The Express.
London, England, 1856-02-19 00:00:00

RAILWAY BILLS IN PARLIAMENT.

TIN following bills bays been decided upon by the
ememiners on Bleeding Orders since tease last reported :
INOTON RAILWAY. For CIDALDBC•imII of Ifort.
Bleeding orders complied with.
Is the COCA of the Aberdeen, Perth, end Fraembargb
Jimmies Beltway, end Dewid* sad Alford Valley Railway
Emission, the mesas, orders • ere declared sot to hare
bees complied with.
Is the Belfast Improvinaret Bill there was so asper-
se.,; sad tee Ceylon Railway sad Leodoe Printing sad
rehlielleion Co spas, were pawpawd until the 3rd Marsh.
CANNOCK RAILWAY RITUISIONS —Toe eri
mated ton of toe c mrraet on of •lesie pr, p teed eateasims,
iollodion all emisseer cies, .e 136 0001.
LITTON, DONSTABLIN AND WILWYW JONCTION Ems-
WAT.—Tbe psrliemeatary deelerstim of this monipasy with
referee's to their lassoes and pressed bill kr an alien-
Mao of jure os with Leatoa sad North Welters, and
for stir r pore o es, sets forth that the expose* of OW pre-
posalldeviaties will be defrayed Oct of 160,000 L, which
they were aetbarised be WSW, and that 161634 f. of that
mesa mill remains asexpeoded, sad that alter dedeeting
from it all that will be reqe4ed to complete the line, then
w 11 remota 46,6341. foe the communist of the detiatios.

The New York paper, al the 4th state that the
eteasar Black Watrior, whisk left the Haysaa oe the
With alt., had bought to t►at putt Mlle. Bache, whose
!web% van delicate. BE* would leave at ease (re
Llvercool, es het way le Fusee.

Clic expreoo.

TO CORRESPONDENTS.
iihir Wowed kr •The espraus..Lastlis !webs paper,
ay
met
a be
peb at die OS" 10. Beeveriealrest, by Tye Vela* es ;be
ilsidar

EWE WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
TO Dillitibp lb. 1e5..........11/tersoos. lb. K.
To-boasow—blarelas, lb. lOa-........Mter5000, 2b. Ma.

THE EXPRESS, TUESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 19, 1856.

nominal incomes as farad contributions to the fund.
There is Indeed a third class of civil servants, com-
prising some of the Ministers of the Crown and all
the ledges of the Superior and County Courts, who,
though entitled to retiring pensions, are in no case
called upon to submit to any deduction from their
fixed salaries with a view of providing the fund from
which such retiring pensions are to be paid.
The complaints of that numerous body of Civil Ser-
vants (two-thirds of the whole) who have been
appointed since 1829 are principally these. They
say, first, that the rule which subjects them alone to
a forced deduction from their nominal rate of official
salaries is in principle indefensible; either no public
officers who are entitled to superannuation allowances
or retiring pensions should be thus called on to con-
tribute, or all should be called upon alike. They
next say that the scale of superannuation allowances,
fixed by the Act of 1834, and applicable to all officers
appointed since 1829, is far too low: so low
as to induce inefficient men to cling to office long
after they ought to have retired, greatly to the
detriment of the public service. Their third
and principal ground of complaint is, that
the product of these forced deductions from salary
constitutes a fund from which only a very small per-
centage of those who are compelled to subscribe to it,
derive any sort of benefit at all. Dr. FARRE'S cal-
culation is, that more than 90 per cent. of these
who pay deductions never receive any portion of
the fund; nor did the CHANCELLOR of the Excnr..
drat, on Friday night, materially shake the soca.
racy of this computation. Finally, as may readily
be understood, and as the CHANCELLOR of the
EXCHEQUER indeed acknowledged, the combined
Incidence of this forced deduction and of the
income tax frequently works great hardship in the
very class of cases where all unnecessary pressure
should as much as possible be avoided. Genteel
" poverty has ills enough of its own to bear, without
having those ills increased by any arbitrary act of
government interference. As things are at pre-
sent managed, a government clerk, who rises
in the official scale from 1051. to 1101. a-year,
actually becomes a loser by his promotion; 6 per
cent. is first deducted from his salary for the super-
annuation fund, thus reducing it to 1041. 10s.; upon
this sum the income tax operates, and that with such
effect as in the end to leave the victim of promotion
a loser of 51.101. a year by the increase of his salary.
The cue just stated rests on no less authority than
that of her MAJESTY'. CHANCELLOR of the Exenz-
dude, and was brought forward by him last Friday
as an illustration of the justice of this branch of the
Civil Service complaints.
Such then, in substance, is the case of the "Lower
Eleven Thousand." With regard to this case, the
CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, in his remark. of
last Friday, indirectly admitted that the two
principal grounds of complaint involved in
it were completely unanswerable. He could not
deny that a very large percentage indeed of those
who have for years been compelled to contribute to
this superannuation fund have not the remotest
prospect, in the periwig either of themselves or their
families, of ever sharing to the extent of a single
farthing's worth in its benefits: he not only did not
deny, but actually illustrated and enforced, the
hardship to which those Civil Servants are subjected
whose incomes are just high enough to expose them
to the joint operation of the five per cent. super-
annuation deduction and of the income tax. Well,
and what follows P Does the CHANCELLOR of
the Excalcitm, in the Bill introduced on
Friday night, propose to pat an end to the
system of superannuation deductions P No. Does
he propose to make soy provision for those
eases of admitted hardship connected with the in-
come tax ? No. Does he propose to put the judges,
or those Civil Servants who have entered the service
before 1829, on the same footing aa to superannua-
tion fund deductions with thou who have entered it
since P Nothing of the kind. What, then, does
he propose P Simply a trifling alteration in the
scale of superannuation allowances, as to the nature
of which he dose not condescend to enlighten us.
It is, however, satisfactory to learn that Sir 0. C.
Lams has consented to submit his Bill to the ordeal
of a Select Committee, which shall have the power to
examine witnesses. In adopting this course he has
acted wisely and fairly, and has somewhat revived
our hopes.

