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progressists under Eugene Richter. The members of this body call. themselves "liberal-minded" on the strength of their claiming liberty from every species of State interference or control. They are about a hundred strong, and they will unquestionably bring home to the Chancellor more keenly than ever a sense of the necessity of looking for support among his Ultramontane adversaries. All roads lead to Rome; and it is the thick and thin adherents of Rome who will profit by the political dissensions of Berlin. Not unnaturally their hopes are high of obtaining the restitution of the Archbishops of Posen and Cologne. But whatever the disposition in such a matter of Prince Bismarck, the notorious anti-German tendencies of the two prelates must make such a concession impossible.

II.-FINANCE.

Hardly a single event of consequence has rippled the still surface of the financial world during the past month. The occurrence of another of those mysterious and extraordinary disappearances of fraudulent debtors seemed to promise much material for gossip in the early days of March. But the excitement regarding Messrs. Parker never reached the height anticipated, at all events in the City. They and their works were unknown within its boundaries. The losses were supposed to fall on the wealthy and well-born, and on private bankers whose length of purse is popularly believed to be great enough to enable them to endure any shock without trembling. A harder question, however, is raised by the numerous failures of this and other descriptions which have recently taken place. Week after week the statistical journals publish a list of the suspensions, or rather of the formal bankruptcies that have occurred in the present year, and the comparison they institute with the same period in 1883 leads superficially to the inference that, colloquially speaking, almost nobody fails to pay 20s. in the £ nowadays. The new bankruptcy law has reformed at a stroke the morals of the trade, and very soon there will be none but virtuous men to be found. Unhappily, this view of the figures is a false one. Bankruptcy Act has not diminished the number of insolvencies, but merely the number of formally certified bankruptcies. It has done this latter at a rate which bids fair to make cases like the Parkers and Thomases the only ones where the new Act will at all appear to come into effective operation. Men who have not already committed gross frauds will effect secret compositions with their creditors; and the majority of these "compositions" will be in themselves either direct impositions by the debtors or indirect by their bankers. The published figures of bankruptcies are, therefore, completely misleading, unless we take them as a measure of the extent to which the new law has driven the disease of insolvency inwards towards the heart of the body politic. It has become like that

The new

wonderful complaint "suppressed gout," which no physician was ever yet known to reach. Thus, assuming that the true number of insolvents is the same under the new law as under the old—and excellent authorities estimate that it is probably higher, for business is much less satisfactory now than it was a year ago-about fifteen hundred bankruptcies have this year been "suppressed." "Arrangements" have been effected in secret, and the insolvent trader probably goes on his way happier than ever. His banker tells the world that he is good for the amount named in this or that letter of inquiry, and his credit is therefore unimpaired. He can buy from new producers and factors who know him not, and pay the old creditors with the proceeds.

It is surprising how little discussion has been caused by the unexpectedly large import of gold from the United States which took place during March. That we should be able to command these imports is not surprising in the existing position of United States trade. Their imports of produce have been comparatively large and their exports small when measured by the debts they owe in Europe. A little gold was therefore to be looked for, but what is surprising about the recent shipments is that they should have reached more than two millions sterling under no stronger impulse from us than a 3 per cent. Bank of England rate. Evidently our power over the accumulated wealth of the American Union is greater than the bulk of people imagine, and it requires very little force of imagination to picture a state of business which would make this power tell with terrific force upon American prosperity. One thing is obvious enough now, and that is the diminished competing power of the Union in European markets. While the young colonies of Australia and the feverishly exploited plains of Northern India have been pouring their surplus grain into our markets, and, helped by the quota of South American States, feeding the peoples of Eastern Europe, the produce of the North American prairies has been rotting in the granaries of Chicago. A variety of causes, chief among which is their benighted tariff, combine to beat the western farmers in the race, and just as they have suffered so will the ranchman and hog raiser suffer. Gold may therefore have to become once more s staple of export from North America, and in that case the economio changes impending within the Union are such as no man dare attempt to foreshadow. Five good harvests in Europe would, perhaps, go far to reduce two-thirds of the apparently prosperous enterprises in the United States, now carried on with English capital, to temporary bankruptcy. Without these, however, by the mere operation of extraneous competition, the reactionary wave whose rush these gold shipments forebode promises to go for.

March 27, 1884.

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. CCIX. NEW SERIES.-MAY 1, 1884.

THE RADICAL PROGRAMME.

VI.-RELIGIOUS EQUALITY.

