The Express.
London, England, 1848-03-29 00:00:00

'ERIAL VARLIAMEA

HOUSE OF LORDS.—Tossosi, MARCH 28.
The LOAD CHANCIII.I.OI4,Ok his seat at 6 o'clock.
PRIVATE BININEBB.
.onnvn RicADlNO.—Elemaree D"°"' Bin"

SECOND Rithut -
ROYAL ASSENT.
The royal assent was given by commission to the Queen's
Prison and the Passengers Billa. The commissionen were
the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Lord
Campbell.
Their lordships adjourned at 20 minutes past the o'clock.

HOUSE OF COMMONS.—Tur.BDAY, Mama 28.
The Srnexen took the chair at 4 o'clock.
PUISLIC BUSINESS.
SECOND READINGS —Administration of Oaths (Conn of Chin-
ese?): Election Reeogniaancea; Rills.
REPORTS. - slam Duties' Apshallation ; Property m
—Mr. Tax ; BalaM. J.
.
NOTICES OT MOTlON.—ltsrao. or sal Pal
O'Cossau to give notice, on behalf of W. W. S. O'Brurn„l Tort
the
he
would nom, on the 11th of April, for lease to bring in a W
repeal ce the legislative union between England and Ireland.
Mmisza OATIM—Mr. GOCIAUKS move (this day) fur the ap-
pointment of a select committee to inquire whether the oaths pre-
scribed to be taken by members at the table of that house had been
duly taken by all the members returned.
BODMIN ELECTION.
The following members were called to the table end sworn
as the select committee to try the merits of the petitions corn-
plaiuing of an undue election and return for the Ooroughetts
of
Bodmin : —Mr. G. A. Hamilton (chairman).
Mr. liodg
Foley, Mr. F. French, Mr. It. Trevor, and Sir E. Filmer,
Bart.
RIGHT OF PETITION.
Mr. WARLEY presented a petition from an individual
named James Beale, stating that he considered this country
in a mad critical state, and that the events which were going
forward in other countries were calculated to rouse the masses
of this country into action and to induce them to make a de-
termined stand in favour of those measures which they con-
sidered would be productive of benefit to them. The peti-
tioner further stated, that he believed the great poverty
and wretchedness which affected large portions of the indus-
trious ewes of this country was owing to the defective ca
ncter ot the repreaentation of the people in this house; and
lie prayed for universal suffrage, vote by ballot, the appro.
priation of church property, and the sale of the crown lands
for the liquidation of the national debt, the abolition of all
Manure places and pensions, the reduction of the standing
army, the abolition of indirect taxation, and the substitution
he lowa
of a general system of direct taxation, the repeal of t
of entail and promogeniture, the reform of the system of cur-
rency, and the abolition of the House of Lords. The peti-
tioner prayed they the house would take into its consideration
all these reasonable requests. (Laughter.)
Sir R. H. INGLIS nee to order. lie objected to this
petition being received.
Mr. WAKLEY said the hon. baronet was premature, so he
(Mr. \Vokley) had other petitions to present.
Sir R. H. INGLIS said that when a petition was objected
to the course was that it should at once be brought u in
order that the souse of t:.e house might at once be taken
upon it.
Mr. HUME rose to order. No member could, under the
rules of the house, object to a petition being brought up.
His course was to objet to its reception when the question
that it do lie on the table was pot.
The SPEAKER said that by the rules of the house every
petition was brought up without the necessity of a motion to
that effect, unless it was informal in its character or at v..ri-
ante with the r alit. or contrary to the rights and priviloges
of the house. He apprehended the objection of tie hon.
baronet reined on one of these grounds.
Sir R. H. INGLIS was aware the election petitions were
brought up without motion, but ho thought no others
were so.
The SPEAKER.—The hor. baronet is mistaken in that

respect.
Sir R. H. INGLIS said he should be contest to leave the
petition subject to the derisive laughter with which it had
been received, but he contended that no individual had a
right to petition this house to abolish the House of Lords.
II the right hon. gentleman in the chair told him that this
was not a sufficient objection to this petition, he (Sir R. W
weird at once desist in his opposition. At present,
however, he apprehended that the house could no more
receive such a petition than it could receive &petition for the
abolition of the monarchy.
Capt. PECHELL sugaested that the petition should he
read b the clerk at the table, and then the h ouse
would ley arn accurately its contents. (Loud cries of " No,

