In our opening number for the present year, we noticed the abortive first act with which the session of Parliament, recently brought to a close, was inauspiciously begun. It remains now to sum up the results of the subsequent performances, with the same view which then influenced us, of endeavouring to extract instruction for the future from the blunders or crimes of the past. Of the opinions we expressed in January, respecting the policy of the late Coalition Government and the proceedings of Parliament under its guidance, we have to retract no item. The events that have since followed prove that the extraordinary measure of convening the Legislature twelve days before Christmas originated, as we then surmised, in a sudden impulse of fear, produced by the development of official ignorance, incapacity, and presumption, into the enormous peril to which the army was exposed in the Crimea. Time has also shown, that from the two legislative acts which the fertility of the ministerial mind was then able to put forth, scarcely any results have as yet been derived. The isles were frighted from their propriety by the calling of an extraordinary session to pass the Militia-volunteering and the Foreign Enlistment Bills, in December, 1854; and now, in August, 1855, there are two or three regiments of militia serving outside the United Kingdom under the provi

sions of the Act; and not one foreign mercenary has yet joined the army at the seat of war. The Government as a body, had, in truth, no definite policy; and we now know that many of its individual members were Russian at heart, and had no other object in view but to bring the war in which they had themselves involved the country to as speedy a close as possible, and with as scant an amount of damage to the enemy, either in strength or reputation, as circumstances would permit. The proposition to recruit the army with foreigners, made in such hot haste after the calamitous triumphs of Inkermann and Balaklava, was, perhaps, acceded to by some of the ministers in stupid respect for the precedents of the late war; but its necessary and obvious tendency was to encourage the enemy, by informing him that our resources were exhausted, and to dishearten the nation by proclaiming an authoritative opinion that it could place no safe reliance upon its own strength and spirit. It is humiliating to be obliged to confess that little doubt can now remain that this tendency was perceived by Mr. Gladstone and his associates, and that it was calculated upon as an efficient means for furthering their designs. The most important operations of the second part of the session were, indeed, exposures of the feeble treason of those half-measure plotters, and their

coincident removal from the position they were unfortunately suffered to occupy too long, to their own indelible disgrace, and to the serious injury of the national interests.

The Session of 1854-5 has been described as one of debates and incidents rather than of legislative work; yet the actual business done was by no means either small in amount or unimportant in character. In the financial department, an income-tax of sixteenpence in the pound, increased duties on spirits and tea, an addition of sixteen millions to the funded debt, an issue of seven millions of Exchequer bills and bonds, to be added to twenty-three millions previously afloat, loans to Sardinia and Turkey (which will be subsidies), to the amount together of seven millions, are, doubtless, monuments of Parliamentary activity at once impressive and durable, although their construction occupied little time, and, except in one notable instance, they were brought to completion without the slightest difficulty or hindrance. In all, 129 bills received the Royal assent since the 12th of December last; and of these, 108 were introduced by ministers, and 21 by private members. The numerical addition to the statutes thus made is somewhat greater than was accomplished last year, when altogether 123 bills passed into law. With the smallness of the quantity of legislative work done we, in truth, see no reason to find fault, and its quality would, in all probability, not have been better, had more important subjects been handled in the faltering and uncertain spirit of the season.

As it

was, some small legal reforms were effected; a weak struggle to prevent London from being smothered in its own exuvia was begun by the passing of the "Metropolis Local Management Act;" the principle of limited liability in trading partnerships was established in a measure so narrowly framed as to frustrate its practical application; and by the Newspaper Stamp-duties' Act the Herculean task was achieved (accidentally, it is true) of convincing a knot of Manchester demagogues of their own folly. These, and the partial repeal of the restrictive Beer Act, are the main feats in law-making which distinguish the session; and they are not of such a character as to induce us to regret much that there were not more of the kind, or that mightier en

