hut, to protect himself, as well as he could, from the injuries of the weather." Bambridge was disgusted at his " unconcernedness." He ordered his officers to pull down the little hut; he would put the culprit who dared to be " easy " into the Strong Room tomorrow. Through a rainy night the wretched man lay on the ground. But this was comfort compared to the Strong Room. Loaded with irons he continued for three weeks, without a bed, in that dungeon. The irons were so closely riveted that his torture nearly brought him to the point of death, and he became lame for life. The Report of this case thus concludes: "The prisoner, upon this usage, petitioned the judges; and after several meetings, and a full hearing, the judges reprimanded Mr. Huggins and Bambridge, and declared that a gaoler could not answer the ironing of a man before he was found guilty of a crime; but, it being out of term, they could not give the prisoner any relief or satisfaction." Instance upon instance of similar cruelties came before the Committee. Huggins and Bambridge, with four of their agents and accomplices, were ordered by the House of Commons to be committed to Newgate, and to be prosecuted by the attorneygeneral. A bill was subsequently brought in to deprive Bambridge of his office. The inquiry into the prison of the Marshalsea disclosed similar enormities on the part of the keeper, who "hath arbitrarily and unlawfully loaded with irons, tortured, and destroyed, in the most cruel and barbarous manner, prisoners for debt under his care." Thumb-screws and iron skull-caps were here the re. ceived instruments of torture. But the horrors of "the common side" of the Marshalsea far exceeded those of the Fleet. Three hundred and thirty prisoners were crowded into a few narrow wards; forty or fifty being locked up, through the night, in a room not sixteen feet square. If they escaped the gaol distemper, famine destroyed them; for the prison allowance was insufficient to support life, and the donations of the charitable were intercepted by the scoundrels in authority. The Committee saw in the Women's Sick Ward many miserable objects lying perishing with extreme want; and "in the Men's Sick Ward yet much worse." The prison of the King's Bench was found exempt from the most revolting of these abuses. The lord chief justice Raymond did not accept fees or presents from the marshal, and he did hear and redress the complaints of the prisoners. In the Session of Parliament which commenced in January 1731, petitions were presented to the Commons from the magistracy of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, complaining "That the obliging grand-jurymen at the sessions of the peace, to make their LAW PROCEEDINGS IN ENGLISH. 439 presentments in a language which few of them understood; and the suffering in any of the proceedings of the courts of justice, or in any of the transactions of the law, whereby the person or property of the subject may be affected, the use of a language not intelligible, and of a character not legible, but by the learned in the law, were great occasions of the delay of justice, and gave room to most dangerous frauds." The ancient practice of using a corrupt Latin for written pleadings had been abolished, with many other legal abuses, in the time of the Commonwealth. When the Restoration gave back the Monarchy, with much of its inherent good and a considerable portion of its trappings of evil, it was held wise and reverential to restore the old law language. During five reigns the people had borne this mischievous absurdity. Lord Chancellor King, the son of an Exeter grocer-one of "the people "saw the necessity of attending to the prayer of the Yorkshire petitions. He directed a Bill to be introduced in the House of Commons to enact "That all proceedings in courts of justice shall be in the English language." The Bill was passed, after some opposition, such as is always at hand to resist what is dreaded as "innovation." In the House of Lords, the judges, speaking through the Lord Chief Justice, were decidedly against the change-difficulties would arise in translating the law out of Latin into English; law-suits would be multiplied, in regard to the interpretation of English words. The duke of Argyle contended that our prayers were in our native tongue that they might be intelligible, and why should not the laws, wherein our lives and properties are concerned. The complaint came from the people "-from magistrates, from jurymen. There never was a period in our history, even in the darkest times in which the remonstrances of the middle classes against prescriptive abuses were not faithfully seconded by some of an aristocracy that did not stand, as a caste, apart from the people." The Bill passed; and the Lords added a clause to provide that records and other documents should be written in a plain legible hand, such as that in which Acts of Parliament are engrossed. The tenacity with which some minds, even of a high order, cling to custom and precedent, is shown in the lament of Blackstone that the old Law Latin was disused. Lord Campbell adds, "I have heard the late lord Ellenborough, from the bench, regret the change, on the ground that it has had the tendency to make attorneys illiterate." There were two other complaints in the Yorkshire petitions which required the labour of a century to redress: "That Special Pleadings, by their intricacy and dilatoriness, rendered the prosecution of the rights of the subject difficult and expensive; that the Recovery of Small Debts, as the law then stood, was impracticable." The king, in opening the Fifth Session of Parliament in 1732, adverted to the foreign policy by which peace had been secured, and the consequent ease which his subjects enjoyed. "This happy situation of affairs, I promise myself, will inspire you all with such temper and unanimity, and such a seasonable zeal for the public good, as becomes a Parliament sensible of the great blessings they enjoy." It was not probable that the royal recommendation of temper and unanimity would have much influence upon the violent spirit of party. There was a strong opposition to the Address, in which Pulteney took the lead. The great opponent of Walpole was not likely to be in a placid mood. In the summer of 1731 his name had been struck out of the list of Privy Councillors by the king's own hand, and he was removed from all commissions of the peace. At that period the war of pamphlets and periodical works was conducted as fiercely by Bolingbroke and Pulteney as in the day when Swift headed the great battle against the Whigs. The organ of Walpole's bitter assailants was "The Craftsman." Pulteney had been visited with the anger of the Court, for publishing a private conversation between Walpole and himself, in which the king's minister had spoken very freely of his present