which had lately been introduced by the hon. Gentleman opposite. done here? He was informed that pupils, by the assistance of these ingenious models, were enabled by the dissection of one or two bodies, to acquire so much knowledge of the science as to require no further instruction. The imitations were so complete, that the most experienced eye could not detect the difference between the model and the real skeleton. It was a disgrace to the medical men of the metropolis, that they had not followed the example of their brethren in Dublin and Paris, but required human carcasses to be sold like pigs or sheep. Mr. Crampton considered that the Bill introduced by the hon. member for Bridport was calculated to put an end to the horrid system of murder which had lately been resorted to for the supply of the schools. What the hon. member for Preston said respecting the means by which anatomy was studied in Dublin might, perhaps, be true of some college, in some other part of the world, but was certainly not true as to the College of Surgeons in that city. There were, in fact, at that moment, in London, three members of that College, who had come over here for the purpose of obtaining for Ireland a bill for regulating the Schools of Anatomy, similar to the English bill now in progress through the House. Those gentlemen believed that such a bill was necessary to prevent the schools in Dublin from being abandoned. Mr. Sheil said, that the hon. member for Preston was right in stating that models in wax were made use of by the College of Surgeons in Dublin, in the teaching of Anatomy. But he was entirely mistaken | in supposing that those models were a modern invention. In fact, they were used many years ago in Florence, where they were invented. But no surgeon ever imagined that the study of models, however perfect, could supersede the necessity of actual dissection. So much were bodies in demand in Dublin, that he could inform the hon. Member 20l. was given for one though formerly it might be had for 20s. Mr. Robinson had no doubt that the practice of dissection was indispensable to the education of a surgeon; but he had great doubts that the bill of the hon. member for Bridport would be sufficient to remove the temptation to murder, the removal of which was one of its avowed objects. Sir Robert Inglis thought that no time should be lost in passing a bill on the subject; although he could not say, that he approved of all the provisions of the Bill Mr. Warburton did not believe that any experienced surgeon would say, that the most perfect of the models alluded to by the hon. member for Preston could supersede dissection. On the contrary, the ingenious foreigner who had invented the latest improvements in those models expressly stated in his pamphlet that they would serve as highly useful maps to guide the student in dissection. Mr. Shaw concurred in what had fallen from other hon. Gentlemen respecting the necessity of a bill for Ireland similar to the Anatomy Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Bridport. Mr. Stephenson thought that the sale of dead bodies ought to be prohibited altogether, and that there would be no more difficulty in obtaining a supply for the schools in this country than in France and Germany, where the schools were all supplied from the hospitals and prisons. Mr. Ruthven hoped that the bill would be rendered unobjectionable, but, to make it so, it must not go forth to the public that a law was about to be passed under the provisions of which parents could legally sell the bodies of their children, or children those of their parents: such a proceeding in legislation would excite disgust in the public mind. Mr. Hunt did not say, that artificial subjects would do away with the necessity of dissection, but that they would diminish the necessity for so many bodies. Mr. O'Connell said, that the schools in Dublin had risen to their present eminence by the facilities which heretofore existed for obtaining subjects. Petition to be printed. POLITICAL UNIONS.] Mr. Warburton presented a Petition from Members of the Council of the National Political Union, praying that the qualification for exercising the elective franchise might not be made to depend on the payment of any rate or tax. Lord Stormont said, that many persons had a serious objection to this class of societies, from which this petition proceeded, and in that number he was included. He conceived that it would not become the dignity of the House to receive a petition from a body of persons designating themselves the Members of the Council of a Political Union, after such societies had been denounced by a Royal proclamation as illegal and unconstitutional; and, upon that ground, he thought that the petition | the society; he had the honour, too, of being ought not to be received. If the peti- a lawyer. The noble Lord, he believed, tioners had designated themselves house- did not pretend to be acquainted with the holders of the city of Westminster, being technicalities of English law, but if the members of such a society, he would have noble Lord were, he defied him-he defied waved his objections to their petition being even themost captious lawyer-to shew that brought up, signing themselves Members the society was guilty of a breach of any of a Political Union, which was an illegal one law. He, for one, must denounce as society, he should feel it his duty to oppose most mischievous the assertion, that a prothe motion for laying such a petition on clamation could have the force of law; and the Table. knowing the utility of such societies he should support the petition. He considered it of much importance that these Unions should not be treated with any thing like contempt or haughtiness by either House of Parliament, so long as they conducted themselves properly. They consisted of Englishmen who thought and felt that there were great abuses in the system of Representation now existing, and it was neither proper nor becoming, that those who