The Press. — London, England, 1855-05-05 00:00:00

MAY 5, 1855 Vratthings in arliattunt. LORD JOHN RUSSELL AND THE VIENNA CONFERENCES. Lord John made his first appearance on Monday. As soon as the routine business of the evening was over Mr. DISRAELI rose and inquired whether it was his intention to lay any papers upon the table with respect to his late mission, or to make any statement to the house with regard to it, and, if so, when ? And whether it is his intention, by any other means, to afford the house any inform aucn as to the proceedings of the last two mouths at Vienna? Before the question could be answered, Lord PAL XERSTON explained that when he had said on a previous night that the Russian plenipotentiaries had made no counter proposition on the limitation point, he was led into error by the telegraph. There had been counter propositions, but they had at once been rejected as unsatisfactory. Lord JOHN RUSSELL then rose, and was received with some cheering. The noble lord said : In reply to the questions which have been put to me by the right hon. gentleman, I have to state, in the first place, that I do hot think it is for me to decide what papers shall be laid upon the table of the house. I may say, however, that I believe her Majesty's Government intend very shortly to lay upon the table the protocols of the conferences which have taken place at Vienna. Those protocols will convey to the house information of the substance of the negotia tions that have taken place. Perhaps I may say a few worda more, without intending to go into any detail as to the negotiations. The first meeting of the conference was on the lath of March. The negotiations with respect to the first two of the four points with which the house is ac quainted lasted until the 26th of March. On the 28th of March the third pint came under consideration. It was suggested by the plenipotentiaries of Austria that the pleni potentiaries of Russia should themselves make a proposal calculated t 3 satisfy the exigencies of the case. The pleni poteutiaries of Russia replied that they had no instructions to do so, but they asked for time to refer to their Govern ment. The consequence was that the conference was then adjourned, and that no meeting fur the transaction of business t ok place until the answer was received from St. Petershing. tin the 17th of April another conference was held. when the plenipotentiaries of Russia informed the conference that they had received instructions from their Government not to take the initiative of any propositions, but that they were ready to hear and discuss any proposal which might be submitted to the conference. The repre sentatives of the allied powers then requested forty-eight hours to consider the form in which they should make their proposal, and on the 19th of April the plenipotentiaries of France and of Great Britain, supported by the plenipo tentaries of Austria, laid their proposition before the con ference. The Russian plenipotentiaries, on their bide, . . asked for forty- eight hours in order to prepare their answer to this proposition. Accot dingly, on the 21st they gave their answer, totally rejecting the propositions which had been made to the conference. They stated to us, how ever, that they had propositions to make on the part of their Goveninient which they conceived would be in ac cordance with the demand that Turkey should be united more closely with the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe, and that so,ue restriction should be placed upon the preponderance of Lussia in the Black Sea. The pleni potentiaries of Austria, France, and Great Br.tain found those proposals of Russia entirely unacceptable, and refused to consider them in detail. The plenipotentiary of Austria then said that, although these propositions had been re jected, he trusted that all the means of reconciling the belli gerent parties by peace were not vet exhausted. To this the plenipotentiaries of France and of Great Britain replied that their instructions were exhausted, and that they had no powers to consider any further propositions. I then considered that the best way of performing my duty would be to repair to my own Government, and to lay before them the whole state of the case with respect to the negotiations at Vienna, and the manner in which the conferences had been suspended. Two or three days afterwards the Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, having requested the orders of the Emperor, came to a similar determination. I believe he was expected to arrive in Paris last night, and I have no doubt he will lay before his Government his account of the occurrences that have taken place in the course of these negotiations Mr. DISRAELI then asked if there would be any objection to lay the preliminary papers upon the table at once, that they might know officially what the four points were? Lord PALMERSTON lhoßgill, there might be no objection to the production of preliminary papers, but he would take care that the house should know what the four points were. Mr. DISRAELI Still thought that the single despatch might be laid on the table, in which the nature of the four points was communicated to the Government. Lord PALMERSTON said that the papers would be produced as' soon as possible, sooner than the right hon. gentleman