Sterility of the last Reform Bill.

509

Alas! sleeping with the remains of Horner in the cold shade of Westminster Abbey. Sydney Smith and Jeffrey lived to see the usual effects of power upon the men whom they lauded as the approaching regenerators of the country. They even became themselves sharers in the degeneracy. They lived to see the great reform measure which was to have been the startingpoint of progress, announced as the goal. They lived to see the appropriation principle openly and shamefully abandoned. They lived to see Brougham imitate the shifting politics of a Wedderburn; and the highest destinies of their party entrusted to an epicure, the aim of whose government appears to have been to discover the minimum of personal activity that can be combined with the maximum of political power. Even Jeffrey was brought. so far as to defend the extension of something like State episcopacy in Scotland; and Sydney Smith expressed his surprise to find himself defending against the Archbishop of Canterbury the most monstrous abuses of the Church of England.

The country, however, may fairly ask, before proceeding to a new Reform Bill, what has come out of the last? We have fallen of late too much into the habit of regarding Reform Bills as something of good in themselves, and not simply as a means to an end. We opine if the country was divided into electoral districts to-morrow, and every sane man in possession of a vote, yet if no beneficial legislative changes were to follow such a measure, the people would do well to delegate to the upper classes. the idle privilege of the franchise. Reforms in the representation are not to be estimated so much by the speculative rights they embody, as by the practical advantages to which they tend in the improved legislation of the country. Tried by this test, what have the Reform Bills of 1882 produced? Is it the abortive attempt to rid Ireland of too much church, by diminishing the number of officials in one quarter in order to increase them in another; or by pulling down a few episcopal palaces with a view to multiply glebes, and increase the number of temples? Is it the reduction of ten Irish bishoprics, with the singular anomaly of leaving the satellites attached to those bishoprics-the staff of deans and canons, who derive the breath of their official existence from the constitution of those bishoprics-perfectly untouched? Is it the abolition of tithes, by commuting them into a rent-charge? Is it the settlement of church-rates, by allowing their extinction to remain an open question? On all these points. the country was promised the most wide and sweeping reforms; yet what have we gained?-a mere feat of legerdemain. The cards have been shuffled, and redistributed, but the issues of the game are the same as before. There was not one of the Whig

ecclesiastical reforms which was not supported by a large section of the old Tory school. Certainly there was not one which the entire party of modern Conservatives would have refused under the least pressure to inaugurate. The late Sir Robert Peel supported the Tithe Commutation Act. The old Duke supported the Irish Church Temporalities Bill. And the present Tory premier, under Whig colours, proposed the first of these measures himself, and would doubtless have proposed any other measure equally alarming, as long as the change simply aimed at the form, and did not, in any way, trench upon the substance of the abuse. The fact is, the Reform Bill was a great triumph, and a great discomfiture. It brought the Whigs back to Downingstreet after an eternity of wandering. Pro tanto, it was a success. But it proved their utter incapacity to retain what they had fought so hard to secure. In this respect it is one of the greatest defeats in the records of party warfare. The Whigs made no other use of the immense force which an over-sanguine country placed at their disposition than to help their antagonists to shield, under a modification of form, the very abuses which constituted the source of their own weakness and of their enemy's strength. The church has ever been the stronghold of Toryism-the only unvarying badge of its ever-shifting creed. While outside the gates of the Treasury, nothing was heard in the Whig camp but talk about the explosive trains by which the deepest foundations of this fortress were to be undermined, about the scaling-ladders by which its topmost heights were to be stormed. When the captors got in, they made no other use of the spoils which fell into their hands than to strengthen the citadel from which they had experienced the most relentless hostility. Of course, they experienced the fate of all who pursue a temporizing policy-the fate of the Carthaginians at Zama, and the Samnites at Soranum, who were destroyed by the forces which they once too leniently spared. If they are to regain power it must be by reviving the policy which they have abandoned; not, indeed, as a short-sighted provision for the day, but as the vital principle of their political existence. New Reform Bills will not serve the purpose, without boldness of political faith, and abiding constancy in political

conviction.

In selecting the Church as battle-ground which would lead to the sound organization of the two parties, we are not desirous of placing the Whigs in an invidious position, or dispatching them upon the pursuit of any Quixotic object. The Appropriation Clause always.commanded stout majorities in the House of Commons. Under the annual motion of Sir Henry Ward, those majorities steadily increased. Had not the Melbourne-Russell

Causes of the Decline of Church Popularity.

