said that when he gave notice of opposition to this Bill he did not, of course, intend to oppose what he might call the subsidiary clauses of this Bill—that was, the proposal to construct an approach leading from the south to the Tower Bridge. He did not regard the plan that had found favour with the London County Council as altogether the host plan that might be made, and he did not think it reflected credit on the management of the London County Council that the plan was only now going to be begun after the Tower Bridge was on the point of completion; but his objection to the Bill was to what he might call the principle of the Bill—namely, the 37th clause, which was commonly called the Betterment Clause. That it was the main principle of the Bill was practically admitted by the London County Council last year when they refused to proceed with the Bill after this main principle had been taken out. He was most anxious not to trespass on the time of the House by making a Committee speech; therefore, he would briefly allude to the objections that might be made to this particular form of the Betterment Clause, such as the arbitrary way in which certain areas were scheduled for betterment, the preposterously long time during which this sword of Damocles, in the shape of a betterment charge, was kept hanging over the head of the unfortunate owner and occupier, to the preposterously short time that was allowed to him to object to the betterment charge made on him and to the entirely new principle of denying the privilege of a jury to assess what pay- ment was due from him instead of putting it on the ipse dixit of an arbitrator, in whose appointment he obviously had no voice whatever. He admitted that as the arbitrators were to be appointed by a Public Department they would be fairly and justly appointed; at the same time, he thought a Public Department would be rather inclined to be against an individual, and he did not think they would appoint an arbitrator who had any leaning in favour of private persons. If it were shown that some scheme could be devised by which the owner and occupier of a property, which would be improved by some scheme, should properly and justly pay their share, he would be the last man to object to it; but he contended that the present system, under which a fresh rating was made as soon as an improvement was made, so that the occupier paid as long as the property was in his possession, and then the freeholder, as long as the improvement lasted, did all that was necessary. Under the proposed system the property might be placed under a perpetual rent-charge for some improvement which appeared to benefit it, and some future improvement might leave the property high and dry, vet it, would have to go on paying the same betterment charge. Moreover, he submitted, it introduced a very great and new principle which was entirely new to our law. Of course, he knew that an instance was adduced in the time of Charles II., immediately after the great fire, when a charge something in the nature of betterment was imposed, but it was only done once; it evidently did not answer, for it was never tried again; therefore he was justified in saying it was a new principle. That being so, he held that it ought to have been brought forward as a Public Bill by a Minister of the Crown, after due inquiry by a Royal Commission or something analogous. Last Session the House of Lords proposed a Joint Committee to look into this thing, but at that time Ministers were not ready to accept any suggestions made by the House of Lords, and, therefore, they pooh-poohed it. He was much obliged to the House for listening to him on this dry subject, but he thought it right that they should make some protest against this Betterment Clause in order that it might not be supposed that they, on that side of the House, were in any way agreed to it. At the same time, this clause appearing as it did in a Bill for a very desirable object, he might say tacked to the Bill, he did not propose at this time to move the Resolution that he had placed on the Taper, therefore, he should content himself with this protest, and should take a further and more convenient opportunity on some further stage of the Bill of opposing the Betterment Clause.

said, with regard to this Bill before the House he wished to emphasise the remarks that had fallen from his hon. Friend the Member for the City (Mr. Alban Gibbs), but it appeared to him it would have been more desirable and better if a great change in the system of taxation had been introduced into this House by means of a Public Bill. Regarding this most beneficial improvement of the Tower Bridge, hon. Members on that side of the House per se did not wish to oppose this most useful improvement made by the City of London, but they did oppose this novel principle of betterment in the Bill that they had now to consider. They were told the improvement was to be made by the whole County of London. Why by the whole county? In the past there wore valuable improvements made that were purely Metropolitan, and paid for by the Metropolis as a whole. There were other improvements made in various districts in London, which were purely parochial improvements, and paid by the individual parish concerned, and there were others that were partly Metropolitan and partly parochial, and paid for partly by the general rate over the whole of London, and partly by the parochial rate. Therefore, he would like to ask why the whole of the cost was to be paid by the County of London? It was calculated in another place, in regard to another Bill, that the amount to be received for the betterment principle, contained in the Bill now under discussion, would only be about £150 a year; but he would ask why the parish of Bermondsey, which would be greatly benefited by the bridge, should not pay its quota? The real reason, in his opinion, was this: that it would not then have made such a strong case for betterment had the parish of Bermondsey to pay its fair and just quota. Hon. Members opposite claimed that property did not pay when it was bettered by improvements; but he would point out to them that by the Metropolis Valuation Act of 1869, Section 46, that not every five years only, but by means of supplemental and provisional lists every year, and every mouth, a man's rating might be put up and down according as the value of his property rose or fell. By this Bill the introduction of the betterment system meant that for all time, to the end of the world, a certain charge would be put on the property; there would be no revaluation every five years, and there would be no power as under the existing law to re-value property every year or every month. There were many other schemes more advantageous to the ratepayers, and he was very much surprised that the London County Council had not carefully considered the recoupment system that worked so well with regard to Northumberland Avenue. The ratepayers of London, by that particular system, not only were gainers by that magnificent thoroughfare itself, but also received in aid of local taxation a sum of £250,000 or £300,000. He was willing to admit there were cases where landowners received benefit by improvements made by the Public Authorities, and he thought it would be desirable for a strong Committee to inquire into the matter, so that a Bill could be brought in which should provide that when a landowner was shown to have derived benefit from public improvements he should be called on to pay his just quota. But, at the same time, if that was admitted, they ought to consider this other fact—that if, on the other hand, an individual had his property injured by a public improvement the community ought to bear the loss with him. So far as this Bill was concerned, it appeared to him that the community was to take half the profit, if there was any, and that the individual, whether in Bermondsey or any where else, took the whole of the loss. In fact, to use a somewhat sporting expression, this scheme was nothing more nor less than "Heads I win, tails you lose." Now, he would not dispute the proposition that where property was specially benefited it should be specially assessed in respect of that increment. But how was that to be considered by the London County Council? It was to be in this way—that if an arbitrator appointed by themselves considered that the property had been benefited, then for all time it would be a, fixed charge on that property. There was, no doubt, a sort of appeal, but it would be, as he would show later, both of an expensive and dilatory character, and it was only in reality an appeal from the surveyor of the London County Council to that of the Local Government Board. In this particular instance the London County Council had been very wise and had not attacked any very important vested interest in London; they had not attacked the brewing interest, or large manufactures, or the large and wealthy men of influence, or the residential landowners, but they had attacked a body of individuals who were, comparatively speaking, poor men, although, no doubt, amongst those properties that would be included in the betterment clauses were Messrs. Sloes' vinegar works, which happened to be very close to the bridge. He understood this firm of vinegar manufacturers had a, 40 years' lease on their premises, but could any reasonable man allege that a vinegar manufactory would be benefited by a road being put in proximity to these works? They had to look at the actual value of the property as it was at present and not to a prospective value. Such a valuation could only be absolutely arbitrary and speculative. Last night he attended an important discussion at the Surveyors' Institute where he heard a member of the London County Council deliver a lecture on ground rents, but he defied any of the eminent surveyors he met then; to say what would be the value of property in London 40 or 50 years hence in any definite area, but that would be the duty of the surveyor in considering the question of betterment. Under the clause a surveyor would have to say what, in his opinion, the value of certain property would be 40 or 50 years hence. The system of betterment introduced a totally new system into our system of taxing the capital value of real property. That had never been the principle on which they had taxed property in this country. It was, no doubt, a principle which had been introduced into America, but it had never been the custom hitherto in the United Kingdom; and if they were going to alter the system of taxation in local municipal areas, he ventured to say they should do it by means of a Public Bill. Now what was this system of betterment? it was an objectionable expression denoting the moiety of an undefined quantity—namely, the enhanced value of property affected by the improvements of the London County Council. He ventured to think that a scheme might be devised by the Loudon County Council which would really benefit the locality in a very much more satisfactory way than the present scheme. And what did the present scheme do? It went behind the great principle that had hitherto been one of the grand principles of the Liberal Party in this House, that representation should accompany taxation. By this betterment system they were going to tax the landowners in the various local districts of London, whilst they gave them no voting power as owners either for County Council elections or for local ones. The system by which they had hitherto carried on government with regard to local taxation was that the burden of the year should fall on the annual value of the property, but this betterment charge would remain an unvarying one for all time. With regard to one principle in this scheme—namely, the proposed "limits of deviation," he should like to say a few words. Might it not be the fact that even on the London County Council they might have a surveyor or somebody who might be biased in regard to his action, and might it not be impossible that in selecting individuals as subjects for this arbitrary form of impost to disassociate entirely from his mind the question whether those individuals did or did not support the views of the majority of the Council? They knew also that fashions changed with regard to important districts in London. They know that at one time that district north of the Park, including Portland Square, Russell Square, and Bedford Square was higher rented than at the present time; they know that fashion had changed and gone further south to Grosvenor Square, and why should not fashion change equally with regard to other areas of London? Therefore, it seemed to him it would be a great injury and wrong to inflict on any landowners a tax for all time on their property by the ipse dixit of some officer of the London County Council. Some people denied that this was either a tax or a rate; he would not therefore call it either, but would describe it as an impost in the nature of a mortgage. If the payment of this charge became in arrear, the Council had power to enter and sell the property in question to satisfy their claim for so-called betterment? Up to the present time it had been the rule that only chattels, movable property, could be seized in payment of rates and taxes due by the ratepayers of the Metropolis, but by this Bill the property itself could be seized and be specially disposed of by the Loudon County Council. In his opinion, it would be very difficult to dispose of property when for six or seven years the cloud of this betterment award might be hanging over it. It should be noticed by the House that seven years might elapse, and in some instances eight, ere the arbitrator's award for betterment of a certain property was settled; and it must, too, be borne in mind that it was a charge on the supposed capital value of a given property not at the moment, but for all time. This could only be a matter of speculation, whereas the annual value of a property, as it now existed, was a matter of fact. He was ready to admit they ought to take every step to reduce the local taxation of London, which was a very heavy burden upon the people of London. At the present time he might mention there was a local debt of no less than £40,000,000 sterling on the Metropolis, but the mode by which the London County Council wished to relieve the ratepayers was not a good or beneficial one. In the last three years the Council had spent in the Parliamentary Committee-rooms upstairs no less a sum than £30,000 in fighting various schemes that came before Parliamentary Committees, and he could not help thinking they must regret that in 1886–7 and 1888 they allowed the Coal and Wine Duties to be repealed, which, whilst their abolition had not decreased the price of coals, £300,000 a year was lost in aid of London rates and for Metropolitan improvements. In fact, the betterment system was only an idea which might enter the mind of the arbitrator as to what the enhanced value would be at some future date. They knew very well that people dreaded going to law in this country. Even the great landowners knew very well the great expense of appearing before Parliamentary Committees, and would consider long before doing so in defence of their rights; but, on the other hand, the London County Council, having the whole taxpayers of London behind them, would not hesitate to bring in Bills imposing any particular system of betterment in any part of the Metropolis, and to that extent they would oppress the individual owner, more especially the least wealthy of them. The cost the London County Council had already gone to in this betterment scheme of theirs would have paid three or four times over any sum they could ever receive by this particular proposal. He did not really believe in his heart of hearts that the hon. Members composing the London County Council were so impressed with this system as they pretended; their object was to have a good fighting question on which to attack the House of Lords. It was a remarkable fact that the members of the County Council did not see that by causing a feeling of uncertainty to arise as to the future onus of taxation on any given house or property they would increase the house rent to the individual occupier; for it was an obvious fact that the landowner had, by the contracts he had entered into, contracted himself out of any obligation with regard to taxes; he had placed that obligation on the individual taking the building lease, who had placed the obligation in his turn on the occupier, so that unless these leases were done away with—and he did not think that Parliament would, in its wisdom, go to the extreme measure of abolishing all leases and contracts made with regard to the whole of the property in London—the whole cost of this betterment would in reality fall on the occupier of the houses in the particular locality. Hon. Members opposite would hesitate before advocating, either in this House or before their constituents, any tax on food used by the working classes, and yet they were apparently anxious to put on a tax that would increase the cost of house rent in London. With the exception of the precedent when a great part of London was re-built after the great fire of London, he did not think there was any analogy to the present proposal in this country. But to consider this question in all its bearings one would have to look at the obverse side of the question. Hon. Members imagined that whenever they made a new road or a new street in a given locality they were always going to benefit that locality. They might benefit the locality, but it could not be said that in all cases it benefited individual proprietors in that locality. What did they find when this subject was discussed in the Committee upstairs? Mr. Field, one of the surveyors retained as a witness by the London County Council, said that no doubt street improvements occasionally created worsement, and he granted it was impossible to assess the compensation for that worsement. That being so, why was it more easy to assess compensation for the betterment? Surely the two were co-relative. A learned counsel, who was a witness for the London County Council, Mr. Fletcher Moulton, Q.C., in his evidence before the Committee, granted that if two several parts of the same property were affected by alterations made by a Public Authority, one of which bettered and the other worsened the several parts of the property affected, the owner ought to be allowed to set off the worsement against the betterment, and pay or receive as the case might be. The late Mr. Saunders, who appeared for the Loudon County Council, bound his clients to insert words in the Bill to enable the owner of the various properties concerned to receive compensation for worsement, where it was caused by the alteration in question. What was the result? Notwithstanding, Mr. Saunders, having given this distinct pledge that words should be introduced in the Bill for the worsement principle, in the result no such words were so introduced; it passed through this House, and was sent up to the other House without those words being inserted. If, however, it was right to give to a single proprietor the right to set off the worsement of his property in one part against a betterment in another, it should be equally done in the case where no betterment occurred, and compensation should also then be given for worsement. The worsement area would, it were needless to say, be, for obvious reasons, not coterminous with the "limits of deviation" for betterment. He did not, however, wish to occupy the time of the House further than to say that he did not believe a proposal that would do less benefit to the ratepayers than this betterment principle could be conceived. He found that in America, where it had been tried, it had been found absolutely and completely wanting. In New York and elsewhere in America they had three or four systems, working even in one given city at the same time, all of which wore found to, in many instances, work oppression on the individual, on the one hand, and cause the danger of bribery on the other, by the fact that the area of "the limits of deviation" were an unknown quantity, subject to the will of the Municipal Surveyor, or a small works committee of a given Municipal Authority, and he thought they would hesitate to copy the Americans in that respect. He found that nearly all the leading American jurists said it was a doubtful system; and one who wrote to a friend of his, Mr. Baumann, who used to be a Member of this House, said the way it occasionally worked was this. The working classes, finding themselves in a majority in a certain town, had a towns' meeting, which decided that a certain betterment system should be introduced, as in America in some townships such matters were settled by a sort of plébiscite. It was not shown that the proposed public work was required, but the result was that the inhabitants of the district had to have it, and the landowners were obliged to bow to the decision, and probably 500 or 600 of these men who voted for it received wages at the rate of two dollars a day for being employed on the works, which was a rate over the market wage in the United States—the whole cost of the so-called improvement, or the major part of it, being paid by the unfortunate landowner, for so-called "betterment," though in many instances it practically injured and decreased the value of the property. Hitherto they had carried out their local government system on very different principles to that, and he would impress upon the London County Council that if they were going to attempt to alter our principle of rating they should do so on a sounder principle than the system of betterment. Their legislation at the present time left the House in a sufficiently chaotic state, and it would be a great injury to the legislative system if this principle were introduced into Private Bills from time to time. He ventured to say that our laws would he even more chaotic than at present, for this betterment system did clumsily and arbitrarily the same thing that was done now by the ordinary operations of the market.

