The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-12 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE EVENING PAPERS OF SATURDAY.
GLOBE.—In the House of Lords last evening, the
Lord Chancellor and the President of the Council had
a tilting-match, with a manifestly mutual wish to gain
a triumph at each other's cost. This is bad manage-
ment. It exhibits disunion in the Cabinet on ques-
tions of " great pith and moment ;" and occurring, as
the disagreement does, at the close of the session, will
operate mischievously during the recess. Ministers
should, for obvious reasons, keep their biclserings from
the public eye and ear. The walls of the Council
Chamber should alone be privy to their altercations.
If--opinions clash in the Cabinet, the brow should be
smooth, and the temper calm, when the disputants
come forth from the Council to the Houses of Parlia-
ment to which they respectively belong. There
should be the appearance of concord within
the walls of Parliament, whatever differences
may prevail elsewhere. To see the Lord
Chancellor and the President of the Council press-
ing their discordant views upon a grave ques-
tion upon the House of Lords with pertinacity, and
even dividing against each other, is a scene that will
be associated in the public mind with dissensions in
Cabinet deliberations upon the measure ; and cannot be
contemplated without diminished respect and confidence
in the Government, the members of which show so little
respect for themselves, and of confidence in each other.
The occasion which gave rise to this strange ex'nibi-
tion—in which it is rumoured there is more than met
the eye of the amazed beholders of the scene—was
briefly this :—The House of Commons had male an
amendment in the Bill for regulating the Irish law
courts. As the measure had originally stood, the ap-
pointments to certain offices had been vested in the
Lord-Lieutenant. The Lords had amended the clause,
and transferred th's patronage to the Judges ; but the
Commons, upon the Bill being sent down for their ap-
proval, had rejected the proposed alteration; and re-
inserted their own clause, which vested the patronage
in the Lord-Lieutenant for the time being. Lord
Wharncliffe had been appointed to conduct the
conference with the Commons, and had failed to
induce the managers of the Lower House to
forego the clause they had restored, and to adopt the
alteration of the House of Lords. His Lordship moved
that the amendment of the Commons should be adopted
by the Lords. The Lord Chancellor resisted the motion;
and with considerable warmth of feeling and acerbity
of expression, declared his intention of divi ling the
House upon the question. The difference of opinion
between the Lord Chancellor and his colleagues on
this question was not sudden and accidental, but
deliberate and foreseen. It involves, as will be seen,
an important principle. It exhibits the strange and
unprecedented occurrence of the highest law officer
of a government opposed upon a question per-
taining to the administration of the law by
his colleagues in office ; and that opposition openly
expressed, persisted in, and carried to a division in
Parliament. Lord Wharncliffe " was of opinion that
the patronage of certain offices in the courts of law
in Ireland should still, according to ancient usage, be
continued in the Lord-Lieutenant." The Lord
Chancellor pronounced this arrangement of the
patronage of these offices as "unwise and unjust; and
as degrading towards the judges of Ireland."
STANDARD. The proceedings in the House of
Commons last evening would have been of little inte-
rest but for Lord John Russell's annual resume of the
offences of omission and commission of Ministers
during the session, and the reply which it provoked
from Sir Robert Peel. In the outset of his address,
however, the Noble Lord explained with commend-
able ingenuousness, in reference to Lord Lynd-
hurst's caustic reviews of the policy of the late
Government, that he did not think that Minis-
ters ought to be held responsible for the legis-
lative failures which might take place in the course of
a session, and that, acting on this principle, he did
not intend to follow the course which had been
adopted towards himself and his late colleagues by tke
Noble and Learned Lord ; for want no doubt of the
materiel to which those periodical reviews were in-
debted for so much of their force and pungency.
Such resumes must have a few facts for their foun-
dation, or they will be irredeemably spiritless and
dull. Instead, therefore, of following out the errors
of Sir Robert Peel's Government seriatim, Lord John
Russell was content to call the attention of the
House to the general results of its policy, as demon-
strated by the present state of the country. The
first topic of complaint was its Irish policy, and
above all the harshness and injustice with which
it had treated the Irish conspirators, in whose
behalf were recapitulated for the hundredth
time, the wrongs they had suffered at the
hands of Protestant jurors and unrelenting prose-
cutors. In discussing the foreign relations of the
country, the affairs of Morocco and Otaheite were not
overlooked ; and after alluding to the general con-
dition of the people, " the scanty means and severe
toil of the labouring population," the currency,
the corn-laws, and the emigration questions, his Lord-
ship wound up his " omniuen gatherum" oration
by a pointed allusion to the manner in which the
time of the Legislature was wasted at the beginning,
and the indecent haste with which the business of
both Houses was transacted towards the end, of the
session. The reply of Sir R. Peel was alike ad-
mirable for its temper and argument. It gave the
Noble Lord full credit for the benevolence he had
claimed for his advice, but questioned the usefulness,
at such a moment, of vague insinuations as to the
neglect of the condition of the humbler classes by the
Legislature, calculated to excite expectations which
could not be fulfilled. With regard to his Lordship's
abstinence from any detailed remarks on the progress
of the session, Sir Robert Peel expressed his regret
that his forbearance should have deprived him of the
opportunity of showing that there never was a ses-
sion in which more important and beneficial legisla-
tion had been effected. Among the measures which
have distinguished the present session,-and to which
we propose hereafter to refer more particularly, the
tranquillisation of Ireland is, beyond all question, the
most important.