the House, then, open the doors of its grand committee of justice to this petition. The effect would be, to suspend all danger from popular feeling-to excite hope in the minds of all, from the anticipation of what might be done in the next session. He called upon them, then, in the name of six millions of people whose interests were so much concerned-in the name of those whose peace was disturbed-and in the name of the empire at large whose security was threatened, to put an end to all fears of present danger, by holding out an assurance to the petitioners that their case would be considered. Mr. Hutchinson, in explanation, repeated, that if the petitioners asserted, that justice was not fairly administered to them by the judges of the land because they were Catholics, they stated what was false; that if they stated that grand and petty juries in the South and West of Ireland did not administer justice fairly to them because they were Catholics, they stated what was false; for the greater part of the juries of that part of the country were themselves Catholics. This was what he had said, and he was surprised at the very gross misrepresentation of his sentiments which had been given by the hon. and learned gentleman. Mr. Brougham said, that his hon. friend had used very strong language. He was sure his hon. friend did not mean to quarrel with him; but if he did, he could assure him that he would not quarrel with his hon. friend. He objected to the terms used by his hon. friend, principally because they happened to have no foundation. The House divided: Ayes 59; Noes 139. KING'S MESSAGE RESPECTING VISCOUNT ST. VINCENT'S ANNUITY.] The Chancellor of the Exchequer presented the following Message from His Majesty: "GEORGE R.His Majesty, taking notice of an Act of Parliament, which has made provision for extending to the Viscount St. Vincent an Annuity granted to the late Earl of St. Vincent, and the Heirs Male of his body, and being desirous that a Pension granted to the said Earl by the Parliament of Ireland should be extended, in like manner, to the Viscount St. Vincent, recommends this object to the consideration of the House." Ordered to be considered on Monday. Mr. PETITION OF G. RowAN. - COMPLAINT AGAINST A MEMBER.] Brougham said, it would be in the recollection of the House, that he had last night presented a petition from a Mr. George Rowan, which contained a serious charge against an hon. member of that House. He had stated upon that occasion, that he had no knowledge either of the party who signed the petition, or of the charges which that petition contained. He had, therefore, upon the suggestion of the president of the Board of Control, after hearing the positive denial given to the accusation by the party whom it implicated, consented to withdraw the petition. But he was now bound to state, that the petitioner having referred him for information to an hon. member of the House, he had made the required reference, and the result of it had been, to make the charges in question assume a much graver interest than he had originally attached to them. He felt that he should, as a public servant, desert his duty to that public, if he did not in conse-plied to had given an opinion favourable quence proceed further in this matter. to the validity of such marriages, yet The hon. member to whom he had referred such opinion had always been clogged for information, had written to him in the with the observation, that there had been following terms "I know Mr. G. no decision on the subject. He regretted Rowan; he is a relative of mine. I never that, during a session in which so much heard any thing against him, except the of the law relating to marriages had been charges on which he was dismissed from taken from the common law, and placed his situation: and, whatever was the merit on the Statute-book, no statute nor clause, of the charges against him, there can be nor even dictum, had been uttered, for no doubt that they were prosecuted from setting at rest this question of the legality the most base and treacherous motives. of marriages solemnized in factories He is a clever, and at the same time a abroad, or in the chapels of our ambascautious, man." He (Mr. B.) was not at sadors. liberty to mention the name of his informant, and he therefore declined giving it. Indeed, it was not necessary for him to give it, since his informant had said nothing against the hon. member who was charged, but had only done that which he was bound in justice to do-namely, speak to the ability, and more particularly to the caution, of Mr. G. Rowan. He now thought it necessary to state, that he should either take another opportunity of presenting Mr. Rowan's petition, or else ground some future proceeding on it. He hoped that, in a matter of such importance, the House would allow him a day or two to consider of the line of conduct which it might be expedient for him to adopt. USURY LAWS REPEAL BILL.] Mr. Serjeant Onslow moved, that the Report of the Committee on this Bill be next received, upon which, a member whose name we could not learn, moved as an amendment, that it be put off for three months. After a short discussion, the House divided For the original motion 21; for the Amendment 26. The bill was consequently lost. HOUSE OF LORDS. Monday, June 30. MARRIAGES IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES.] On the committal of the Marriages at St. Petersburgh bill, Lord