said, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether the attention of the Select Committee, appointed to inquire into the present modes of conducting Parliamentary and Municipal Elections, will be instructed to take into their consideration the expediency of abolishing Nomination Days at Parliamentary Elections?

, in reply, said, it would be one of the objects of the Select Committee to inquire into the question of nomination days and the expediency of continuing personal nomination.

said, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Whether his attention has been called to the statement contained in the Report on Prison Discipline in the Colonies (1867–8), respecting the Imperial Convict Prison at Gibraltar—namely, that—

"The building does not admit of separation. The wards, when full, give only 176 cubic feet per head, the hammocks then almost touching. There are but fifteen separate or punishment cells for the 800 prisoners. The water is very impure. The visitors have visited only eight times in five years;"

whether any enlargement or alteration of the Prison has since been effected; and, if not, whether it is intended to continue such Prison as a place of detention for Convicts?

said, in reply, that the statement in the Report on Prison Discipline in the Colonies (1867–8) conveyed rather an erroneous impression with respect to Gibraltar. It would be quite true that if there were 800 prisoners in the convict prison there would be only 176 cubic feet of air per head, but at the time at which the Report was made the maximum number of prisoners was only 390, and the average was 304. The number had now, however, been increased, and there were 525 prisoners. In the last Report made by the surgeon he stated that the health of the convicts was very good, only about 3 per cent being on the sick list. The water, no doubt, was very impure, which was the case generally at Gibraltar; but a Sanitary Commission had been sitting for some time, and they were now boring for water, not only for the use of the convict establishment, but of Gibraltar generally. At the time the Report was made a very unsatisfactory account was given of the way in which the visitors discharged their duty, but new visitors had been appointed, who attended every day, and the last despatches received contained an expression of the Governor's entire satisfaction with the way they discharged their duties. There were no material alterations or enlargements made in the prison, because it had been intended two years ago to get rid of the convict establishment at Gibraltar; that project had been given up, and it had been felt that the Colonial Office had no proper staff at their disposal for the regulation of the establishment. It, therefore, would be handed over to the Home Office, and it would be their duty to consider the requirements of the present establishment and to make whatever alterations they considered necessary in the prison.

said, he rose to ask the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Whether Captain Mackey, the Fenian convict, who is reported in the Freeman's Journal, the organ of the Government in Ireland, to have received an unconditional pardon from Her Majesty's present Advisers, is the same individual who last year killed a police-constable at Cork, who attacked and set fire to a police barrack at Ballyknockbane and seized the arms of the constabulary belonging to that station, who also attacked and rifled the Martello Tower at Fota in December 1867, and who was implicated in other outrages at Castle Martyr, Knockadoon, Kilmallock, Kilcooley Wood, and elsewhere; whether the said Captain Mackey had, in 1866, been arrested by order of Lord Kimberley, under a Lord Lieutenant's warrant, and had been discharged in the month of April following on his solemnly pledging himself in writing not to return to the United Kingdom; and, finally, whether this man is the criminal who, for these repeated outrages, was, on the 20th of March last, sentenced by the present Lord Chancellor to twelve years' penal servitude—a sentence which the convict admitted to be a most just and lenient one?

Sir, I am not aware that the Government has any organ, as the hon. Member has stated, in the Irish Press; but with regard to the Question of the hon. Baronet I can only say that the statements contained in it are substantially correct, with one exception, and that is the assumption that the prisoner Mackey has been discharged. The fact is that there has not been the slightest intention of remitting the punishment inflicted on Mackey, and the hon. Baronet will not find his name in the Return which has been already presented to the House.

said, he wished to know when the Return will be in print?

said, he hoped it would be in a few days.

said, he wished to ask the President of the Poor Law Board, When the Return, ordered on the 19th February, regarding the cost of Sick Poor Asylums in the Metropolis will be presented to the House?

said, in reply, that the part of the Return which related to the number of medical officers, their salaries, and the cost of medicine for the last three years could not be obtained without communicating with several Boards of Guardians, and there- fore there had been some delay in collecting that information. It would probably be in the hands of Members next week. The other part of the Return he would endeavour to place in the hands of Members the day after to-morrow.

said, he wished to ask the Under Secretary of State for India, Whether it is true that the Indian Government have subsidized the Ameer of Affghanistan with money and arms; if so, whether the subsidy is to be an annual one, and what conditions are attached thereto?

said, in reply, that, in compliance with a request for assistance from the Ameer of Affghanistan, the late Viceroy gave him a sum of six lacs of rupees, and sanctioned the payment to him, somewhat later, of a like amount, the greater part of which had no doubt before this reached his treasury. The late Viceroy also sent him some muskets and ammunition. No formal conditions were attached to the gifts. They were intended as a pledge of good-will, and as the expression of a hope that a strong Government was about to be established in a long distracted country. The words "subsidy" and "subsidizing" were not appropriate to the circumstances. Sir John Lawrence never contemplated a subsidy, and the Government considered itself entirely unfettered as to the amount and kind of assistance to be rendered to the Ameer.

said, he wished to ask, Whether it is intended to proceed with the Endowed Schools Bill on Monday next? He asked the Question because it had created a good deal of feeling in the country.

said, in reply, that he hoped to proceed with it on Monday, when it stood for the first Order of the Day.

said, he would beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury, What arrangements are contemplated, with regard to the Easter holidays?

said, in reply, that the arrangement as to the holidays, which he hoped would be agreeable to the House, was that on Tuesday, the 23rd, he should move the adjournment of the House to the Thursday in the following week. The answer just given by his right hon. Friend the Vice President of the Board of Education was substantially correct; but inasmuch as Monday would probably be the day on which the House of Lords would appoint a joint Committee of both Houses to consider the arrangement of the business between the two Houses, it would be convenient if a similar proposition were made in that House on the same day, in which case he should move the postponement of the Orders of the Day till after that Motion was disposed of.

said, in moving for leave to bring in a Bill for the better settling the Real Estates of Intestates, that the law which he proposed to alter was one which had its origin at a very early period of our history. The law to which he alluded was then found expedient with a view to sustain a great system of military organization, and subsequently, when that was no longer required, it was felt convenient to maintain the law then in force in order to uphold a small body of great and powerful territorial proprietors. No very great alteration was made in that law until after the confiscation of the lands of the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII., when, for the first time, land was allowed to be alienated by will, under certain conditions. When the late Sir Samuel Romilly introduced his Bill to make freehold estates assets for the payment of debts, he remarked that this country from being a feudal had come to be a great commercial country, and certainly it was much more commercial now than it was then. Distinguished Law Officers of the Crown had frequently expressed their opinion that the transfer of landed property ought to be as simple as that of money in the funds, and he thought it was desirable that they should show their earnestness by assimilating the descent of real property as much as possible to that of personal property. He cared not whether they looked at that question from the point of view of the small holders or the great holders of land. If they looked at it from the point of view of the former, they would find that familiar as the small holders of the soil were with the law of personal property, they could scarcely be made to believe that there was such an injustice in the law of real property that if they happened to die intestate all their land would go to only one of their sons; and when their attention was called to that injustice they almost universally made a will, in order that there might be a fair distribution of their property among their children. But, on the other hand, there were cases where the dislike to make a will led persons of that class to postpone doing so till it was too late; and then, under the present state of the law, the injustice to which he had referred resulted from their neglect. He had lately heard a case of this kind of very great hardship. A farmer possessed of several acres had an eldest son, who went away from his father's home and led a very dissolute life. The second son conducted the farm with the father, and the father always told him that he intended to leave him the property, charging it with a certain sum for the dissolute son. The father, however, died suddenly without making a will; the property came to the eldest son, who took it as heir-at-law, and in course of about a year or so he squandered the whole of it; while the younger son was left entirely destitute. He would next look at the matter from the point of view of the great landholders, and he was prepared to say this was not a question which affected them to any great extent, for they were not only conversant with the law themselves, but their attorneys would tell them of the danger they ran in not making wills. But, further, their real estate was almost universally settled, entailed, and tied up in such a way that it very rarely happened that their eldest sons took it as heirs-at-law without settlements. The great holders of land might therefore well assent to that reasonable measure, which was asked for on behalf of the small owners of real property in this country; and they ought not to resist such a change when it was in their case only a prejudice that was offended. It was said that he wished to introduce the French law into England; but that was an en -tire mistake. He did not by any means approve the French law, which interfered with the parent's power of willing away his property. In England there was a most fair and just law in regard to personal property. When the husband being a father died intestate one-third of his personalty went to his widow and two-thirds to his children or next of kin. But in the case of freehold land, where there were sons and daughters, the whole went to the eldest son, and there was no provision whatever for the rest of the family. That was a state of things which it was impossible to call other than unfair and unjust. Moreover the whole system was full of anomalies. Long leaseholds, dating perhaps as far back as King James II., and. for 10,000 years, which were as good as freeholds, were treated by the law as personal estate; but if the leases were leases for lives, then they descended as freehold estate. They had now a Government which was decidedly a Government of progress; and the country looked forward to its expressing an opinion on that Bill at the very earliest stage. Many Members of that Government had voted in favour of the Bill on previous occasions, and even the name of the present Solicitor General had appeared on the back of it. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the President of the Board of Trade had not only repeatedly voted but spoken in its support most strongly. He therefore felt that the time had arrived when the Government must come forward and not refuse any longer to do an act of justice to the small holders of real property. The hon. Member concluded by moving for leave to bring in his Bill.