said, he had hoped the Bill might have gone forward without being delayed by speeches which, so far from making a straight attack on a principle, wandered round about it. He should not follow the example of those hon. Members. The Bill had been introduced under somewhat peculiar circumstances. There was a Bill brought forward on which there was really no contention, except on one clause, the Betterment Clause. It went before a Committee of this House, and, having been investigated and local evidence taken which had been published to this House by that Committee, the clause referred to was twice adopted in this House by overwhelming majorities—first, of two to one; and, secondly, of nearly three to one. After the clause had been rejected by the House of Lords without consideration it was adopted and sent back to the House of Lords; but under those circumstances the House of Lords refused to introduce the clause, and the Bill fell through. Now, in the present year, in this Session of Parliament, the London County Council had re-introduced the Bill, and it was re-introduced, so far as the Tower Bridge was concerned, in exactly the same words in which it was passed by this House. The Bill was not altered in one jot or tittle; it was brought forward again, and he should almost have expected that its adoption by this House would have been regarded as a matter, more or less, of form; that it would have passed through its various stages and been sent up to the House of Lords there to receive that consideration it had not received. In respect of the action of the House of Lords in this matter the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition made the following remarkable statement. He said—

"The Lords desire to inquire whether there is any equitable machinery by which the per- son the value of whose property is increased by an improvement can be made to contribute to the cost of the improvement. That is my view of what the words mean, and the words are certainly capable of that construction."

"I believe that the majority of gentlemen on this side of the House have only one difficulty in regard to betterment—which is, how to carry it out: and if they could see any machinery by which that end could be attained, they would be as anxious to see the principle introduced into our Private Bill legislation as anyone on the other side of the House."

"It is not fair to allege that the Lords as a body, collectively or individually, are opposed to the principle of betterment."

"He was inclined to agree that it would be extremely difficult by a Public Act to lay down principles which would apply to every variety of case that could occur, not only in London, but elsewhere. He was not at all sure it would be desirable or safe to lay down general principles which would be at once adopted without any experience being obtained on these grounds, and on the grounds that the application of the principle in this case depended entirely on local circumstances; he thought it was a subject that might legitimately and rightly be left to private legislation. They would then have the advantage of the application of the principle to individual cases, and by the growth of experience they would gradually get such an amount of knowledge as to be able to lay down, principles for individual application."

"The principle of the 41stclause of the Bill"—now the 37th—"which your Lordships declined to accept, was that proximity is the one test of improvement, and that, if yon are near a public improvement, it says that your property must have improved by that public improvement. A more senseless suggestion was never put—and that is saying a good deal—into a Bill presented to Parliament."

There is no proposition in the Bill with regard to worsement.

said, that was a totally different question; the point he was dealing with was that the hon. Gentleman fell into the same error as Lord Salisbury when he assumed the only test of betterment was the proximity to the improvement. The essential point of the method of charging for betterment was this—that no one should be called on to contribute any part of the charge who was not clearly in receipt of betterment on which the charge was made. The hon. Gentleman, when he ventured to oppose the Bill in this House, and the late Prime Minister in the Upper House should make themselves aware by the simple perusal of the Bill of what were its contents. There were only two points in what had been said it was incumbent upon him to answer, for, as he had said, he did not intend to enter into a general discussion. The two main points were these, and they were points of misstatement. The first was as to recoupment, to which the hon. Gentleman who spoke last referred. The hon. Member referred to the method of recoupment in London as having been a satisfactory method to the ratepayers, and one that provided a large sum of money. If the hon. Member looked into the figures before the Committee upstairs, it was shown, and could not be disputed, that the recoupment, system as introduced and carried out in the Metropolis had been an extreme pecuniary burden to the ratepayers, and it was owing to the failure of that system that the betterment system was substituted. The other point he wished to call attention to was one on which they had often been misrepresented in the County Council, and in this House. It had been said, with respect to this Bill and with respect to their action on the betterment section of it, that, they ought to have proceeded with the Bill for the Tower Bridge approach without waiting for any Betterment Clause, because they were bound in honour to make an approach to the bridge that was made by the City of Loudon. He understood the hon. Member for the City of London (Mr. Alban Gibbs) signified by his action his approval of that statement. Now, would the House believe that, the main Petitions against the Bill as it stood were the Corporation of the City of Loudon, and would the House believe that the Petition against, the Bill laid on the Table by the Corporation of the City of London was not, only a Petition against, betterment, but, against the actual improvement itself? The Petitioners went into some detail, and said the betterment system was had and could not be applied; they put themselves in direct opposition to the great majority of this House and the Committee upstairs. Therefore, by going on without the Betterment Clause they should not be meeting what, the City of London wanted. The London County Council, who had introduced the Bill again, looked on the Betterment Clause as one of the most important clauses brought before this House in any private legislation, and in regard to it they had now got the assistance of the Corporation of Manchester, whose Bill down for this day contained the same Betterment Clause. He could not doubt that the House would willingly assent to this principle as it, did last year, and would send the Bill to the House of Lords, which would then have the oppor- tunity of giving that consideration to it in Committee which they and their most trusted advisers said it ought to have, and which it would have had last year but for the complete misunderstanding of the Bill by their Lordships when it was before them.