master when prince of Wales. Neither of these rivals hesitated to violate the confidence of familar intercourse in their party-quarrels. In the attacks upon Walpole the licence used was such as gentlemen of a later period would disdain to employ. The great minister was nicknamed "Sir Blue String "-"Sir Robert Brass "" Iago." Caricatures, issuing from the “Craftsman's " publisher, set forth "Robin's Reign." He was "the harlequin of state "Satan's minister. Franklin, the printer of the "Craftsman," was convicted of a libel. The mob huzzaed Pulteney, who had attended the trial. Never was such a season of quarrel and scandal. Lord Hervey and Pulteney fought a duel about an article in the "Craftsman," which is gone to the region of all worthless effusions of party-spite. Pope libelled lord Hervey, in a character which, for its brutal virulence, must ever be execrated, but which for its concentration of all the powers of satire will never be forgotten. As the supporter of Walpole in the House of Commons--as the confidential intimate of queen Caroline-Hervey is thus delineated: "Whether in florid impotence he speaks, And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks; Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies, Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies." "Prologue to the Satires." PARTY QUARRELS AND LIBELS. A pleasant world to live in, for statesman and authors! 441 The parliamentary history of 1732, imperfectly as the debates. are reported, give us some notion not altogether inadequate of the vigour which characterised a British House of Commons, at a period of a strong government encountered by a powerful opposition. To us, who have escaped some of the dangers to the constitution which were then predicted to those whom Walpole contemptuously termed "patriots and boys," denunciations such as those of Pulteney against Standing Armies may appear trite and juvenile. Nevertheless, we cannot but admire the spirit which called them forth, when we look around, even at this day, upon other states. "The nations around us," said Pulteney, "are already enslaved, and have been enslaved, by those very means. By means of their standing armies they have every one lost their liberties." That is true now, as it was true then. But when he goes on to say that "it is impossible that the liberties of the people can be preserved, in any country where a numerous standing army is kept up," we ask, how has England preserved its liberties with a Standing Army? The answer is at hand. England never lost the safeguard of a free expression of public opinion. Vain were the attempts to prevent the publication of proceedings in Parliament. In 1729, Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, was ordered to attend at the bar of the Commons, upon a complaint that he had printed speeches purporting to have been delivered in that House; and it was unanimously resolved, "that it is an indignity to, and a breach of the privileges of, this House, for any person to presume to give, in written or printed newspapers, any account or minutes of the debates, or other proceedings of this House, or of any Committee thereof; and that upon the discovery of the authors, printers, or publishers, this House will proceed against the offenders with the utmost severity." In 1638, William Pulteney, whose memory is of small historical value if disconnected with what we have learnt of his speeches in Parliament, was eager to join in that most solemn resolution against any publication of the debates, which compelled the use of fictitious names in "Debates in the Senate of Great Lilliput "-a device which Johnson made so famous in the Gentleman's Magazine." The jealousy with which parliamentary privilege was guarded made even "patriots" insensible to the value of a power of influencing public opinion legiti mately through the press, instead of by the publication of virulent personal attacks upon the party opposed to them. Pulteney dreaded that the publication of speeches in Parliament, even if they were not mis represented, would look very like making members "accountable without doors for what they say within." The boldness of sir William Wyndham might have contributed to the eagerness of all parties to debate without publicity. I don't know but what the people have a right to know what their representatives are doing," said the staunch old Tory. The financial measures of Walpole, although the sober judg ment of later times does condemn them in the unmeasured manner in which they were denounced by his contemporaries as arbitrary and unjust,—had in some cases more regard to the strengthening of his government than to the statesman's obligation to raise supplies in the manner least oppressive to the national industry. His great object was to propitiate the country-party. In 1732 he revived the Salt-Duty, which, only two years before, had been held to be injurious, and was abolished by Statute. In proposing the revival of a tax, which he contended was the most just because the most general, he made it perfectly understood that the tax to which the poorest labourer would contribute what was deemed a trifle, was to relieve the proprietors of estates from the necessity of pay ing a Land-tax of two shillings in the pound instead of one shilling. He calculated that if the population consisted of eight millions, and the sum of £230,250 were raised by a Salt-tax, it would not amount to sevenpence a head. There were men in the House of Commons who saw the fallacy of this argument-who told the minister that he was about to injure the agriculture and manufactures of the country by imposing a duty upon an article of essential importance in the operations of industry. Pulteney truly said, If any of our neighbours can sell but one tenth part of a farthing in a yard cheaper than we can do, they will at last turn us entirely out of the business. This holds as to all our manufactures in general, but as to some particular manufactures, such as glass, leather, earthenware, it is still more grievous. I find it is granted by all, that the making use of salt is an improvement to land." We can not be surprised that these arguments were of no avail in the days of George II. when we look back upon their fruitless repetition for nearly a century, during which period the importance of salt in the arts had increased a hundred fold. In what condition would be our manufacturing industry if Salt were now taxed as it was taxed in the reign of George IV. ? Walpole carried his revived Salt-duty by a majority of only thirty-eight. The most popular argument against the government was that this measure was a step towards a General Excise. Every Excise," said Pulteney, "is a General Excise, if the whole body of the people, the poor, the needy, the most wretched, are liged to contribute thereto. If this be granted, |