TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MINISTERIAL MEASURE.
IT is well not to holloa till you are out of the wood, and it would be folly to begin that never very remunerative process on the very morrow of entering it ; but, to assert no more than bare fact, no one can doubt that Mr. Gladstone's bill, and the marvellous effort of exposition and oratory by which it was accompanied, have made such a beginning of a very difficult enterprise that all who are concerned in it are sanguine of success, and all who are anxious to defeat it are beginning to tremble or despair. Mr. Gladstone has begun his Irish campaign as Lord Napier of Magdala began his Abyssinian campaign, with an administrative breadth and minuteness, a largeness of view as to the end, and a perfection of detail in the arrangement of the means, which is full of something much less vague than hope,—of assurance for the future. On one point, and on one alone, we cannot but think that the Ministry have purchased immunity from an immediate difficulty at the cost of the Church which they are to disestablish, and very possibly, too, at the cost of much greater perplexities to themselves in the future,—we mean by not asking Parliament to prescribe the form of the ecclesiastical organization to which they offer to convey the property which will remain to the disestablished Church. If the Government is to act, as Mr. Gladstone proposes, as a kind of jury for the purpose of determining whether any Church body formed before the 1st January, 1871, is fairly representative of the clergy and laity of the Protestant Church of Ireland, it may have to adjudicate on ecclesiastical quarrels of a very delicate nature, to judge between competitive claims involving many fierce jealousies, or even to amend the present measure by doing in the end, by the authority of Parliament, what it now proposes to evade. We think it would have been wiser and fairer to engraft on the measure itself any fair precedent for the representation of an Episcopal Church,—either the American or Canadian precedent, for example,—and to accept in committee any suggestions for its amendment which might seem to be desired by the great body of Irish Protestants. Of course, if it should happen, as we scarcely expect, that the Irish Church has ability and prudence enough to mature a good popular constitution for itself, without any fierce quarrelling tending to break it into fragments beforehand, the reticence of the Government will be more than justified. But we greatly fear that intervention will become necessary in the end, and become necessary only after an amount of internal jealousy and squabbling which will materially injure the prospects of
the regenerate Church. Certainly the glaring folly and arrogance of the Irish Bishops, who should be the leaders, the sluggishness of the Irish Clergy, and the apathy of the laity, have furnished no good omens for the power of the present Irish Protestant Establishment to draw up an efficient reconstruction scheme for itself on which it should be substantially united. We fear that in this matter a bill drawn on Parliamentary wisdom has been simply renewed, and that at a rate of interest which will greatly augment the burden when the Bill has matured.
But this is, to our minds, the only blot on the great and statesmanlike measure which Mr. Gladstone explained last Monday in the most wonderful speech which Parliament has listened to during this generation. And before we note the features in it which should command, and we are sure will gain, the confidence of the country, let us observe first how remarkable a testimony the present position of this question bears to Mr. Gladstone's political sagacity in passing the Suspensory Bill through the Lower House last session,—a step for which he was at the time vilified as if it had been the merest caprice of wanton party spirit. Yet who doubts now that a session at least has been gained by that bold step ? that the discussion it compelled, and the widespread but unsuccessful resistance it excited, were absolutely necessary preliminaries to success ?—that, had Mr. Gladstone been now beginning his work for the first time, he would neither have had the data for devising the wonderfully skilful and mature measure which he has presented to Parliament, nor the opportunity for discussing its details without first running the gauntlet of the most fierce and protracted opposition on first principles V As it is, the measure comes before Parliament in a perfected form. with all the advantages of the most skilfully elaborated organization, and comes before it in the first great lull after the battle of principle has been fought and won. The first strong impression which the
brilliant success of Monday produces upon us, is that it is The well-earned reward of the promptitude and earnestness of the campaign of last session. No such measure as this could have been even offered to Parliament now, if that preliminary campaign had not been successfully fought out.
But no battle of principle like that of last session could have gained the Government the success of Monday night, without the application of an extraordinary amount of knowledge, industry, and statesmanlike judgment to the resolution of the vast difficulties of the problem. Alike in the ramification of the detail, and the determination of the principles at issue, there was indefinite room for serious miscarriage. The felicity with which the many dangers of miscarriage have been avoided, the success with which the perils of the conflict have been reduced to a mininum,—the perils, namely, involved in accepting the principle itselt—is beyond praise. We do not hesitate to say that the Bill itself, with all its immense extent of political surface, all its range of detail, has not less, but more promise of complete success in the Commons than the Suspensory Bill of last year, which was confessedly only preliminary and precautionary. The arrangement is so happy, that the vast amount of detail adds new momentum rather than new friction, and the judgment applied in determining the principles involved has been so masterly, that every new decision has given a specific relief to the puzzled imagination of the public. First, take the decision on the difference which at one time appeared to exist between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister as to the immediate and forcible extinction of the various claims of incumbents, curates, or otherwise, in the Established Church. Mr. Lowe was understood to be in favour of estimating the value of each clergyman's vested interest on a very low scale, suitable to the intention of releasing him from duty, and so turning him roughly out of the State service by the shoulders as it were, with a life pittance to keep him from want. Mr. Gladstone was understood to be at that time favourable to keeping him in the service of the State so long as he chose to remain in it, and paying his old income, though of course conditionally on his performing the duty. Both proposals were open to very serious objection. Mr. Lowe's was rude and offensive. Mr. Gladstone's,—if it were really at any time his view, as was rather conjectured than proved,—was open to the objection of leaving the shadow of the unpopular Establishment resting upon Ireland long after the substance was condemned, and so failing to realize half the moral advantage of the change. What is now proposed seems to us to have the advantages of both suggestions and the disadvantages of neither. The incumbent or curate will not be turned out into the world, with a pittance representing the