said, the speech of the hon. Member for Hoxton (Mr. Stuart) would have been noticed for one peculiarity, and that was that it contained no reason in support of the Betterment Code which was included in this Bill; the only reason in support of the Betterment Code in the Bill which was given was that a similar clause was in another Bill last year which was passed by this House by, as he admitted, a considerable majority. The merits of the Betterment Code had never been threshed out in this House, and the hon. Member omitted to state the important fact that when the Code got to the House of Lords the House of Lords threw the Bill out. The hon. Member might attach no importance to that, but he thought the country would attach importance to it, and desire that there should be a dispassionate discussion. Lord Hobhouse had recently accused the opponents of betterment of having never given a hint or a suggestion of any kind as to what should be the method of applying the principle. The noble Lord told them that they were met by a mere negation; but he could not have paid attention to the proceedings of three Committees of that House, on two of which he sat. He maintained that there were means under the existing law of applying the principle of betterment. He was in favour of the application of the principle under the existing machinery. The London County Council were not satisfied with the methods then in use for assessing the rates, but they considered it necessary to devise some new system, and in order to conceal as much as possible what they were doing they invented the principle of annual annuities. They did it in a more insidious manner. They provided that an annuity of £3 a year should not be redeemed or redeemable in all time except by payment of £100 in cash. It was all very well for Lord Hobhouse and hon. Gentlemen to say that the plan devised was one which should receive the unanimous support of the House, because it was a plan by which those who secured the benefits from the working of the Act would be the persons directly called upon to contribute to the expenses incurred in carrying out the improvements. It was also very well to say they had never suggested any alternative plan to secure that those who got the benefit of the improvements should pay for them; but the existing arrangement under the Valuation Act of 1869 had been found to work, on the whole, very fairly; it had been in force now 25 years, and every year it was revised by means of supplemental lists. He would ask any gentleman on the opposite Bench who lived in a fashionable part of Loudon whether he was willing that his rent should be increased, say, £60 a year, and the capital value of his house raised from £200 or £300 a year, as now, to six times that figure, because the London County Council chose to think that they had a right to assess his house, not at its present value as now, but at what they considered would be its value at a future time. It was frequently the case that the value of a house suddenly disappeared, and in such a case he would like to know if the annuity was to remain a burden on the property for ever? Yet no provision had been made for any deterioration in the living value of a house during the period over which the assessment extended. Was that a reasonable, fair, or just method of levying a tax? He would like to point out to the hon. Member for Hoxton that this one clause contained 17 sub-clauses, and a number of sections, so that it constituted a regular Code in itself. Although this was in one sense a Private Bill, in so far as it affected private taxation, yet it dealt with a matter of general public interest, and involved an alteration of a great public principle; and it seemed to him, therefore, to be very inconvenient that no explanation had been given hon. Members of the grounds upon which it had been brought forward. This way of bringing in a Bill put Members who wished to oppose a measure in a difficult position, as they could only meet the questions raised in the negative, and do their utmost to show that in their opinion the proposed innovation was had and that the existing law was good. He therefore need make no apology to the House for entering into those particulars. He had already given his definition of the just principle of betterment. He would apply it by an enhanced rate while the enhanced value of the property continued, and no longer. But what was the system proposed to be adopted? First, the value of the property was scheduled in the document which the London County Council called "the award," Assessment Committees fixed the amount, and ratepayers and individuals were not allowed to go before the County Council itself to show cause against the award, but the authorities were entitled to say to any ratepayer, "Your property will be increased in value by this improvement to the extent of £200, or £6 annual value, and we put you in the list on that assessment." The list actually became the award, and if the ratepayer felt aggrieved the only course open to him was to resort to the expensive method of taking legal steps to have his appeal tried, not before the ordinary tribunals of the country, but before an arbitrator. Being compelled to go to law in such a matter as this was doubly serious, because not only was the result uncertain, in which case the appellant would be saddled with very heavy costs, but it was a case of a private individual having to fight a public body who were perfectly irresponsible for any expenses which they incurred. Therefore, the proposal of the Council involved a very serious innovation—indeed a violent innovation in the accepted law. He was well aware that the Loudon County Council had no respect for Rules and Regulations held sacred by our grandfathers; but he thought they should show some kind of respect to the present laws relating to taxation, and not bring in such great innovations without giving very good and substantial reasons for so doing. The second serious innovation which this House was asked to sanction was the conferring of a power upon the London County Council to alter the incidence of taxation between owners, lessees, and occupiers of property. This innovation was also smoothed over by a statement that the tax would be levied on the landlord of the premises and not on the tenant, and that where the house was not occupied by the owner the Act would not apply. This was altogether a false cry. The present system was to assess the house and the site with everything upon it, and he maintained that they rightly assessed that at its gross value. But there were generally three persons interested in a property—the owner, the lessee, and the occupier, and now the assessment was divided between the three parties in such proportions as they might agree upon. But this Bill proposed to do away with the existing freedom of arrangement, and to differentiate between the parties. On the previous night he received an intimation from some of the members of the County Council that they intended to oppose the Instruction he had put on the Paper, and he was, therefore, unable to move it that day. But he trusted the Leader of the House and the Government generally would support the proposal he intended to make, which was to the effect that such a matter as this should be brought in as a Public Bill, and thoroughly discussed as a public measure. He hoped, also, that the Government would take steps to have full inquiries made as to whether the facts that had been put forward were really true. He wished to have ascertained the effects of these changes on the exising law of the country. The third innovation consisted in a restricted area of taxation, and the plan submitted by the County Council showed that while outside the lines of the plan certain properties would be bettered, other properties inside the lines would not be bettered. This would be manifestly a gross injustice, to be founded on an arbitrary decision in the office of the surveyor to the London County Council, into the reasons for which no outsider could inquire. So far they had never had submitted to them any reason for constituting this restricted area. Again, the existing legal remedies were abolished by the Bill. Now aggrieved persons could go before the Assessment Committee, which was fairly constituted, without counsel, solicitors, or surveyors; and from this Committee there was now an appeal to Quarter Sessions, which was simple and inexpensive. For this generally equitable tribunal there was to be substituted a Judge selected on the application of the County Council to the Local Government Board, and persons appeared before this tribunal with the peril facing them of having, in all probability, to pay costs. They were, in fact, to lose the benefit of the existing tribunal on which they could rely. The House of Commons, by two important Public Commit- tees, in 1870 and 1889—a Committee on the subject of Local Taxation and the Committee on the Town Holdings Act of 1882—reported that if and when local taxation was so altered that the immediate and direct incidence of it fell not upon the occupier as now, and through him upon the owner, but upon the owners direct, representation must be given to the owners on the body which spent the money. But no such representation was here vouchsafed. The County Council had, moreover, abandoned the system of recoupment, the principle of which was the purchase of such laud as would be bettered by the proposed improvement in order by re-sale to recover the cost of the improvement. It was, however, admitted that recoupment had been a loss, except in two cases, one of these being the Northumberland Avenue, from which a large profit was made, and the loss had been caused by every man who was worsened having to be compensated before he was turned out. Now, the County Council thought that they would escape compensations for worsement. Was this a just principle to sanction? The Council further proposed to tax vacant land and unproductive property. The first principle of our system of taxation was that the needs of the year, as regarded local expenditure, should be met out of the income of the year—an income drawn from all properties within the area. This principle it was now proposed to depart from, and by saying they would tax everything that existed, whether it produced anything or nothing, they were reverting to the crudest forms of American taxation. He should not move the Instruction to the Committee of which he had given notice, because it would occupy the House for another day; but when the Government referred the Bill to a Committee, he was anxious to ensure that they had a Report, aye or no, whether the Betterment Clause contained the inequalities which had been suggested. He wanted that in black and white before the Bill went to the House of Lords, where he hoped it would be examined on its merits. He hoped the-Bill would not be referred to a Hybrid Committee, which was the worst possible Committee for a Bill of the kind, and that the House would support the Instruction to the Committee which he had placed on the Paper to report generally on the principle of "better- ment," and how far and to what extent it interfered with our existing laws of local taxation.

said, he was glad that his hon. Friend who had initiated the discussion had expressed his intention of not dividing the House. His hon. Friend spoke on this occasion rather as the representative of ancient traditions than as Member for the City, and rather as an individual than as a Conservative. Not as a Conservative, because the Manchester Corporation proposed a similar plan in a Bill which bore the name of the Leader of the Opposition; not as Member for the City, because more than one meeting had been held at the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce, where unanimous opinions had been passed urging the great importance of making the southern approaches to the Tower Bridge. Indeed, he did not understand his hon. Friend to contest the importance of the improvement, but only to object to the single clause dealing with betterment. The hon. Member who had just sat down complained of the reference of the Bill of last year to a Hybrid Committee. That was not the choice of the supporters of the Bill; and the Hybrid Committee was only agreed to to conciliate hon. Members opposite from whom the suggestion originated. The hon. Member also complained that no speech had been made on the introduction of the Bill. The Bill was introduced without a word of comment to save the time of the House, because the same discussion had already occupied the House several times.' He believed that the differences between the hon. Member and the supporters of the Bill arose partly from the fact that some hon. Members did not quite understand what the Bill effected. In a pamphlet on the subject the hon. Member said that the area of betterment was arbitrarily drawn by lines on a map, and, while including property which was not bettered, excluded property which was very much bettered. From that statement it might be supposed that all the property within the area was to be taxed; but such was not the case. No property could be taxed unless it had been shown that it was materially improved. The hon. Member further stated in his pamphlet that the tax was imposed, not on the ascertained increased value, but on the basis of the County Council's own opinion that the property would be improved. This was an entire misapprehension. Truly, no claim would be made unless the County Council were of opinion that the property had been improved; but before the tax could be levied an arbitrator, appointed by the Local Government Board, must be satisfied that the claim was just. In this matter it was impossible to do absolute justice; the only thing to be done was to arrive at a system which would do the least injustice all round. Under the old system half the cost of improvements fell 011 the district and half on the Metropolis; and it frequently happened that property not benefited at all paid both the district and the Metropolitan rate. He could not but feel that the ratepayers of London had reason for complaint against the Government in reference to this question. The whole amount which this betterment tax was expected to raise was £5,000. The expense of promoting the Bill before the House last Session was about £5,000: the expense of the present Bill would be considerable; and the delay in opening the approaches to the Tower Bridge would inflict great inconvenience on the trade of South Loudon. If the Government had accepted the proposal of the House of Lords for a Joint Committee on the question last year all this extra expense would have been saved and the Bill would have been passed a year sooner. The unreasoning animosity of the Government against the House of Lords had inflicted this additional expense on London and entailed great loss and inconvenience on trade and commerce.

said, that while absolutely agreeing in the last observations which fell from the right hon. Member for London University, he should like to point out to the House that he thought his right hon. Friend was under a misapprehension when he said that all that was to be done was to satisfy the Local Government Board as to the equity of the increased assessment that was proposed to be placed on certain property. If hon. Members would refer to the Bill they would observe that the Local Government Board never interfered in any way whatever. The Local Government Board had, indeed, to appoint an Inspector, who was to be satisfied with the increase in the value of the property proposed to be taxed; but that procedure was only resorted to when some intrepid, wealthy, and public-spirited individual ventured into the arena to fight the London County Council with his own money, while the County Council fought with the money of the ratepayers. In the House or elsewhere he had never neglected an opportunity of advocating the principle of betterment—a principle which he thought would have more quickly and more efficiently become law if those in authority in the London County Council who were promoting this Bill had not for four years wasted thousands of pounds of the ratepayers in the at last successful effort to rescue £5,000. If, instead of that, they had put pressure on the Government to assent to the principle, it would have done away with controversy, it would have secured an automatic operation of the principle, which his hon. Friends and Colleagues opposite professed to advocate, though their action must in the minds of impartial persons, and certainly in the minds of the suffering ratepayers, throw doubt on the genuineness of their views.

said, he would like to point out that in the Hybrid Committee the Betterment Clause was carried only by one vote, that of the hon. Member for West Fife, who had stated he had been able to find out all the arguments on the question from the Report of the Committee, and therefore did not think it worth while to be present at the discussions. He ventured to think the Loudon County Council had made a mistake in ignoring expert individual opinion on the question such as that of Sir Whittaker Ellis.