terprises were not undertaken by those who performed them. The Limited Liability Act will, perhaps, bring some disrepute upon its principle by the clumsiness of the machinery with which its working is encumbered; but the principle has been conceded, and the commercial spirit of the country is too influential to permit of its remaining unapplied. The theory that it is better to allow the small capitalist to employ his savings in trade than to force him to hoard, being now admitted, a way will, no doubt, be found to open money-stockings, and to employ unprofitable bank-balances, without exposing the owners to the risk of utter ruin in speculations in which they may see good reason to make an adventure, although their regular avocations should prevent them from taking an active part in their conduct. Of the Newspaper Stamp Act, the best we can say is, that it will probably be productive of no permanent public mischief. It has lessened the revenue by some two or three hundred thousand pounds yearly, and it has not produced that extension of newspaper circulation which its advocates promised. The cheap press that started into a mushroom existence under its influence has even already almost entirely perished; and if some inconvenience and loss have been entailed upon established journals, and some useless labour imposed upon the Post Office by the change, some good has been done by the exposure made of the presumption and ignorance of the Manchester demagogues, and, it is to be hoped also, by the enlightenment as to the extent to which those individuals represent public opinion, which has been afforded to the Government. Stunned by the bellowing of Messrs. Gibson, Cobden, and Bright, the ministers surrendered the newspaper stamp-duties, as they supposed, to popular clamour. On the other hand, in total ignorance of the state of public opinion, they provoked the Hyde-Park insurrection by shutting their ears to sounds of popular discontent but too audible to everyone outside of the circle of professional politicians, yet only heard there when their violence was so great as to cause that panic in which the novel and absurd limitation of the ancient English right of beer-drinking was partially removed with the unseemly haste of great fear.

Every attempt to make men religious or moral by penal laws has been, and ever will be, futile; and the Beer Act being such an attempt, it was manifestly right to desist from an enterprise which never should have been begun. Yet it is impossible to deny that the manner in which the false step was retraced was injurious to the dignity of Parliament, and damaging to the character of representative institutions. The obnoxious statute was virtually abrogated in a cour pleniere of the mob; it was merely its formal repeal that was timidly and reluctantly registered by the Legislature. The precedent of a successful invasion of the principles of our mixed constitution was thus set, and will, doubtless, be hailed with pleasure by the Red Republicans of the day; while we may imagine the manes of the ultraDemocrats of the first American Congress to be soothed by the surrender of one of the most ancient aristocratic forms of the English legislature, by which the late session was also rendered remarkable. There is little intrinsic importance in the naked fact, that henceforward messages may be carried between the Houses of Lords and Commons by their respective clerks, instead of, as of old, by Judges, Masters in Chancery, or the Queen's Ancient Sergeant, in the one case, and by Members of the Lower House in the other: but it is curious and racy of the time, that the change should have been made without opposition, and almost without remark, from the English to the American practice, when, some sixty years since, the latter was introduced in preference to the former, only after lengthened discussion, and in the face of much opposition, among the eminent men who inaugurated the constitution of the great Republic.

Into an enumeration of the failures of the late session it would be bootless to enter, even did our limited time and space permit of our doing so. We shall, therefore, proceed at once to a brief consideration of the events that give its peculiar character to this portion of our constitutional history, and that have so much deranged the relations of parties and public men, as to render it difficult to foresee the nature of combinations and arrangements that are, nevertherless, to all appearance, immediately impending. When Parliament adjourned for the Christmas recess, on the 23rd of December,

the ricketty condition of the Coalition Government was obvious to every eye; and the general expectation that the resumption of business on the 23rd of January would be the signal for its disruption, was strengthened in every mind by the proof of the hopeless incapacity of its principal members, which each day's report of the sufferings of the army in the Crimea brought, in the interval, to England. It was, therefore, no more than an expression of the common opinion of the nation to which Mr. Roebuck gave utterance on the first night of the second meeting of the House of Commons, when he put upon the books his notice of motion for "a select committee to inquire into the condition of the army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those departments of the Government whose duty it has been to minister to the wants of that army." Two days after this step was taken, the House and the country were surprised by an intimation being made by the Secretary of the Treasury that Lord John Russell had resigned his office of President of the Council; and upon the succeeding evening Lord John himself stated, in explanation of his retirement, that he found it impossible to join in opposing the proposed inquiry which (he could not, he said, deny) was demanded by existing evils, and by the fact that effectual means had not been taken to remedy them. His own share in the faults of the past he attempted to lighten by showing that he had remonstrated upon the state of affairs with Lord Aberdeen more than two months before; that he had then demanded that the Duke of Newcastle should be superseded in his post of Minister of War by Lord Palmerston, as the only man available whose experience and inherent vigour of mind fitted him to guide the great operations in hand. with authority and success. Lord John cast out an anchor a-head in the shape of a declaration of very bellicose sentiments on his own part, and he exhibited the shortness of his political vision by pledging his opinion that, if a safe and honourable peace could not be rendered possible by Russian concessions, Austria would bring her 500,000 men into the field in aid of the allies. It was at once apparent to the whole world, that the ex-President of the Council saw the danger that impended over his colleagues, and that