congratulated the hon. Gentleman on the history he had given of his Bill, but in that history there were some omissions. On the last two occasions on which the hon. Gentleman brought forward that Bill, once in 1859 and again in 1866, he was defeated on a division in the first case by 271 against 76, and in the second by 281 against 84, so that although he had made eight converts in seven years, he had increased by ten the number of those who resisted his proposal. Among the opponents of the Bill on a previous occasion was the Attorney General of that day (Sir Roundell Palmer), who felt so strongly on the matter that he came down to the House in his legal garments and made a most telling speech from the front Treasury Bench against it. From the same Bench a speech was also made against the Bill by the present Prime Minister; and the measure was likewise opposed in 1859 by one of the wisest, most philosophical, and most moderate of statesmen, the late Sir George Lewis, who said its effect would be to extinguish that class of persons who were denominated as heirs—a pretty trenchant expression, especially from one so much accustomed to weigh, all his words. And so little did the hon. Gentleman opposite trust his own arguments, that he appealed to the House ad misericordiam just to accept this Bill and then limit it to little properties of £1,000 or £2,000 value. The hon. Gentleman had that night given them a touching anecdote; he always gave them a touching anecdote. Last time it was the story of a young woman, now it was the story of a prodigal son. But his latest anecdote only proved that the old father was a stupid, fellow for not making his will. Even if the hon. Gentleman's Bill had been in force, that prodigal eldest son would have had half the property, and the small estate would have been cut into two. An infinite amount of distress would be caused by the splitting up of estates into plots of three or four acres. He had watched the results of such a system in Kent where it existed as gavel-kind, and should be very sorry to see it extended to England. The small pauper proprietorships with joint rights so created, of which one owner might be in the union and another in America—he was speaking from books—were a simple nuisance, both to the community and to the unfortunate persons themselves. As he intended to oppose the second reading of the Bill, he would not say much more on the present occasion. He would simply remark that he did not oppose the measure from any feudal or sentimental motive, but from a desire to preserve the security and money value which land at present possessed, but which would be much diminished in the event of the proposed change taking effect.

said, he thought the House would make a great mistake if they were to pass the Bill. He entirely agreed with the hon. Member for the University of Cambridge (Mr. Beresford Hope), who opposed the measure from a Conservative point of view, whereas he opposed it altogether from a Liberal point of view. The hon. Member for Surrey (Mr. Locke King), asked the House to change what he described as the most ancient law in this country, and his demand was based on a personal grievance. On the present occasion the hon. Member had only drawn attention to one grievance, but nine years ago he had alluded to a long string of grievances of a similar kind. He presumed, therefore, that the hon. Gentleman had on his notes a number of other grievances with which he had not troubled the House to-night. It was, however, incumbent on the hon. Gentleman to demonstrate, first, that these grievances really resulted from the present state of the law; and secondly, that they were so numerous as to warrant the great change he proposed in so important a law. He had, however, never done anything of the kind. The whole argument of the hon. Member laboured under this weakness—that he failed to show that the grievance complained of would not have existed just the same even if his Bill had been law. It was mere matter of conjecture to say that this man or that man would have made a will, for in many instances it would, no doubt, happen that he would not have made a will. The hon. Member had stated that the owners of small estates were ignorant of the law, and fancied that on their decease their estate would be divided like their personal property. Now, nothing could be more self-evidently wrong than such an assumption on the part of the hon. Member. These small estates were often the most ancient in the kingdom, and in the north of England there were freeholders whose property had descended from father to son for many generations. How, then, could the holder of such an estate, who had himself inherited to the exclusion of his younger brothers, be ignorant of the fact that his elder son would inherit it to the exclusion of his younger sons? If the present measure became law, the probability was that many persons who now died intestate, would be put to the unnecessary trouble and expense of making wills. It must be also borne in mind that there would be grievances on the other side of the question. It would happen, for instance, that the eldest son would naturally be regarded as the successor to the estate, and would consequently be left without any other provision. His sisters might have had their portions, and his younger brothers their advancements, and yet if the old man should forget to make a will, the property would be divided into equal portions, and the eldest son would get no larger share of the property than the others. Indeed, the grievance would sometimes be intensified, because it might happen that while his younger brothers had been building up their fortunes elsewhere, the eldest son had been expending all his energies in improving this very farm, nearly the whole of which would, under the provisions of the pro-Bent Bill, be taken away from him. But, even according to the hon. Member himself, the Bill would only bring about an infinitesimally small amount of good, and we should be acting like the inhabitant of China who burnt down his house for a culinary purpose. One of the complaints frequently made was that the land of this country was in very few hands. The hon. Gentleman the Member for East Surrey admitted, however, that the greater portion of the land was under settlement, and consequently it would be in no way affected by the passing of the Bill. For all the grievances referred to there was an obvious remedy, which, however, he did not propose, and which had not been proposed by the hon. Member for Surrey. It was simply that the children who had not received advances in their father's life-time should, on his decease, come next after creditors, and have a claim on the ancestor's estate, no matter in whose hands it might happen to be. For what could it matter to a child who had been left destitute whether the estate were real or personal, or whether it were in the hands of a devisee or of the heir-at-law? Although the hon. Member disclaimed any political object, he knew very well that the object of those hon. Gentlemen who would give their support to the measure was to increase the number of small landed properties in this country; but he ventured to say that, instead of accomplishing that object, the Bill would tend directly to defeat it. The largo estates under settlement would not be immediately affected by the Bill, which would, therefore, only touch small estates. Now, supposing the latter were divided great expense would be incurred, much money would go to surveyors and attorneys, and a good deal of land would be wasted. In a vast number of cases, however, the estate would not be divided, but sold, as every attorney would advise his clients to sell the land, for two reasons—first, because it would be the best advice he could give; and, secondly, because it would be most to his own interest to give that advice. Well, if the land were put up for sale, it would of course be purchased by the great landed proprietor in the neighbourhood, who would always be able to give a higher price than anybody else. Those who were acquainted with the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland were well aware that a change of this kind was constantly going on, and that the small freeholds were being gradually absorbed in the estates of Lord Lonsdale and of Mr. Marshall, formerly a Member of that House. Now, hon. Gentlemen on that side ought to remember that they owed a great deal to the small freeholders, who, before the passing of the Reform Act of 1832, were the people who returned Liberal Members to the House of Commons. The late Mr. Cobden once said that the great effect of this Bill would be to set a fashion, and that people following the fashion would by degrees give up settlements, so that in the end the great estates of the country would be divided. In his opinion that was a wild speculation. There had been for hundreds of years two lines in which property descended—the line of the Common Law or tail general, and the line of the male entail, which applied to nearly all the land under settlement, and yet the fashion of the Common Law had not destroyed the male entail. Yet surely nothing could be more painful to a dying man than the reflection that his estate would go to his brother, his uncle, or possibly even to some very remote relation, though he left a largo family of daughters inadequately provided, for. Why, then, should it be supposed that the moral effect of the measure under discussion would be to destroy the practice of entailing estates? It appeared to him that the Bill was a bad one, because it would frustrate the very object it was pretended to promote, like the Septennial Act, which, as everybody knew, was passed for the purpose of keeping out the Tories, though it had the effect of keeping them in.

said, he thought the question which the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Locke King) had brought under the notice of the House should be dealt with, if at all, as a whole, and not be made the subject of patchwork legislation. The Commission, of which the late Lord Campbell was the head, in their Reports, dealing with that and other kindred questions, had recommended that if any Act was to be founded upon the suggestions which they made it should proceed on the footing of taking them as a whole and effecting a complete and systematic reform. If the law of inheritance were at once done away with, as was now proposed, the result would be the creation of great anomalies. Let him, for instance, take the case of a widow with a son. Should that widow marry again, the son, under the operation of the Bill of the hon. Gentleman, might not get a farthing of her property. If she died without a will all her personal property would vest immediately in her husband, who might prevent her from making a will, and thus grasp the property of the child. To take another case, if the distribution of a man's property was to follow his domicile, the distribution of property in this country might have to be made in accordance with the law of France. He objected, therefore, to such piecemeal legislation as the hon. Gentleman proposed to support, merely because it bore on the face of it the appearance of being a sort of clap-trap justice.

