In the session of Parliament of 1850, a bill was brought in by the Government for the revision and consolidation of the acts regulating the Dublin Metropolitan Police. It was printed, and a considerable number of copies were circulated in Dublin. We regarded it as a most desirable measure, for it would, if passed, have substituted, a simplified code for an involved and complicated hotch-potch of seven statutes containing about four hundred sections. The police authorities were extremely anxious for the success of the proposed bill, but it was objected to by others, delayed, and ultimately, at the close of the session, became one of the sufferers in the "Massacre of the Innocents." Whilst it was pending, an alderman made it the subject, at a meeting of the Corporation, of a most condemnatory speech. He stigmatised it as unconstitutional and tyrannical, and dwelt at considerable length on a section which would impart power to a divisional magistrate, in case dealers in certain commodities neglected or refused to comply with a notice to produce any article in their possession, alleged to have been stolen, to inflict on the person so neglecting or refusing, a penalty of _twenty pounds_, and in default of payment of such penalty, to commit the offender for _two months_. He indignantly demanded from what region of despotism had such a tyrannical proposition been imported, and declared that it would disgrace any legislature to enact, or any executive to enforce, such unconstitutional severity. He was spared the mortification of seeing such power imparted to a police magistrate. The obnoxious bill was not passed, and the law remained unaltered. By it the tyrannical penalty is only _fifty pounds_, with an alternative imprisonment of merely _six months_. I do not believe, however, that there has ever been an instance of such a penalty being exacted or such imprisonment inflicted. LEAVE OF ABSENCE.