The Express.
London, England, 1848-08-15 00:00:00

Vie erpreoo.

bably exclaim some innocent individual." These miscel-
laneous estimates are a trifle—an absolute nothing ;
merely, as their name no doubt denotes, the froymenta
of the supplies : just those loose and indifferent items
that cannot be classified otherwise, and that art ac-
cordingly collected here for general convenience and
facility. 'These may be considered at any time, and
just as well on the 14th of August as on any other
day of this dreary and interminable session."
The utterer of such a reflection deserves to sleep
through what the CHANCELLOR OP THE EXCHEQUER
calls " the financXl year," utterly unconscious of income
tax or assessed ! But, if awake, he must be told
that these " miscellaneous estimates," so far from

being the skim are the very cream of the supplies;
that they contain everything in public expenditure
thit is not comprised in the support of our army,
navy, and ordnance—our peace or war establishments
(whichever you are pleased to call them) ; that with-
out these estimates were passed, the QUEEN—God
bless her !—would not have a house over her
head; that not a public servant, from that
eulightened statistician, the CHANCELLOR OF THE Ex-
citement, down to the humblest door-keeper in his
office, would receive a stiver ; that there would not
be a farthing for " secret service money," nor a six-
pence for " printing and etatienery"—nothing to
satisfy the inexhaustible voracity of the Caledonian
Canal—nothing to feed the vanity of Mr. BARRY, or
to citable Dr. Item to warm the tempers or tingers of
our legislature.
These miscellaneous estimates, in fact, comprise
everything that is of the first importance iu our finan-
cial arrangements ; and, more than that, they really
comprise nearly everything in respect of which the
country can hope for immediate reduction of extrava-
gant expenditure. If you wish to ec irch fur a go-
vernment job, here is the place to put your finger on
it ; and how jobs have increseed, despite public and
part amentary vigilance, may be gathered from this
single fact—that in 1833 the expi•nditure under this
head was 2,390,000/., and that it has progressively
increased every twelvemonths, until this year the
estimate nearly doubles that amount !
The committee which was appointed early in the
session to examine into these estimates have made a
partial report, and which is certainly open to animad-
version as an exceedingly bare and meagre docu-
ment. On the other hand, it was ably defended as a
report not professing to embrace the whole of a most
difficult and complicated subject, but merely. bringing
the results of inquiry up to a certain point.
Possibly sufficient allowance is not made for
all the difficulties this committee have had
to encounter. Although it was composed of some
of the ablest and must practical members of the
house, it was, we believe, with the greatest difficulty
that this committee gut un at all. They were daunted
at the very outset by the magnitude and complexity
of the inquiry entrusted to them. Some time elapsed
before they could bring themselves to grapple with it,
and when they did the difficulties rapidly increased.
They found the witnesses firs: brought before them
wedded to existing systems, and little willing, if able,
to give information which might result in recommen-
dations of a large and comprehensive character. In
fact, so much valuable time was 1 ist in considering
what to do and how to do it, that it is only surprising
that the inquiry did not absolutely result in nothing.
There are points, however, about the report of this
committee that are of a valuable character, because
they are suggestive of topics which may next year be
the suniect of more complete analysis. Where w •
think the committee have been wrung is in en-
deavouring to do too much at eerie. Why
not have gone thoroughly into one branch of
the inquiry, and given to the house from time to time,
in a cun7enient compass, the result of their delibera
lions upon that specific topic ? Take the first four
votes in these estimates : 40,0001. tbr the repairs of
public buildings and the maintenance of the royal
palaces; 10,0001. for the new works at Buckingham
Palace; 8,4001. (more) for the erection of a palm-
house at Kew ; and 4,224/. for the annual expenses
attending the temporary accommodation of the par-
liament and its officers. How valuable would have
been a distinct report from the committee in a shape
easy of reference upon each of the poicte included in
these items!