said, he was anxious to take the opportunity which the present discussion afforded to vindicate himself from charges which had been brought against him not very long ago by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Bright). The right hon. Gentleman accused him, when his qualifications for the position of a Boundary Commissioner were in question in that House, of being a "fanatical admirer of the territorial interest." The right hon. Gentleman seemed to think that the opinions which he had attributed to him on that occasion disqualified him from being appointed to so important and responsible a situation, and under those circumstances he felt assured the House would allow him to offer a few remarks in explanation of those supposed opinions. He would, he thought, be doing the right hon. Gentleman no injustice when he stated that the only possible knowledge he could have of the existence of the fanaticism to which he objected must have been derived from a conversation of some five minutes' duration which he had with him about fourteen or fifteen years back, when the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Locke King) had brought forward a Bill of the very same character as that which he had just submitted to the notice of the House. It had been his lot to vote on more than one occasion, he believed, against the proposal of his hon. Friend, and to speak against it once; but he was neither going to vote nor speak against it that evening. He desired merely to state in a few words the reasons which influenced him in arriving at that which might appear to be a change of opinion on the subject. He had always attached the slightest possible importance to the law of primogeniture, thinking that it would make little practical difference whether it was abolished or retained. What he did attach importance to, however, was the handle it afforded those who wished to throw odium upon the landed interest. It was made a handle for statements on public platforms both in this country and the United States, which were calculated to create an unjust prejudice against the owners of land. If the House would permit him, he would read a passage from the work of an American gentleman who had passed some time in England, and who gave the following description of the general condition of landed property in England. It was often said of Frenchmen that it was impossible to make them understand the law of England, and when he had read the passage to which he had just referred, the House would, he thought, be of opinion that the remark applied with not less force to our American friends. Professor Hoppin, the gentleman from whose Work he was about to quote, was a professor of Yale College, and had written one of the most agreeable books on "Old England" which he had ever read. Speaking of what he had seen in the neighbourhood of Malvern, the Professor said—

"In the distance, upon the Hereford side of the Malvern Hills, rose the monument or pillar of the Somers family. This is one of those proud me- mortals, the one responding to the other over hill and dale, which remind us of the well-known fact that England is divided up chiefly among twenty or thirty great families. Those rich and powerful families give the law to everything."

That was a fact which was certainly new to him, and, he believed, to every other Member of the House. It was, however, the conclusion at which an American gentleman of the highest education, who had the best possible opportunity of making himself acquainted with the facts, and who mixed in the most intelligent and influential circles in England, seemed to have arrived. But Professor Hoppin proceeded to qualify his remarks in the following manner. After using a few complimentary remarks with respect to our modern legislation, he said—

"Even the rigid old law of primogeniture is not so rigid as I, for one, had supposed. I notice Sir John Barnard Byles, now of the Court of Common Pleas, stated to a friend of mine, in conversation, that the entail of all the entailed estates in England could be cut off when the eldest son coming of age consented, except in four cases. The Justice, furthermore, stated that no property could be entailed for any period longer than a life or lives in being, and twenty-one years."

He had called attention to those passages because they showed the sort of impression which seemed to exist among well-informed and intelligent Americans, as to the way in which landed property in England was held. Almost all those, he might add, in America, with whom he had come in contact, appeared to entertain the notion that there was some law, some fatality, binding on the landed proprietors of England, which compelled them, as a matter of necessity, to leave their property to the eldest son. He recollected talking to a gentleman who informed him positively that every nobleman and landed proprietor in England was bound by law to leave his property in that way, and upon his venturing to dispute the accuracy of that statement, and pointing to the sale of the Duke of Buckingham's property as an illustration of his argument, the reply was, "No doubt you mean to speak the truth, but Mr. Bright says it is as I tell you, and he must know better." The right hon. Gentleman was, no doubt, responsible for a good deal of the misconception which prevailed in the minds of Americans with respect, at all events, to the influence of the law of primogeniture. What the popular feeling in other countries generally was on the subject he hardly knew; but he supposed the idea prevailed among some persons that, by law, all the landed property in England must go from the father to the oldest son. Now, the only case bearing on the point at issue, which came within his personal knowledge, was that of a friend of his own, who lived in Sussex, who had landed property, and who died intestate. He had a small estate near Eastbourne, and the personal property went in accordance with the Statute of Distributions, but the real estate went to the youngest son by a second marriage, in accordance with the law of Borough English. He did not stand up in that House to defend the law of primogeniture in the abstract. He thought it far bettor that the law, in cases of intestacy, should make such a distribution of a man's property as might be deemed most advantageous for the general good. He, for one, would not maintain that the devolution of landed estate on the oldest son, where no provision was made for the younger children, was anything but a flagrant injustice, and he was of opinion that the hon. Member for East Surrey was perfectly right in calling on the Government, not only to express an opinion on the subject, but to undertake the conduct of legislation with respect to it. A matter so serious as the alteration of the descent of real property ought not to be left to a private Member, but ought to be dealt with in such a manner as to suit, not only the abstract notion of justice, but the habits and general views of the people of this country. His experience led him to the conclusion that there was not the slightest desire in. England to see old estates roughly broken up, or old families dispossessed of the power to make disposition of their property. He, for one, would not think it worth while to hold an acre of land if he had not the power to dispose of it as he liked; while he was also of opinion, that if a man went out of the world without having made a will, there would be no right to complain of any disposition which the law might think it expedient and just to make of his property. Such were the "fanatical opinions" which he held on the subject of territorial possessions, and he would commend them to the attention of the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, who, he hoped, would acquit him of any wish to see the landed interests unduly favoured or vested with any privileges which they ought not to possess.

said, it was a monstrous thing that because one son was born before the others, he should therefore be entitled to the whole of his father's freehold property. Very little property used to exist in this country except real estate, but now the value of personal property in the country was equal to that of real estate, and no one could understand why this distinction between realty and personalty was maintained. The sense of the country was entirely opposed to it, and when he was in practice he had met with instances in which, upon intestacy, the heir-at-law refused to take the realty to the exclusion of the rest of the family, and divided the property among them, reserving his own share only. He supposed that this question would only be settled, as many others had been, by means of pressure from without; but, sooner or later, the result must inevitably be that victory would be obtained on the side of common sense, good policy, and sound administration of the law. This was such an important matter that he trusted the Government would take it in hand, and endeavour to frame a measure which would nsure a more satisfactory state of things than the present.

said, there was a growing custom in the country to accumulate large landed estates, the great bar to which was the law of entail, which prevented such estates coming into the market and being divided. If the hon. Member (Mr. Locke King) carried his Bill he would certainly be furnishing facilities for the sale and division of those estates, and by doing so the desire for accumulating large landed properties would acquire a fresh impetus. In his opinion a man should have the right of leaving and settling his property in the manner he pleased; and it appeared to him that the greatest tyranny was to tell a man that he should not leave his estate as he desired. He trusted that the Bill of the hon. Member would not be allowed to progress, especially under existing circumstances, when there were so many important questions to discuss.

