The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1848-09-05 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

THE "BILLS 01:' MORTALITY."  There had been this session 45 public committees of 15 members each, 28 election committees of five members each, 14 groups on railway bills of five members, 17 groups on private bills, and 111 committees on private bills of five members each. The committee on commercial distress sat 39 days; that on sugar and coffee, 39 days; that on navy, army, and ordnance expenditure, 40 days ; and that on miscellaneous expenditure, 37 days. There had, too, been presented 18,500 petitions. Such were the statistics. Parliament had been summoned at a time of a great commercial crisis, when famine was upon the land —when trade was dead—and when the great commercial dynasties of England were hurled from their high positions—and Parliament was especially summoned to inquire into the causes of that distress ; but with the exception of a desultory debate on the address, and one on the motion forced upon Mr. Herries by the conduct of the government in authorising the infringement of the Bank Charter Act, the discussions on commercial distress occupied no portion of the house, and could therefore not be accused of having wasted time.  PRESENT CONSTITUTION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS  The House of Commons as it is now conducted, is a great committee, sitting on public affairs, in which every man speaks with the same right, and most of us with the same weight. No more the disciplined array of traditionary influences and hereditary opinions—the realised experience of an ancient society and of a race that for generations has lived and flourished in the practice of a noble system of self-government. Nothing now of this, and we are to be compensated for the future by other qualities—the conceits of the illiterate—the crochets of the whimsical—the violent course of a vulgar ambition that acknowledges no gratitude :to antiquity, and to posterity no duty—until at last this free and famous parliament of England is to subside to the low-water mark of those national assemblies and those provisional conventions that are at the same time the terror and ridicule of the world. Sir, I trace all these evils to the disorganisation of party. The system which is now pursued is a system opposed to those party and traditionary influences which hitherto have been the life-blood and spirit of the House of Commons. lam not charging the gentlemen opposite with a departure from that spirit, but I charge them with adopting a system of which they may be the unwilling administrators, but they are no less responsible for its consequences. If you persist in this system, the consequences will be, that you will realise events such as no revolution ever succeeded in accomplishing—such as no conspirator in any of those midnight conclaves wh:rli you have of late disturbed ever had the audacity to devise. Iknow of no political combination that can long withstand these deleterious And sapping influences, and it appears to me that those public men who have hitherto administered the fortunes of the country will be swept from the public scene. For my part, I protest against this system. I denounce it even at the eleventh hour. I call upon the country to brand it with its indignant reprobation. But whatever may be its consequences, I have had the sails, faction of attempting to place in a clear aspect before you the causes of this great national evil. I have more--4 have had the consolation of justifying this great assembly, wherein it is my highest honour to hold a seat, and vindicating in the face of England the characf.er and conduct of the lic-ase of Coninions.—(Loud cherss.)  erne 'AI  •••Mr. Justice Coleridge has described the new Court at Bristol as " the perfection of inconvenience." Among the members initiated into the Orange orclez. at Bradford was Lord Melgund, an officer of the army. A new Roman Catholic Chapel at Thurnham, near Kirkham, was opened on Tuesday. The quantity of malt charged with duty in the twelve years ending 1845, was 306,105;7'58 bushels. Mr. Easam, of Sutton-upon-Trent, has found that mustard sown amongst wheat is an effectual cure for the wire worm.  The number of lives lost by the wreck of fishing boats during the late gale on the eastern coast of Scotland was upwards of a hundred. On Friday night and Saturday, morning there were no fewer than eleven fires in London within six hours ; but fortunately no persons sustained'any bodily injury. The Sicilian Government has forwarded orders to England for several hundred large rockets, on the plan of Mr. Hale, by which they are fired without a staff.  The Pariiamemtajry Committee of the Council on Education have resolved to devote £30,000 for workhouse schools.  A man has been fined forty shillings at Marlboroughstreet police-court for pulling down some voting papers from the door of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. After an exciting and extremely well-played game, the Salop Cricket Club beat the Liverpool Club on Tuesday, on the Shrewsbury race-course, byl& runs. The execution of the convict Kelly, who shot a woman in the barrack-yard, Newport, took place yesterday week, at Monmouth gaol.  Dr. Ullathorne was, on Thursday, enthroned bishop. of the new Roman Catholic diocese of Birmingham, in terms of the rescript received from the Pope. At the petty sessions lately held at Swindon, a distress warrant was ordered to issue against the Great Western Railway Company, for.the non-payment of poor-rate, in the parish of Highworth, amounting to £9O. Mr. Maurice Bright, a member of the Sheffield Town Council, committed suicide on Tuesday, by; cutting his throat. The death of a son, the illness of his wife, and the depression of trade had unsettled his mind.  Some Bokhara clover, nine feet in height, is now growing in a garden in the nighbourhoodof London, and some Surrey farmers propose to attempt its cultivation ou a considerable scale.