AT a time when the interference of the F
Provisional
pmGioxoyvhmeoreininrsmt ewnantasawitathhvrrwtohst eildiah; hours
tuaothmrseioaoginfvniitieruhaweigortidao:kaciin
mast
and the wages of labourers, is exciting so much indie.
rant comment ors this side of the channel, it 'nay
be amiss to take a glance at the working of our not
legislation on these beads. It is good to poll rs,
beam out of our own eye before setting ourselves to
extract the mote from the eye of our neighbour. pit
Loughborough, as our readers will have seen from
a report published in our yesterday's impression, the
justices, on the application of the sub-inspector 0f
factories, have fined a hosiery manufacturing firm, ii,
ten cases, for employing children thirteen hours d a
half in one day. The truth was, and it was as-,,
mitted by the sub-inspector, that none of the chil-
dren employed in the establishment had worked
named in the information. The thirteen and a halt
inhoollrenethea:
The Act 7 & 8 Viet., c. 15, sec. 26, enacts that no child
I shall be employed more than six hours and thirty
minutes in any one day, and that" the hour,. of the work
of children and young persons in every factory shall
be reckoned from the time when any child or young
peswz.hra°nfacethaloryl."firstThb:geinhilthdrewn
i thirteen and a half hours in the Loughborough
came had begun to work at 1 p.m., and they
worked for six hours and three quarters ; hat as
other children had been at work six hours and
three quarters before that time, in the eye et the
law the relays had worked thirteen hour and a half.
And for each of the ten cases in which the children
i were by a legal fiction assumed to !•:ace worked
I thirteen hours and a hal, their employers were
sentenced to pay a fine of 3/f. and costs.
The la* will not allow the owners of factories to
employ hale adult males for the number of hours that
they are willing and glad to be employed, and couple
with them relays of children, each relay working only
half the time the men do. It only allows the em.
ployment of children during six hours and a half
every week day, or during ten hours of every ak
is a -
nate day. It as the masters choose to take it, a
six and a half hours act or a ten hours act. 'his
masters cannot afford to pay the lame wages
for short hours as for longer hours ; they are not
able to make the same machinery keep the
same number of persons at work ; they cannot pro.
duce the same quantity of goods, and of
course cannot employ the same number of persons in
finishing them. The act 7& 8 Victoria, c. 13, is
an act for arbitrarily reducing profits on the masters'
capital, and throwing labourers out of employment
The mischief will not stop here. America poem.
" water privileges " and beds of coal more exteadvs
than those of Britain. In America the employer may
keep his machinery going twelve or cvi n more hours
in the day ; he may employ
America the factory owner te
nearer the place of growth of cotton. la it then to
be expected that men of capital, men of mechanical
talent, will remain in this country trammelled, pars.
lyeed by vexatious and impoverishing legislation,
when in America their enterprise and energy are
allowed to reap their due reward?
These are considerations which we would implore
the operatives of this country to reflect upon while it
is yet time. We speak withourbias i we are neither
masters nor workmen, though we have mingled
largely with both. We see, as lookers-on are pro-a
verbially said to see most of the game, that the Fero-
thrice Act has a necessary tendency to diminish em-
ployment and ultimately to drive manufactures out d
the country. This will be a severe infliction oa capi
talists, and the head-workers who invent machinery
and organise factories ; but it will be a sentence of
starvation to the labourers who have not the same
means of shifting their scene of action.
Our dense population have been kept alive but not
brought into existence, by manufactures. When the
silk mills at herby were first set at work a redundant
population besieged their doors begging to be taken
in on far harder terms than any factory operative
would listen to now. At a much later date, when
DAVID DALE established his cotton-mills at New
Lanark, similar scenes were witnessed in Scotland.
There is still suffering enough, Clod knows, in Greet
Britain, but it is as nothing compared to the suffering
in Ireland. And that the poorer classes in Great
Britain are not exactly in the same condition as them
of Ireland, is owing 'solely to our manufactures.