seemed to suppose. In reply to further questions, it was stated that a proposal had never been made by Russia which was not likely to lead to a satistertory result, and that the p:•oceedings were approved by the Turkish plenipo tentiaries. NEWSPAPER STAMP BILL. The committee on this bill, on Monday, sett'ed the various points respecting which so much qua %ten had boon raised. In the first place the THE PRESS. Chancellor of the Exchequer withdrew his registra tion clause, leaving the law in all respects as it now stands. This, be said, would still leave the incon venience of determining what was or was not a newspaper; but that inconvenience would be much lessened when the stamp was no longer compulsory. A clause was then added to the bill limiting free transmission by post to fifteen days after publica tion. The copyright clause, moved by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought a discu►sion. The mover had said that it was not intended to abandon the liberty which had been so long used by the evening and country journals of taking the parliamentary debates and other reports from the morning papers, but to prevent a journal from being established, animo furandi, with th 3 intention of living entirely upon pirated articles and intelligence. The morning newspapers, be thought., might be safely trusted that they would not take any vexatious advantage of the clause. Mr. WHITESIDE, however, opposed it, as imprac ticable, and, it' practicable, as limiting the blessings of printing and the electric telegraph. The editors of the Press, the Examiner, and the Spectator, all men of great talent, might at any time be taken up before a magistrate to answer the charge of stealing ideas from the Times. The stipendiary magistrates were most unfit persons to be trusted with such a jurisdiction. Mr. GIBSON, on the same side, did not see why the great newspapers, whose news had been 80 long unprotected, should now require protection, about which, in fact, they did not seem to care much. If the clause was intended against the army of pirates that was to come, let them wait and see whether it came or not. Lord LOVAINE advocated the limiting the operation of the clause to signed articles. Lord STANLEY pointed oat how impossible it, would be to solve the problem of distinction be tween statements and comments; and Mr. RICARDO urged several practical G mlties connected with the transmission of commercial intelligence. Mr. BRIGHT said that if a paper hying on piracy could have been established, it might have been under the old law, under which that greatest of pirates the Globe was published. The American press required no copy right protection. Intelligence published at Man enester and elsewhere, said to be pirated, was often obtained from original sources. Mr. J. O. PRIMA MORE adverted to the difficulty of carrying out the clause, and Mr. BENTINcic was not disposed to trust to the forbearance of the great papers. Meanwhile only two speakers had appeared in favour of th• clause. Mr. PHINN believed that with out it cheap papers would be created, living on the morning papers, and reducing our press to the level of the American ; and thought, notwithstanding, that the clause was npen to many objections, and would have preferred the establishment of a regular news paper code. Mr. Fox thought likewise that the character of the press would be lowered, and the large sums spent on articles and intelligence diminished. The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, ligeontageci at the reception of his clause, with drew it. Air. DISRAELI continued the discussion, placing it on more general grounds. He did not believe that any peat newspaper would suffer from this kind of competition. It had been urged that newspaper writers should sign their names ; but who was to see that they gave a true signature. Anonymous writing was the rule in this country, and he instanced several of our greatest works which had in the first instance been published anonymously. It was their great duty to facilitate intelligence, which was not to be done by imposing a copyright. This matter disposed of, Mr. M. MILNES moved a clause giving the penny transmission by the post to all papers whose superficial inches of printed matter did not exceed 3,500. The object of the clause was to give the double copy of the Times the same rate of transmission as smaller papers, and the debate in consequence turned almost entirely upon the Times. Mr. Milnes urged that the chance of success should not be diminished to those papers which had distri buted over the country an amount of intellectual matter unknown in any other nation. Mr. COWAN urged the enormous weight which the newspapers had already attained; the annual weight of the double Times would be 48,000 tons, and that of the London press was actually 150 tons weekly, having been about five tons in 1808. Great duties were thus thrown upon the Post-office, which would be increased with the increase of newspapers. Lord STANLEY looked on the matter as one of contract—it was exchange for a service performed. We were already sending twelve times the weight of newspapers over that of letteri, and six times over—giving the newspapers seventy-two times the advantage over the letters. Ha thought this a sufficient allowance to the newspaper interest. ➢lr. Low