We await the award of the Committee, persuaded
that the Eleven Thousand have still a chance
of obtaining legislative recognition of the im-
portance And the justice of their use. We cannot
believe that any body of intelligent and impartial
inquirers can fail to see the impolicy of inducing the
members of the Civil Berens to linger on in office
after their fitness for it has ceased, in consequence
of the notoriously inadequate scale of those allow-
ances which the State offers to their debility and
their age. We do not think it likely that any
satisfactory arguments will be found for establishing
the equity of taxing men for the support of a fund,
in the benefits of which not above one-third of them
can, on any reasonable calculation, ever expect to
participate; nor for maintaining the inoppreseiveness
of a system under which a Government Clerk, by a
nominal increase of salary to the extent of fit., mat
actually be a loser to the extent of W. 10a. If the
present nominal scale of salaries be too high (es we
firmly believe It is not), let it at once be diminished in
terms to the amount to which it is in fact reduced by the
superannuation deductions : a saving effected in that
way for the public, though, in our opinion, Inexpedient,
would at least be intelligible. The present system, by
a peculiar felicity of mismanagement, combines the
somewhat incoogruou disadvantages of effecting •
very tetennwm of saving to the public treasury, and
creating a no:imams of well-grounded dissatisfaction
in more than two-thirds of the whole body of the
public servants.

de We learn," mays the Mao Beacon, " that them
Is ao chime whatever of any cootarratioe of the ponish
meat sow andergoimg by Unit resets Hallo t and Most-
insury, and, Rimiest, that to all probability the commis-
MOM of bath vatlones will be sacrificed."

The Rued= Grand Duke Nicholas is twenty-ilva
rm. of ass, sad the Gaud Duke Michael twsetf•toar.
The Russian Garotte do r Academie announces the
desists's of Colossi Lake sad Csptsiu Thomplos from
Tiflis to ID. Farnham sad the likability of Os octal Wil-
liams to Maas the former eity by masa of Massa

Awarding to the Paris earreepoodeat of Le Nord,
Bates 11-ioew met Ceeat Monty et tt e bust of the Prim-
ula Lions, es the day ears as arrival is Pert " Tee
ceavenetiee toted tom time, mad wu very COD fldential."

The Russian journals are earnestly discussing the
sesissity for the con•toetion eI more railways in the ern-
" It {scent is," sap wt. wr;tar, "that with railway

stommentratien between the Crimea sad the net of the
empire, the Analo-Freneh army would nem hem disem-
barked."

---
The cantos of Zurich has just elected a member
of the Ezasative Otveracaest. There were three mad'.
detee—a Conserves ye, a Socialist, sad a Radical. The
lee•-aaesed .61 /2600411.

The Second Chamber of the Eitatewaeneral of the
NetherUeda hes resolved to epeeist a emulates of five of
Its sielabers to squire tato the best mesas of preveatiag
the obese of spirits.

If, es is maid, the 'igniters* at the Coeferenees
weer is alphebetiell order. the erresiteweat wilt be
as for con :—Aasteie, Frazee, Great &ha e, Run*
Taekey.