had shared the fruits of these abuses should be the parties to oppose the honest petitions of those who felt themselves aggrieved. Mr. Warburton said, that the noble Lord had just informed him of what he really did not know before, viz., that a Royal proclamation had declared that similar associations to that from which this petition came were illegal. The proclamation to which the noble Lord alluded was directed only against such associations as, by their conduct, should bring themselves within the letter of certain-penal Statutes. When the noble Lord, therefore, objected to this petition, upon the ground of its coming from an illegal body, it remained for him to prove that that body had so conducted itself as to come within the meaning of the penal enactments to which the proclamation related. That the proclamation itself was to be considered in the light of a Statute, that it should be supposed to have the force of a Statute, and that consequently it should be interpreted as having the power to render illegal what was not illegal before, he must altogether deny. The proclamation was founded upon the enactments of certain Statutes; it derived its force from those Statutes, and could be considered only in conjunction with them. The body from whom the petition emanated had never so conducted itself as to violate those Statutes, and, consequently, could not be regarded as illegal. He maintained, that the petition ought to be received. Mr. O'Connell rose to support the reception of the petition. In the first place, he declared, that the society was not illegal; and in the next, it was plain that a Royal proclamation could not make any thing illegal which was not so by some previous law. It never had been said, that the King's proclamation should have the force of a Statute, except in a part of the reign of Henry 8th, or in Ireland, where violations of the Constitution had been the mode of government resorted to. He stood in that House, as a member of this Union, to defend its legality, and to declare its right to petition. He denied that there was any shadow of a foundation for charging the society with being illegal. He was a Member of Mr. Trevor entirely concurred in the objections which had been taken by his noble friend near him to the reception of this petition. Had it proceeded from the same individuals, describing themselves as householders, no objection could possibly have been raised to it. But when it was signed by them in the exclusive capacity of members of a Political Union, against which a Royal proclamation had been issued, denouncing such Unions as illegal bodies, and for an illegal purpose, he thought it would not become that House to receive it. He considered such a petition to be an evasion of the practice of the House, which only received petitions from acknowledged corporations, or as containing the prayer of the individuals who signed them. Whatever course his noble friend might adopt, he should feel it to be his duty to give him his humble support. Mr. Hume said, that, as a Member of this Political Union, he must protest against the language of the hon. Member for Durham. So far from Political Unions being illegal associations, it was the duty of every man to become a member of such associations. He would say of this Union, that it was a body as well entitled to address the House as any other set of men in the country, and if the noble Lord and the hon. Member had read its rules, they would speak of it with praise. He said the House was bound to receive the petition, provided the petitioners signed for themselves, which they did in this instance, as they did not profess to be delegates, or to sign for others. While there were evils, there would be Unions, and he hoped to see them in every parish in the kingdom, so long as there were grievances to be redressed. He would ask, were Englishmen to be told, that, no matter under what name they might come to this House, whether they were called free-and-easy societies, or by any other denomination they chose to assume, that therefore these petitions were to be rejected? No such thing; and to speak of proclamations as having the force of law, was only referring to the worst periods of our history, when truth was stifled by tyranny. Mr. Trevor wished to ask the hon. member for Middlesex, of what avail was the Royal Proclamation, if the House were to continue to receive such petitions? Pro Mr. Hume: of no avail whatever. clamations cannot render such societies illegal. Mr. Hunt supported the petition, although he was not a member of the society. The prayer of the petition was in his mind proper. The object of it was, that rent and taxes should not be the only qualification for voting under the Reform Bill. That had never yet been the law, and he, as well as they, wished that it never should be so. There was no law whatever to prevent persons from forming themselves into political associations. He would go further indeed than any one who had spoken, for he would ask whether, if parties had even been declared guilty of crime, and were suffering the sentence of the law, they were still to be debarred from their right of petitioning? Sir Richard Vyvyan said, that before the report was brought up, he felt it necessary to refer for a moment to the discussion which had taken place between himself and the noble Viscount, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, on Friday last, relative to a motion which he (Sir Richard Vyvyan) had stated it to be his intention to bring forward respecting the affairs of Belgium, and which he then postponed to the Tuesday following. It would be recollected that, in the conversation which then took place, he contended that it was wholly without precedent in the history of the country, that a treaty to which six Powers were contracting parties, which had received the signatures of the Plenipotentiaries of each of those Powers, but which had been ratified by three of them only, should be laid upon the Table of this