given of his eloquence and powers of imagination. His "roar of waters, his trickling stream, his ferry-boat, his ships climbing mountains," were not at all in that gentleman's usual style of oratory. As to the part we should take in the present contest, Mr. Whitbread contended that it would be perfectly gratuitous and voluntary, there were no obligations in the treaty to bind us, we were free as air as to the conduct we should pursue. The crown prince of Sweden had not fulfilled the stipulations of the treaty, by which we had agreed to assist him in the subjugation and annexation of Norway. This was his firm opinion; and it was, he believed, the opinion of the highest military authorities, that Sweden had not given that assistance to the common cause which she was bound by the express conditions of this unprincipled contract to give. He should like to have had the opinions of sir Charles Stewart, of marshal Blucher, as to the effective co-operation of Sweden at the battle of Leipsic, and after that battle, after the allies had entered France, or when they were under the walls of Paris. With respect to the charge of treachery against Denmark, in defeating the cession of Norway, which she herself had formerly made, it was sufficiently answered by the ratification of the original treaty with that country, so late as the 19th of April, when it was plain that the allies were perfectly satisfied with the conduct and good faith of the king of Denmark. Every one knew what blockade meant in the present instance. It was not intended to prevent the sending of arms or ammunition to Norway, but to cut off her supplies of food, to inflict upon her that which had been described by Mr. Burke as

the greatest of all possible calamities, as a calamity so dreadful that every humane mind shuddered and turned away from its contempla. tion. Would not the house pause, then, before they proceeded to this last act of aggravated injustice and cruelty?-Yet ministers would not allow them to inquire, or were themselves most scandalously igno rant, whether the condition of a treaty, which could alone bind them down to such disgraceful conduct, had been fulfilled or not. He was sorry not to see an honourable and learned member (Mr. Stephen) in his place, or he should have animadverted on some expressions that had fallen from him. He might have alluded to the half pious, half profane,' expression which he suffered to escape him, that we had thrown down the gauntlet to the Almighty, who, he had no doubt, would take it up. He would also (if he were present) say, that that honourable gentleman's tender mercies were cruel, though he himself was not among the wicked; for, if he had not known his voice, and person, and his manner so well as he did, he should have supposed, during his speech to night, that he was hearing one of those persons who used formerly to descant on the miseries. of the Africans in their own country, in order to show the justice and humanity of the slave trade. [Here Mr. Whitbread, seeing Mr. Stephen enter the house, hailed his approach, and, recapitulating what he had just said, proceeded.] If that honourable and learned gentleman were not also one of the most moral and philosophical characters of the age, who held all jacobins and jacobinism in the utmost abhorrence, he should almost have mistaken him for one of the members

of.

of the constituent assembly of France, setting out on a crusade to Norway, with the rights of man in one hand, and a sword and famine in the other, to compel them to accept of freedom and happiness, on the peril of their lives. Mr. Whitbread here pointedly alluded to the sentiment of the right honourable member for Liverpool delivered out of the house at a convivial meeting, in which the eloquent speaker had declared his satisfaction, that it was in the wilds of Russia, of a barbarous and despotic country, that Bonaparte had been first defeated. This, according to the right honourable gentleman, proved that patriotism had nothing to do with the freedom, or the forms of government.

AY 31.-Mr. sergeant On

MAY slow moved the second

reading of the apprentice bill, which was warmly opposed by sir Frederic Flood, who, though a friend to liberty, disliked licentiousness. The bill went to abrogate that most salutary law of the 5th Elizabeth, and to revive the practice which had previously existed from Edward the third's time. It would be destructive of the interests of persons who served their apprenticeships and paid for education in their respective trades, and ruinous to the morals of youth. It would be hurtful to commerce, to mechanics, to manufactures, and

to the stamp act; the present law had lasted two hundred and twenty one years. He proposed to postpone the second reading to that day six months.

