laving dealt with only eight clauses, and the Bill containing 120 clauses, on which there were 390 proposed amendments, there was no prospect of passing the Bill through Committee this Session. The truth, no doubt, is, as Mr. Bryce indicated in his very excellent speech in the Committee, that this Bill was not a good subject foi the work of a Grand Committee. First, it was drafted by a Commission, and not by the Government -draftsman ; and secondly, great alterations of principle, as distinct from codification of the existing law, were introduced into the Bill. Both these circumstances rendered it a very bad specimen Bill for the purpose of testing the powers of a Grand -Committee.
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