The Press. — London, England, 1856-06-28 00:00:00

b,_abiliitY, Pot have beep re:enacted by the Holm of Commons, kind the hilt would have been lost. The course which he had taken would effect the abroga tion of an unnecessary, and therefore improper, oath without calling attention to those special words with which their lordships were not disposed to part ; and he hoped that the House of Commons would not seek an unnecessary conflict by rejecting a bill which effected an object which all desired, because it did not make other changes upon which there was a difference of opinion between the two Houses of Par liament. The bill was then read a second time. The Factories Bill was considered before com mittee, the various clauses agreed to, and the bill reported to the house. Toe Police Counties and Borough Bill was re ported. SLEEPING STATUTES DILL. Earl FORTESCUE moved the second reading of this bill, and explained that it would deal with 120 sta tutes from the 13th Edward I. to 17th George 111. Lord CAMPBELL observed that the bill would help to purge the statute-book from a mass of excrescent legislation, and the noble lord was entitled to the thanks of the public for introducing it. The LORD CHANCELLOR said the measure had his entire concurrence. He believed that to send it to a select committee would be a sheer waste of valu able time. The Marquis of SALISBURY protested against pass ing laws 01 the highest importance without the house being furnished with the documents and evi dence on which they were based. The second reading was agreed to. HOUSE OF COMMONS—TUESDAY. NAWAB OF SURAT'S TREATY BILL. Sir F. KELLY moved the third reading of this bill, and observed, that after the unanswerable speech of the right hon. gentleman the member for Oxford (Mr. Cardwell), in the debate on Wednesday last, no doubt could be entertained that the East India Company had bound themselves to pay an annuity to the Nawab of Surat and his heirs. The Board of Control had admitted the justice of the claim, and it was the East India Company alone who disputed it. Sir J. W. Hoot-, rose to move that the bill should be read a third time that day three months, and de clared that if the Government had come to the con clusion which the hon. and learned gentleman had intimated, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, for every Government for the last ten years had in sisted upon a totally different view. Lord Ellen borough, Lord Hardinge, Lord Ripon, Lord Brough ton, and Sir Charles Wood had all held that this claim had no foundation, either in law or equity ; and that if the claim were now conceded the effect would be to withhold the provision now made to those members of the late Nawab's family, whose rights as heirs general had been judicially declared. The house had been told that terms of compromise bad been placed before the Court of Directors ; but the court would have nothing to do with them, because they were grossly unjust to absent parties. It was true he had given his support to the second reading of the bill, for which he was now very sorry, but he had been coerced into doing so by the Government ex pressing a wish to support the second reading in order that the matter might be afterwards in some other form arranged. He had been deceived, and he never would depend again upon anything so slippery as the support of Government. Mr. V. SMITH retorted that the greater part of the embarrassment he !Mr. Smith) felt arose from his having rested upon the slippery support of the directors. His hon. friend was in the habit of assuming that the East India Direction was himself, and the house was in the habit of attending to him as if he spoke on behalf of the whole court. He (Mr. V. Smith) in his position had no means of communication with the Court of Directors, except by correspondence with the chairman and deputy chairman, and ho could state that in every step he had taken those gentlemen completely agreed. But, after all, the whole question lay in a small compass. The only point they had to consider was whether it ought to be treated as a legal or as a political ques tion. He contended that it ought to be treated as a political question; and therefore it was that he dis sented from the gentlemen who sat upon the corn. mittee, because they bad looked upon the treaty as a legal question only. As to the matter of compro mise, the Court of Directors objected to the proposi tion. That proposed compromise was, in his view, nothing but an extension of a previous compromise. If the Court of Directors bad been anxious to come to some decision upon this question they would have fairly stated it; but their rejection of his pro posal was so complete that he bad nothing to do but to consider the case as it stood. Upon the whole matter he could only say, on the part of the Govetn• ment, that he had acted with the utmost frankness, his only desire being that the parties making this claim should be dealt with in a spirit of the utmost generosity, and he thought that the best course rritV PittSS. for him to adopt was to leave the matter with the house and suffer the bill to pass without opposition. The house then divided, when the numbers were : For the third reading .. .. 