said, that if he rightly understood the wish of the House, gathered from the speeches of hon. Members on both sides, there was no intention to divide against the introduction of the Bill. It appeared to be the general sentiment of the House that there was, at any rate, a case for legislation of some kind upon this question, more or less in the direction pointed to by his hon. Friend (Mr. Locke King), and hon. Members seemed inclined to give to the principle of the measure that sort of qualified assent to which they should be understood to give by voting for the introduction of the Bill, independently of those—and, no doubt, there were many—who were disposed to embrace the principle fully and absolutely. Regarding that as quite a reasonable state of things, he only rose to notice the appeal made, or, at any rate, the opinion expressed, by an hon. Member opposite, by his hon. Friend (Mr. Walter), and by several other Gentlemen, that this was a subject which had better be placed in the hands of the Government. He was not prepared at all to demur to that proposition, though until he saw the measure, and it had been carefully considered, he did not know that it would be possible to give a definitive opinion upon either the question whether this was capable of being dealt with as a simple, unconditional proposal, or whether it would require to be dealt with in a more developed and elaborate manner, and with more careful reference to a variety of details arising out of the present state of the law. If, however, he refrained from giving any pledge on the part of the Government that they were willing and disposed to direct their attention to the subject, with the view of introducing such a measure as they might deem upon the whole to be the best, it was only because he thought it was not the duty of a Government to charge itself at any given time with more than a certain number of subjects, and that, in choosing those subjects, it must have regard to its probable opportunities of obtaining for them full discussion and consideration at the hands of both branches of the Legislature, and, if they were approved, of passing them into law. Upon that simple ground he was not able—he wished, he was—to give a pledge on behalf of the Government, which perhaps it might be desirable that they were in a condition to give. That being so, he was glad that the Bill of his hon. Friend should be introduced; and if, as his hon. Friend (Mr. Beresford Hope) said, he (Mr. Gladstone) had in June, 1866, taken part in opposing the second reading of this Bill, it was not because he thought that the present law was defensible in all its parts—for he was bound to say that he concurred in much that had been said by his hon. Friend (Mr. Locke King) as to the effect of the present law of intestacy upon the descent of real estate—but because, considering the late: period of the Session, he did not think, in 1866, that the labours of his hon. Friend could be brought to a practical j conclusion. At the present time he knew not whether the circumstances would be more favourable to the attempt of his hon. Friend, who had, at any rate, one great advantage in proposing this measure in March instead of in June, so that several months were available for its discussion and consideration. He (Mr. Gladstone) agreed with his hon. Friend that the proposition was one which it was material for the House to embrace—that the provisions of this Bill would have but a very limited direct effect upon the descent of the larger properties in this country. His hon. Friend himself allowed that the Bill was mainly to be judged by its probable re-suits upon the smaller properties of the country; and what between the different causes of intestacy—such as pure accident and carelessness, the strange effeminate or capricious dislike which I some persons had to consider the contingency which made a will necessary, and the casual errors which, even when persons had been discreet enough to make a will, rendered it informal—the law ought to be the subject of scrupulous care in providing for cases of intestacy. What should be the precise disposition of landed property under the law he did not undertake to say. But he felt that the present law, so far as it concerned real estate, was not the best that could be devised, and, being very much disposed to agree with his hon. Friend, he should vote for the introduction of the Bill.

said, he hoped the title of the Bill would be altered, and would be made to read "A Bill for the Confiscation of all the 40,s. Freeholds in this Country." The owners of 40s. freeholds hardly ever made wills, and if one of these freeholds had to be divided among the children, it must be sold, and would fall into the hands of the neighbouring landowner. In this way all the 40s. freeholders would in time be snuffed out, or if they fell into the hands of lawyers and conveyancers, there would be little left for division among the family.

, in moving that a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the Laws affecting the Registration of persons entitled to vote in the Election of Members to serve in Parliament for Boroughs in England and Wales, and to report whether any and what amendments are required therein, said, that he was afraid that the subject of which he had given notice would be found somewhat dry in its details, but it was not uninteresting to a great number of Members in that House; and a strong desire prevailed that the law in respect to it should be placed on a sounder and better footing. The evils of the existing system were very well known. The question he intended to raise was not calculated to excite party feeling. It was entirely removed from all matters of controversy which affected the basis of the suffrage. Both sides would probably agree that whatever franchise was established every facility ought to be given for all classes of voters to be placed on the register at the smallest amount of trouble and expense. The importance of the question could not be denied. Indeed, ever since Sir Robert Peel's famous aphorism that the battle of the Constitution must be fought in the registration courts it had been admitted that this matter lay at the root of our political system of government. The battle-field of the Constitution was, however, at pre sent in a confused and embarrassed condition, reminding him of the story in Hindoo mythology, according to which Heaven rested on the earth, the earth was supported by an elephant, and the elephant by a tortoise, but what the tortoise was supported by nobody had been able to say. So the English Government was understood to stand on the House of Commons, and the House of Commons on the constituencies, but what the constituencies depended on was by no means clear. As far as he could understand the matter, they appeared to stand on the overseer, who made out the list of persons to elect Members for that House. The overseer's office was very ancient, and he might say antiquated, and the machinery at his disposal was not adapted to the present condition of affairs. He was not a person necessarily conversant with the law, and instructed in the manner in which the list of voters should be made out. Some boroughs were divided into different parishes, and different overseers might happen to act on different principles in the several parts of the boroughs; so that there would be no unity of principle or uniformity of action. The overseer made out his list from the rate book, which was an imperfect and incorrect document for the purpose of a political register. The rate book was kept for the economical purpose of collecting the rate and not for the political object of ascertaining the constituency. The result was that the list made out by the overseer contained names which ought not to be in it, and was deficient in other names which ought not to have been omitted. Then, in order to correct the list, the expensive machinery of the registration court was put in motion, and, after all, a very indifferent list was finally obtained. All this arose from the fact that the rate book from which the list was taken was constructed not for a political but an economic purpose. It might be said, why should not the overseer be compelled to keep the rate book more accurately? Why, at present there was a law and a penalty to compel him so to do, but the law was wholly inoperative, and he believed that any law with a similar object would be equally ineffectual. These considerations led him to the conclusion that, in each of the boroughs of England, there should be an officer whose particular duty should be to pay attention to the making out of the list of voters, and who would discharge the functions of a registrar of voters. That was a plan adopted with great advantage in Scotland, where the system of registration was extremely satisfactory. For example, there was only one man to attend to the whole register of the borough of Glasgow, and he was informed that he performed his duties admirably. He should be sorry to throw any additional burden on the borough rates; but it was probable that the cost of paying such an officer would not be greater than the charges incurred under the present system. The first requisites, as the basis of the register, were accurate street lists of the occupiers of boroughs. It had been suggested that those street lists might be made out through the intervention of the Post Office as an assistance to the registrar, and he understood that the head of the Post Office, without committing himself to the details or principle of the plan, was not unwilling to give instructions in order to see whether such a thing could be conveniently done through the intervention of that establishment. That would materially diminish the labour of revision, and, instead of crowding claims and objections into a few weeks in autumn, he would suggest that they might be sent to the registrar at any period of the year. In that manner we might get a primâ facie good list of the voters. If that were the case, he hoped we might, to a great degree, dispense with the expensive machinery of registration associations. The registers being so deficient, he admitted their existence was almost indispensable, and, at the same time, the temptation became too great to give money to voters to enable them to be placed on the rates and to attend the registration courts. Nevertheless he considered that these registration associations were productive of serious mischief. The consequence of their establishment was at once to scatter objections broadcast over the constituents, and this system had gone to such an extent that the House must feel itself bound to provide a remedy. It seemed to be thought that in politics, as in love and war, everything was fair, and objections were recklessly issued by thousands by the representatives of both parties. He believed that both sides were equally unjust and unfair in that practice, and. that objections were made on the unfair speculation that a number of good voters would lose their votes simply because they could not attend to support them. The injustice was great, because it fell the heaviest on those who depended for their subsistence on their daily wages, and to take such men away from their work to attend the Revising Barrister' Courts for one, two, or three days, was to destroy the maintenance of himself and family. The consequences were most mischievous in their results, because this system inflicted on them a pecuniary fine for which they endeavoured in some way or other to recoup themselves in money, and it thereby became an absolute premium on corruption. Parliament should see that each voter was put upon the electoral list without expense to himself or to others, for if others were at the expense of putting him on the register or of keeping him there, they would as a matter of course claim his vote, and, in most cases, would get it. And all these considerations had greater weight when viewed in the light of the recent ruling to the effect that expenditure upon an election contest by a registration society of money paid to it by a candidate was not an expenditure for which the candidate was responsible. Presuming that to be the true reading of the law, the sooner it was altered the better. As a remedy he suggested that; all the objections to the first list should be made within as early a day as possible, and that the claims should be delivered a fortnight afterwards; it would then be possible to remove all merely formal grounds of objection, and to cast upon the objector the responsibility of sustaining the objection if he could. He also recommended that the practice of compelling the objector to specify particularly the grounds of his objection should, be adopted in the boroughs as well as in the counties. Vexatious objections could be prevented by making the objector pay costs in cases of failure, and find security for those costs before he was heard. The voters would then stand in as fair a position as a successful candidate; he would be placed upon the register by a competent; authority, as the registrar of voters would be, and if not absolutely secured against frivolous objections, it would be in the power of the court to award him compensation for loss of time in cases where he stood his ground on his right to vote being challenged. Some alteration, too, was required in the law regulating the registration of lodger claims. Under the present law the lodger franchise had been almost a dead letter, because the lodgers could not tell whether their claims would be objected to or not unless they attended at the Revising Barrister's Court. He could not understand why the lodgers should not be placed in the same position as any other voter, by having his name put upon the first list, which would entitle him to notice of objections. A great deal of caution would be necessary in dealing with all those matters, as it would be impolitic to discourage objections to such a degree as would lead to impunity of errors in the register; and having said so much he would pass to the revising authority. That was rather a delicate matter for a person in his profession to deal with. Sydney Smith once said in reference to a Bishop that the greatest punishment that could, be inflicted on him was that he should be preached to death by wild curates. It was a dangerous position for a man to do anything to bring down upon him the wrath of the class of Revising Barristers. He had no disposition to pass any censure on that tribunal; but he begged to point out that if they got their primary list in better condition there would be much less for Revising Barristers to do, and he should I hope that many of the trivial details they had now to correct would be removed, and they would only have to deal with questions of law, which were sent by appeal to the Court of Common Pleas. Fewer Revising Barristers would then be required, and they would be able to pay them a higher remuneration and thereby to secure the services of persons of greater weight in the profession. Another amendment was required in the matter of appeal. At present there was no power to compel an appeal from the Revising Barrister, and a strong feeling existed throughout the country upon this point. In the north of England thousands of voters had been; disfranchised by a decision of the Revising Barrister, from which all appeal had been refused. In the most trivial suit at Common Law the subject had a right to tender a bill of exceptions to the ruling of the Judge. What reason, then, could be urged against making the same rule in the case of decisions by Revising Barristers? To show that I greater powers of amending the list should be given to Revising Barristers than they had at present, he instanced the case of a man, resident in Oxford during the last twenty years, who had been struck off the list simply because he had moved from one street into another during the previous twelve months and the overseer had omitted to enter the two addresses on the list. The Revising Barrister had in that case no power to amend the description, although he knew the man had as good a qualification as any in the borough. These were a few of the points on which the law required amendment; probably if the Committee asked for were appointed, others having more experience than himself would suggest many more. The noble Lord the Member for Middlesex (Lord Enfield) had suggested that the question of county registration should be included in the order of reference; but he had purposely omitted to include counties because they stood in, an entirely different position; the qualification was different, and in consequence of the area of the constituency the machinery of registration must be different. He believed, however, county Members would do good if they had a Committee composed of some of their own number to inquire into the subject of county registration. He would venture, in conclusion, to say that an improved registration system was an object in which they would all concur. Everyone must desire to diminish that increasing cost which had become a scandal to our Parliamentary system, to make the franchise free from much of that corruption which now attended it in consequence of our defective registration, and to give the electors the enjoyment of their rights without vexation and without expense. He hoped that a wisely considered scheme would place our Parliamentary government upon a more just and satisfactory footing than that upon which it stood at present. He begged to move for a Select Committee.

