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ministrations and accounts upon the same, incests, fornications, adulteries, solicitation of chastity, pensions, and all others relating to public morals, or to questions of civil rights, be transferred from the present Ecclesiastical Courts to other tribunals. In practice many of these causes are obsolete, owing to the impracticable nature of the Courts where they were to be tried. The offences against public morals, enumerated above, are irremediable at common law, probably because the Church Courts had undertaken that branch of public jurisprudence. It is possible that some portion of the civil-law system touching public morality might be incorporated with our statute law. The absence of legal remedy for the crimes of adultery and seduction has often been complained of by our moralists. I think that there is quite enough matter here to warrant the continuance of, at all events, a single reformed Civil-law Court in London, with jurisdiction in all these questions.
2. I propose that the existing 372 Ecclesiastical Courts be abolished, but that the Archbishops shall appoint, with the sanction of the Crown, certain qualified persons, as their deputies, to hear, and decide summarily in all appeals upon ecclesiastical questions brought before them from the various Diocesan Courts throughout the country. I also propose that the Bishops and Archdeacons shall severally hold Church Courts in which they shall preside in person, and refer all questions of fact to