Holland said, that the present bill had his entire concurrence. He only regretted that it did not extend to all marriages contracted by British subjects, and solemnized in the chapels of our ministers abroad; for, although no lawyer, he had no doubt of the validity of such marriages himself, yet many respectable persons did entertain doubts on the subject; and, though lawyers when ap The Marquis of Lansdown concurred in opinion with his noble friend as to the necessity of some declaratory law on the subject. Lord Colchester was also desirous that another session should not pass without some measure being brought in for setting the question at rest. The Earl of Liverpool entirely agreed with what had fallen from the preceding speakers. At the time the present bill was brought in, he had said, that the only objection which could be made against it was, that being confined in its operation to marriages solemnized at St. Petersburgh, it might give rise to doubts of the validity of other foreign marriages. He believed it was a completely recognised principle of our laws, that marriages made in foreign countries, according to the laws of those countries, were valid; but the present bill had no reference to that case. There were two ways in which marriages might be regularly solemnized by British subjects abroad. They might either be made according to the laws of the respec tive countries, or the parties might be married in the House of the minister. So long as the factory at St. Petersburgh existed, marriages solemnized by the chaplain there were conceived to be of the same effect as if they had been solemnized in the house of the ambassador; but it hav ing happened that the factory at St. Petersburgh had been put an end to, the question had arisen, whether marriages made there, not according to the laws of Russia, were valid in this country. was with a view to that particular difficulty that the present bill was brought in. He should have no objection to a general measure, if it were thought necessary. It The Earl of Lauderdale said, there was no doubt as to the law regarding marriages made in foreign countries according to the laws of those countries; but the doubt was, as to marriages made in British factories abroad, or in the chapels of ambas sadors; and, respecting these, there ought not to exist any doubt, since a short bill might be passed on the subject during the present session. The Lord Chancellor said, that during the fifty years he had been in the profession, he never heard of any doubts till the late bills were brought in, whether marriages performed in the chapels of our ambassadors were valid. There was no doubt that they were good marriages; and he was persuaded that no contrary opinion would ever be sanctioned by judicial authority. The bill went through the committee. APPELLATE JURISDICTION.] On the order of the day for the second reading of this bill, The Earl of Liverpool moved the first resolution, recommended by the select committee, for increasing the number of days during which the House would hear appeals, from three days to five days in the week. Earl Grosvenor objected to the compulsory clause for enforcing the attendance of peers, and thought it would be worth while to see first, whether a voluntary attendance could not be procured. If this resolution were adopted, it would lead to a singular anomaly; part of a cause might be heard by three peers, another part by three other peers, and the conclusion by three others, who had heard perhaps little or nothing of the case, and the deputy Speaker could only give his opinion. At present, the House had the advantage of the opinion of the noble and learned lord on the wool-sack; which, notwithstanding that habitual doubt and hesitation which he had himself good-humouredly acknowledged to belong to him, certainly, swayed the opinion of many noble lords. They had also the advantage of the noble and learned earl's vote, which they could not have from the deputy Speaker. Lord Manvers hoped the House would pause before they adopted this resolution; for if agreed to without modification, the House must sit all the summer. Lord Erskine thought, that if the bill which had been read the second time that evening passed into a law, their lordships would, in a short time, be under no difficulty at all on the subject of appeals; because he was sure, that if they appointed proper commissioners (of which he had no doubt) they would have faithful and enlightened assistance from the judges of the court of session, and from the eminent persons of the Scotch bar, and the best effects might be anticipated. In his opi-, nion, the great arrear arose from their having brought before them points of fact, and not points of law. It never was intended that appeals on facts should occupy their lordships' time. But it might be said, what was to be done in the interim, while the inquiry was going on by the commissioners? He would say, nothing should be done. They must go on as they could. The present seemed to be meant as a preliminary step; and he for one could not consent to any change in the manner in which the House should exercise its jurisdiction. For his own part, he was so well satisfied with the manner in which the judicial business of the House was conducted by his noble and learned friend on the woolsack, assisted by another noble and learned friend (lord Redesdale), that he professed he could see no remedy for the evil, but impounding him in that House [a laugh!]