ty's earnest desire
to cultivate. It was the boast of Mr. Canning, he said, to be the
representative of Mr. Pitt's opinions; but, he would venture to
say, that if Mr. Pitt were living, he would be ashamed of such
an appointment; and that he never would have lent himself to the
contemptible system of irritation which the present administration
seemed to have adopted. This debate took place on the presentation of
the Roman Catholic petition, on which occasion ministers were anxious to
elude the question. Opposition, however, not only pressed it upon them
in this debate, but also in others, when it was wholly out of place;
going occasionally to some unjustifiable lengths, in the way of
assertion. Thus Lord Hawkesbury affirmed, that ministers and the country
had learned from the disaffected in Ireland, that there were secret
engagements in the treaty of Tilsit, which secret engagements he
declared in his speech. All the powers of Europe, he said, were to be
confederated to engage or seize on the fleets of Denmark and Portugal;
and then Ireland was to be attacked from two points, i.e. from
Lisbon and Copenhagen. This ministers, he added, had learned from the
disaffected in Ireland, and they had never yet found the information of
these parties false!

MOTION RESPECTING THE DROITS OF ADMIRALTY, ETC.

Sir Francis Burdett, considering that the proceeds from the droits of
admiralty were so large as to become dangerous to public liberty, moved,
with a view to ulterior inquiry, that an account of the net proceeds
paid out of the court of admiralty since the 1st of January, 1793, with
the balances now remaining, be laid before the house, which motion was
agreed to. This year witnessed a diminution of rigour in our criminal
code. Sir Samuel Romilly introduced a bill to repeal so much of an
act of Elizabeth as tended to take away the benefit of the clergy from
offenders convicted of stealing privately from the person. A clause was
introduced by the solicitor-general, providing that the act, instead of
being punished by death, should be punished by transportation for life,
or for a term of years, according to the discretion of the judge. During
this session a bill was also passed for the better administration of
justice in Scotland; its object being to divide the court of session
into two chambers of seven or eight judges; to give those courts certain
powers for making regulations with respect to proceedings, and to
executions