House by a Minister of the Crown as a complete and binding instrument. The noble Viscount had then remarked, that he was mistaken, and had quoted the Treaty of Vienna as a precedent. The noble Viscount stated, that when that treaty was presented to Parliament, in the year 1815, it was ratified only by seven out of the eight Powers of which the Congress was composed. The reason, however, why the king of Spain refused to ratify the treaty was, that his Plenipotentiary had not signed it. That was the only precedent which the noble Lord had stated to the House in support of his own conduct. But, so far from that being a precedent in favour, he thought that it was a precedent against the noble Viscount's proceedings. The treaty of Vienna, which the Plenipotentiary of Spain did not sign, was not a treaty in which Spain was concerned. He believed, then, that he was perfectly correct Sir Robert Inglis contended that these parties, petitioning as the council of a Political Union, came under the terms of the rules for rejecting petitions laid down re-in what he had stated the other nightpeatedly in the House. Sir Francis Burdett said, that unless there appeared on the face of a petition some valid ground of objection, it ought to be received. There was none whatever here; for the designation those persons thought proper to bestow upon themselves did not justify the House in rejecting the petition; and this, as well as the petitions of all classes of the King's subjects, ought to be readily listened to. Petition to be printed. TREATY RELATIVE ΤΟ BELGIUM.] Lord Althorp moved the Order of the Day for receiving the Report of the Committee of Supply. VOL. IX. {T} Third that there was no precedent for the step which Ministers had taken in advising his Majesty to cause to be presented to his Parliament a treaty which, although ratified by himself, had not been ratified by three other Powers which were parties to it. The House, he felt, was placed in an awkward situation, by having a treaty laid on the Table which was an imperfect instrument. When he had first given notice of his Motion relative to the affairs of Belgium it was generally understood that the treaty relating to the settlement was to be ratified on the 15th of January; that ratification was afterwards postponed until the 31st of the same month, and had not yet even taken place. It appeared to him 2 T the treaty should not be presented to that House. The hon. Baronet had called the transaction incomplete. He begged to state that, as far as this country was concerned, it was not incomplete. All he should fur therefore, impossible to enter upon the discussion of a treaty which was yet incomplete, particularly as another Protocol had been issued, which still left hopes that the ratification might be expected. He begged leave, therefore, again to postpone his mother say was, that the Ministers having tion, which stood for to-morrow, until the 28th of February, with an express understanding, however, if the treaty was not then fully ratified, that he should feel it necessary to postpone his motion still further. The course that he intended to take would be to propose a vote of censure on his Majesty's Government, but he should be unwilling to propose that, till the treaty was complete. laid the treaty before Parliament, they were prepared to defend it, and to vindicate their own conduct in the transaction, whenever it might suit the hon. Baronet, or any other Member, to call upon the House for an expression of its opinion upon the subject. Viscount Palmerston: To that question I answer distinctly, yes. I conceive that a treaty concluded between five parties on the one hand, and one party on the other, is equally binding on such of the five as may have ratified, whether the others have done so or not. Mr. Croker begged to ask the noble Lord, whether, by his interpretation of the law of nations, a treaty entered into by Viscount Palmerston had only one re-six contracting parties, and ratified by three mark to make upon the statement which only, was binding upon those which had had just fallen from the hon. Baronet. ratified? When he quoted the Treaty of Vienna as a precedent, on Friday, he believed he stated that there might be a doubt, whether in all respects it could be considered as similar to that which now related to Belgium. He conceived, however, that there were infinitely stronger grounds of objection to the manner in which the Treaty of Vienna came before that House than there could possibly RUSSIAN-DUTCH LOAN] Mr. Robinson be to the treaty upon which the hon. Ba- felt it to be his duty to take that opporturonet's Motion so much depended. In the nity of reverting to a question which he Treaty of Vienna, not only had the Spanish had put to the noble Lord, the Chancellor government not ratified, but, although of the Exchequer, on Friday evening last, Spain was recited in the preamble as one relative to the situation in which this counof the contracting parties, her Plenipoten- try had been placed by his Majesty's Mitiary had not even attached his signature, nisters with respect to the Russian-Dutch and the treaty was laid before this House, Loan. He did not wish to provoke discussigned by the Plenipotentiaries of the other sion upon the merits of the case, but merely powers only. In the present case, the to deal with the facts as they appeared at Plenipotentiaries of all the powers had present. The House would recollect that signed. He conceived, then, that the the Motion which the hon. member for Treaty of Vienna was not only a precedent, Harwich had submitted upon the subject but a much stronger case than the present. was to the effect that the payments which But, however that might be, the House had taken place since the separation of the would remember that on Friday last he Belgic provinces from Holland were withhad stated, that if there had been no pre- out warranty in law. The House negacedent, it would have been indispensably tived that proposition; but no