objected to the argument as not a prac tical one—they must either treat letters and news papers on the same principle, or give up ill comps rison whatever. He hi ped that in a few years other alwaPaPars would be able to neoch the sane extent 417 as the Timm), when it would be to the advantage of all that this clause should be adopted. He could not see why a particular stage of advancement in a newspaper should be taken to levy a fine on it. The Times bad already reached the point at which its circulation, taken alone, ceased to be remunerative, and it therefore sought to contract it. It was not worth while, for the sake of a halfpenny, to add to embarrassment, and throw impediments in the way of circulation. Mr. M. GLUON said that the Times had already profited to the extent of 20,0001. year y by the rem►s sion of the supplement, stamp, for which it had given no return of outlay, and which would more than cover any loss by the halfpenny postage. He would willingly undertake to pay that extra halfpenny, if the Times would give him what they gained by the advertisements in their supplemental sheet. Mr. E. BAIA, thought that the best paper should not, because it was the best, be subject to restriction. The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER said that he could understand the principle of charging all news papers a penny postage, but the proposed clause es tablished a limit for which he could see no particular reason. He then argued the question oil purely Post-office grounds, and the expenses incurred by the additional weight the mails would have to carry. After Mr. DETJMMOND had urged the policy of keep ing up the good writing which appeared in the Times, and Mr. MILNES had replied, the committee divided, and the clause was rejected by 260 to $6. MAYNOOTH GRANT. On Tuesday Mr. Spooner once more brought for- ward his motion for a committee to inquire int.) this gnait with a view to its abolition. There was a perfect deluge of petitions in the house on the subject, and when Mr. Spooner rose to present some preliminary petitions of his own, a whole crowd of members, fancying they were losing their chance, rushed forward to the table—►n some instances pushing their petitions on the table—without any regard to the forms of the house. Alter the Speaker had restored order, and the petitions were presented in due course, Mr. SPOONER, anticipating the objections that the present time was an ill judged one—politically—for such a motion, reprobated dealing with the question on such grounds. It the grant was a sin it was always the light time to deal with sin for its abate ment. As fur our allies, the French viewed the papal supremacy with as much distrust as we did. He then combated the notion that the grant was in auy way a compact with the Irish nation. Next came the report of the commission appointed to inquire into the state of the college. Mr. Spooner showed that the notes of the evidence, sent to the witnesses for revisal, had been sent to Rome—that they had been altered and cooked before publication--that some evidence was suppressed—that illegal titles were formally given to Roman Catholic prelates without the knowledge of the commission ; and lie declared that he had seen himself some of the proof-sheets of the evidence in which there were material al.erations. At the bottom of all this was Mr. More O'Ferral, the Roman Catholic commissioner, who had commu nicated the evidence to Rome through Dr. Cullen. Mr. Spooner then proceeded to quote from Liguori and parts of the evidence, to show that the Roman Catholic doctrines still virtually went to authorise papal interference in temporal matters, that a wrong vote at an election might be called a deadly sin, and that its doctrines with respect to marriage tended to invalidate Protestant succession. He ended by denouncing all support of that religion as national sin. Mr. DUNLOP, who seconded the motion, took up the last part of Mr. Spooner's argument., and endea voured to prove from the evidence of the committee that while the Roman Catholics denied in terms the power of the Pope to absolve subjects from their allegiance, they admitted it in fact by allowing that there were circumstances where allegiance ceased— that the Pope was the best judge of teach circum stances—and that every Roman Catholic found his conscience at ease when acting according to the decision of the Pope. Mr. POLLARD URQUHART, who had an amendment on the paper—that the committee should inquire into all religions endowments ►n Ireland—contended that if the grant to Maynooth by a Protestant Legisla ture was an anomaly, the existence of the Irish Church Establishment was one still greater. The grant had been established by Pitt at one time of naticnal difficulty, and increased by Peel at another. If we followed their policy we should now increase it still further. The Roman Catholic clergy were in every way connected with the great mass of the people. Their interferenee at elect;ons dated from the struggle for emancipation ; but they had often used their influence for the suppression of revolution and for the maintaiance of order. Mr. SCHOLEVIELD quoted the report of the con missioners to prove the loyalty and morality of M ay• nooth. Where was the danger at this moment to religious liberty to authorise the attacks on this