Again, look at the votes which were considered
last night. We saw nothing of the estimate on ac-
count ot the new Houses of Parliament, which is a
sebjeet requiring, as it has to acne extent received,
distinct and separate investigation. But take that vote
for public works in the Isle of Man, or look at the little
discussien which arose about the pavmi nt the sur-
veyor's travelling expenses on the Holyhead road. I low
could these matters have been better disposed 6f than
by the pen ot the chairman of the select committee ?
Surely nothing but the weakness of a public officer
could have recommended the House of Commons to
pass either of these items. The revenues of the Isle
of Mao, if properly managed, are amply sufficient to
build all chapels and court-houses required in that
locality. And 600/. for the travelling expenses of a
well salaried gentleman, who drives himself in his gig
two or three times a sear from Holyhead to Shrews-
bury, to examine the mile-stones! Why, poor old SAM
who drives the Shrewsbury Wonder over these llo;y-
-head roads would give thegovernment the most per ece
intormatiou on the subject for hal: a-sovereign, and
ith all the superior advantage of a twice-a-day
experience upon the ground.
The defence of this little piece of rrivate job-
bery was unique, and in the highest degree cha-
racteristic of the " Woods and Forests." Because
the 600/. had been charged eve r siren the Holyhead
roads were made, therefore it ou.lit to be continued in
perpetuity. By the same rule, because the ledgers of
that department have never been posted since 1839,
as my Lords Commissioners of thel rummy have just
discovered to their infinite dismay, then.fore it is in
the highest degree unnecessary ever to poet them
hereafter.
The votes of last night for the new Houses of Par-
liament lead to very serious reflections. What
a cost has been entails el upon the nation by the un-
fortunate cireumeance of the housekeeper of St-
Stephen's retiring to her couch one wintry night
in 1834 without seeing her tires pi op, rly extin-
guished' With regard to Mr. BARRY', bills, members
seem to have arrived at the conclusion that there is
nothing for it hut 'o " grin and bear it." People
may sigh, however, to reflect how many thousands of
pounds have been spew, not for the yellow-pinnacled
pearte, but for what is facetiously •ailed "the tem-
porary accommodation of the houses of parliament."
Why, the rent of the houses in Parliament-stree,
Great George-street, Bridge-Mmt, Abingdon-street,
Duke-street, Eaton square, Palace-yard, Richmond-
terrace, and we do not know where else,
that have been taken for " the temporary
accommodation of the houses of parliament,"
would pretty nearly have paid Mr. Batter, which
is saying a great deal. The hire of the SPEAKER'S
chandehers for the last twelve years would have
bought the best set that Mr. BLADES cool I have eup-
plied ten times over. The c--et of moving the papers
b eckwards and forwards mi ;let abselutely have built'
a house to keep them in. There is one item that has
been voted in this est mete ev, ry yesr tha' really
s. ems so monstrous that any explanation of it would
be acceptable. It is this :
For the probable expense that will be incurred for taking
up hair cloth, mats, etc., and elearinz dirt from under the
house and the sapid) of hair cloth and mats which will be
required from thine to time to make good what is worn out
. . . 1,1601.
This same estimate of "probable expense " has
appeared precisely in the same form for these ten
years ; leaving us in a state of pleasing surprise at the
reflection how nicely the" probable expense is every
year estimated, and how skilfully it is contrived that
precisely the same quantity of dirt should be cleared
and the same quantity of hair cloth and mats re-
quired. But probably the house fancy that the man
who removes their dirt richly deserves to be well paid.
It is doe to remark that the estimate of 4,2241.,
which is the amount demanded this year, is a great
reduction upon the ordinary anneal expenditure for
the "temporary accommodation of the houses of par-
liament." In truth it was time. In 1841, the sum
voted on this account was nearly 20,0001: in 1846 it
approached 9,0001. The details of this expenleditusson re
fo , it r
is now, alas, useless to discuss, except as a
the future. Suffice it that the 110/. per annum for the
hire of the SPEAKER'S chandeliers, or the 6001. for
what was called " the outfit of his kitchen," and the
thousands upon thousands which have been voted "for
alterations according to the estimates of Mr. BARRY,"
are only samples of about as senseless a squander as
ever was made of even the public money.

MAILS.
T..e West India Mail', eacluding Bermuda, Nassau, Havanna,
flisaiiiras, Ni. Urlt.r.w Vern Cruz, *I Annan., and l'urto Inca, Iliad
0t.'!..,g Woo, for Madeira, Carthagen , Santa Martha,
Coaces, Panama, West Coast of South America. and St JuL.n-de-
Naaragua, will be made up on the morning of the 17th August.
The mail, fur Vigo, °port°, Laura, Madeira, Cad* anti Gibraltar
will be made up on the'morninnot the 17th Aug.
The made for British North America, and the United States,
will be mane up this evening of the 10th Aug.
Ile overland mats lot Gibraltar, Malta, Greece, the lonian Islands,
rept, Aden, Ceylon, India, Moog-Kong, and China, via lioulliampa
toe. will be made up on the evening of the 19th August.
The overland chord mails, via Marseilles, to the Mediterranean,
gent, Aden, Ceylon, India, Hong-Kong, Ste., will be made up on the
evening dale 24th Aug.
The Walk for New South Wale., Van Diernan's Land, aad New
ttidand aid be made up on the evening of the 31st August.
The mats for the West West of Africa and Madeira will be wade
lean the evening of the dial August.
The for tle linazils, the Inver Plate. Monte Video, rermu'"
ham, . Bahia, Madeira, and Buenos Ayres, will be made up on the
teams of the 41b September.

