SPEECH,

&c. &c.

MR. BROUGHAM returned his best thanks for the candor and the kindness of both the honorable gentlemen, in allowing him the precedence; and now, without any further preface, he would at once enter upon the subject he wished to bring before the House. After a very long period of time employed upon its consideration, he had at length determined to bring forward a motion, which was second to none in its magnitude or its importance. They had been, for some time, indeed, occupied upon what might be vulgarly considered a topic of more importance, a question to which the most intense attention of the nation had been directed; but by the production of the plan, which he was about to submit to Parliament, he trusted, that long after that question should have been determined, and those who were its subjects (illustrious as they were) should have been forgotten, he trusted that he should have put it in the power of the House to do a benefit to mankind, which would exist and be widely felt, when those unhappy circumstances to which he had alluded should have ceased to operate or to be remembered. He well knew that this was a very unfortunate moment for the bringing forward a question proceeding upon such abstract principles as the present one; and he could only hope that the House would assist him by its candor and attention, to a developement and elucidation of those principles, which became, for that very reason, the more indispensable. Without meaning for one moment, or in the slightest degree, to convey any thing like a sneer or a sarcasm, he would beg leave to say, that if any gentleman should feel that the subject before the House was one which pos

sessed not sufficient interest to command his attention, it would be better that he should remove to scenes more capable of exciting that interest within him. (A laugh.) It was not more than two years since, that those proceedings, the result of which it was now his duty to bring before them, were commenced. They had been since pursued with various success, but with equal industry and zeal upon the part of those who were engaged in them. Their inquiries and exertions had produced a mass of statistical information, which, for its importance and its kind, was equally unprecedented; for, instead of possessing the dry, abstract, and uninteresting character of statistics (and they who were versed in that science would know that such, generally speaking, was their nature), instead of mere numerical details and elaborate calculations, those inquiries had produced a vast body of moral information, which, the more it was studied and examined, would be found to be the more important and effectual. (Hear, hear.) Let him, in the first place, once more return his most cordial thanks to those reverend gentlemen, without whose assistance they could not have advanced a single step towards that point of their labors at which they had arrived. He meant the whole of the Protestant Clergy of the Established Church. It was, however, quite impossible that any words of his could do justice to the zeal, the honesty, and the ability, with which they had lent their assistance towards the attainment of the great object which had been proposed as the result of the inquiries. Those reverend persons had been actuated by no angry feeling, and had manifested no degree of impatience, when, from the circumstances of the nature of the information which was required, and the length at which it was to be detailed, their readiness to undertake what they might have considered a work of unnecessary labor, was a thing hardly in reason to be expected from them. He candidly confessed, that he felt it incumbent upon him to enter a little more into the statement which he thought it necessary to make upon this part of the subject, in justice to the important services of the reverend individuals in question. This was a measure, the great burden of which must, of course, be thrown upon the ministers of the Established Church. It might be proper, therefore, rather to show, first of all, what were the claims of those clergymen to the confidence which this bill reposed in them; and that he could not do in any way so well as in stating merely what it was which they had done. The Committee. first addressed a circular to them, the object of which was to call their attention to a variety of matters. The clergy set about returning answers to these circulars; and as a proof how instantly they had exerted themselves in obedience to the wishes of the House, as signified through the Committee, he need only mention, that, a

day or two after, he (Mr. Brougham) had received no less than 600 returns, all in one day; and, two days after that, as many as 2,600 (hear, hear); so that, within one week, about one-third of the whole clergy had obeyed the wishes of the House-that is, those who were sufficiently near the capital to make their returns in such a space of time. In a little while the Committee received nearly all the remainder: but, in a correspondence maintained with so large a number of persons as 11,400, there were, as might be expected, many defaulters; and they amounted to 600. To these another circular was addressed; whereupon, as universally hap pened in such cases, their number was soon greatly reduced; and about 200 ministers only were still defaulters. He had next to mention a circumstance, of which he would only say beforehand, that there was no blame to be attributed to the clerks at the Postoffice, nor to any of those channels of transmission whose extraordinary fidelity, accuracy, and dispatch, he most willingly acknow ledged; nor to any party more immediately engaged in conducting or aiding in the inquiries; nor, indeed, to himself. By some accident, however, there were 360 returns that were mislaid after the dissolution of Parliament: they were put into a box, for the purpose of being taken care of, and could not afterwards be found, as he should have occasion to explain. Another circular was addressed to the clergymen who had furnished these returns. Now it did so happen, that these 360 returns had been picked out of the whole 11,400, as being the most elaborate, and the most ample of them all. They had been so selected, as pattern cards, if he might use the term, of the rest. Owing to the misconception occasioned by this unfortunate accident, however, a letter was sent to those gentlemen, couched in terms which pretty smartly imput ed to them neglect and delay. Those very returns were a second time called for from reverend gentlemen, who were thus censured, owing to a mistake arising out of an accident, for which, he repeated, he was not aware that any one was to blame; which accident, again, arose out of the very fact of their superior industry, skill, and attention, as testified in the returns. Any one might have supposed that, after this, those ministers would have felt themselves hurt and aggrieved; and he should not have been surprised, for one, if they had said, that it was really too hard that they should be again called upon to make out returns which they had before sent up, after infinite pains and some labor; for many of them extended to the length of ten pages and upwards. But would the House believe-and he protested that it did appear to him a most unexampled and incomparable instance of a very honorable and meritorious feeling-that so great and so zealous was their good-will to a most important national object, and such the truly

Christian meekness which they evinced, that out of those 360 clergymen no more than two murmured at the fresh trouble that was imposed upon them; and even those two transmitted the required returns together with their remonstrances? He knew that, in making this allusion to the accident out of which the renewed applications in question originated, he ran the risk of incurring some blame; but he was content rather that blame should be imputed to him, than that he should fail to do justice to a body of men who had so handsomely and so liberally exerted themselves to remedy the loss of their own labors. The same reverend gentlemen had since answered even private letters connected with this subject, and letters written under no Parliamentary authority whatever. He had himself sent private letters, again and again, to them, always making his most humble apologies for the trespass committed on their leisure, Another proof of the good-will to the cause which he was embarked in was this: that if any one would look through the digest, he would find, that in many cases a foundation was supported entirely by the charity and exertions of the incumbent himself. When he said this he spoke of the working parish priests, of those meritorious individuals who had given up a portion of their money and their time, to their great honor. He did not speak of the more dignified prelate, who could not, of course, be expected to reside upon the one particular spot; nor of the pluralist, who could not, if he would, reside there (a laugh); but he meant the working parish minister, the true and effective labourer in the vineyard. He had said thus much in order to make out his case for intrusting the Protestant clergymen of the Establishment with the execution of the plan, rather than those of any other" church. (Hear, hear.) The digest was at length prepared, and in stating its principal features, its object, its character, many words would be necessary. In order to apply it to Scotland and Ireland, he had felt it to be his duty to preface it with certain keys or guides, explanatory and illustrative of its nature and contents. Two of those keys had already appeared. The digest itself consisted of an abstract of the informations obtained, and in some parts recapitu lated the very words of those informations. His late lamented and honorable friend, the member for Bedford (Mr. Whitbread), had proposed a plan upon a similar subject, but of a very different nature; Mr. Perceval objected to it; not as to its principle, but because he thought previous inquiry necessary: he said, "Have a commission first, and then see whether, from the information to be derived under it, a new and better plan may not be the result." Such a plan was now ready, and it was founded on the basis Mr. Perceval had recommended. He held in his hand a calculation clearly proving how wide of the mark writers upon