With regard to the Instruction which has been placed on the Taper by me, I do not know whether hon. Gentlemen opposite intend to oppose it.

Yes, Sir; we oppose the entire Instruction.

I am not going to subject the House to a second Debate on this question to-morrow; but perhaps the Government may suggest some means for the elucidation of this subject.

The Government cannot accept this Instruction, because it proposes that the Committee should go into all questions which were thoroughly investigated by a Committee appointed for the purpose three years ago. I was myself a Member of that Committee; we went most carefully into the question, and though we did not report at length we came to a conclusion in the matter. Under these circumstances, the Government cannot allow this Instruction to pass.

I understand that last week an arrangement was arrived at between the hon. Member for South Islington and Her Majesty's Government that the Motion for the Police and Sanitary Committee should be moved in the terms in which it stands on the Paper. I have only to observe that we fully agree with the view of the Association of Municipal Corporations that Standing Orders 150 and 173a are already applicable and the Government will not move an Instruction. I beg to move—

said, that as some exception had been taken by Municipalities to the action of the Police and Sanitary Committee in excising and restricting certain of their Bills, he had feared it might have been necessary for him to oppose the Motion. No doubt the Committee had been controlled to a large extent by a special Instruction which had been passed by the House previously for their guidance, with the result that its operation in the last two or three years had been undoubtedly of a character to produce what was felt to be a too centralising spirit on the part of the Department in dealing with the local Private Bills of Corporations. However, the matter had been met in a very cordial and generous spirit by the Local Government Board, the Under Secretary of which had seen him, and done his best to meet the Corporations' wishes; and therefore he would not divide the House on the subject this Session. He would only express the hope that in the coining year the Committee, unfettered by an Instruction and with a greater representation of the Municipalities on it, might allow more liberty to that spirit of local legislation which had been the chief means of building up the statutes of local government, such as the Public Health Act and others. In that hope he assented most readily to the Motion.

said, that as he had been Chairman of this Committee during the last Session of Parliament, he might be allowed to say a few words on the Motion. He regretted that his hon. Friend the Member for Islington had not thought fit to promulgate more definitely the charges he desired to bring against the Committee, because he questioned whether it would be possible for his hon. Friend to establish the central charge he had advanced—namely, that the Committee had been governed by a Departmental feeling of centralisation, and had been narrowly controlled by the Instruction of the House. Of course, it was impossible for him to say who would compose the Committee in the future, or who would be Chairman of it, and he did not know whether notice would be taken of the suggestion of his hon. Friend, that there should be a larger representation of Members representing Municipalities on the Committee; but he ventured to point out this simple fact in connection with the previous Instruction—that all the House of Commons had done hitherto, and all the Committee did last Session, was to decline to allow any changes in the law to be effected in eases where the existing Statutes had been recently passed. Undoubtedly, it would be a serious thing if the Debate had been allowed to pass without a single word being said against the impression which had been conveyed to the House, that because the Instruction moved last year and the year before was not moved this year, therefore the Committee, however composed, was to understand that it was not to be governed by that Instruction. He did not know whether his hon. Friend the Member for Islington had actually in mind what the Instruction was; but he ventured to repudiate the idea that there had been on the part of the Committee any attempt at centralisation, or any inclination to give into the representations or recommendations of Government Departments. He could show that on many occasions the Committee did give special powers to the Local Authorities, when they were able to show that their local circumstances made it absolutely necessary that there should be some small changes in the existing law; but the House would agree that it would be intolerable if a small Committee sitting upstairs were to allow the law to be extended, curtailed, or materially altered, when the House as a whole had within the four or five years dealt with the identical subject in a comprehensive way, and had declared what the intentions of the Legislature were on that subject. To allow anything like that would be throwing on a small Committee a very great and serious responsibility; and he, for one, would feel himself absolutely unable to serve on the Committee if it had to accept that very onerous task, which properly belonged to the House, and of which the House could not divest itself. He thought it his duty to say so much, because if it were his fortune to be on the Committee again this year he should not like his hon. Friend to think that, because he had allowed the matter to pass in silence, he had acquiesced in the suggestion that the action of the House in not moving an Instruction relieved the Committee from the course it had taken up last year, which was supported by every Committee, and was not desirable in the interests of well-conducted legislation. He would, however, suggest that the quorum be reduced from five to three, as on some occasions there had been a delay and inconvenience caused to witnesses through the failure of the required number of Members turning up early.

thought the Committee should have access, more than hitherto, to the Reports made to the Local Government Board with regard to those particular measures when they dealt with the law as it existed. In fact, he thought all Members of the House ought to have no difficulty whatever in getting access to-such Reports.

said, that as he had been for six years a Member of the Sanitary and Police Committee, he might be permitted to say a, few words on the Motion. His hon. Friend had made some reference to what was known as the adoptive Acts. Those Acts had been passed because in their absence the labours of the Police and Sanitary Committee had become almost crushing. The subject-matter of many of those adoptive Acts came before the Committee in a most perfect form; every one of their clauses had been fully discussed; and the body of adoptive Acts presented the result of the most careful consideration in such a form that any Local Authority might adopt one or all of those Acts, and have the advantage of that body of legislation. He was sure it would be a great injury to Public Health Pills if the whole subject were thown again, as during former years, in a confused shape before the Committee. He was sure that legislation would be less satisfactory than at this moment, and that the duties of the Committee would become so formidable that no Committee could possibly undertake them. He hoped the Police and Sanitay Committee would act in a thoroughly independent spirit. It was their duty to stand between the Departments and the public and to investigate the recommendations of those who appeared before the Committee. Sometimes they must decide in favour of the promoters, sometimes in favour of the objectors, and sometimes in favour of the Departments, but they should proceed from first to last in a judicial spirit and, guided by the arguments, decide according to the facts as they arose. He believed good work would continue to be done by the Committee if the adoptive Acts were not interfered with, but if they were private legislation would sink into chaos.

said, that with the right hon. Baronet the Member for the Forest of Dean and the hon. Member for South Islington he had been requested by the Association of Municipal Corporations to support their complaint on this point. He could assure the House that great injury and injustice had been done the Municipalities by the manner in which their Bills had been mutilated by the Police and Sanitary Committee, He ventured to hope that that would not occur again. It, was local action which the hon. Member for Liverpool (Mr. Long) had referred to on the part of the Municipal Corporations of the Kingdom which had resulted in the building up of the Statutes.

said, he had referred to proposals to deal with subjects which had been dealt with by Parliament within the past three or four years. The hon. Member's statement was based on existing Acts of Parliament passed before the general law was laid down. It did not refer to recent Acts—those of 1889 and 1892.

said, they were the re-enactments and consolidation of the existing law.

No, no.

said, that at any rate he ventured to hope that Municipal Corporations would not have this injury done to them during the present Session.

said, that objection had been made that hon. Members had not access to the Local Government Board Reports. The Local Government Board would have no objection to the Sanitary and Police Committee having access to these Reports.

said, that his Motion for the appointment of a Committee to consider and report upon the procedure, practice, and forms of the House was dictated not by party, but purely by business, considerations. Some such Committees had been previously formed, and there was an impression that their proceedings had not been fruitful, but, after a careful comparison of their proposals with the present Standing Orders of the House, he had come to the conclusion that many of their suggestions had proved valuable, and had been incorporated with advantage in the law of Parliament. Moreover, time had now elapsed, and some of the recommendations of such Committees, which, when made, had been in advance of public opinion, might now with advantage be reconsidered in the light of more recent experience. And he was also of opinion that, but for what such Committees had effected, the present state of Parliamentary business might have been much worse than it was. Such experience showed that business in the House of Commons had become more and more congested, and one of the Committees had reported that this feature of Parliamentary life would be likely to increase rather than diminish. There were now more speakers, and the Sessions were longer; indeed, it might be said that there were practically no vacations, and that Parliament had been for nearly 18 months in almost permanent Session. Yet, notwithstanding this sacrifice on the part of Members, the promises of Parliament were being less and less fulfilled. The programmes of Governments on each side of the House were but slightly carried into effect. The list of promises was long—of performances, extremely short. And in the case of non-official Members, the proportion of performances was almost infinitesimal, inasmuch as during last Session 309 such measures were introduced, while only 23 were passed. Even for the completion of the financial work of the year, the Government had been dependent upon the courtesy of the Opposition, and, while such cordial relations had an excellent effect on business, they could not be relied upon amid the stress of Party feeling. Yet Governments were constantly promising what it must be known could not be performed, and thus public opinion was greatly misled and public misapprehension produced. Equally, non-official Members were encouraged by the existing Rules to what he would call trying their luck at legislation. Some hundreds ballotted for the chances, and yet it was well known that, under the circumstances of the most favourable Session, only 10 or 15 places were worth having, and this year there were not more than five. Yet Members gave their time, and the time of the public, to the ballot. They remained midnight after midnight on the off-chance of passing a Bill, notwithstanding the fact that, even if they were successful in the ballot, nevertheless, if the measure was opposed, it could not possibly pass through all its stages in tin; House of Commons, as was indicated in the case of the Sites for Public Worship Bills of the last Session. Hence, there was a strong and growing feeling both inside and outside the House of Commons that, if Parliamentary institutions were not to be endangered, there must be some change—some reform. The Prime Minister himself, in his recent speech at Edinburgh, frankly admitted, and indeed, invited such proposals. The Prime Minister was, beyond doubt, sincere in this, and meant what he said. Moreover, he expressed a general public feeling, and he impressed upon the Government the duty on this occasion of following their own Prime Minister's recommendation by helping forward this Motion both in the House and in Committee. What, then, were the chief evils and their causes? They were: pressure of Parliamentary work out of all proportion to Parliamentary time, the want of business-like economy in dealing with that time, and the ever-present and all-pervading element of chance and uncertainty. It might not be possible to eliminate chance entirely, but he protested against making it, as they did, a principle of action. For instance, non-official Members' Bills and Motions, which had been useful in the past as themes of discussions, and as suggestions, and which, in many cases, had been carried into legislation with the best effect, were subjected to a series of chances and uncertainties. The first chance was the ballot itself. Was there always "a survival of the fittest" Bills? Some were good, but sometimes Wednesdays were wasted by talk on proposals which had no chance whatever of becoming law, which were even talked upon to stave off more important propositions, and which were sometimes put down with that very object, to which, unfortunately, the forms of the House too often lent themselves. This was the real origin of the Bill - Syndicates, which, though irregular, had at least the excuse of being organisations to forward the more important measures. Again, on Tuesdays and Fridays Motions were often dealt with in just the same way, and, as a result, they had those "counts-out" which often destroyed an evening's work when it was too late to devote the time to any other purpose, one remedy for which would be to count out a useless Motion, instead of the House, and then to proceed to the next Order. The second chance was the prospect that Governments might at any moment take the whole time of the House, indeed often Government work was so pressing that they must have it. Governments were always on the "pounce" for this purpose, as they were thought to be even last night. And, thirdly, when Bills came on at midnight, their being taken, even if entirely non-contentious, was still a matter of the greatest doubt. He admitted the objections to late Sittings; he himself had had no reason to complain: indeed, he acknowledged the courtesy of the House in permitting the passing of so many of his own Bills, and, personally, he was as much opposed as anyone to unduly late Sittings, except for the formal passage of unopposed, or, as he would rather call them, uncontentious Bills. If there was a real objection to them he had nothing to say, but he had gathered from a recent exclamation, as well as from Members themselves, that there were some on his side of the House who were opposed to all such legislation. He understood this feeling, though he did not share it, but, on the contrary, considered that legislation had advanced, and might more advance, the welfare of the people. Moreover, the Standing Orders contemplated the passage after 12 o'clock of uncontentious Bills, and he certainly objected to all progress being stopped by the simple words, on the part of a single Member, of "I object," especially when the objecting Member had not even read the Bill. He therefore proposed, though only suggestively, and, as in all cases, for the consideration of the Committee, that an effort should be made to reduce the elements of chance and caprice, and to secure more certainty, and that this might be effected by some system of selection in favour of the Bills which were relatively the more important and useful.