NOTICE TO ADVERTISERS.
The number or STAMPS breed by the authorities of the
Starap-ofhee, during 1847, to *he
DAILY NEWS wu 3,447.009
Thin, we believe, is within eight per cent. of the number
:mad to the Morning Herald, Morning Chronicle, end
Morning Post, ALL PVT TOOETHItt.
In addition to tic above, issued to too DAILY NEWS,
livening Paper, there were issued for the 'seating Edition,
THE EXPRESS 778.714
Wh h was mere lee Y elieve, than were i.auo'! either to
%,...;1r4,110T Sfandtird, Freeing Paperr.

Hum FAUX AT 1.0/11,0/1 211411208
Tei•l,..-1./town., IS vela. Pe. 2. Afternoo., IS .1.112 P.M E
10. aaaaa past 2, Lito7llool2, Wan 3.

LONDON, TUESDAY, ALIG.IS.

- -
AFT ER sit log nine entire months, the Commons
House of Parliament have at last, in the middle of the
month of August, commenced the consideration of the
miscellaneous estimates. " And what of that ?" will pro-

WHEN the traveller through Scotland finds any dis-
trict of country exhibiting signs of more than ordinary
neglect—when the fences are decayed, the land
drained, the the roads in disrepair, the farm steadings

THE EXPRESS, yUESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 15, 1848.

imperfect, the mansions ruinous, and the trees cat
down—ho will be informed, in answer to his in-
quiries,' that " there is a deal of entailed land in this
neighbourhood." It will appear very unaccountable
should the stranger not be satisfied with this solution
of the problem ; for to the sagacious native it appears
quite as conclusively, and irremediably, to be the
cause of desolation and agricultural sordidness, as
peat-bog is the soil of heath and rushes. The pro-
prietor cannot afford to occupy the mansion, and dare
not sell it with the estate to a comfortable capita-
list; therefore it is let to the tenant of
the home farm, who occupies a room or two.
and lets the remainder „,o to ruin. The gardens and
pleasure g, ounds suffering a like fate are partly con-
verted into pasture, and partly are covered wth
dockers and nudes. The old ancestral trees have

been cut down by the creditors. Unless there `:appen
to be old leases on the property, the boasted skill of
Scottish agriculture finds no room to develop itself;
and the tenants, rack-retiteii to supply the immediate
wants of their lord, cannot afford to give the soil the
advantages of skilful husbandry. The circle of deso-
lation ep•eads still wider, and abundant types of its
presence rray be found in the neighbouring towns.
The builder applied to by the lord of so wide a tract
of territory has not he itated to enlarge the mansion ;
the upholsterer has been too glad to get the job of
furnishing so fine a house ; the coachmaker, looking
to the security of so handsome an establishment, eon-
tribtres his proportion in the shape of the family
cha'se; and the wine merchant cannot refuse un-
limited c. edit to the perion who drives to his door in
an equipage so imposing.
. . .

lila a well known swindler's trick to aasume a con-
sequentially sounding firm that has an old familiar
tune about it in the ears of dealers to obtuin the tern-

porary use of premises, and to give them the air of
being well stocked and business-like. If a whole-
sale dealer is caught in the snare, others are sure to
follow ; and when some fine morning the premises are
shut and the rogues have bolted, each dupe finds that
he has suffered from an implicit reliance on the gene-
ral appearance of things, and the sagacity of his fel-
lows. Their position is very like that of the entailed
proprietors' creditors—they discover all at once, to
their horror, that he is not owner of that fine estate,
. .

but is merely entitled to a life lease of it, the owner-
ship of it bring, in fact., by some mysterious juggle of
the law, extinguished.

And he, the being not in existence when the entail
was made, yet for whose sake these contortions of the
natural law of ownership have been made—does all
this ruin make him a great and happy man ? Romance
paints him :entering on his unburdened possessions
Hushed with youthful hopes, while the poor duped
creditors of hi, ancestor endure their losses in obscure

-.
silence. Sober truth would often more accurately

depict him as the chief sufferer in the general wreck.
His immediate predecessors have carried to the utmost
their privilege of providing for their widows and
children, and he himself has in anticipation spent half
of his lite interest. He is virtually a poor man, pos-
sessed only of a slender annuity, but the social
institutions of his country compel him to hold
the name and rank of a rich man, owning
a large estate ; and society, mocking him with
a shadow 'of the substantial rights of property,
expects that he shall substantially perform its social
dutif a. It is not in human nature that the man so
placed should be a good member of society. It is
sometimes difficult enough for those who might live
in humble obscurity if they chose, to avoid expensive
ostentation ; but surely if' any man is excusable in
spending more than is justly his own, it is he whom
the law hes arbitrarily compelled to hold a rank as a
rich landlord, while in its humbler capacity of adjust-
ing the accounts between debtor and creditor it
finds him to be a poor man.

