proposed is therefore a bad one, though it were not barbarous and impolitic in other respects.

But the Court of Admiralty is also to be abolished. It has been already deprived of much of its utility. It was formerly most valuable as a mercantile court. An English merchant, or a Scotch manufacturer, sending goods in small parcels to different parts of Scotland, employed only one agent, viz. at Edinburgh, who raised actions, when necessary, for payment, before the Judge Admiral; but his jurisdiction was lately abolished by our wise rulers, except in causes above L.25; the effect of which is, that a merchant, furnishing small parcels of goods to different parts of the country, must employ as many agents as there are counties in Scotland.

In all maritime and commercial states, courts of admiralty are kept distinct from the courts of common law, as in America, England, France, &c. This occurs with a view to the law of evidence, and the very peculiar situation of parties coming before such courts. I venture to predict, that for some years the Court of Session will have more disputation before it, about the mode of conducting consistorial and maritime questions, than about the merits of half the other cases in dependence before the court.

As to the Court of Exchequer, I shall only say, that even although the patronage of it has been much abused, yet it has afforded the means of doing honour to the law of Scotland, by the preferment of David Hume.

Next, as to the diminution of the number of Judges in the Outer House of the Court of Session, the plan is most absurd. It is by the Judges in the Outer House that the business of the Court is, and ought to be, done. The Inner House, by the constitution of the court, is a court of review. The Inner House ought to be occupied merely in giving an opinion whether a cause has been rightly prepared for judgment, and rightly decided. It is evident, therefore, that if the business of the country is to be performed with care and dispatch, there ought to be a full body of Judges in the Outer House. Instead of the number being diminished, it ought rather to be increased. At the same time, it is unsafe

to diminish the number of Judges in the divisions of the Inner House, Scotland is a narrow country. The Court of Session has great powers in political and other matters, reserved to Parliament in England. The country being narrow, family or other influences are highly dangerous. It is therefore absolutely necessary, either that the Bench in Scotland shall be numerous, or that the House of Lords shall be considered as an ordinary Scottish court, to be gene rally resorted to,

Next, however, Trial by Jury is to be transferred to the Court of Ses sion. It ought never to have existed elsewhere. But, as if to defeat the effect of the only right part of the bill, care is taken to attempt to fasten down on the Court of Session all the absurd and antiquated English forms and principles by which trial by jury is encumbered, and has been rendered disgusting in Scotland. The same judges who have been trained in these forms, are to be compelled to attend at all trials, and compulsory trial by jury is to be continued in those cases in which, in favour of the Jury Court, it has been established. If the men who concocted the bill in question, gave the slightest attention to the subject, or made enquiry concerning it, they must have recollected or learned that the Jury Court has introduced into Scotland one, among many, grievous and most oppressive evils, that of multiplying actions of damages for trifling alleged injuries. Such actions are a mere indulgence of personal hostility. In former days, they occasioned only an eloquent debate in the Outer House of the Court of Session. A condescendence (special statement) was then ordered, and there the matter ended-parties got time to cool, because it was known that small damages were to be obtained, (except in rare and atrocious cases,) and that the court discouraged all frivolous litigations of that sort. Now all such cases must be prepared for a jury. Heavy expenses are incurred in consequence of the indulgence given to personal hostility-trifles light as air are magnified, and individuals are tempted to endeavour to ruin themselves and each other by such litigations. The Court of Ses sion is now to be compelled to indulge this spirit. In other cases,

trial by jury is to be fastened on the court and litigants in many cases, though both should see the propriety of avoiding that mode of trial.

But let us come to the material question, What could tempt Government to bring forward a legislative measure of this description? The saving of money is so paltry, that it must after all be regarded as a mere pretext. Then is it true that the present Military Cabinet are enemies to law and literature-that they wish to extinguish them from the land, and deliberately to bring us back to barbarism? Little as we think of the Cabinet, we cannot go this length. Then why, in the name of common sense, is such a bill introduced into Parliament? An answer generally made is this: When the English judges obtained an augmentation of their salaries in 1825, it appeared reasonable that the Scottish judges should share in the same liberality. But the Members for Scotland either had not the spirit to stand forward and demand for their country this act of justice, or they were men of so little credit and respectability in the House of Commons that they could not obtain a hearing on the subject. Thus the favourable opportunity was lost. Times changed, and when, in 1829, the minister (Mr Peel) himself made the proposal, he found the House so unfavourable that it was necessarily withdrawn. Now, to accomplish the object, the present bill has been got up as a stratagem devised by a weak government, to do that justice indirectly, which it is unable openly to perform. Other courts are to be destroyed, and the judges of the Court of Session are to be diminished in number, and their duties increased, to afford a pretext for claiming on their behalf an augmentation of pay. For this object, the ancient institutions of the country, the patronage of the law and the prizes of literature for Scotland, are to be extinguished.

