326 Notes of the Month on [MARCH; 



present act, up to the end of 1829, amounted to 51,000 ; their debts, 

 four millions sterling ; assets averaged one farthing in the pound, and 

 the expence of discharge 25 each prisoner. Not more than 65 out of 

 every 1,200 " estates" produced any assets at all ! The annual salaries 

 of the four commissioners amount to 11,251. Their travelling ex- 

 penses (which are necessarily great) are not included in this sum. We 

 thus pay 11,000., or, in fact, nearer 20,000. a year, for what? the 

 valuable purpose of knowing that 51,000 people are worth one farthing 

 in the pound. So much for the good of their creditors. But then comes 

 another item. Each of those miserables, who cannot pay their debts 

 to the amount of a shilling in every half hundred, must contrive to pay 

 the lawyers, in all their classes, not less than 25. each, or about a 

 million and a quarter of pounds sterling ! a handsome profit certainly 

 for the lawyers, and actually amounting to about a third of the whole 

 debt of the insolvents, stated at four millions. We think that this third 

 would have been better paid into the hands of their creditors. Surely 

 this must be looked into. We find the statement in the public papers ; 

 no one contradicts it, yet the system goes on. Or can common sense 

 devise no means for making the insolvent, who thus contrives to pay 

 25. to the law, amenable to the creditor for something more than a 

 farthing ? In the present state of the act the advantage is all on the 

 side of the lawyer, and the knave his client. It is impossible to conceive 

 that four millions of money can have disappeared from the insolvents* 

 hands without fraud ; and it should be the business of legislation to 

 make that money tangible once more. That insolvents and bankrupts 

 give a false statement of their affairs, in ninety-nine cases out of a 

 hundred, is as notorious as noon-day. 



Orator Hunt has enthroned himself in the House of Commons' 

 beside Orator Hume, arid henceforth the world is to go round on 

 another principle. He has already made a speech not at all tempestuous, 

 and seems commencing his campaign as a diseur de Ions mots. His first 

 fires are brandished against the laurels of his late rival, Stanley, the 

 Irish secretary, of whom he has given the public the following proof 

 of those powers which were to make him a statesman : 



" The story goes-~when he was in College, employed reading Cobbett's 

 English Grammar, he had a half-starved cat in the room; and a pound of 

 mutton-chops, which he intended for his dinner, was stolen. He questioned 

 the maid about it, who laid it on the cat ; upon which Stanley took the cat by 

 the scruff of the neck to the next cheesemonger's shop, weighed it, and finding 

 the cat, who was accused of eating the pound of chops, did not altogether 

 weigh half a pound, by this ingenious device detected the theft of the servant- 

 maid." 



The Orator argues, that glory must attend the steps of a youth who could 

 give so profound an evidence of his sagacity in detecting the misprisions 

 of cookmaids. The weigher of cats might do good service in weighing 

 some of the sinecurists, and ascertaining whether their quantity of 

 matter was really adequate to their supposed receipts, or whether some 

 higher hand, some official cookmaid, did not share the spoil, and mulct 

 the sinecurist himself. 



Yet Ireland is certainly at all times curiously administered. Its 

 secretaryship is generally the lot of somebody of whom nobody has 

 ever heard before. A clerk from the treasury, a promising youth from 



