weekly. There could be but two or three debates upon the great question in the course of the session, but in the same time it might be discussed thirty times before an audience ten times more numerous.
Parliament met on the 1st of February. The queen had been directed to say in her speech:—"I congratulate you on the improved condition of several important branches of the trade and manufactures of the country. I trust that the increased demand for labour bas relieved in a corresponding degree many classes of my faithful subjects from sufferings and privations which, at former periods, I have had occasion to deplore." The course of the administration could easily be prognosticated from this. Trade was to be represented as thriving and the revenue as improving, and the inference was to be that there was no occasion for any change. Accordingly Lord Clive, who moved the address, and Mr. Cardwell, who seconded it, sung a song of triumph on the improved and improving condition of the country. The latter talked fluently about revival of the cotton manufacture, the improvement of the linen trade, the increase in the deposit banks, the decrease in the poor-rates, and the good prospects of the iron trade. Lord John Russell attributed such improvement as had taken place to the reduction in the price of bread:
"I have made some inquiries with respect to the effects produced in poor families by the reduction of the price of bread this year, and I have been told that in some families it has occasioned & saving of a shilling every week in the consumption of the family, and if we multiply the numbers of families that must be in this condition, it will show an amount of some eight or ten millions saved, in the article of food; and can there be a ground for doubting that the application of the money thus saved to the acquisition of other objects, which are the obvious produce of the bounty of Providence, goes far to account for the improvement that has taken place." (Cheers.)
But Lord John Russell still contended for his fixed duty, as a revenue duty, and laid himself open to a rebuke from Sir Robert Peel:—