Truly, the devisers of this project are committing a great crime. They are the enemies of Scotland, and of its law and literature.

But let us consider what is reported to have been said in Parliament to justify the measure.

The Lord Advocate is accused of having said that the Bar of Scotlaud

cannot supply an adequate number of men of learning to fill so many judicial situations. Did his Lordship never hear of the doctrine of demand and supply, and that the one is productive of the other? Scotland always produced more able lawyers than obtained preferment. Did not Erskine, Wight, and many others, eminent counsel in their day, go down to the grave unpromoted? The present Lord Advocate cannot well have a very intimate knowledge of the Bar of Scotland. He was long so much occupied with his duties as Sheriff of Edinburgh, and afterwards with the Crown's business in his present station, that he has had little leisure to act for private parties, as a practitioner in the civil court. It is to these circumstances that the statement in question must be ascribed. In truth, the practice of the law of Scotland was formerly of a description which tended to rear up a very large number of men of learning. In all actions, parties were entitled to state their cases in written arguments; and, to entitle them to appeal from one judge to the whole bench, they were compelled to do so. The younger counsel were much employed in preparing these pleadings, and in that way they acquired both law and literature. Instead of diminishing the number of these arguments from three in each case to two, or even one, recourse was had to the plan now in force of allowing no written argument whatever, without the permission of the Court. The tendency of this state of things, added to the proposed bill, no doubt is to diminish the number of qualified servants of the public, whether judges or counsel. How this is to serve the public it is not easy to discover. We are descending fast, with the help of his Lordship and his patrons, into Gothic and barbarous arrangements. To be sure, it is said that the course of preferment is now to be more pure than formerly. This prediction is explained in favour of Scotland, by the recent measure of conferring the best judicial situation in it upon an English barrister, upborne by English influence.

Farther, the Lord Advocate is said to have suggested, that collusive actions of divorce might be prevented by transferring the jurisdiction to the Court of Session; that is to say, a

WERE the subject of less serious character, it would be a somewhat amusing task to examine the various plans suggested for the removal or alleviation of the evils under which the population of Ireland has laboured more or less for centuries. Moments occasionally occur when the sufferings of the people acquire an unusual degree of intensity: public feeling is then aroused, and it becomes necessary to attempt, at least, to alleviate the most urgent symptoms. Thus, in 1822, when the potato crop -the staple food of the Irish population-had partially failed, and when the operation of an enhanced currency had exhausted the means of the unhappy occupiers, and totally disabled them to supply the deficiency from their own resources, it was deemed expedient that a meeting of Irish proprietors should be convened for the purpose of devising the most efficient mode of relieving their starving tenantry. Even this measure was attended with many of the whimsical circumstances which seem to attach to all transactions connected with Ireland: in any other case the meeting would have been convened in some town of the county which required relief: In the instance here stated, the proprietors of Irish land met-not in Dublin, Cork, or Belfast -but at the Thatched House tavern, in St James's-street, in order that the immaculate frequenters of certain houses in that pure neighbourhood, might be enabled to attend, without interrupting their regular and useful avocations.

On that occasion, as well as upon others of a similar character, two leading propositions have been usually put forward for the relief of Irish distress. The landlords proposed that the endowments of the Established Church in Ireland, should be confiscated for the benefit of their impoverished and racked tenantry: having nothing of their own to spare for this purpose, they proposed to give them the property of others. Now, we beg to state, that we marvelled not a little at the impudence of this proposition: we knew that the poorer Irish had in effect the actual

enjoyment of, at least, a very considerable portion of this property; we knew that, with few exceptions, the clergy were resident in the districts whence their incomes were drawn: we knew that these incomes were mostly spent upon domestics, mechanics, and labourers, living upon the spot; we were also aware, that the extinction of the claim of the Church would have had merely the effect of transferring these incomes from the resident ecclesiastic into the pockets of the lay-landlord, who, being probably an absentee, would expend his revenues at Paris, Rome, or Naples; whilst the working classes, to whom the expenditure of this property now gives employment, would have been thrown out of work, and would have been added to the unoc

cupied multitude which the absentees had already created in every part of Ireland.