This system has been in force in Scotland longer
than a century and a halt Every yean adds to the
b eadth of land brought under restrictions, which, if
they remain in their existing rigour, will wage a
war of extermination with agricultural improve-
ment. The evil has cut deep. It is a mistake to
suppose that the old aristocratic houses are the sole
supporters of entail. It is a law far more
popular with those who found than with those who
succeed to fortunes, and while the descendants
of the old families are wincing under the lash of its
inflictions, every rich shopkeeper who realises a few
hundreds of acres, desires to perpetuate the fame of
h;s success, much to the prejudice of his order, by
marking out the line of succession applicable to it
for some few centuries to come. Such dictation to pos-
terity, when the law is complacent enough to under-
take the enforcement of it, is a privilege which few
men have virtue enough to resign.
An attempt was made to mitigate the igotirs of
the entail law by Lord ABERDEEN'S act of 182.5. It
was passed for the benevolent purpose
.of enabling
owners of entailed estates to make provisions for their
idows and children. It is believed to have done
more harm than good, by reducing the owner's an-
nuity, and driving him farther into a corner, where
he is set more desperately at bay with the rest of
society, a signal instance of the impossibility of ex-
tracting good from the operation of Item essen-
tially bad, of gathering grapes from thistles. It
would amuse and astonish perhaps in some
cases check the public—were we to publish
the secrets of some of these entails. The religion
to he professed by the holder is a not unfre-
quent condition. It is sometimes, for instance,
provided that he must forfeit the estate to the next in
right if he be not a sound protestant ; imagine the
next in right coming forward to demand the estate on
the plea " I am holier than thou," and insisting that
the court of session shall adjudge between them. If
the courts of law are bound thus to enforce protestant-
ism, they are, of course, bound to enforce catholicism.
Would they give the same sanction to other denomi-
tions of religion, and find that the holder of an estate
must be a unitarian, or a muggletonian, under penally
of losing it ?
It is clear that all this is a relic of barbarism not
to be tolerated in a civilised country. Upwards of a
century ago Lord fisienwleee and Lord KAIMEC
had settled between them the propriety of is
total extinction, but some legislative accident
interposed to transmit the nuisance through the
first French revolution, which frightened statesmen
out of the capacity of undertaking social reforms
down to the present day.
If we had a choice of measures for the alleviation
of the evil, we would without hesitation say, that the
beet arrangement, both for present times and for pos-
terity, would be the complete abolition of the power
of cntailirg, accompanied by " an equitable adjust-
ment" of all existing interests in entails. We hold
this abstract fixing of remote possession to be as great
a mistake as the French system of coercive distribu-
tion, the one being the antipodes of the other, and
equally an interference with the sound rule, which is
the old and simple one, of permitting every one to do
w hat he likes with his own. If a man desires to give
all his landed property to some particular in-
dividual, let him. If he desire that one person
shall hold it for life, and another shall sue-
coed to the reversion —still let him ; but to
carry this system of destination beyond individuals
to whom he can point as in existence—to allow him
to lay out a figurative geaealogical tree, which
the law is bound, a century after his death, to attend
to and make the criterion of the disposal of a portion
of the property that may then be in existence, is de-
manding mere than, on any sound principles of the
moat absolute respect for vested rights, the citizen is
entitled to. Look over the Scottish case books :
every now and then there occurs a question about the
meaning of some expression in some old deed of
entail. Justice is delayed. Important questions be-
tween living men cannot be settled ; heartbroken 1
clients pray for the judicial adjustment of the most I
momentous affairs of modern stirring life ; all must I
be postponed because the skill and patience of the
judges are taxed to the utmost to discover in what
manner a man who has been a hundred years in his
grave meant to say that some portion of the earth's
surface al ould be appropriated at th's moment.
With respect to the LORD ADVOCATE'S bill for
amending the law of Scotland relating to entails,
which passed through committee of the Lords
with an undergrowl of cavils but no serious oppo-
sition, we are bound in candour to admit that
it is much more comprehensive than we had any
right to expect, and quite as strong as the preponde-
rating interest among the electoral class in Scotland
is prepared to submit to. Considerable privileges are
conferred on the new comers who have no vested in-
terests, that is to say, on those who may hold under
entails date d before the passing of the act, bat are
themselves born after its date, or who, holding under
subsequent entails, are born after the date they bear.
In fact every person so situated is to be entitled abso-
lutely, and without. requiring the assent of any other