Now the condition upon which the manufacturer is
able to give employment, that is, food and clothing to
the poor, is, that he shall be able to turn his capital
or his ingenuity, or both, to account. If he did net
possess them, he could not find the poor in work; it
he did not gain by employing them he would not—
any more than the poor man would work without
wages. The labourer has as deep an interest in the
manufacturer's making good profits as the menders
turer himself. But so soon as a uniform, inevitable
law is passed and enforced, declaring either that the
manufacturer shall give such and such wages, or the
workman so many hours of work, profits become pre-
carious, even when they are not cut off. 'f ne wages
an employer can afford, the number of hours he may
require his machinery to be kept at work, de-
pend upon circumstances over which ham=
power has no control, the shifting of which
human foresight cannot discover beforehand. A
law fixing the quantity and remuneration of labour
inevitably checks the free play of manufactures, di-
minishes profit and renders it precarious, and throes
workmen out of employment. We will assume, for
the sake of argumeet, that all masters are exacting
and penurious, and anxious to drive hard bargains
awyiatthemthegiriveviasnkpraomenf that . Theat m
history
afof
titiheemfacirarli
been so. But of late years the evil has lea
I admittedly abated. The growth of intelligence a
a sense of self-respect among the operatives, the
progress of education, with its refining influence,
among the masters, have brought this abont.ce-
These influences, amid a good deal of
casional squabbling and mutual misapprehes-
sions, will carry the good work still further.
This may be a comparatively slow method of bring-
ing about a more humane and equitable
.state of society
than any the world has yet witnessed ; but it is the
only safe one. When men and masters drive their
own bargains for themselves, for the time being, all
circumstances can be taken into account and allow.
&nee made ; but when a deaf, unalterable law, steps ia,
it must be obeyed to the letter, at whatever cost.
We observe that the partner of the Loughboroagh
firm, who appeared in court, threw out a rugger as
relative to an arrangement which he thought
be made to work better than the only one
under the existing Factories Act. "He had 101
told by an eminent cotton spinner, a Ili
in the habit of making close calcalatialle
that if he might be allowed to eta#l
two seta of hands, each working eight hours a dap
he could afford to give for these eight hours of wore
as much as he could for ten hours' work of one sat
only ; for this reason—that in the former case the
capital employed in the construction of the ame
chinery would in the first instance bear interest iv
teen hours in the day, and in the latter only tea
hours." But this has to us the appearance d
a calculation made in despair of justice—an
attempt to reduce an inevitable evil to its minimum.
For the interest of employers, and far more for
the interests of workmen, we feel that all legislative
interference, either with wages or the hours of work,
is to be deprecated.

Winter the citizens of Madrid and the peopled
Spain are astonishingly tranquil, the small knot of
courtiers and statesmen calling themselves modersde
are in a desperate state of indignation and excitement
Some days back, on the first receipt of the intelligence
from Paris, and the abandonment of the Duchess
MoNTPENSIER in the Tuileries, the dons of
CHRISTINA'S coterie meditated nothing less than
declaration of war against France, and a restoration
of Lotis PHILIPPE by the arms of Nsfirai•
This heroic fit soon passed away but it
has now been succeeded by another, equal
choleric and valorous, in which the Christinaine
threaten to do no less than levy war upon Englao,
and to send a new armada to dethrone Uueen
TORIA. The cause of this resentment lies in the fact
that the Duke and Duchess of MONTTENsIER called
at Buckingham Palace to see the QUEEN, and the
they certainly went away without seeing her. The
Spaniards say the QUEEN was willing to receive the
Infanta, but not the French Duke and Dacha*
We understand, on the contrary, that her Majesty
did not contemplate the vexing of the r.oynl.
exiles by such distinction, but that being within
a day or two of her confinement, and not porn
Portant!? to receive any visitors, the preparation for
receiving the Duke and Duchesa reqMred a greaten
length of time than the patience of the viaitore