THE time has now long gone by since those who approach the question of the Establishment must first turn or capture the great fortresses that have been at sundry times and in divers places diligently reared in defence of a National Church by a long array of potent divines. From the noble gravity of Hooker, in the sixteenth century, and the shrewd reason of Warburton and Paley in the eighteenth, down to the practical wisdom of Chalmers, the vehemence of Arnold, the eager tenacity of Stanley in our own immediate day and generation, all the resources of ecclesiastical eloquence and logic have gone to build up and to fortify a theory which may still impress the student of abstract polity, but which has a steadily and rapidly lessening relation to real affairs. Nor is it any more needful that the assailant of the Establishment should begin with the imposing pleas of some of the most renowned of lay statesmen, from Burke to Mr. Gladstone, in favour of the solemn consecration of the commonwealth by binding it to a great ecclesiastical corporation, "exalting its mitred front in courts and parliaments," and giving to the civil magistrate the guardianship of the settled institution of religion. However gracious the ideal, it is now seen to be practically unattained and for ever unattainable. As we trace back the course of events, the most reluctant eye sees them all tending uniformly and with growing momentum to the secularisation of the state and the emancipation of the church. Social forces, political forces, intellectual forces, spiritual forces, all unite in one undeviating and indeflectible direction. Attachment to the Church of England as a religious society is probably deeper in the hearts and imaginations of men than it has ever been. But the march of legislation for the last half century has faithfully registered the growth of the conviction that the installation of the episcopal church in the seat of privilege is no condition of its moral or religious efficacy, while it is a political injustice, a social mischief, and a hindrance to the full sense of equal citizenship in a united community.

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The abstract question which has exercised so many great and wise men has lost its relevancy, because circumstances have completely stripped the old arguments of their aptness and their weight. Parliament may or may not have been fit a hundred years ago to control the discipline and the doctrines of a protestant and episcopal church, but the House of Commons a hundred years ago was wholly protestant and almost wholly episcopalian. To-day the House of Commons contains several Jews, a great many Presbyterians, a host of Nonconformists, and a host of Roman Catholics. The conditions of state supervision have undergone a revolution. A Church Discipline Act or a Public Worship Regulation Act might now be passed by the Catholic vote or the Presbyterian vote or the Nonconformist vote or even by the casting vote of Mr. Bradlaugh. Again, a hundred years ago, and even sixty years ago, no Nonconformist could, without procuring an indemnity, hold the most insignificant office under the Crown. The Cabinet of 1880 contained a Presbyterian, a Quaker, and a Unitarian, and there be some who think that we may even live to see the Unitarian nominating the Archbishop of Canterbury. Even in the present century, if Nelson had been a Roman Catholic, he would not have been allowed to win Trafalgar; the Establishment was worth calling an Establishment in those days. But to-day a Roman Catholic is Lord Chamberlain, and a Roman Catholic is Governor-General of India. So complete a transformation in the structure and system of Parliament and Administration has reduced the theory of a state church to a gross farce, an unseemly mockery, and a truly repulsive scandal, which would have filled the great strong champions of that cause, like Hooker and like Burke, with whom it was an honest and a solemn cause, with utter horror and dismay.

To match the change in the character of parliament there has taken place a remarkable change in the ideas of parliament with respect to Church property. Even after the great reform of 1832 the Conservative part of the legislature were strong enough to resist even a theoretical assertion of the right of the State to appropriate the surplus revenues of the Irish Church. But after the next reform of the House of Commons, the Minister of the day was able to carry a measure that not only disestablished the Church of Ireland, but boldly applied the bulk of its revenues, after the satisfaction of existing interests, to secular purposes. In a different spirit, but probably, as we may one day see, with even more momentous consequences, a fundamental change was made in respect of the property of the Church in England by the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. What parlisment did by this vast innovation was to set aside the old and fundamental principle that each ecclesiastical corporation, whether aggregate or sole, possesses its own property, separate, distinct,

and inalienable, and in place of that to assume that the Church at large is one corporation with common property, which is applicable to general purposes, to be defined as parliament may think fit. The different and independent ecclesiastical estates were put into the melting-pot and transformed into a common fund, and the common fund was handed over to a board, who deal with the distribution of this fund, and indirectly as a consequence of the power of the purse, with a vast number of other ecclesiastical matters, practically at their own discretion. It is not any too much to say that "during the thirty years chronicled in the reports of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, they have slowly grown, from mere builders and restorers of episcopal residences, to be the absolute rulers and managers of all the secular concerns of the Church of England." The results of this sweeping change may have been as useful as we please, but those churchmen and lawyers were not wrong who complained at the time that it was a surrender of the fundamental principle of the inviolability of Church property, and the concession to an external body of unlimited control over the whole destination of that property.

Another order of facts is equally germane. The universal preponderance of the privileged sect has shifted and swung round. The precise figures of the various bodies are not to be obtained, but data are not wanting for arriving at a conclusion that is near enough to the mark to satisfy a candid politician. We may content ourselves with the following:-In 1801 the Wesleyans had 825 chapels or places of worship; the Independents had 914; the Baptists had 652. According to a parliamentary return that was issued last year, the five divisions of Baptists had 2,243 certified places of worship; the Independents 2,603; and the nine divisions of Methodists had 13,305. The gross total, therefore, of the places of worship of these three great bodies in 1882 was over 18,000. The total of churches and chapels in which marriages were solemnised according to the rites of the Established Church was 14,500, or only a thousand more than the Methodists alone. In fine, the whole of the non-established bodies, now including Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and the rest, number 21,300 of these buildings against the 14,500 of the Established Church, or very nearly half as many again. When we have made whatever adjustments may be reasonable for the greater accommodation in one group of buildings, not omitting however the set-off in the fuller attendance in the other group, we may well ask after all, what in the name of common sense is to be made of the talk about a national church in the face of figures like these?

The case of Establishment in Wales will not bear stating. "On one subject, in particular," said Mr. Gladstone, not long since, "the

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