213 Against it • • .. 28 Majority .. —lB5 The announcement of the numbers was received with loud cheers. The bill was then read a third time and passed. The Hospital Dublin Bill was read a second time. The Sardinian Loan Bill was read a third time and passed. At the evening sitting, after the presentation of petitions, an Hon. Member moved that the house be counted, and there being only thirty•eight members present, the house adjourned. HOUSE OF COMMONS-WEDNESDAY. Major REED called the attention of the house to the number of times during the present and last session of Parliament ;that the Speaker had been unable to form a house (forty members not being present) ; also the number of times the house had been counted out " for the same reason during that period. Mr. OLIVEIRA gave notice that, on the Bth of July, he should move that the duty on wine be reduced. MAYNOOTH COLLEGE BILL. Mr. SPOONER, in moving the second reading of the Maynooth College Bill, stated its object to be to separate the Government and nation at large from all connection with the College of Maynooth, thereby removing what he regarded as a great national sin. The provisions of the bill repealed the act Bth and 9th of Victoria, incorporated the trustees, and enacted that, with certain exceptions in favour of the present resident students, the grant to the college from the Consolidated Fund should cease. The bill was supported by Sir W. VERNER and Mr. JAMES MACGREGOR. Mr. H. HERBERT moved to defer the second read ing for six months. Mr. NAPIER supported the bill. He had never understood that this college was supported by the State as a religious endowment. The statute of 1845, which the bill sought to repeal, was passed for a special legislative and political object, and if that object had not been carried out,—if the college, instead of giving a good and enlightened education, gave an unsound one, inculcating ultramontane doc trines,—if, in short, the money professed to be given for one object was really given for another, the grant should not be continued. Mr. MAGUIRE vindicated Maynooth against the charges made by Mr. Spooner, who, he said, had been grossly deceived and misled. The bill was in tended as a penal measure, because, as it was alleged, the institution had been tried and found wanting, and had thereby forfeited the grant, but he appealed to the character and conduct of the Irish priesthood and people to disprove these calumnies. Mr. DRUMMOND opposed the bill, though he thought Mr. Spooner was entitled to the thanks of the house for bringing forward this question, which should be considered, in his opinion, at least once a year, and he hoped that in the course of time the house would learn to distinguish between the Church of Rome and its abuses. He would go, he said, as far as any one to expose the immorality taught by Roman Catholic priests, but the best way of dealing with the evil was to increase the means of education and to double the grant to Maynooth. Mr. NEWDEGATE, in supporting the bill, accused Mr. Drummond of inconsistency in recommending the doubling of the grant for the benefit of a priest. hood he condemned, and for the extension of doc trines which be stigmatised as leading to the degra dation of mankind. He (Mr. Newdegate) refused to put one shilling into the hands of a priesthood appointed by Rome, although he was ready to vote money to the Roman Catholic laity for the.purposes of education. Mr. BLAND opposed the bill. Sir J. PAKING4O2.I avowed that he had been inten• tionally absent from the house when the motion was made for leave to introduce this bill. He thought no reflecting man could shut his eyes to the difficulties of this question, and he was desirous of knowing the nature of Mr. Spooner's proposal and the scope of his bill before he pledged himself by a vote. The bill, he found, simply went to repeal the act of 1845, and thereby to reverse the policy adopted towards Ireland for upwards of half a century, and he was not prepared to take any stop to reverse the policy. He was bound to ask himself whether any con siderations, religious or political, called upon him, looking at the mixed character of the population of Ireland and to the interests of the empire, as a member of that house and as a Protestant Christian, to reverse that policy. Mr. Spooner had put his objection to the grant upon religious grounds; but, having voted in favour of the policy of Sir R. Peel in 1845, he (Sir John) was debarred from that ground of objection, and he, moreover, thought this would be a most unfortunate moment for the adop. SATURDAY, tion of a hostile policy towards the Roman Catholics of