value of his vested interest disencumbered of its dignity and duty. If he chooses, indeed, he will continue to receive,—not from the State,—but from the Commissioners appointed under this Act, his full income, so long as he continues to discharge the duty. That is not the same thing, even to the popular imagination, as receiving it from the State. The Commissioners are specially appointed for the work of disestablishment :—and to receive income from the Commissioners is to receive it from a body created for the special purpose of bringing about religious equality, and promoting that object by any means in their power. The very fact, then, that the clergyman continues to receive his income, if he does continue to receive it, from this intermediate body, advertises what has been done and is being done. The freehold of the living is no longer his. He farms no glebe. He receives no tithe rent-charge. He is but an annuitant on a temporary fund created for the purpose of removing the Establishment. But the chances are very great indeed that he will not continue to receive any income, even from this intermediate Commission. He will have the strongest possible inducement to transfer his allegiance to the new body, the voluntary organization which will succeed the Established Church, and to depend upon it and upon it only, for his income, and for the duty to be assigned to him in future. For he will have full power to ask for a commutation of his life income for a capital sum, and to obtain the transfer of this sum, charged with the life income due to him, to the newly incorporated Church,—and every hope of perferment as well as all the motives of Church loyalty will urge him to take this course. For it is obvious that this course will give the Church quite new opportunities of re-organizing itself after the disestablishment, by freely re-arranging the duties and localities of the clergy at her disposal so as to man all the important poste and withdraw only from the least hopeful parishes of Ireland. Again, if any anan looks for perferment, he can only expect to gain it by showing complete confidence in, and thorough devotion to, the new Government of his Church. Thus we may well expect that very few indeed, and none of the more energetic and hopeful clergy, will fail to avail themselves of the opportunity thus afforded them of doing a very great service to the new -voluntary organization, and fairly earning a reputation for zeal and public spirit. We think it is quite reasonable to suppose -that, within the ten years allowed for the work, almost all the clergy of the Church will have willinglytransferred their services to the new corporation. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the set of clerical opinion will run very strongly in favour of such a step,—that hesitation in taking it will be looked upon as a sign of a grudging and selfish,—of an unclerical,—spirit. Thus without either the heartburnings of a harsh and peremptory measure, or the evils of a protracted death-bed for the present system, we may, in all probability, see disendowanent finally completed before the end of 1880, and disestablishment completed at once,—or at least by the first year of that decade.
The next great political stroke of the Bill is the proposal for the sale of the tithe rent-charge to the landlords. What that virtually amounts to is simply this,—to sell it to the landlords at a price rather below what the State might demand, but very much above what any one but the State could demand. With the political doubts which at present affect the selling price of the tithe rent-charges, no one would think of giving for it the full value of an ordinary rental derived from land. At the same time, the State might no doubt itself sell such a rent-charge for a greater price than twenty-two and a half years' purchase, since the State's security for the sale would be absolute. The State is therefore selling out at a rate rather below what it might get, but one decidedly higher than any other vendor could get,—a compromise which seems only fair on both sides. It enables the landlord to extinguish his tithe rent-charge completely in forty-five years without
paying more than per cent. each year during that time on the capital value so estimated,—an arrangement which he will think favourable, and of which the people of Ireland will as certainly have no right to complain. No one can say that there is any treachery to the public interest in the proposal. No one can say that it is not fair to the landlord. It will place a large sum at the disposal of the Commissioners for general Irish purposes,—no less than f9,000,000,—and it does so without imposing any new tax upon the land.
Lastly, the Government have solved the very difficult problem as to the appropriation of the surplus with great wisdom and tact. Lord Westbury, who seems to stand godfather, in public estimation, to all the obvious sarcasms of the day, is said to have remarked that in taking money from the Irish clergy whose intellects are, to say the least, warped, and giving it to lunatics and idiots whose intellects are absolutely gone, the Government has but followed a natural law of association, and been guided by a fine discrimination as to the relative intensity of the various competing claims on its compassion. The sarcasm is a little obvious, and probably not just. In reality, however, the appropriation of the revenue to be derived from the surplus to a peculiar class of charitable objects which are at once greatly needed in Ireland, and never likely to be achieved out of the only available tax, the county cess, is a 'thoroughly national use for it,—in every true sense, a use of it for nnsectarian spiritual purposes. Moreover, as, in fact, the purposes to be achieved would in all probability be left altogether 'unachieved if left to depend upon the county cess, it will not be possible to argue that this step is a disguised bribe to the landlords. It is a real and great subtraction from the popular miseries of Ireland, without being a bonus to any special class. Sir Stafford Northeote calls the mode by which the revenue is gained a colossal robbery, and that to which it is applied an equally colossal bribery. But the man 'who thinks that, after protecting in the most scrupulous way every vested individual interest, a nation can bribe itself in order to persuade itself to rob itself, seems to us almost in mead of aid from one of those mental infirmaries to be subsidized. There is nothing Ireland needs more than those more -refined charities which are supplied by the overflowing wealth of private revenues in England, but which, in a very poor land, are not provided at alL Infirmaries for the body and the mind are institutions as distinctively Christian as churches themselves, and indeed the hard misery which springs out of the want of them not unfrequently drives men into an irreligious attitude of heart. There seems to ns a fine
moral, as well as political, tact in appropriating the surplus revenues in this way. If the Protestants are apt to say that this proposal promises to be a rather special fulfilment of the prophecy, " The poor ye have always with you, but Me ye have not always," they should be reminded that, inasmuch as we are only about to divert the trust-money of the nation to " some of the least of these " Christ's " brethren," we are not in any true sense diverting it from Him.
On the whole, the Ministry have made a great strength out of their great difficulty, and are probably ten times as strong as when they first took office.
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