The absentees, indeed, prefer heavy charges against the Irish clergy: they accuse them of spending their incomes like lay-esquires, in luxu rious indulgences-not like Irish layesquires, on Neapolitan macaroni, but like English lay-esquires, in clothing their wives and daughters in silk, and their sons in broadcloth. Suppose we grant that they are actually guilty of the offence here imputed to them-that they live comfortably and respectably, liberally, but not wastefully, on their professional incomes, still we like them as well as a resident lay-proprietor, and prefer them immeasurably before the absentee landlord. They neither cook their own dinners, clean their own shoes, nor feed their own horses, but employ Irish men or Irish women in these various departments of domestic economy: we therefore prefer seeing a portion, although it be but a small portion, of the surplus produce of Ireland thus going into the mouths of her own children, to seeing the whole of it carried away to be expended on the inhabitants of France or Italy. If honesty were therefore put out of the question, it appears utterly inconsistent with the clearest principles of public policy, that the means of relieving Irish dis

tress should at any period be sought for in the confiscation of Church property.

The political economists assert, that emigration is the true and only remedy for the poverty and misrule which prevail in Ireland: they propose that "a vacuum" should be created, by transporting one half or some other proportion of the present population of that island to our foreign settlements. They then suggest that the people of Ireland should be weaned from their injurious attachment to that abominable vegetable-the potato, and be coaxed into the indulgence of a taste for beef and mutton. This, they tell us, would have the effect of preventing Irishmen, conspiring with Irishwomen, from filling up "the vacuum." Of the success of this project we own that we entertain strong doubts. We are informed by the philosophers, that throughout all her works nature abhors a vacuum: hence we are inclined to think, that the exertions of the economists will prove of little avail: in spite of all their lectures, emigration reports, and pamphlets, we feel pret ty confident that nature will prove too strong for them.

Ireland has been usually considered the stronghold of the political economist. Here the preventive checks upon the multiplication of the human race are admitted not to be in operation. The people of Ireland laugh at Mr Malthus, and propagate, as the economists assure us, "like brute beasts:" here then, if any where, it was to be expected that the theory which makes the population of a country increase in a geometrical ratio, and the produce of the same country in an arithmetical ratio,would have been completely realized. It appeared as if the state of society in Ireland had been expressly organized for the purpose of giving this theory fair play and a full trial. There are no Poor Laws to operate, as we are told they do in England, as a bonus upon human production, and interfere with the free trade of propagation. His Majesty's Irish subjects seem to be deterred by no checks or restraints from entering into matrimony. Here then was the most favourable ground which its author could have devised for the purpose of subjecting "the theory of popula

tion" to the test of experience. No extra stimulus from Poor Laws-no checks from what the economists ocularly denominate "moral" restraint; but the people resolutely and fearlessly increasing their numbers, without regard to consequences. What, it may be asked, has been the result of the experiment? The theory would have led us to expect that within the last five-andtwenty years the population of Ireland would have doubled its numbers: but that the means of sustaining them increasing only in an arithmetical ratio, each individual must have been supplied with less food than would have fallen to his share five-and-twenty years ago. But, alas! and alack-a-day! for the geometrical theory! It is no doubt true, that the population of Ireland, proceeding without let or hinderance, has, within the period in question, increased with unexampled rapidity: but the produce of the country-the food which the soil yields, seems to have at least kept pace with the increase of the population: for, although at particular seasons much misery prevails in Ireland, it cannot be denied that the condition of the population has improved, in the ratio of the increase which has taken place in their number. An author well acquainted with the subject, observes, that "notwithstanding the wilderness of words, oral and written, which has of late years been wasted upon the affairs of Ireland, and the paroxysm of legislation under which we have laboured, arising out of the perpetual discussion of her misfortunes and her faults, I am grieved to acknowledge, that the proceedings even of the present (1827) session of Parliament compel me to think that the people of England are greatly uninformed, or, what is worse, greatly misinformed, as to our real condition. A plain Englishman despairs of eliciting truth from the mass of conflicting testimonies that exist on the subject. I myself, whilst I lived only in the capital, was satisfied with such vague notions of our peasantry, as that they were very dirty, and cheerful when they could get enough of potatoes; and very wretched and turbulent when they could not: that Popery and potatoes were in themselves baneful evils, greatly incompatible with peace and