, in seconding the Motion, said, that the present state of the law was such as to offer an almost overwhelming temptation to revision agents to make a large number of speculative objections without any foundation, but upon the bare idea that a great many of those objected to would not be able, or would not take the trouble, to come up and defend their votes. At the last revision court for Liverpool, out of some 40,000 names on the primary register, no fewer than 15,000 had to be separately considered by the Revising Barristers, who took three weeks in going through the lists. About 9,000 were objections, and 6,000 claims. Out of the 9,000 objections no fewer than 4,700 failed altogether, 500 fines were imposed for frivolous objections, and more than 1,800 fines would have been imposed if the objections had not been withdrawn when it was seen that the Revising Barristers were doing their duty. Of 4,600 householder claims no fewer than 2,000 were good, or, in other words, 2,000 names that had a right to be on the lists had been omitted by the overseers. As he was anxious not to overstate the case, he must deduct from the 9,000 objections 1,400 which were made on both sides, and which related to persons who were dead, but that left no fewer than 7,600 men who were called away from their daily occupations to defend, their votes in the borough of Liverpool. And that did not include the county registration. In other words, about one person in eight of those entitled to vote had been subjected to the inconvenience of which he complained. Nor was that all—because a very large number was struck off because they were unable to attend to sustain their claims, the objections being in many cases altogether without foundation. There was only one point on which he would venture to correct the hon. and learned Gentleman who had made this Motion. The hon. and learned Gentleman had said that this hardship pressed most on the poorer classes. In his opinion it would have been more correct to say that it pressed most heavily on the industrious classes who were least able to spare time to defend their votes. With foremen and others whose work was of a really responsible character it was not a mere question of the loss of a day's wages, but of offending their employers by not attending to some important business, and thus losing their situations. There was one safeguard in addition to those mentioned by the hon. and learned Gentleman that he would suggest, not upon his own authority merely, but upon that of some of the most experienced registration agents in the north of England; and it was this—that a person before making an objection should be compelled to state, either before the Registrar or a magistrate, the primâ facie grounds upon which the objection was based. The figures he had quoted proved conclusively the necessity of some entirely new method of forming the primary lists. It appeared to him that the House of Commons was bound to give the electors of this country that protection to which the greatest rogue was entitled, for ho could not be compelled to appear before any Court until a primâ facie case was made out against him.

said, that upon reading the Notice he was very much, surprised that the hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Harcourt) had not included the counties in it, because the registration in counties was as defective as that in boroughs. The registration in boroughs was very simple, and he doubted if it could be materially improved. ["Oh. Oh!"] Hon. Members might exclaim "Oh, oh!" but that did not disprove his statement, but rather showed that they were not conversant with the system. The registration in boroughs was taken entirely from the rate book, and it was the duty of the overseer of the parish to take the rate book on the 1st of August, look through the rates made during the previous year, and if he found that the persons named had been on during the whole of the twelve months he was bound to place them on the register for the following year. The system was therefore self-acting in boroughs. The hon. and learned Gentleman was somewhat inaccurate when he stated that the owners, and not the occupiers, were on the rate book. Since the passing of the Small Tenements Act the contrary was the case. He did not think there was a small borough in the kingdom in which the overseer was not bound to put the occupier's name on the register, and he believed it was done. Otherwise, how could the overseer collect the rate? Overseers were not, of course, infallible; no more were registration officers. An overseer might not know whether a man entered upon his occupation on the 1st of August or the 10th of August, although if the man entered on the former date his vote would be good; if on the latter his vote would be bad. It was obviously impossible always to tell whether an occupation began on the 30th of July or on the 2nd of August. But having seen something of the working of the union assessment committees, and knowing how very accurate they were, as far as the north of England was concerned, he believed there was not a single borough there where care was not taken to have the occupier's name brought upon the rate book. The law very properly required a man's qualification to be stated for the whole of the previous twelve months, and if he had lived six months in one street, and another six months in another street, the two houses he had occupied in succession ought to be placed against his name. Surely there was no hardship in calling upon the man who wished to protect his vote to give the public information where he had lived for the entire year. That had been the law of the land ever since the first Reform Act; there had been decisions of the courts upon the subject; and it was perfectly well known and understood. With regard to the right of appeal, lie thought the Revising Barristers were, if anything, rather too ready to grant a case for an appeal. They must judge whether they could grant a case or not; and they would not refuse one if there were any grounds for giving it. Their duty was just the same as that of magistrates at quarter sessions. It was said that lodgers ought not to have to claim their votes, but should have their names put down like other people's. But how was the overseer to get at the lodger, who paid no rates and was not on the rate book? The overseer collected money from the occupiers—a very substantial mode of knowing them; but he had no dealings with the lodger, who must be made to show that he had lived in his lodgings for the requisite period to qualify him. They surely could not say that a lodger once upon the list was to remain on it always, without having proof that he was entitled to be there. In the case of the counties, however, there were one or two points really requiring to be dealt with by legislation. In the counties at present they had two occupation franchises—that of the old £50, or—as he might be called—the Chandos occupier, and that of the new £14 occupier, and the consequence of that was that, as almost every £50 occupier was at the same time qualified also under the £14 occupation franchise, the Chandos occupiers were put on the list twice. That was a needlessly cumbrous arrangement, and it would be better to put those Chandos occupiers on under the £14 clause. In that way they would cure the evil of having a Chandos occupier, as sometimes happened, remaining on the list for perhaps six years after he had left his farm and gone away. In conclusion, if the Government thought there was scope for a Select Committee, of course he would have no objection to it; but he would certainly prefer that the subject should be dealt with by a Bill, and that the hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Harcourt) should sketch out in it the alterations which he deemed desirable.