Mr. Protheroe seconded the motion, as the bill proceeded on no general comprehensive system; but simply on a repeal, without any efficient substitute for what was to be repealed. The apprenticeship system was beneficial both to manufactures and morals. Lord Coke had said, that it was intended to prevent children from being brought up in idleness. Blackstone expressed himself to the same effect. As to vexatious prosecutions, he learn

ed that in Bristol there had not been one prosecution under the act for the last twenty years. Apprenticeship was most peculiarly at tended to among shipwrights; yet they had struck for increased wages but once during twelve years. If apprenticeship was more encouraged, it would be found the best mode of checking combinations. It was a great comfort to poor parents to fix their son with a good master, and so insure his future livelihood. Let there be a proper report on the subject, and let some wise, comprehensive plan be proposed.

Mr. Davies Giddy was averse to theories: but if ever natural and indefeasible rights could be maintained, it would be in favour of men employing their skill and labour in those pursuits which seemed to them best adapted to their faculties and powers. He who looked back to Elizabeth's reign, and saw the number of patents and monopolies then granted, and the remonstrance of the commons against them, would find no reason for veneration of the statesmen of those days. Under the operation of the law, suburbs were frequently found to flourish more than the cities to which they adjoined. Wherever such a law had not force, it was found that manufactures thrived better. Apprenticeship might be expedient in many cases; but the bill provided for that, while it prevented the country from being longer divided into hostile classes of artisans. He most heartily concurred in the proposed measure.

Mr. Thompson wished the law totally repealed, though the bill did not go so far. The present law was necessarily broken every day. It was clear that the judges always wished to evade it when they could do so. He knew a case

of two men, who were prosecuted under the act for sawing a piece of wood; another, of a good and a bad baker in the same town, where the bad one finding that the good one had not served a regular apprenticeship, had him turned out, and got liberty to poison all his neighbours with his bad bread, Some years ago the printers struck, and there was a difficulty in getting even the the parliamentary papers printed. Let those who chose it bind their children as apprentices, but let not others be compelled to do the same. Instances of the absurdity of the law would be innumerable. It was none the better for the age of it, which the worthy baronet had stated. It was, in fact, superannuated; and it was much the kindest way to let it die quietly, and so confer an advantage both in this country and Ireland. Lord Ellenborough got the coachmakers out of a scrape ingeniously enough. They were attacked as wheel-makers; but his lordship said that coaches could not have been known in Elizabeth's days, as that queen went to parliament on horseback.

Sir S. Romilly thought that when he heard the advantages that were stated to arise from the system of apprenticeships, they would be suf ficient without any compulsion to induce parents to put their sons apprentices. One gentleman had stated the great comfort to poor parents of being entirely relieved from the burden of maintaining their children for so many years; and the petitions from the shipwrights stated, that their trade could not be learned in less than seven years. If this was the case, he conceived that there would still remain sufficient encouragement to the system of apprenticeships, with

out

out the penalties of the act of Elizabeth. He considered that statute as; in many instances, a prohibition against persons becoming useful members of society, and sup. porting their families by their industry, and an injunction on them that they should remain beggars, and that their families should go to the poor-house. Men were by this statute punished in the severest manner, because their friends had neglected or were unable to put them out as apprentices at the proper time. He never knew a greater mass of folly and absurdity in any statute, than in this which had been so highly cried up.

Sir F. Flood, seeing the sense of the house against him, withdrew his amendment, and the bill was read a second time.

May 17.-Mr. W. Smith, in moving for leave to bring in a bill to punish the crime of child-stealing, observed that it was singular that this offence, though there was none of greater enormity, was not at all punished by the existing law, unless in those cases where the person stealing a child could be convicted of stealing its clothes. It was surely a sufficient ground for the bill which he wished to bring in, that, as the law stood, a man should not be punished for stealing a child, while he was punished for stealing its shoes. But practical inconveniencies had arisen; for it had happened that the judges in their charges to juries had said, that if the jurors should think that the intention was to steal the person of the child and not its clothes, it was their duty to acquit the prisoner. There were other motives for stealing children besides the possession of their clothes, though this might be the most common. Instances had been known where

children had been stolen in order to be brought up by the person who had stolen them, a case of which kind had excited great interest, and which was tried at Winchester assizes. This object was no palliation of the offence, as the agony of the parents was the same. Sometimes even offenders had reached such a pitch of enormity as to steal children in order to sell them, or to enure them to degraded employments. A bill to render the offence penal had been introduced, and passed without opposition through that house, but it had dropped in the house of lords. The honourable gentleman concluded by moving for leave to bring in the bill. Leave given.