Ireland. Did the advocates of the bill, he asked, as Christians and as Protestants, think it desirable that 0,000,000 of their fellow-subjects should be without a priesthood? If not, was it better that they should be trained in a foreign country or at home? It was said that Parliament was guilty of an anomaly in making this grant; but the whole state of our religious endowments in Ireland was an anomaly. He was no Roman Catholic, or semi-Roman Catho lic; he was an advocate for toleration and charity, and he thought it most unadvisable that angry feel ings should be excited upon this question between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Nevertheless, he confessed that it was attended with considerable difficulty, and that the views entertained by Mr. Spooner were shared by a very large portion of the people of England. One of the avowed motives of Sir R. Peel in 1845 was to put an end to these annual discussions, and he (Sir John) suggested whether it was not possible to devise some mode of preventing them, by putting the grant upon a diffe rent footing. He should vote against the second reading of the bill. The bill was also opposed by Mr. BOWYER. Mr. HORSMAN said the Government thought it their duty to adhere to this grant as a measure of policy, justice, and good faith. It was the duty of the Legislature to preserve tranquillity in Ireland, and to promote morality and religion ; whatever tended to raise the moral and religious standard there was a national duty, and to obstruct that object was, in his view, a national sin. Mr. SPOONER replied, when the house divided upon the amendment, which was negatived by 174 to 108. The question being then put that the bill be read a second time, Mr. BOWYER moved that the debate be adjourned. Mr. H. HERBERT supported this motion, wine:- was affirmed by the lapse of time, and, the orders having been disposed of; the house adjourned at ten minutes to six o'clock. HOUSE OF LORDS-THURSDAY. GRAND JURIES BILL. Lord CAMPBELL moved the second reading of the Grand Juries Bill, the object of which, he said, was to enable the foreman of the grand jury to swear each witness in their own chamber as he presented himself to give evidence. The bill ;as read a second time. DIVORCE AND MATRIMONIAL CAUSES BILL. Lord LYNDHURST, in bringing up the report of the Select Committee on the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, stated that the great object the commit tee had in view was to obtain a separate tribunal for the decision of matrimonial causes, and they came to the conclusion that it ought to consist of the Lord Chancellor, the three Chief Justices of the courts of common law, and the Dean of the Arches. With such a tribunal, from which, in cases a vinculo matrimonii, there would be an appeal to the House of Lords in matters of law but not of fact, he thought their lord ships and the public ought to be satisfied. The Dean of the Arches would have the power to sit alone and decide cases a ntonsa et thoro, but an appeal would lie from him to the larger court. As to the altera tions in the existing law, he added, the committee had unanimously decided that where a wife was twin rated from her husband a mensa et thoro, in conse quence of his misconduct, whatever property was acquired by her subsequent to the separation should be held for her own separate use. They also proposed to give her the right of cueing in her own name for any wrong done to her while living apart from her husband, which was denied to her at present, unless with the husband's consent. Adverting to the action to recover damages in cases of adultery, whicit operated with the greatest hardship and injustice towards the wife, and was in that and other respects of the most scandalous character, he said he had proposed its abolition in the committee, but in that he was overruled. In other respects the committee had made a great step in advance, and recommended that the wife should have a right of di*orce in cases of adultery with cruelty, incestuous adul tery, and bigamy. He still, however, adhered to the opinion that it was alike consistent with law, Scripture, and reason that, with respect to adultery, the wife should Le put upon the same footing as the husband in all respects, and he meant to submit a motion at a subsequent stage of the bill with the view to elict their lordships' opinion on the subject. The Marquis of LANSDOWNE supported the bill. thought the committee had gone as far as they ought. in drawing a distinction between adultery on the part of the husband and on the part of the wife. The LORD CHANCELLOR Said the majority of the, committee were of opinion that it would not be safe to abolish the action for criminal conservation alto- gether. He had no objection to the relief in cases of adultery being reciprocal ; but he thought a pro position giving husband and wife an equal right of redress, on the presumption that the guilt of each ALI