said, the question immediately before the House related to the boroughs, not to the counties. The hon. Member who had just spoken (Mr. Collins) stated that the Revising Barristers would always give an appeal to parties when they made out a fair case for it. Now, he knew a borough in the north of England where a Revising Barrister, by Ms own interpretation of the law, struck out 2,000 voters from a register comprising a total of some 5,000 voters; and that Revising Barrister refused an appeal against his decision. That fact alone, he thought, would justify the appointment of the proposed Committee. The thanks of the House and the country were due to the hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. Harcourt) for bringing the subject before them, and also for the remedies he had suggested. He wished that before proceeding to amend the mode of making up the electoral register, the grounds on which that register reposed were changed, and the connection between rating and voting were cut at as early a date as possible. The principle of making the vote depend upon parochial rating could not stand as a basis of the franchise, beset, as it was, with so many difficulties. There were other executive defects in the Reform Bill. In many boroughs in the counties of Durham and Northumberland, there were several tenements under the same roof. In Tynemouth all tenants of such houses were struck off; whilst at Shields the same class of tenants were retained. But in Sunderland, which he had the honour to represent, the Barrister compounded the matter by retaining some and excising the rest. Until there was some degree of uniformity in the definition of a house, the working of the Act must be defective. Men of the same social rank were enfranchised in one section of the borough and disfranchised in another. The Assessed Rates Bill, which had been introduced by the Presi- dent of the Poor Law Board, would do much to get rid of some of the evils of the Reform Bill, but it would fail to touch the question as to what persons were rateable. In conclusion, he trusted the Government would grant a Committee with enlarged power, so that everything connected with the subject, all matters of detail not involving matters of principle, might be brought under its consideration.

thanked his hon. Friends opposite for having brought this proposal before the House. The system of registration in Liverpool, the borough with which he was connected, led to very great and serious evils, and the party he was associated with was as anxious as his Colleague who sat opposite that the law on the subject should be altered. It had been said that the present registration system pressed very hardly on the poorer classes of the community; but in his opinion the House ought to consider the matter not as one affecting one particular class, but all sections of the community, and there could be no doubt that all alike—the merchant, the clergyman, the professional man, the tradesman, as well as those technically known as the working classes—were subject to much unnecessary annoyance in this matter. With all due deference to the hon. Member for Knaresborough, the objectors to the present system did not rest their case on the fact of the law not being clear, but on the ground that it was vexatious and oppressive. He could fully endorse the opinion expressed by the hon. and learned Member for Oxford (Mr. Harcourt), and he would venture to suggest that it would be satisfactory to both sides of the House if the Government should see fit to refer this difficult question to the judgment of the Committee on Municipal and Parliamentary Elections, which was shortly going to sit under the direct management of the Government. When he sat in the House, some ten years ago, it was considered undesirable to multiply Committees on kindred subjects, and it must be obvious to every one that the most experienced Members of both parties would be taken up by their attendance on the Committee already appointed, so that this matter, one of no little delicacy and intricacy, and of perhaps as great importance as those entrusted to the Committee on Parlia- mentary and Municipal Elections, and certainly nearly allied to them, would have to be dealt with by men of far less experience and knowledge in such affairs.

said, that in many of the larger boroughs the lodger franchise was the most important franchise. In the whole of the old metropolitan boroughs the total increase of voters on the register under the Representation of the People Act was only about 15,000, and the increase consisted of lodgers. But the form for claiming the lodger franchise was technical in the extreme. There were two forms in use, one containing two signatures, the other three; and the Revising Barrister admitted one of the classes to the register only on the condition of his decision being subjected to an appeal to the Court of Common Pleas. But, owing to want of funds, or other cause, the appeal was not tried, and the uncertainty therefore remained. Again, the Revising Barrister sat in the day instead of in the evening, as might be done with convenience to the working classes. The lodgers, unlike other classes of voters, were required to send in a fresh claim every year. The collectors might be made to leave at all lodging-houses notices to the lodgers. As the law stood at this moment, an occupier who occupied two or more houses in succession within the same borough, provided he had not left it, might claim for the houses in succession, but in the case of a lodger there was no such provision. If there were two joint occupiers of a house, each might be placed on the register under the old law, if they paid together more than £20, but no such privilege was given to the lodgers. He contended that the same privileges ought to be given alike to lodgers and occupiers. The result of this state of things was that, whilst in the metropolitan boroughs there were between 200,000 and 300,000 male lodgers of full age, as a matter of fact only 15,000 of them had succeeded in getting on the register. Turning to another point—it could not be questioned that the omissions from the lists in London had been wholesale. In portions of the borough which he had the honour to represent, out of every 100 houses, twenty-five were omitted from the list, on the ground that they were empty or were occupied by women; out of the remaining seventy-five occupiers only forty were placed on the register. From inquiries he had made he found that something similar was the case in the whole of the metropolitan boroughs. Of the thirty-five occupiers omitted, only ten were omitted from any fault of their own; the other twenty-five were left off the register entirely by the negligence, he would not say of the overseers, but of their subordinates. It was a singular fact that the Representation of the People Act (1867) made no provision of a form of claim for enabling occupiers whose names had been omitted through the negligence of the overseers to claim their votes. In Paris there was an excellent system of registration in force, established, not by law, but by authority of the municipality, which might possibly be introduced into this country. Cards were prepared bearing the name of the voter, his residence and profession. When those cards were shuffled into alphabetical order they formed the register, and when into streets, the street lists of the entire borough. Clerks, at a certain period of the year, went round and inquired at each house whether the voter still lived there, and whether there were any other persons who ought to be on the register. From these inquiries the lists were made up, and then subjected to a revision. That system somewhat resembled one he had seen in operation in Australia, under which the rate-collector was directed to leave, at every house in his district, a form of claim enabling persons to get upom the register. Instead of the revising court he was convinced that there should be some efficient person appointed who should be made responsible for the registration of each electoral district.

said, that whatever doubts his hon. Friend the Member for Boston (Mr. Collins) might have entertained as to the existence of a grievance upon this subject, those doubts must have been removed by what had come out in the course of the present discussion. The hon. and learned Member for Oxford (Mr. Harcourt) had made out a good case; but by the time the hon. Member for Liverpool (Mr. Rathbone) and the hon. Member who had just addressed the House (Mr. Dilke) with so much force and knowledge on the subject had concluded their speeches he must have been quite satisfied that there existed in our system of registration very grave imper- fections which required to be removed. When it was, stated that in Liverpool there were thousands of voters whose names never appeared upon the list, and that in Chelsea and in other places, out of seventy-five occupiers whose names should have been on the list, only forty appeared there, and when it was stated that numbers of voters were struck off the list on the most frivolous objections, it was impossible to deny that great defects existed in the present system of registration. And it was no wonder that such should be the case. There had been an immense expansion of the suffrage, and the machinery they had endeavoured to apply to the increased pressure consequent upon that expansion was imperfect. In fact, there existed at the bottom of the whole system this great defect—namely, that this system was intended for fiscal purposes, and was unequal to the discharge of political functions. The overseer was good for the purpose of the rate; but he was bad for the purpose of a political register. The hon. Member for Boston had said nothing could be better than the register. They knew, as a matter of fact, that, whatever might be the responsibility of the overseer, his first interest was for the rate. He liked to see who paid the rate. Now, in many cases the rate was paid by the owner, and the occupier's name never appeared in the rate book, and this was one of the reasons why the omissions complained of in the register occurred. A suggestion had been made that the inquiry should not be limited to the boroughs, as there existed grievances of the same description in the counties. He recollected when he was on a Commission of Inquiry some years since very grave imperfections were found to exist, and the remedies recommended by that Committee were very similar, if not identical, with those proposed by his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Oxford. He also recollected that they recommended that there should be an officer whose special duty it should be to look after the registration, and it was suggested that the clerk of the peace should be intrusted with that duty. Again, with respect to the objections, they recommended that strong measures should be taken against those who objected to votes on frivolous grounds. In Scotland, which had so frequently led the way in a great many useful reforms, hardly any of those difficulties existed. There they had to deal with the question of boroughs in which a good valuation list had been drawn, up, and that was found to be a record upon which trust might safely be reposed. The consequence was that all those omissions, all those grievances, all those expenses, to which the unfortunate voters were exposed in this country, were altogether unknown in Scotland. He was not sure, indeed, whether they had even such an institution as a Revising Barrister in Scotland; but, if it existed at all, it was deprived of all the inconveniences which were attendant upon it in this country. He thought enough had been said by himself, and if not by himself by others, to show the necessity of such an inquiry as was proposed; and he agreed with his hon. and learned Friend that there would be advantage in limiting that inquiry to boroughs. If they could succeed in establishing a good and perfect system, the counties would not be long in following their example.

said, he hoped that the scope of any inquiry which might be entered upon would be extended to Irish boroughs as well, where similar evils existed, though not to the same extent.

