THE THREE KINGDOMS.

MR. SHANDY held all kinds of swearing to be bad, and would have been confirmed in this opinion if he had
lived to hear the debates on Baron Rothschild's claim to sit in the House of Commons. Scriptural
precept never received holier warrant than in the wisdom of the inspired injunction, Swear not at all. If
swearing does not tend to utter indifference in the matter of oaths, it certainly tends to distinctions between
what is sworn and what is unsworn, very fatal to the sanctions of truth in half the affairs of life. Nothing
can be necessary to truth in the witness-box, or at the table of the House of Commons, which elsewhere is
not necessary to it; or the observance of which in the one case, does not to a certain extent damage its non-
observance in the other; nor is there any argument producible for oaths which is not directly drawn from
their own effects upon society, or which would not yield to the higher and better influence of an enactment
restoring solemnity to truth on all occasions, and excusing its laxity in none. In this respect the case of a
Member of Parliament is the same as that of a common witness; and the distinctions attempted to be taken
in the debate, between oaths of verity and oaths promissory, were properly scouted. The Jew is excluded
from the legislature for his respect to an oath, by men who sit there in very right of their indifference to
one; just as the law shuts out of the witness-box a man whose scruples are honest, and listens to him whose
conscience is accommodating. Rabelais contains few greater absurdities than these swearing debates will be
to the readers of another century. Here it suffices to mention that the greater part of them turned upon
the question of whether any words of an oath could be omitted as immaterial, at the swearer's discretion;
that the first of the two principal divisions affirmed Baron Rothschild's seat as not full, the second declaring
it to be not empty; and that they left the matter, on the whole, somewhat worse than they found it.

The Session was afterwards brought to a close with a great deal of hard work, making up as usual for wasted
time; but failing to overtake some important Irish bills, and one very important English one. The Savings' Bank
Bill never reached its second reading; and the compromise of ten shillings in the pound offered to the
Cuffe Street depositors, will be but a sorry satisfaction to many other bodies of the most important class of
men in any country, poor, honest, industrious, frugal, saving men, whose danger from dishonest actuaries and
irresponsilale trustees ought much earlier to have been the care of a government which can have no safer
or more reliable support. Nor will it be inappropriate to add, while on the subject of savings, that, manifold
as Lord Brougham's subjects of scandal have been during the last month, he has discovered the greatest
scandal of all in the fact that the savings from the Queen's Civil List are kept by herself, and not paid into
the public treasury; which would be just as reasonable as that his own savings, out of his pension of five
thousand a year, secured in like manner by statute, should go to the removal of public nuisances, or in
alleviation of the expenditure on lunacy. The Queen, admitting that no more than what was just was settled
upon her at her accession (which Lord Brougham at least must admit, since at that time he anticipated nothing
less than a royal insolvency as the result of the arrangement), has been honourably careful in pecuniary
matters; and, out of her own income of sixty thousand a year, and the balance of three hundred and twenty-
five thousand on the other five departments of the Civil List, has managed, during the past year, to show an
unexpected surplus of thirty-eight thousand pounds; whereupon Lord Brougham rushes off into the city
to tell his old Whig friends the fishmongers, who used to cheer him when he denounced the profligacy and
tyranny of the Court thirty years ago, that they have lost all spirit because they don't cheer him when he
does the same thing now; and rushes back to the House of Lords to fall foul of his old Whig friends there, for
having basked in Court smiles till they have no relish for popular abuse; and finally accuses both Houses of
Parliament of an absolute prostration of the understanding, when such a thing as even the word Prince happens
to be mentioned in the country. But all this, thrown out in intervals of abuse of newspaper editors, and
other oddities of a similar kind, seem to pass for nothing that may not easily be pardoned to the extravagant
and erring spirit which all are glad to remember so capable of better things. Her Majesty's appearance on
the prorogation day showed certainly no sign of temper ruffled by anything unpleasing. She entered with
her usual dignified ease, greeted Lords and Commons with her accustomed grace, and, as she occupied the
throne, so picturesquely arranged her person and robes of state as to give an admirable "sitting" to
Mr. Gibson the sculptor, who had been placed for that purpose exactly opposite royalty, and whose plain
black coat seemed oddly out of place in a scene glittering with diamonds and gold lace, epaulettes and
plumes. And so the speech was read, in tones that no peer of Parliament can make so audible or clear in
that gorgeous chamber; and Lords and Commons were sent packing to their private affairs.

Thus Parliament is up (to express it in other words, one might say the Sea-Serpent has reappeared in the
newspapers), and everyone, heartily sick of the subject, is prepared to listen to all kinds of abuse of it, for
which there is no lack of providers. But Lord Lyndhurst, who used to spend all the session in obstructing what
the Whigs wanted to do, and then abuse them at the end of it for doing nothing, has had no worthy successor
in his ingenious art; and there is now as much dullness in finding fault with the thing as in the thing itself.
The premier's plea had best be admitted, therefore, that the House of Commons has really been very busy for
the last six months, and has done a better stroke of work than any other legislative assembly going. But granting
this; conceding also Mr. Bright's illustration, that the two hundred really working members have worked
harder during the summer than any equal number of manual labourers in any parish of the land; and not
questioning in any manner the return obtained by Sir Benjamin Hall, making it manifest that a thousand and