How?

Well, it might be done in many ways, one of which was by Members undersigning the Bills which they approved upon a list in the Library, on the same principle as they now backed them. Or, by requiring more than one, say 10, Members to give notice of opposition, as had been suggested by the hon. Member for Rushcliffe, and, indeed, the Speaker had already effected an improvement, which he heartily acknowledged, in giving time to Members to disarm opposition by a few words in explanation of their Bills. And there were other ways in which time might be saved and obstacles removed. There was what was called "obstruction," which came from both sides of the House, and which he need not define. With such dilatory tactics he had no sympathy, though he had no objection whatever to deliberate discussion, for which time must be gained by the removal of obstruction. St. Paul had said, "the strength of sin is the law," and the strength of obstruction was the present law of Parliament. The remedy was to strike at inducements to, and at the motives of, obstruction. For example, even now, if the Twelve o'clock Rule were suspended, merely in terrorem, the effect was magical, because Members knew that the time must come at some period of the early morning when there must be an end of the discussion. Consequently, they obstructed no longer, and generally all was over by midnight. It was the same with that somewhat barbarous instrument the guillotine. When once applied it was effective, but its application involved debate, in which time was often lost rather than gained, and in the Party struggle the merits were often wholly lost sight of. Hence, the guillotine was injurious, but there was very much to be said for producing its effect beforehand, and that considerately and impartially, by allotting a certain time to sections of a Bill, and to the Bill itself, through the action of the Speaker, aided by a Committee, such as the Committee of Selection. By this means, discussions would be devoted to the main points of measures, instead of often leaving them wholly unconsidered. But perhaps it might be necessary to take some securities for points developed during the Debate, by giving power to the Speaker to extend the time; indeed, he was in favour himself of giving much greater powers to the Chairman, as in the case of other public assemblies. Moreover, if the limitation of the time prevented some points being discussed, there were still many other stages in which this might, be remedied. Again, suggestively, the carrying over and on from one Session to another of Bills in progress, upon a Resolution moved by the Minister or Member in charge, might prevent their destruction and the consequent waste of public time, and remove a great incentive to Party obstruction. The last long Session of nearly 18 months showed that Sessions were, after all, only arbitrary divisions of time, and an incidental advantage would be the limitation of the necessity for the Closure. The Chambers of Commerce had resolved 10 times in favour of thus carrying over Bills, and again this year; and they had been actuated by the yearly fate of such an important, industrial measure as the Bill for Exempting Machinery and Tools from Rating, a subject which had received attention in most competing countries. This Bill had several times passed its Second Reading, and early last Session by a majority of 173, yet it never got further. Lord Salisbury had said that the practice of measures dying with each Session was as sensible as that of a business man who should annually destroy and recommence all his unfinished correspondence; and out of the 15 National Assemblies of Europe 12, and also the United States, had adopted the more modern practice he had suggested, which had vindicated itself by experience. Much, too, might be said for similarly carrying over measures from day to day, as in other public assemblies, as being likely to get more omnibuses to their journey 'send instead of their jostling each other to pieces by overcrowding Temple Bar. Again, much more devolution was wanted. Private Bill legislation ought to be delegated to Commissions or to the Town and County Councils, and at the last meeting of the Chambers of Commerce—which were formed of business men and men versed in public life—the voices from every part of Ireland—from Belfast to Dublin and Cork and from all political Parties—from Scotland and from England, were universally favourable to at least this form of business like Home Rule. These views he urged in the Debate on Scotch Committees last night, and he would now only add that the Estimates might well go to a Standing Committee. The time in Supply was greatly increasing, owing very much to the encroachments by the Government on the time of non-official Members, who were forced to take this opportunity of airing and redressing grievances. Thus, in 1869 the Civil Service Estimates were in Committee of Supply for 16 days, and in 1887 for 31 days; and this rate was progressive. True, in Supply, attention was given not only to finance, but also to points of policy and administration, and this was of value. But such discussion was desultory; the reductions of expenditure were utterly inadequate to the period expended on them; and, as the Secretary for India had said, there was a waste of public time to little or no purpose in preventing a waste of public money. Through a Committee there would be real revision of expenditure; the officials might, be examined; and the saving of time in Supply would give much greater opportunities of raising Motions for redress directly, and for securing their regular and adequate discussion. There was, indeed, already a plethora of such opportunities in the various stages of Supply—on first going into Committee, on the Motion that the Speaker leave the Chair, on Votes on Account—when discussion was most discursive, as it was on Supplementary Estimates and on the various stages of the Appropriation Bill, and also on Report of Supply. Surely all this was more than sufficient, if the time were economically and profitably used. And, indeed, the Committee of 1886 had recommended that every Public Bill should be referred to a Standing Committee (as was generally the case in the Lords), and that in one of such several Committees the Bills of non-official Members should have precedence, the Committees meeting on Thursdays and Fridays in the day time, and the House at 9 in the evening. These were all matters worth the consideration of a Committee, as were some of the technicalities, and what he might call the anachronisms, as well as the many anomalies, of present Parliamentary procedure. To learn that procedure was almost the work of a lifetime, which no business man could give, and the practice ought to be simplified and more closely adapted to modern life and to the procedure of other Public Bodies. For instance, there were the ancient forms in introducing Bills. These had been recently somewhat shortened and improved, but the discussion of the subject had consumed much of the time of the House, and the result had shown that there was still need for more consideration and change. After the ballot Members had to march to the Par, just as they did two centuries ago.

Hear, hear.

Yes, but in the reign of William and Mary time was more plentiful than now; and the rule was frequently broken by Members not going to the Bar at all, but only a yard or two from their places, and then countermarching to the Table. Next, the Order Paper, carefully prepared though it was by the Speaker and the Clerks, was dictated by ancient precedents. Once, no doubt from its name, it indicated the actual order of business, but now it was almost misleading to any but those who were experts in Parliamentary procedure. Then, the recent discussions of Lords Amendments showed that the system was cumbersome and restrictive of those opportunities for the adjustment of differences between the Houses which ought always to be effected, for the sake of both and of the country, if at all possible without sacrifice of principle. The reasons given for Amendments, compiled in a sham Committee meeting held behind the Chair, were often the very worst reasons, only worthy of such a mock proceeding; and the obstacles to conferences were such as to practically prevent them. Such a proceeding on Privilege as that of the noble Lord the Member for Paddington the other day—

I raised it to test the validity of the Rules.

I only need to say that the noble Lord raised it, not why he raised it, and I was going to thank him for having shown that the Sessional Order against Peers taking part in elections was an annual sham; as was the like Order of the House threatening Members with every severity for bribery and corruption, which was obsolete now that, by the Act of the right hon. Member for Bury, the House's judicial jurisdiction was delegated to the Judges, the annual Order being merely a relic of a procedure which was once a real one, but is no longer so, and one which could now hardly be constitutionally placed in operation. Lastly, the process as to Petitions was almost a misleading of the public. The Press even did not now notice them, as it once did. They were seldom if ever read; they were plunged into the dark profundity of a bag behind the Chair; and yet it was discovered the other night upon the Estimates that the cost of counting these Petitions was some hundreds a year, and the cost of printing what was seldom, if ever, read might be some thousands. He would be the last to propose to abrogate the ancient and once useful right of public petition, but he did propose to reform and make it real, and to put an end to an idle form and a useless expenditure. Other Committees had sat, and done good work, but experience was constantly extending. New conditions and circumstances affected the House like other institutions, and, with a view to the speedy and efficient despatch of public business—for public time was not their own, but the nation's—it was necessary that the House should possess itself of the most effective means of conducting its business and proceedings. Hon. Members were there in the performance of great public duties, at great cost of both time and money; they occupied both public time and attention; and anything in their forms and procedure which detracted from the public estimation of their services or tended to create misapprehension ought to be ended. He therefore asked the House, which had been indulgent, to agree with him that there were grounds for inquiry, consideration, and report by a Select Committee, and to take the opportunity of more economically utilising public time, of lessening what might be a source even of some danger to the State, and of adding to the usefulness and dignity of Parliamentary institutions. The hon. Member concluded by moving for a Select Committee.

