Mr. H. C. Malkin, for many years a Clerk of
Public Bills in the House of Lords, contributes to the current number of the Quarterly Review, noticed by us elsewhere, a most important article on the privileges of the Commons in regard to finance. Though he reaches them by a somewhat different road, Mr. l'ifalkin, in effect, arrives at exactly the conclusions arrived at by the Spectator in its study of the precedents. He lays it down that "it is an established principle that the Lords may, without breach of privilege, omit the whole of a clause which they cannot amend, or the whole of a subject. The Lords have rejected, and may reject, any Finance Bill to which extraneous matter has been tacked." These last two prin- ciples, he continues, "have been questioned on the ground that Mr, Glidatone settled the point (as we have seen) in 1881,
But it has never been proved, or even to my knowledge suggested, that any Finance Bill since 1860 has contained provisions which the Lords would have rejected, if they had been sent up in a separate Bill ; and, until that is done, this conclusive precedent proves nothing at all."
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