, in moving for leave to bring in a Bill to alter the mode of electing Representative Peers in Scotland and Ireland, and to enable the Crown to summon such Scotch and Irish Peers as may not be Representative Peers to sit in Parliament for life, said, he would state to the House that the ob- ject which he had in view was to introduce in the electoral system, by which Representative Peers were permitted to sit in the House of Lords, something of that principle which was sought to be introduced, and which in some instances had actually been introduced into the election of Members of that House, by what was generally known as the minority clause. Another object which he had was to give power to the Crown to summon Peers to Parliament from Scotland or Ireland by their Scotch or Irish titles. With regard to the first of those points, so far as Scotland was concerned, he proposed that at the general election of Representative Peers for Scotland no Peer should have more than ten votes; he did not make any proposal with regard to by-elections of Scotch Peers following therein the precedent which was set in the minority clause as applied to the Members of that House, an illustration of which they had just seen in the election for the City of London consequent on the death of Mr. Bell, where the minority clause became inoperative, there being only one Member to elect. Then, with regard to Ireland, he proposed that the Irish Peers, who were elected at present only one by one as vacancies occurred, should henceforward be elected in batches of three, and that at those elections no Peer should have more than two votes. Of course, it might be said that by the election of Irish Peers in batches of three the practical effect would be to diminish the number of Peers by two, inasmuch as it would be necessary to wait until there were three vacancies. But ho wished the House to bear in mind that there was another measure contemplated, under which it was proposed to release four Irish Bishops from their attendance in the House of Lords; and therefore if it should be thought desirable to increase the number of Irish Peers, it would be very easy to do so by adding two to their number. Even without such an addition he thought his next clause would prevent any injustice being done. The next clause, and the last, was one which he thought the House would entirely agree with. It was that the Crown should have power to summon the Scotch and Irish Peers in Parliament either by their Scotch or Irish titles, the Peers so summoned to be Peers of Parliament for life and for life only. In applying the operation of the mi- nority clause to the election of Representative Peers, he felt confident that if that House passed the Bill it would be accepted by the other House, which it; more especially concerned; because it would be in the recollection of everybody that the minority clause came down during the last Parliament from the House of Lords to that House; and therefore he thought that they would not object to apply that principle to their own House. With regard to the objection which was made to the operation of the minority clause, so far as Members of the House of Commons were concerned, it did not hold good with respect to the election of Representative Peers, because the argument which was made use of, that the minority of one constituency might prove the majority of another, had no force when they were speaking of the election of Representative Peers. Then with respect to summoning Peers by their Scotch or Irish titles. He was quite aware that it was always in the power of the Crown to confer an English Peerage on a Member of the Scotch or Irish Peerage, and ho did not see any reason why they should not have the same chance of being made Peers as an English country gentleman. Yet that hardly met the case, because an English Peer must be an hereditary Peer. Some time ago, when he was looking over the list of Peers in Dod, in reference to that matter, in order to see how many were on one side, and how many on the other, he came to a title formerly borne by a friend of O'Connell's, an Irish Peer, who had been created a Peer of the United Kingdom, the present holder of which was put down as a Conservative, this showed that conferring English titles on Irish Peers was a blundering and awkward way of redressing the balance Moreover, when such Peers went into the House of Lords, they went into it not as Scotch Peers or Irish, but as English Peers, and they had precedence only according to their title in the English Peerage. Take, for instance the Duke of Argyll. He was a very great man in Scotland, as they all knew. He was the Macallum More, and yet he sat in the House of Lords merely as one of the Barons, and only had precedence as a Baron. It was difficult to obtain precise information as to the political opinions of some of those Peers who were not in Parliament. He (Mr. Stapleton) would only say that, so far as Ms own opinion went, the minority in each case consisted of about a third, so that it would be five Scotch, and ten Irish Peers, or in all fifteen. Of course, upon a division in the House of Lords that counted for thirty. He was anxious to have it understood that he brought forward that question, not in the interest of the Scotch and Irish Peers, but in the interest of the community at large. He could not conceive anything more dangerous than a collision between the two Houses. He sat there as a strong Liberal; but, at the same time, he had an earnest desire to preserve the institutions of the country. He would go as far as any man in that House in the direction of reform but not of revolution. But the mode of election of Representative Peers being what it was, if there was any collision between the two Houses, unless the majority of the House of Lords upon the question was more than thirty, the whole collision would arise, not out of any misunderstanding between that House and the hereditary Members of the other House, but out of a misrepresentation, or rather an inaccurate representation of the two subsidiary Peerages; and it might be, unless the Bishops redressed the matter—and they had been told by the Archbishop of York that they were the Liberals of the House—that a majority of twenty hereditary Members of the other House might be in accord with the Members of that House, notwithstanding which a great crisis might arise which would be entirely attributable to the misrepresentation of the Irish and Scotch Peerage. He trusted therefore that he should be permitted to bring in the Bill; for he was quite sure it would meet with the approval of the other House. At all events, they would have the opportunity of making any Amendments to it which they might think proper. In conclusion, the hon. Member moved for leave to introduce the Bill.

Sir, I do not perceive any disposition on the part of the House to refuse leave to the hon. Member—to my hon. Friend if he will permit me to call him so—to introduce this Bill, and I hope he will not think I am taking too great a liberty in the suggestion which I am about to make. I think the argument in favour of the principle for which he contends is irresistible; it is impossible not to see that the arrangements for the election both of Scotch and Irish Representative Peers are unsatisfactory and. require re-consideration. The case has been stated in the speech of the hon. Member sufficiently, though very briefly, to develop the irresistible strength of the general proposition that there should be a change in this respect. And yet if I might give a recommendation to my hon. Friend, it would be that he should be satisfied with the introduction of the Bill, and that he should not attempt at the present time to press it further. I should not certainly venture to make any recommendation of the kind in a manner implying the slightest derogation from the title of any Member of this House to introduce a Bill, or of this House to pass through all its stages a Bill affecting the constitution of the House of Lords. The House of Lords has at all times exercised its unquestionable right of passing and of modifying or rejecting measures affecting the constitution of this House. The rights of the two Houses in this respect are incontestable. At the same time, as a matter of policy, I think my hon. Friend will agree with me that it is desirable that the initiative should be taken by the House of Lords itself in legislation of this kind. Any decided attempt on the part of this House or of any party in this House to modify the constitution of the House of Lords, particularly at this special period, and with the questions that are likely to come before the House of Lords during the present Session, might produce an effect which, for the time, would be injurious. I think my hon. Friend must also feel that it would be judicious that some time, at any rate, should be afforded to the House of Lords to consider the state of its own subsidiary arrangements in detail, after the very great change that has taken place in the representation of the people and the constitution of the Lower House. And until we come to the conclusion—which I hope we shall not come to—that there is no likelihood that an effort will be made by the House of Lords itself to improve the existing arrangements, we ought not, I think, to show too great an eagerness to take the matter into our own hands. That is the recommendation which I venture to make to my hon. Friend, with great respect and deference. He will understand that it rests on grounds of general prudence, and that it is not offered by way of derogation either from his purpose or his argument, but, on the contrary, in furtherance of that argument and of the cause which he has at heart. If he is disposed to accede to that suggestion, he will probably find that the fruits produced by the efforts which he now makes will be beneficial and without any admixture of dissatisfaction or inconvenience.

, in moving the second reading of this Bill, said that he would not trouble the House with any lengthened statement with regard to it. He must, however, make a few remarks, as notice had been given of an Amendment for the rejection of the Bill. Great interest had been for some time felt respecting the limitation of the hours for the sale of intoxicating liquors in Ireland. Three years ago, in consequence of the representations made to him, he undertook to bring in a Bill on the subject, which he did as a tentative measure. This measure, which was similar in its object to the present Bill, although unlike in its provisions, passed a second reading. It was then ordered to be referred to a Select Committee; but July having arrived, it was too late to begin to take evidence, and the Order was discharged. Last year he again introduced a Bill, which was read a second time and referred to a Select Committee, who examined a number of witnesses, upon whose evidence the present Bill had been drawn. He would now point out how far the authority of the Select Committee might be quoted in favour of the Bill. The Select Committee proceeded by Re-solution, and they first resolved that—

"The hours for the sale of intoxicating drinks on Sunday, and the other days enumerated in the Bill be from two p.m., to seven p.m., except in the towns to be hereafter defined."