There was one expression which fell from my hon. Friend in respect of which the noble Lord (Lord R. Churchill) opposite dissented. He said there was a strong and general feeling in the House and outside the House with regard to the cumbersome methods of procedure which we adopt. The noble Lord dissented, and I must say I share his dissent, because I do not agree with my hon. Friend, whose Motion 1 second, that there is any strong feeling within this House as to our cumbersome proceedings. No one can be found in Parliament to contend that our Forms and our way of using them are perfect, and outside the House of Commons there is an almost unanimous agreement that they are disgracefully had. If it is necessary to offer any proof of this statement I would give, for example, the mode of moving the adjournment of the House, and so bringing some unexpected subject, not however generally (as was intended) of a sudden nature, but often such as would bear postponement, before the House, in lieu of the business appointed for the day. This was never intended when the Form was devised to meet emergency. Then, again, there is the consideration of Estimates. We now debate the early Votes every year on every Vote on Account and on the main Vote far too fully, and we do not debate the later Votes at all. Then, again, there is the period of the year for the Sittings of the House. The theory is that we sit during the season, and Members take their houses upon that theory. The practice is beginning to be that we sit all the year round, and I venture to prophesy that in the present year, if the Government survive the Budget, we shall sit, as we did last year, throughout the autumn. There is a great deal of chance about our proceedings which gives a portion of our time to the Government, the organised opposition being able to select another portion—but only for the sterile purpose of moving Votes of Censure, while private Members are left to the chance of a chance, to individualism run mad—a single Member by the luck of the ballot obtaining the time which he may misspend. Our Forms are not business-like. The Assembly is less business-like than any County Council or Town Council in the country; and the democracy, or, to be precise, the new voters, enfranchised in 1867 and 1885, have never had the smallest sympathy with us in our inability to transact our work. One of their Representatives in this House, the hon. Member for Batter-sea, in a most able recent speech upon this subject in London, took a view which is almost exactly similar to that of the most experienced of our Chairmen of Committees, my right hon. Friend the Member for the Bodmin Division of Cornwall, and to the view taken by those very experienced gentlemen the Clerks at the Table, as expressed in the evidence of two of them before several Select Committees, and in the suggestions which have been made by Mr. Milman at various times. There was only one point in which I myself differed from my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, as there is no point in which I differ from the gentlemen at the Table and from my right hon. Friend. I am content, in the great difficulty of selecting arbiters of our proceedings, to fully trust the Speaker of the House from time to time, as he is both the choice of the whole House and the natural protector of every minority. It is much easier, however, to point out the extent of the disease than to bring about agreement upon the remedy. The' various Committees which have sat have made many suggestions which have not been adopted, besides those which have. The Committee of 1886 suggested that every Bill should go to a Standing Committee unless otherwise ordered, and accompanied this proposal to divide the whole House into Standing Committees by suggestions, which I believe had the great authority of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin, for getting rid of that private business which the House no longer transacts as well as it once did. The Committee of 1888 appeared to share the views of the Committee of 1886, but also desired that the Estimates, or at least certain Classes and certain Votes on other Classes, should go to Grand Committee. The Committee of 1890 made suggestions which were far less unanimous than those of the Committees of 1886 and 1888, for they were carried against the Liberal Party, I myself agreeing with the majority of the Committee and not with my Party upon the subject, and they were for the carrying over of Bills. Since 1890 we have had a complete breakdown of Committee Closure, which it has been found impracticable to make use of in the manner which was undoubtedly intended by the House, and I say this as a strong friend of Closure, which I have supported for a great number of years, whichever Party was in power. But here I speak for myself only. To me it seems (although holding extreme views I am generally in a minority) that the House should be looked upon as a place of business, and not as a place of display, and that the democratic constituencies are far from agreeing with those in this House who look upon it mainly as an enjoyable arena of Debate. No one, I think, who was present throughout the proceedings in Committee on the Local Government Bill can think that they were wholly satisfactory, and, from my own experience of Select Committees and of Standing Committees, I cannot have a doubt but that the Bill would have emerged from Committee and come to the House on Report in a more workable form had it been examined by such tribunals, especially if there were power (which exists in most other countries) for the direct consultation by the Committee on technical points of the Government draftsman and experts. Against the evils of chance in private Members' time the private Members of the House have been righting by means of syndicate balloting, a practice, however, which has been condemned in the strongest terms from the Chair as a gross evasion of the Forms. This in itself seems to mo a sufficient base for inquiry by a Committee. If we could agree upon nothing else than to make, on behalf of private Members of this House, practical proposals for the allocation of private Members' time by a reasonable system of preference as against chance, I think that there would be a full justification for our proceedings of to-day. The Leader of the House has declared in the House that he thinks syndicate balloting (but for the former condemnation of the Speaker) a useful means of expressing preference. We are at present working by a rough plan, and are obliged to use rough means on behalf of private Members for forcing on the Government those measures on which the largest numbers of us are agreed—such as the Miners' Eight Hours, for which we are going to obtain time this year. But surely it does not transcend the resources of our statesmanship to find apt and scientific means of doing that which we all wish to do. The Committee of 1888 dealt with this matter in its evidence, though, strictly speaking, it lay outside the scope of the Committee, which was on Estimates. The Committee went far beyond Estimates, and had placed before it plans of the gentlemen at the Table and of my right hon. Friend the Member for the Bodmin Division of Cornwall, for underwriting Motions. Perhaps this is not the best form for carrying out our end, but surely we must all concur that power ought to be given to groups rather than to mere individuals—some proportion of the time to large groups, and some to small. There is a great deal to say for the view that half-a-dozen gentlemen ought to have their chance of bringing questions before Parliament. But in these days of pressure there is not much to say for the view that a single individual, who cannot obtain the support of any other, should be able to prevent business by monopolising its time; and at the present moment not only are private Members' days themselves an uncertain quantity, but success in the ballot is a chance upon a chance. Any power of the House to exhibit preference should apply to Bills as well as Motions. Some years ago, I think at the suggestion of one of the gentlemen at the Table, I was able to induce Sir Stafford Northcote's Committee to adopt the plan which is now observed of preference after Whitsuntide to the Bills which have passed through their first stages. This is the concession of the principle, and could easily be extended, and I have also seen a suggestion, which I believe also has the authority of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin, that we should do well to give a certain proportion of our Wednesdays to small and uncontentious Bills which have a reasonable chance of passing—Bills which would be allowed to remain in this class according to their freedom from unpopularity evinced by their not being under-written against. To sum up our suggestions, we press for the principle of preference by large groups and small groups of Members, as against the mere individual Member, and for the business aspect of the House against the show point of view.

said, that the right hon. Baronet opposite, like the hon. Member for Islington, had dealt entirely in paradox and generalities and had not descended to details. Though he had listened most attentively to the speeches just delivered he had been unable to discover that the subject had been treated by the speakers apart from generalities. He would deal for a moment, in the first place, with the statement of the hon. Member for Islington as to the private Members' Bills introduced last year. The hon. Member had I stated that of 369 private Members' Bills introduced last year only about 20 had passed.

Twenty-three.

said, the hon. Member had left out a most important reason, which was the fact that the Homo Rule Bill occupied 80 days, and that the rest of the Session was given up to Supply. How could 369 Bills, or any large proportion of them, have any chance in such a Session? The right hon. Baronet and the hon. Member said that the ballot operated unfavourably to legislation by private Members, and the former said that the country was largely in favour of private Members' Bills being advanced and thought that the time allotted to private Members should be enlarged.

, said, he must lake exception to the noble Lord's statement; be was under an entire misapprehension as to what had really been said.

also disclaimed the purport of the remarks attributed to him. He had said nothing of the kind, but that the system of procedure was most unworkmanlike.

said that, at all events, the general tendency of the two speeches was to impress upon the House that not only the House ought to be unanimous on this point, but that there was a strong feeling in the country about it. He had gone about the country a great deal—nobody went about the country more than he did last year—and he never met with anybody, any ordinary intelligent elector, who could explain what a private Members' Bill was. It was a most absurd name to give, and the ordinary elector had never heard of such a thing. The hon. Baronet had asserted that there was a strong popular feeling in favour of a great reform in the procedure of the House of Commons; but he questioned that statement from his own experience of public opinion. The hon. Member proposed that the range of discussion on the initiative of private Members should be enlarged by some process, which, however, he did not indicate. Personally, he bold that the use of Bills introduced by private Members was this—and it had been slightly hinted at by the right hon. Baronet—that subjects should be brought under the notice of the House and pressed upon its attention from year to year, until finally, if the Bills were in fact wanted, if they were really wise Bills, both parties would take them up and they would ultimately be carried. He had known several instances of that having occurred. It was absolutely impossible for the Government nowadays to afford sufficient time for the discussion of private Members' Bills, even if their Bills were excellent, and nobody could devise a scheme which would enable them to do so. The present Government would very soon be compelled by the pressure of circumstances to make the usual raid on the time of private Mem- bers, partly on account of the late period at which the Session opened, and partly on account of the immense amount of business to be got through. The hon. Member suggested that on the Opposition side of the House the feeling was unfavourable to private Members' legislation, but he would find that that statement was quite unfounded.

said, he was very reluctant to again interrupt the noble Lord, but he was not aware that he had said anything of the kind.

was alluding to the statement that an opinion was entertained on that side of the House that legislation was undesirable.

assured the noble Lord that he had only said that an opinion was entertained by some Members on that side of the House. The noble Lord would, of course, accept his assurance.