511

Cabinet, to elude the embarrassing position in which this motion yearly placed them, sent off the mover to expend his energies upon the Ionic Greeks, there is little doubt, like every other motion commanding a large increase of the popular sympathies, it would, ere this, have found its way into the Statute Book. The fact is, the Church is no longer the prickly thing to touch she was in the days of Queen Anne. No institution has lost so much ground in the popular favour within the last one hundred and fifty years as the Church of England. It would not be too much to say that the relation in which she stood to the popular sympathy under the rule of the last Stuart queen, has been completely inverted. Then, the attack of the Whigs upon one of the most foolish of her ministers, overturned their administration, and placed their opponents securely in power. In our days, we have seen their opponents driven from the Treasury, and the Whigs quietly borne into their places-not, indeed, by any idle condemnation of the exploded doctrine of divine right, but by an actual attack on the property of the establishment. Even down to the Pelham administration, had any writer ventured to lay a finger of irreverence on a shred of the Church's garment, he would have been summoned to the bar of the House of Commons; his book would have been burnt by the common hangman, and he might thank his destiny if he escaped whipping at a cart's tail, and simply paid the penalty of his indiscretion by half a day's exposure in the pillory to the hooting of an exasperated populace. Now, we conjecture, any member would be allowed to bring in a bill to confiscate three-fourths of the ecclesiastical property in Ireland, and to apply any profits which might accrue from the lay management of the Church estates in England to secular purposes: he might even go into the lobby on the second reading with a considerable following in support of such While before any fortuitous gathering of people in Kensington Park, or on Wimbledon Common, we doubt not that the proposition to sell off all Church property belonging to the State, and to apply the proceeds to the extinction of the debt, would obtain for the proposer the most deafening exclamations of assent, and the keenest admiration. It is more easy to mark the gradations of the great change from the zenith of popularity to the nadir of decline than to enter into any detailed analysis of the causes of it. First, the film fell off the eyes of the legislature. The Lower House, in 1773, passed the repeal of the Test Acts. In 1772 both Houses, by a large majority, passed those celebrated resolutions in favour of toleration, drawn up by Lord North and Mr. Burke. But the cloud still rested on the masses below. Burke was rudely ejected from the Bristol hustings. North was hissed

a measure.

whenever he appeared in the streets of London. A mob rose in Smithfield the gaols were broken open: the magistrates were pelted in the performance of their duty: Lord Camden had his library sacked, and his house burnt over his head: Lord Mansfield was dragged out of his carriage, and his person roughly handled, on his way to the House of Peers. The upper classes now paid the penalty of those angry prejudices which their bigoted ancestors had been too eager to sow. As in the natural world, the waves of popular commotion continued to invade the quiet of the upper atmosphere long after the causes of the commotion which had first issued thence had been folded to rest.

But a change was at hand, also, for the unsophisticated multitude. The pulpit soon ceased to be the only organ by which the thoughts of the educated classes could find their way among the lower. Newspapers sprang up: a Briarean-handed press unmasked its batteries against prejudices on every side: education became extended. The final estrangement of the Jacobites from the Pretender on the accession of George III. no longer furnished Government with a pretext to identify zeal for the Church with the cause of free institutions. In the generation which grew up under these influences, blind ardour soon subsided into complete indifference. In the mean time the political aspects of the Church underwent a change, which turned that indifference into a feeling of direct hostility. The Tories, who, under Anne and the two first Georges, kept the Church fever at its height among the populace, owed a great deal of their success to the alliance of the Church with Radicalism in polities. Everything for which the working man clamoured-annual parliaments, free-trade in corn, abolition of sinecures, and the banishment of placemen from the House of Commons-was bound up with Conservatism and with the integrity of the Church as the palladium of the constitution. But under the two last Georges the current of Toryism set in an opposite direction. The modern representatives of Harley and Bolingbroke, instead of continuing to ally the Church with a Liberal policy, thought it more prudent to associate it with gagging bills and coercion acts; with a course of constitutional restriction which would have denuded the poor man of the privileges of a freeman, and a course of social restriction which would have rendered his living inferior to that of a slave. The effect is, that popular fervour for the Church has long given way to popular antipathy. It is not the least significant sign of the times, as the last census shows, that two-thirds of the nation are already alienated from her teaching. The multitude, ever true to their own interest in domestic politics, have been so long habituated to encountering the Church on the side

Piebald Character of the Present Government.

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of oppression, that they are not even inclined to do her common justice. To think that the Whigs ought to be averted from bringing her temporal relations into something like unison with her spiritual functions by a fear of incurring temporary obloquy is clearly akin to telling a man that to rise with the tide of popular favour is the sure way of becoming a victim to public disgrace.

Never was there an epoch in which it was so necessary for the Liberal party to unite their energies, to concentrate their efforts, and make a move in the right direction. They are opposed by a Government which represents every shade of opinion within the limits of the constitution; whose extreme left, in the persons of Mr. Henley and Lord Chelmsford, leans on the doctrines of Perceval and Eldon, and whose extreme right, in the persons of Mr. Disraeli and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, represents the Toryism of Windham and Bolingbroke. Of course the Tory cameleon can be blue or green, as it suits the purposes of the party. It actually at this moment in Ireland is stroking the Catholic with one hand, while solacing the Orangeman with the other. Doubtless Lord Naas and Mr. Newdegate have told their friends in Belfast they have a Government now which will support their interest; while the noble Premier, in accordance with Mr. Disraeli's theory, that the Orangeman is the only pure and unadulterated Whig,'* is offering judicial appointment to editors of ultramontane newspapers, and framing a bill for securing the Maynooth Grant by legal settlement to the Roman Catholic priesthood for ever. The same fent which is performed with religious parties in Ireland is accomplished with political parties in England. Mr. Lendrick assures the Radicals, on the part of the Tories, that the present administration will not only talk about Liberal measures, but pass them; and his language derives some support from the events of the session. In the meantime, if Lord John Manners goes down to Salisbury, or Mr. Henley addresses the rough squires of Oxfordshire, the country is lectured upon the advantage of having a Government which will resist anarchy, and stand by the old constitution of Church and State. It is said that George III.'s idea of a new administration was a change of men without a change of measures. But the present administration seems based upon the principle of giving the country the benefit of a change of measures without putting it to the inconvenience of a change of men. It is the delusion of the kaleidoscope. Though the materials are discordant, yet the Whig, Tory, and Radical measures are to follow each other in such rapid succes

* Vide Coningsby.