Sir. J. Hippesley said, that in the last session a doubt arose as to the fact which he had mentioned, that 30,000l. had been remitted from Roine to Ireland, for the establishment of a jesuitical seminary. Not only was this sum remitted, but Castle Brown had been purchased for the sum of 16,000l. for the institution, at the head of which a professed jesuit was placed. A professional gentleman of eminence (Mr. Brown) in an eulogium of the order of jesuits, lately published by him, had admitted that young men had been sent from Ireland to Naples, there to receive orders; and had maintained that an oath was binding, not secundum intentionem imponentis, but secundum intentionem jurantis-the old jesuitical maxim. The plans for the re-establishment of this once formidable body were deeply laid, and those best acquainted with the state of Ireland dreaded the event. Another circumstance, which he thought should be viewed with jealousy, was, the frequent meetings which had been held by the catholic clergy in Ire

land;

land; an assumption of authority the more wonderful, considering the restrictions which the catholic clergy had submitted to in catholic as well as reformed countries. He hoped the government of Ireland was alive to the consequences of such meetings, as well as to that of another body-the catholic board, a body which had taken on itself to appeal from its own government to the Spanish cortes. The papers which he should wish to be printed would inform the house of the regulations adopted in foreign countries respecting the catholic clergy, and would give them a more accurate idea of the practice of the catholic church than could be obtained from the varying and contradictory rescripts of the papal see. The honourable baronet concluded by moving that the fortysecond and forty-third paragraphs of the instructions to sir G. Prevost, governor of Lower Canada, of the 22d October 1811, presented to the house of commons in July 1813, be

laid before the house.

Sir H. Parnel stated, that the institution, which had been alluded to by the honourable baronet, was in fact no other than a lay establishment for the education of young people in Ireland of any religious persuasion. Any fears from the efforts of the jesuits in the present state of that society, and of religious opinions, he conceived to be ridiculous; and he did not see how the house could interfere to prevent a gentleman from keeping a school, because he was formerly educated at a jesuits' college.

Mr. Peele observed, that the utmost jealousy of jesuitic institutions had always been evinced by the government; and therefore he had had a communication with Mr. Kenny, the head of the institution

alluded to, and had stated to that gentleman, that he should conceive it his duty, in his official station, to watch the establishment with peculiar jealousy; to which he was the more disposed by that gentleman's refusal to state the funds from which he derived the very considerable sum with which that establishment was supported.

The motion was agreed to.

May 18.-The house resolved itself into a committee on the copyright bill, in which Mr. D. Giddy explained the object of the clauses which he intended to propose. The clauses provided-1. That it should not be necessary that the copies of books presented to public libraries should be on fine paper.-2. That no book need be presented to these libraries, unless such as were re, quired from the booksellers. 3. That all copy-rights should be entered at stationers' hall; and that if the author, by a special entry, waved his copy-right, he should then only be required to present one copy to the British Museum.-4. That the term of copyright be extended from fourteen years certain, and another fourteen years if the author was living at the end of the first term, to twentyeight years certain.-There was another clause which had been presented by the booksellers, to provide that improper use should not be made of the books presented to the public libraries, as it had been said that they were sometimes sold! These clauses were then received for the purpose of being printed.— The bill with alterations was in due time passed into a law.

May 20.-Mr. Whitbread presented a petition from Charles Random de Berenger, which being read, complained of having been arrested by virtue of a warrant

from