would pass on. The right hon. Baronet wanted to supersede the Ballot. There was a good deal to be said for and against the Ballot, but it was rather odd that one of the most Radical Members of the House should wish to do without any system of ballot. A system of selection, however, might operate most unfairly on a minority. Whatever measures were adopted, the majority on a, Committee would correspond with the majority in the House, and that majority would take care that the Bills of private Members in the minority should not proceed. That would be a very great hindrance to the equality of Members, and a great injustice; but the Ballot prevented that, for it gave everybody an equal chance; it gave the same chance to the minority as to the majority. They should not rashly and without thought adopt a proposal which would rule the House of Commons for it was impossible to say how many years. He pointed out that the procedure of the House of Commons had never been dealt with except under the Loaders of the Government, and generally with the support of the Opposition. He thought that some Committee had been appointed to consider the procedure of that House, and the character of those Committees was remarkable. They were composed of the most experienced Members of the House, but the Mover and Seconder of this Motion had given no indication whatever as to who should constitute the proposed Committee. Nothing could be more dangerous than that Members not well acquainted, as some Members of the House could not be well acquainted, with the Rules and Forms of the House and with its general procedure should decide what their new Rules, if any were adopted, should be. No man was a stronger opponent of constant alteration of the Rules of Procedure than the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Midlothian. That was his attitude up to last Session, when, no doubt, great alterations were made in order to pass the Home Rule Bill. Up to that time no one was more averse to the alteration of the Rules of the House than the right hon. Gentleman. When it was proposed to carry on Bills from one Session to another, the right hon. Gentleman was absolutely opposed to the suggestion. In 1881 and 1882 the right hon. Gentleman made alterations in procedure. He was Prime Minister at that time, and there was trouble with the Irish Party, who were very strong. A Coercion Bill was being passed in 1881 and certain Rules of Urgency were adopted. From an authoritative source he had received the information that those Rules were passed on the initiative of the Chair. In 1892 the Closure was passed, and that also rested on the initiative of the Speaker. The procedure of the late Government was on this wise. The late Government passed the Closure in 1887 in much the same form as it had been passed in 1882, but it rested with the Speaker as well as with the Chairman of Committees whether the Motion should be put. It never was intended, he thought, except for the great political purpose of the Party opposite of carrying the Home Rule Bill, that the Closure should be used for the purpose of oppression or tyranny, but simply when the course of business became embarrassing. The late Government also passed in 1888 15 new Rules, the best which had ever been passed for regulating their business. He protested against the theory of the right hon. Baronet with regard to dealing with little Bills. They were often more contentious than big Bills.

desired to state what he really did say. He merely endorsed a suggestion of his right hon. Friend with regard to small Bills which had not met with more than a certain measure of opposition.

said, these interruptions showed that he was very unfortunate in his appreciation of what had been said. He protested against placing small Bills on a level with large Bills such as the Eight Hours Bill. He thought there should be a Ballot, and that private Members' time should be extended as much as possible. Their time was always very contracted—it was certainly never too largo. He had never known a period when private Members' time was not encroached upon by the existing Government. To put the reform of procedure into the hands of private Members without the concurrence of the Leaders of the Opposition would be the gravest departure from precedent ever adopted by the House of Commons.

said, he agreed with the noble Lord that the term "private Members" was an absurd phrase. They were all public Members, and he was glad to see that in the latest edition of Sir Erskine May's book the term used was "unofficial Members," which seemed to him to convey a much more accurate description of the position occupied by those who wore not Members of the Government. He thought also that a proposal of this character should be brought forward under the aegis of the Government, and no Committee would command any confidence unless a commanding Member of the Government was its Chairman. At the same time, he did not concur with the optimistic view expressed by the noble Lord (Lord R. Churchill) of the present position. He cordially endorsed all that had fallen from the Mover and Seconder of the Motion with respect to opinion outside concerning Parliamentary procedure. He was bound to say there was a large amount of impatient bewilderment out of doors, and it seemed to him that the necessity of some further devolution of business was self-evident. The situation had become almost intolerable from its uncertainty. This matter affected the Government just as much as it affected unofficial Members. During the last eight or 10 years Queen's Speeches had always contained five or six times as many measures as could possibly be carried into law. No stronger condemnation of the procedure of the House of Commons could be found than in that single fact. The case with regard to non-contentious measures was oven more serious. During last Session of Parliament there were two Committees appointed by the Government dealing with matters in which the House, at least, had very great interest, and which were not Party matters at all. The Committee on Railway Rates sat a great many days, and after the most exhaustive inquiry with practical unanimity adopted a Report drawn by the President of the Local Government Board (Mr. Shaw-Lefevre). The President of the Board of Trade had announced that a Bill, founded on the recommendation of that Committee, would be brought before the House; but everybody knew that in the present state of business, and with the present procedure, it was almost hopeless to expect a good Railway Rates Bill. Then the Committee on Building Societies of last Session spent five hours in maturing its Report. He was sure that in the judgment of every Member of the Committee a Bill was needed dealing reasonably, carefully, but still firmly, with Building Societies throughout the country. If a notorious person happened to arrive in this country there might be such a feeling produced by the revelations which would be made at the particular trial as would almost compel the House to pass a measure on the subject. The cases of the Rating and Machinery Bill and the Eight Hours (Mines) Bill had been mentioned. Those two measures had passed a Second Reading by large majorities more than once; but unless something very unexpected happened and the Government gave facilities, neither of them had the slightest chance of passing into law. It almost came to this—that in regard to non-official Members' Bills the House began each Session with an unmitigated farce. Something like 250 Members put their names in the Ballot this Session, but even the first five of those who came out of it had very little chance indeed of seeing their measures become law in the present year. The reasons for the present state of things were not hard to see. There was a constant pressure from outside for new legis- lation, and constant promises from candidates in response to it. There was undoubtedly arising outside a feeling that an Act of Parliament could do almost everything, and cure all the ills that flesh was heir to. Accompanied by this the House had to contend with the fact that it had very much less time in which to transact its business. The alterations made in procedure in 1888 created an enormous revolution. A certain hour was fixed when business should stop, and this put for the first time in the power of persons who desired to obstruct or delay particular business the opportunity of doing so. It also put it in the power of one man out of 670 to stop all business after a particular time. Such a state of things would not be tolerated for a single moment in a Town Council or a County Council, or in any other body. Mr. Speaker had, much to the gratification and admiration of Members, mitigated the operation of the Rule in some respects, but he thought that before long the House ought to take the matter into its own hands. The real remedy for the present state of things was, after all, to bring the Standing Orders into harmony with the requirements of the moment. What he thought was most required was certainty in the way in which business was conducted. The Committee of 1861 quoted Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre as saying in 1854—

"In all the improvements that we have yet made in the conduct of Public Business we have endeavoured as much as possible to let the House understand exactly what questions they have to discuss to prevent surprises and to give some certainty to our proceedings."

said, he thought the speech of his hon. Friend the Member for Islington (Sir A. Rollit) was a most interesting and strong speech as far as it consisted of a denunciation of the present system, but that there was a great, falling-off in it when it came to the suggestion of remedies. That, he thought, had been the defect of the whole of the present Debate. His hon. Friend had made one suggestion which immediately had cold water thrown upon it by the right hon. Baronet (Sir C. W. Dilke), and that was about "syndicating Bills" or "underwriting."

said, the hon. Member was mistaken. He had said, in passing, that possibly under writing might not be the best form of carrying out the intention, but, with regard to general principles, he had entirely endorsed the view expressed by his right hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin (Mr. Courtney.)

said, that hitherto, at all events, the House had set its face against that method. It had been one of the great complaints of private Members that all the Wednesdays had been taken up by the Irish Members. The right hon. Baronet admitted that in the House itself the feeling against the present system was not very strong, but said that a strong feeling existed outside. Of course, people outside could not know what the difficulties were; they could not know how difficult it was to frame Rules which would enable the hundreds of thousands of subjects that had to be discussed by Parliament to be brought before the House. He (Mr. Hanbury) agreed that a good deal of the private legislation of the House might be done locally. Even if it were not devolved upon Local Bodies it would no doubt be more economically done if done on the spot. No doubt a great many reckless promises were made by Members as to the legislation that was going to be passed, and constituents were naturally disappointed when those promises were not fulfilled. Reference had been made to a variety of the most useful Party measures, such as the measure arising out of the Report of the Railway Rates Committee. There was no doubt, however, that all Governments unfortunately gave too great a precedence to mere political measures over the measures which were supported by Members on both sides. His hon. Friend (Sir A. Rollit) had said there were some Members on that (the Opposition) side of the House who objected to legislation altogether. He (Mr. Hanbury) did not think there were any who went so far as that. There was, however, a strong opinion amongst many that it was better that a few measures should be passed after having been properly considered than that a whole host of measures should pass without much discussion, especially when they were passed after 12 o'clock at night. So far as he understood the suggestions of his hon. Friend, the result of all of them would be that they would sit later at night; that they would begin the Sitting earlier in the morning, and that they would sit during a longer period of the year. A great distinction ought to be drawn between Government Bills and private Members' Bills after 12 o'clock at night. He had always objected to Government Bills coming on after 12 o'clock, because the Government were the masters of their own time, but he was opposed to the blocking of private Members' Bills of a good and useful character. But they must recollect that if the suggestions of his hon. Friend were carried out they would every night have private Members' Bills discussed after 12 o'clock until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and thus, if at the same time they extended the Committee system, they would be lengthening the time of the House at both ends. The House was becoming more and more a House of business men, and it was utterly impossible for those men to sit there regularly on Committees at 12 o'clock in the morning. They had already gone too far in the matter of Committees. Queen's counsel and barristers and other Members were excused from attendance, and the result was that pretty much the same Members were found sitting on every one of the Committees. Therefore, if the suggestions of the hon. Member were carried out they would have fewer and fewer of the most useful Members coming to the House, and the work of the House would be thrown into the hands of a set of professional politicians. He entirely agreed that it would be well if there were more certainty as to Government Business, because at present they never knew what was coming on. Therefore, while he sympathised with the object of his hon. Friend, he could not see that any reasonable suggestion had been made as yet to meet the difficulty, and he was bound to say that he feared his hon. Friend's suggestions would rather increase than decrease the evil.