. It was very true, they might lose the benefit of their services by death; but he believed they were too much men of honour, seeing their usefulness, to suffer any thing but death to cause the House a loss of their services. He might say, that he knew something of the law; but of Scotch law he was as ignorant as a native of Mexico. And yet he was quite as learned in it as any one of their lordships who could be appointed deputy Speaker, and who could but bring to his office a legal apprehension. For his own part, he was above seventy years of age, and could not be compelled to take any part; and he should, therefore, if the resolutions were adopted, leave their lordships to themselves. The Lord Chancellor said, he did not see because his noble and learned friend was above seventy years of age, that he should, therefore, have such an utter obliviousness of what was going on, that he should not assist in the business of appeals in the House of Lords. He thought that in the case of any future Chancellor retiring, the minister should make his attendance a condition of his pension. A noble earl (Grovenor), in the plenitude of his knowledge, might perhaps have no doubts on any point of English, Irish, or Scotch law; but, when the noble earl took upon himself to taunt him with hesitation, and doubting, he would tell that noble earl, that when they were deciding causes in the last resort, and their decisions were to give the law to other courts, they could not be too cautious. The time was fast approaching when his natural life must terminate; and for his judicial life, it had already been too long; but, when the termination of his natural life did arrive, that degree of caution, which was called doubt and hesitation, would be his greatest comfort; because, by means of that caution, he had reversed decrees, and prevented the injustice of A keeping possession of property which of right belonged to B. If their lordships would compare his conduct during the twenty years which he had sat on the judicial bench, with the conduct of any of his illustrious predecessors-and he did not fear the comparison; on the contrary, he invited it he was sure that the comparison would not turn out to his discredit. On that account he could not but feel indignation, when he was informed of the language in which his conduct had been arraigned in another place, by those who ought to have known better. It had been publicly asserted, that appeals in the House of Lords were nothing more than appeals from the lord chancellor in one place, to the lord chancellor in another. He should like to know, whether the persons who dealt in such assertions were aware that there were many appeals to their lordships from the Chancery, in cases which had never been heard at all by the lord chancellor, but which had been decided by the Master of the Rolls, or the Vice-chancellor? For instance, the great case of Clinton v. Cholmondely was not an appeal from the Lord Chancellor; and there were a number of other appeal cases now before their lordships of a similar description. Besides this, he should like to know whether the gentlemen in Westminster-hall had yet to learn, that lord chancellors were not ashamed to retract their opinions, when they had reason to believe that those opinions were formed upon erroneous grounds. He would undertake to say, that not one of the distinguished characters who had sat before him upon their lordships' woolsack; had ever shewn the slighest reluctance to reverse his judgment, when it was shown to be incorrect; and he would fearlessly ask, whether he himself had ever exhibited any unwillingness to reconsider before their lordships any of the decisions to which he might have previously come in another place? He could say most conscientiously, that he never had; and for that very reason, the insinuations which had been thrown out against his judicial conduct were as cruel and vexatious as they were unfounded and unjust. He had never upon any occasion declined, on the contrary he had made it his continual practice, to state at length the various grounds upon which he rested his decisions; in order that the bar might be enabled to declare to their clients, whether those decisions were correct or not. And he defied any man to point out a single case where the correctness of them had been doubted, in which he had not expressed his gratitude to the party who suggested the doubt. If persons acquainted with the practice of his court had made upon his conduct the observations which had been made upon it by those who were totally unacquainted with it, he should indeed have felt them acutely: but he was happy to say, that those observations did not proceed from those who had the best opportunities of marking his conduct. They came from those who knew little or nothing of the subject-who had scarcely ever put a foot into his court; and who were not therefore particularly well qualified to judge of its proceedings. He would add, that, upon that very account, they were bound, in common honesty, to abstain from throwing out random insinuations, which were calculated to hurt, in the opinion of the king's subjects, an individual, who, if he was not a great judge-and he did not venture to call himself a great judge-at least filled a great judicial situation.