step had necessary for Ministers to have made one. since been taken, to shew that the payments He repeated that he thought the treaty were made by warrant of law. He apprein its present state binding upon this coun- hended, therefore, that the question retry. He could not conceive it to be the mained precisely where it was; and that less binding on the powers who had ratified being the case, he begged, for one mobecause it had not been ratified by the ment, to call the attention of the House to three other powers who were parties to it. it. He, for one, contended that the GoAt all events, he maintained that the King vernment, after the separation of Belgium of this country having been advised by his from Holland, had no right to make any Ministers to ratify the treaty, it was the further payments on account of the Russianduty of those Ministers to lose no time in Dutch loan without bringing the merits submitting it to Parliament; and the fact of the case before Parliament, and obtainof the other powers not having ratified diding its opinion upon them. He stated this not appear to him to be any reason why because, among the arguments which Mi nisters had set up in their defence, the noble Lord (the Paymaster of the Forces) had contended, that their conduct was justified by certain circumstances growing out of the negotiations of 1830 and 1831. If the Government could make out a sufficient case, he had so good an opinion of Parliament as to believe that it would sanction, if the matter were submitted to it, the making of those further payments which were required to complete the obligations of the Treaty of 1815. But reading that treaty literally and plainly, and strictly interpreting the words of the Act of Parliament which was founded upon it, he denied that the Government had the power to make any further payments without the sanction of Parliament. He begged to ask, therefore, whether the Government considered themselves warranted in making any further payment without bringing the subject under the consideration of Parliament? If the question, with all its details, were to be submitted to that House, he should be prepared to let it rest until brought forward by Ministers; but, if that were not the case, so convinced was he of the breach of the constitutional privileges of that House which would occur in any further payments, that, unless the hon. member for Harwich, who was much more competent to the task, would undertake to move a resolution upon the subject, he should undoubtedly feel it to be his duty to do so himself. Lord Althorp did not expect, upon that occasion, to have been called upon to answer a question upon the subject of the Russian Dutch loan. The separation of Belgium from Holland had undoubtedly made a change in the circumstances; and, although he was prepared to maintain that that change did not absolve this country from the obligations into which it entered by the Treaty of 1815, yet, undoubtedly, in point of form, it rendered another convention necessary. That convention would of course be submitted to the House. On the Motion being again put, FINANCE-DEFICIENCY IN THE REVENUE Mr. Goulburn felt satisfied that it would not be necessary for him to make any apology to the House, or to the right hon. Gentleman opposite, for interrupting for a moment, by some financial observations, the progress of that measure to which, by a sort of common consent, the largest portion of their time had of late been devoted. On the contrary, he felt that if apology were due, it was from the Parliament to the country, for having so long omitted to direct its attention to the circumstances and the situation in which the nation then stood with regard to the finances; to direct its attention to that which it was more peculiarly its province to attend to-the state of the public purse; and to require from his Majesty's Government those explanations of the past, and such information with respect to the future, as might, in some degree, calm the apprehension which the present juncture of affairs was so well calculated to excite. The situation in which the country now stood with respect to its finances was one of an almost unprecedented character. We had gone through periods of war and peace-we had met the difficulties of the one, and the embarrassments of the other; but hitherto we had always found, at the termination of the year, that the arrangements of the Government had been such, either by one means or the other, as to have provided a fund adequate to the expenditure of the year. The present was the first occasion on which we had found ourselves with a large deficiency of income as compared with expenditure. The noble Lord (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), in the statement he had made, when the supplies were granted predicted a surplus little short of 500,000l.; but now it was ascertained that, instead of a surplus, the noble Lord's arrangements had caused a deficiency of 700,000l. according to the financial accounts of last quarter, so that a change of no less than 1,200,000l. had been effected in the finances of the country within the short period of three months. If they calculated with reference to the brief space in which it had occurred, the deficiency was one which, he was sure, no Member of the House would regard as trifling or unimportant. Yet it was singular that no direct communication upon the subject had been made to Parliament. No Minister of the Crown had announced the fact to that House, much less had any of the explanations which were necessary been offered. It was only brought under the notice of the House by the presentation of a paper which he (Mr. Goulburn) had taken the liberty of moving for. It was not until the production of that document, anticipating as he had a right to do, a surplus of revenue, that he discovered that there was, in fact, a considerable deficiency. That circumstance very much changed the character of the financial discussions in which the House |