said, he was afraid that the present state of the House justified the observations which had been made by his right hon. Friend the Member for the Forest of Dean, that this was a subject in which Members themselves did not feel very strongly interested. There was no doubt, on the part of the older Members of the House, a constant tendency to make idols of the Forms of business, and he was afraid they thought that there existed the best possible arrangements for the despatch of business. He was, however, quite satisfied that his right hon. Friend was right when he said that in the country there was a strong feeling that somehow or other they did not do as much business as their constituents had a right to expect. Work was not done. They talked about things, but somehow or other consumed their time without performing, not all that was required, but even a very moderate portion of what was expected of them. On the balance of argument, he thought the Leader of the House would see that there was a very strong case for a Grand Committee. There were only three ways of improving their position. They must enlarge their time, or diminish their work, or economise their time. As to enlarging their time, no doubt, as had been shown, their recent experience had been that it was curtailed. The recent experiment made of closing contentious business at 12 o'clock had very materially shortened the time at their disposal, and lessened to a very great degree the amount of work formerly done after that hour; but by reducing their work and economising their time they might still recover a great deal of lost ground. If the House were relieved of Private Business they would be able to devote much more time to Public Business without increasing the demand made on the time of hon. Members. If they also referred the Committee stage of Bills and certain branches of the Estimates to Committees outside the House, and got a considerable portion of work discharged concurrently by three or four Grand Committees, they would be able to get through much more Government Business. A good deal of time was now lost on Friday nights, and to save it he suggested that they should permanently adopt the practice of holding on that day a Morning Sitting from 2 to 7 o'clock for Government Business, and an Evening Sitting from 9 to 12 o'clock for private Members' Motions. That would be no waste of time, because a great many hon. Members who were not interested in the subjects to be brought on might go way into the country on the Friday night, after the Government Business was brought to a close for the day. With regard to private Members' time, there was a much greater power of economising that time which was at their disposal. A "system of voice" might be arranged by which the majority and the minority of private Members might each in turn proportionately get an opportunity of bringing forward their measures. They could, by an easy arrangement, secure that the time at the disposal of private Members might be so arranged that it could be devoted to subjects which they had at heart. This would facilitate legislation by private Members, especially if their measures, after reaching a certain stage, were allowed to be taken up again at that stage the following Session. No doubt under such a system the majority of the private Members would obtain the pull in the first instance, but the minority would also obtain their fair share of the time of the House. Reference had been made to some Members who appeared to think that all legislation on the part of private Members might be dropped, but he did not think that anybody of experience would approve of that. Bills introduced by private Members had been largely instrumental in influencing the legislation of this House. In some cases private Members had succeeded in passing their Bills: in other cases they had brought them on year after year until the Government had been bound to take them up and carry them through. He would refer to one of the most recent cases—the Cruelty to Children Act, which had been carried by the exertions of a private Member. The experience of the working of that Act must convince everybody who had any doubt about it before of the extreme necessity there was for passing such a measure. It had brought to light the most horrible cases of cruelty to children on the part of parents and others, and much evil had been redressed. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of London and other private Members had been able to pass Bills which were of great interest to the community at large. It had been owing to the action of private Members on Wednesday afternoon that church rates had been abolished, the Burials Act carried, and many vexed questions of a similar character settled. The Deceased Wife's Sister question also, although not yet settled, had been dealt with on a Wednesday. By the proposal he had made many measures that were much desired by different sections of the House might be carried through. It had been suggested that an hour might be set apart once a week or once a fortnight for carrying measures to which there was little or no opposition. He entirely approved of that proposal. Of course, in such a case, if a sufficient number of hon. Members were to signify their opposition to any measure of the kind in writing it would come on in the ordinary way. These were all measures which might well be taken into consideration by a Committee without the Government being called upon to express any opinion with regard to them at the present moment. They said that there was a case for submission to a Committee, as public time was not now used as efficiently as it might be. Both in respect of Public and Private Business there was a case for examination, and for practical suggestions to be inquired into, and he hoped the Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite the comparatively small attendance at this Debate, would see his way to granting the Committee asked for.

said, that when he first read the terms of the Motion he felt very much inclined to support it by his vote, but every speech he had heard had made him less inclined to do so, and the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin had finally decided him to vote against the Motion. The speech of the Member for the Forest of Dean did not greatly affect his opinion of the Motion one way or the other, because the right hon. Gentleman had confined himself to generalities. The hon. Member for South Islington, who moved the Motion, was, he was bound to say, the Member who began the impression on his mind which induced him to vote against the Motion; but the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin had clearly shown, in that magisterial manner with which he was wont to address' the House, that the Motion should not further be proceeded with. The right hon. Gentleman, who was a man of great authority, had shown that two things only could be done to improve the forms of procedure of the House—namely, that Private Business, or business connected with Private Bills, should be delegated to some other authority; and that the Estimates, instead of being thrown, as it were, on the floor of the House in their thousands and left to the industry, or want of industry, of Members to go through them in order to acquire the knowledge necessary for discussing them even in a most cursory fashion, should be referred for examination to a Committee upstairs. There was something to be said for both these points. Private legislation undoubtedly partook of a judicial character, and it would be an advantage to remove all judicial business from the Chamber, which was nothing if not legislative. Again, the reference of the Estimates to a Committee would be an advantage if the Committee were empowered to have before it the permanent officials responsible for the Estimates. The difficulty in dealing with the Estimates was that the Treasury Bench was occupied by a number of gentlemen who really knew little or nothing about them, and who, when they were asked a question about them, could not answer until they had consulted their prompters who sat under the Gallery, or else could only say that the matter was under consideration, or give some other sort of unsatisfactory reply. It would, therefore, be of considerable advantage to have the Estimates examined by a Committee, who would have the officials who prepared the Estimates before them, instead of Ministers who knew nothing, and could know nothing, about the details. But, at the same time, he should be sorry to see the Estimates taken outside the purview of the House altogether, and he did claim that the right of examination of the Estimates, and of cross-examination of the Ministers upon them, was a right most essential to the performance of the most important duties of the Committees of the House. The hon. Member for Islington talked of discussion on the Estimates as a waste of time. He knew not from what fount the hon. Gentleman got his Constitutional knowledge; but he had always understood that one of the most important functions of the House was the guardianship of the Public Purse, and he did not see how the Public Purse was to be guarded unless the Estimates were duly discussed. The hon. Member for Islington had also used words that shocked him with regard to the Rules and Forms of the House. The hon. Gentleman said they were cumbersome, and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Forest of Dean added that the outside world was convinced they were cumbersome. He challenged that assertion. He believed that no such feeling existed outside the House. There was a strong feeling outside the House that people did not understand the Rules and Forms of the House, and that was only natural; but he had never found any widespread public feeling that the Rules of the House were too cumbersome. He used the word "too" advisedly. Having regard to the great complexity of the business which came before the House, it was inevitable that the Rules should appear cumbersome to those not acquainted with them, but he denied that they were cumbersome as a matter of fact. Instead of being cumbersome, he considered that the Rules of the House were admirably good Rules. Undoubtedly, he had come across Rules which seemed to him at first to be without good reason, but he soon came to understand that there was excellent and sufficient reason for the Rules, and that without them the business of the House could not be well conducted. He would cite as an example of what seemed a trifling Rule the Rule which said that no Member might stand above the Bar. If that Rule had been strictly observed the scene which took place in the House last Session, and which they all regretted, would not have occurred. He should strongly condemn the hon. Member for Islington for presuming to tell the House that its Rules were cumbersome; and he had been pained to find that even the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bodmin was inclined to adopt the same tone, and cast ridicule and contempt on some of the Rules of the House, which were entitled to great respect. The Australian Parliament was, like all Parliaments worthy of the name, based upon our Parliament, and an Australian Minister recently writing on the subject had said that they had thought they could improve on some of the Rules that had been adopted from the House of Commons; but when they had changed the Rules, they found that things did not go so well; they saw that there was good reason and sound principle at the bottom of the Rules they had abandoned, and so they quickly re-adopted the Rules again. That was a very strong testimony of the value of the Rules of the House. He believed that the Rules were admirable. They had grown up from the experience of a thousand years, and if and when they were had it was because they had been subjected to hasty, unreflecting, and inconsiderate Amendments, contrived to meet the supposed exigencies of the moment or the imagined convenience of a Party. The Rules were good, and all that was required was that they should be understood and properly carried out. The Debate had turned on the point of the allocation of the time of the House. He ventured to say that it was impossible to read attentively through and understand the Rules of the House without seeing that the ordinary allocation of time was most excellent as between Ministers and non-official or unpaid Members. The allocation of the time of the House as between the unpaid Members and the placemen was good. But what, happened? The Session was hardly begun when the Government appropriated nearly all the time for their own measures, and there was very little opportunity left for any other business. The offenders against the Rules of the House, the purloiners of its time, were not the private Members, but the Government; and so long as private Members neglected to combine together, irrespective of Party, to maintain their rights and to refuse the Government permission to take all the time of the House in this unconstitutional fashion, so long would the. House suffer from what was the great complaint of the present time. The hon. Member for Islington had also declared that the results obtained under the Rules had not pleased him. There were not enough Acts of Parliament passed. The hon. Member complained that only 27 out of 357 Bills introduced last Session had passed. His own opinion was that 27 were rather more than ought to have been passed. The remaining 330 were extremely had, haphazard, ill-considered Bills, which ought never to have been introduced at all. The Member for Islington wanted more Acts of Parliament and less consideration. He, on the other hand, wanted more consideration and fewer Acts of Parliament. The Member for Islington had his pockets full of Bills, some Conservative and some Radical, but other Members took a more prosaic view of their duty. They were there to see that the business of the country was well conducted, and to prevent the hon. Gentlemen opposite from spending too much money. He also considered that the Twelve o'Clock Rule was a good Rule and required no alteration. It was not reasonable to ask the House to accept Bills after 12 o'clock, unless they were of a non-contentious character, and it was perfectly right that Members with sufficient public spirit should object to Bills being considered at such an hour, when there was no time for full and free discussion. It was suggested that they should have a system of underwriting Bills; but if Bills were to be underwritten, they must also have underwriting against Bills. That was only a natural corollary; and consequently they would have Members in charge of Bills occupying the whole of their time getting Members to back their Bills, while their opponents would be running about on the other side getting other Members to underwrite against the Bills. Then he presumed that there must be a quorum of underwriters. What would be the quorum, 50, or 90, or 120? He thought that half the House would not be too large a quorum. Therefore, it would be necessary to get 335 Members to back a Bill before it could be taken out of its turn and considered. He thought such a suggestion might be dismissed without further attention. Technicalities and Forms had been treated with great contempt by various Members who had spoken in the Debate. He defended the technicalities and Forms of the House as being a protection of the weak against the strong. He would remind the House that the Form of requiring a Member introducing a Bill to appear at the Bar of the House was taken from the ancient practice of Bills being brought into the House from outside, and when agreed to by the Parliament, becoming Acts. The time taken in this operation was extremely small, and it seemed to him that it was a Form to which meaning and traditions attached which ought not to be cast aside, but should be preserved. He was not prepared to deny that there were directions in which the Rules of the House might possibly be amended; but if there were, it was rather in reversion to old principles and forms and the language of old Rules than by—if he might use the term—getting into back parlours and inventing new Rules to fit particular occasions. There was a time when placemen were not allowed to sit in the House. There was a time when, according to Prynne, 40 was not considered a quorum except for Prayers and unimportant business; and when for the consideration of grave and serious Public Business it was held necessary that the whole or greater part of the House should be present. That Rule had been not invented, but borrowed from this House by the United States, so that while this House had gone back through the usurpation of the Long Parliament to a quorum of 40, the United States House of Representatives required that, before serious business could be considered, there should be half the House, plus one, present. That might be a reform worthy of consideration. Again, there was the "call of the House," such as was made in 1628, moved by Sir G. Moore—

"That any Members of the House being in town and not attending here the Serjeant to be sent for them. The Serjeant to be sent for all the Members of the House now in town as well lawyers as others"

"to be here presently and to attend every day."

"Ordered, No Member of this House shall go out of town till this great business is ended without special leave of the House."

"The House shall be called upon Thursday next week, and every Member of the House then to attend upon pain of £10, to be disposed of as the House shall appoint, besides such further forfeiture as the House shall inflict."