— Having said thus much regarding the doubts and hesitations with which he had been taunted, he now came to the subject more immediately before their lordships. The bill then before the House ought not to be considered with reference to the present lord chancellor, but all future lord chancellors: And it appeared to him, that however sedulously they might attend to their judicial duties in that House-and he could assure their lordships, that whether in office or out of office, he would always attend in his place, whilst strength was left to him-no reform that their lordships might make in their own judicial regulations would effect much good, unless a very great change were, at the same time, made in those of appeal could be made by reclaiming peti tion from one division of the Court of Session to another; and the only difference which his plan would have made would be, that the appeal would be to the whole court instead of to a part of it. He had, however, abandoned that idea; and he now said to noble lords, with regard to the plan contained in the bill before the House, "If it be not the best, have any of you any thing better to propose? If you have, propose it; if you have not, examine whether this plan be not better than your existing system." He believed the Court of Session. It was the peculiar happiness of the people of England, that they had a system of law, no matter how it had been constructed, and an administration of justice, superior to that of any other country. The division of the courts of law from the courts of equity was so admirable, and at the same time so necessary to the administration of speedy justice, that until something like it were established in Scotland, it would be impossible for their lordships to do enough, whatever alterations they might make in their appellate jurisdiction. In making this observation, he did not mean to re-that one noble lord had suggested, that it flect either upon the learning or the judgment of the members of the Court of Session-by no means. It was the system of which he complained, not of those who administered it. So involved and complicated was it, that it was almost impossible for any man who perused the different papers in a Scotch appeal, to discover what the point was, about which the parties were quarrelling. Here the learned lord entered into a description of the manner in which the papers of a Scotch lawsuit increased in its different stages; first from the summons to the memorial; then from the memorial to the answer, in which a distinguished Scotch advocate had confessed to him, that it was the practice to insert any thing and every thing the party chose; and then from the answer down, through all the intermediate stages, to the decree, by which time the papers were swollen into an immense mass.- The learned lord then proceeded to complain, that when the judges in the court of session gave their decision, they merely stated the nature of it, without explaining the reasons which it was founded. Hence it happened, that it was frequently not satisfactory to the party against whom it was given; and it was a fact that was undeniable, that appeals were often made from Scotland to their lordships, in order to discover the reasons on which the judgment rested in the courts below. He had once thought, that the establishment of a court of error in Scotland, by calling in all the judges to review the case which had been decided by a portion of them, would tend much to diminish the number of Scotch appeals. He had been since told, that such was not likely to be the result of it. Indeed, one objection that had been made to it was the expense. But he could not see how it applied, since at present an on might be expedient to take away from their lordships all Scotch appeals. If that could be done constitutionally, it might be well; but he was afraid it could not. He had now been conversant in Scotch causes for forty years. Whilst at the bar, he had been counsel in many of the most important of them: whilst he was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, he had attended regularly when they came before the House; and he thought that since he had been chancellor, nobody could justly charge him with treating them with negligence. Experienced as he was in them, he would say that they occupied his attention, not only while hearing them in that House, not only during the intervals when he was enabled to detach his thoughts from the cases he had heard elsewhere, but also during many a night which their lordships had devoted to much more interesting pursuits. With that experience to direct him, he again said that the remedy for these numerous appeals must be administered in the courts below in the first instance, and in that House in the second. Without some such remedy, it would be quite impossible that those of them which happened to be in arrear, could ever be overtaken. The learned lord then asked leave to offer a few observations to the House upon the court of Chancery, in which he trusted their lordships would not so much consider him the person presiding in that court, as an individual peer declaring his opinion upon a point in which the whole nation was interested. He believed it was a generally admitted truth, that the greater attendance a judge gave to causes, the more causes he had to attend to. Now, under the present increase of business in the court of Chancery, it would be quite impossible for the lord chancellor, if he only attended to it three days in the week, |