They next resolved that in other towns to be afterwards defined the hours to be from two p.m. to nine p.m. These Resolutions were passed unanimously. They had then to define what constituted a town under the second Resolution—whether a population of 2,000 or 5,000—and after a division the latter was carried. The evidence conclusively proved that it was desirable to diminish the hours for the sale of intoxicating drinks, and that these hours could be shortened to the advantage not only of the consumers, but of the sellers. All; the witnesses, with two exceptions, were; in favour of a limitation of the hours. They consisted of stipendiary magistrates and others, and ministers of religion, although ho would not rest his case on the evidence of the latter class, as they might be supposed to be prejudiced in favour of sobriety. Mr. Ralph, President of the Association of the Spirit Grocers of Dublin, was in; favour of limiting the hours even more than was proposed by the Bill. The Mayor of Cork, a gentleman largely engaged in trade, was of opinion that the public-houses might advantageously be closed at an earlier hour in the country, and that even in Cork they might be; closed at eight or nine o'clock. Mr. Barry, President of the Cork Vintners' Society, assented to the hours being fixed at from two to nine on Sunday. Two witnesses, indeed, stood out against any diminution. One was Mr. Gary, President of the Licensed Victuallers of Dublin; and, even he, when pressed with the question whether the hours might not be safely reduced, replied that he thought if there was to be any alteration it would be the best course. As to the other adverse witness, Mr. Porter, an ex-police magistrate, as he was against any restriction whatever on the sale of liquors on Sunday or on any other day, his testimony would probably not be considered of much importance. The hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Murphy), in opposing the measure of last year, took this ground—he considered it undesirable to make any change in the hours of selling intoxicating drinks in Ireland until the system of licensing houses for the sale of intoxicating drinks had been altered. Now, he (Mr. O'Reilly) believed all who had studied the question were agreed that the whole licensing system, both in Ireland and in England, was in a very unsatisfactory state, and he had urged the Government to bring in a Bill to re-organize and regulate that system. But he protested against its being said that they should not diminish the hours of selling intoxicating drinks on Sunday in Ireland until the very large and complicated question of licensing had been settled. At the same time, if the Secretary for Ireland gave him the assurance that he was in a position to grapple with that question, and desired that this Bill should be postponed until he could deal with it, he would at once accede to the suggestion. His present proposition was only to diminish the number of hours for the sale of intoxicating drinks by two hours in the evening in towns and by four in the country. The last two hours in the public-house were useless for the labouring class, who required to be early at work the following morning; and those hours were also the most productive of drunkenness. Public opinion in Ireland was strongly in favour of the Bill. Only two petitions had been presented against it, one from Cork and the other from the City of Dublin. The petition from Cork was signed by 700, but of these 500 were publicans, leaving only 200 to represent the general community. There had also been a petition from Cork, signed by 700, presented in its favour. He confidently appealed to the Chief Secretary for Ireland whether he was not aware, as the result of his large experience, that public opinion there was greatly in favour of the principle of the Bill. If the principle were affirmed by the second reading, the Bill could not go into Committee before the middle of May; and in the meantime those who were interested in the matter would have ample opportunities for considering its particular clauses.

, in moving that the Bill be read a second time that day six months, said, that, if the measure had been a simple one to close public-houses in Ireland at nine o'clock on Sunday, and would have been made applicable to the country parts as well as to the towns, although it might have aggravated, under the present system of licensing, the evils complained of, he should not have moved an Amendment to it. He reminded the hon. and gallant Member (Mr. O'Reilly) that neither the Bill of last year nor the Bill previous to it passed a second reading as a matter of course, but were referred to a Select Committee, before whom a considerable amount of evidence had been taken. Now, one of the main reasons for my agreeing to the appointment of a Select Committee on this subject was the expediency, and indeed necessity, of inquiring into the general system of licensing, with a view to the correction of the abuses which it is believed that system has engendered; and the hon. and gallant Member must no doubt recollect the opinion expressed by me, and the appeal I made to Lord Mayo, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, as to whether the Select Committee then to be appointed had scope or power enough to deal with the subject and report thereon. The noble Lord's opinion was that the Committee would have such a power, but the result, however, disclosed the contrary, and in fact the Committee did not report at all on the subject. However, amongst other witnesses who had been examined before the Committee was the Chief Commissioner of Police in Dublin, who stated that the legitimate business of the public-houses in Ireland had been trenched upon by the beer-houses and spirit grocers' establishments, and who gave it as his opinion that any alteration of the law in the direction indicated by the Bill ought to be accompanied by a considerable change in the licensing system. He did not admit that the Committee had agreed to the principle of limiting, pure and simple, the hours of keeping open public-houses in Ireland, and he, therefore, differed from the construction which the hon. and gallant Member had put on their Resolutions in that respect. He had last year consented to the second reading of the Bill solely upon the understanding that it was to be referred to a Select Committee, which should inquire into the whole system of granting licenses, and he was very strongly of opinion that such a Bill should not be agreed to until some legislation had taken place with respect to licensing. He was quite convinced that, until some alteration was effected in the licensing laws, it would be perfectly useless to restrict the hours for the sale of liquor as was now proposed. It would be better, therefore, he thought, to wait until the whole subject could be grappled with by the Government than to deal with it by means of bit-by-bit legislation, which could only aggravate the evil which it was intended to remedy, Independently of this consideration, however, the Bill contained a principle which he could never sanction, and that was what was called the permissive principle. This, if carried into execution, would enable two-thirds of the ratepayers to dictate to the minority in the matter of drinking, which was an infringement of the liberty of the subject he could not sanction. The Bill would in short restrict I no less than 5,000,000 of the population of Ireland to the hour of seven o'clock in the evening as the hour at which the public-houses should be closed. In his opinion this legislation was useless and irritating, I and believing that it would be better to relegate the whole subject to the Government and let them deal with it, he moved, as an Amendment, that the Bill be read a second time that day six months.

seconded the Amendment.

said, he regretted that the hon. Member for Cork (Mr. Murphy) had continued his opposition to this Bill, which was calculated to do much good. He was in hopes that the hon. Member, after listening to the evidence given before the Select Committee on this question, would have come to the conclusion that a measure of this sort was necessary. The provisions of the Bill appeared to be of a most harmless character, and to embody legislation which was loudly called for. A most moderate restriction upon the sale of liquor was proposed, and in the interest of morality and order he hoped that that restriction would be agreed to. There was reason to fear that drunkenness was on the increase in Ireland, especially in large towns, on the Sunday; and as the interests of travellers and the general convenience were consulted by the Bill, which enlisted the support of Presbyterians and Catholics alike, he hoped that the opposition to the second reading would not be persisted in.

said, that the medical profession and the justices of the peace had testified that the great amount of ardent spirits which was consumed tended largely to the increase of disease, pauperism, and crime, and thus indirectly to the increase of the public taxation. That being the case, it was time that the House interposed with some legislation on the matter. It had been said that such a measure as this ought not to be introduced until the licensing system was remodelled; but if they did so they would then be told to wait until some restriction was proposed upon the opening of the licensed houses. It was the old story of Lord Chatham waiting for Sir Richard Strachan, and Sir Richard waiting for Lord Chatham. If Parliament were responsible for the punishment of crime, there was no harm in their trying to prevent crime, and on that principle he should support the second reading.

said, that two points had been clearly established by this discussion. One was that the present licensing system was seriously defective and gave rise to well-grounded complaint; the other, that there was a widespread desire in Ireland in favour of some further restriction upon the sale of intoxicating liquor on Sundays, that feeling not being con-| fined to one class or creed, but being shared, as the hon. Member (Mr. Dawson) had stated, by the Presbyterians of the north as well as by the Catholics of the south. These statements were true, whatever effect they might have upon the ultimate fate of the Bill, and they both supported the appeal which he should make to his hon. Friend (Mr. Murphy)not to reject the Bill at its present stage, but to allow it to go forward to Committee. As to the licensing system, he did not know that he could reply in very definite terms to the appeal of his hon. Friend (Mr. O'Reilly); still, when he, sitting on the Treasury Bench, admitted that the present state of the law was unsatisfactory and mischievous, this was a tolerably plain acknowledgment that it was incumbent upon the Government, in; due time and at the proper opportunity, to deal with that system. Without going any further at present, ho should be glad of time to look into the matter and see whether he could, upon a subsequent occasion, state his opinions more definitely to the author of the Bill and the House. As to the strong feeling which existed in favour of the Bill, that was also a reason why his hon. Friend (Mr. Murphy) should give the people of Ireland further time to look into the provisions of the measure and consider them before the House finally decided respecting them. Although his hon. Friend was not sanguine of any good to be effected by restrictions upon the sale of drink on Sunday, until the licensing laws were placed on a better foundation, he did not refuse his assent to a certain amount of restriction in this direction. There being, therefore, evidently some room for a compromise, and the proper time to deal with such a compromise being in Committee, he would recommend his hon. Friend to allow the Bill to reach that further stage.

said, that, after the appeal just made to him by his right hon. Friend, he would withdraw his Amendment.