The Sun.
London, England, 1860-01-28 00:00:00

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ti t S U N
LoNDIN, SATURDAY, JAN. 28, 1860.

For yemrs burl,: it has been the common regret
that so in.ifly bills have been lost for the Session from
a want of system in apportioni:ig such bills as could
have beeo jirt introduced in the House of Lords,
and then sent down to the Commons for final con-
i,!‘). The consequence naturally was, that
the time of the Lords was so much occupied at last
with 131:1)lie and private bills, that it was with great
difficulty they were enabled even to pass the public
Ir.,it:ed, in many cases it was the usual
practice towards the end of the session to
make what was facetiously termed the slaughter of
the Innocents. Now, what might have been con-
sidered a good joke to those who cared nothing
about the fit& of the Innocents, it was no joke at
all to the promoters of private bills, who had expended
large sums of money and much valuable time in
nursing those poor Innocents through a wearily
protracted session in the vain hope that their
ban flings might be christened into Parliamentary
legitimacy. But no; Ministers and others influential
members were too busy with their own matters to be
troubled with the private concerns of others—though
millions of prospective property depended on the
event. The promoters of these private bills were
treated as—" outer Barbarians"—in Chinese phra-
seology. And indeed much of our legislative
" slang" bears a beautiful yet incomprehensible
analogy to the learned language of the far East.
So much so that often the very authors of the bills
so interweave them with crude inconsistencies as to
baffle even their own unlimited understandings !
It was in vain that common sense was appealed
to, because the invariable answer returned to any
plain suggestion always was—" There's no prece-
dent For it !-'—as if the world were never to get
wiscar or learn more by practice than it had before
done by 'walking in the maze of mystery, and, like
owls, shun the light
Happily there is now some hope. A change has
already taken place. We
some eighty bills out of the gat3vhlelyesterday a . list of
in the Parliamen-
tary private list of bills on
lc:der-book of the
House of Commons, which are tevf:thnow transferred
to the House of Lords to begin
all T
bills inhothgeencorma.l
reason assigned for beginning
mons was, that they might contain some "e
or.r
more money clauses, which would
vitiatethel
being passed into law, if originally introduced in
the Lords. All this may have been constitutional
enough where there was a money clause in a bill,
bat why not sce if such actually were the case p
The old :4er«)typed answer was ready—there's
no prec,. den! fiLls beginning in the Lords,

ones.