THE OPPOSITION TO A RELIGIOUS CENSUS.
IN an age of statistics it is strange that objections should still be taken to the discovery and tabulation of a large and important group of facts. Fresh devices are constantly resorted to to obtain all possible particulars about the population of this country, and we have become quite accustomed to furnish statements, or at all events what purport to be statements, about much of which, were it not for the scientific curiosity of Governments, we should have contentedly remained ignorant. Upon one point, however, and that one which is neither uninteresting nor hard to ascertain, the Government are forbidden to give us any information. The Census papers grow in magnitude and go on opening fresh lines of inquiry about the popula- tion, but one very obvious question must neither be asked nor answered. A man may not say what his religion is. Though the relation of religion to population is a fact of far more interest than most of those which are made the subject of official returns, we are not allowed to find out what it is. In a far more delicate region, that of age, the Census paper gives us no choice. We must insert the year of our birth in the Census paper whether we like it or not, although some of us, for various reasons, might prefer to leave the question unanswered. The working man who is anxious to conceal his age because he is afraid that he will be thought past work, or more liable than younger men to disabling accidents, has no refuge but in a down- right lie. But though if he have a religion he may be proud of it, and may have no hesitation whatever about giving the information asked for, a stringent rule of silence is imposed on him. His religion must remain a secret. The Census will tell us much about things of lesser interest, but it rises superior to -vulgar curiosity as to a man's belief. We can and do take a religious Census in Ireland, but we are powerless to do the same thing in Great Britain.
The state of mind which has brought about this singular condition of things was very much in evidence in the House of Commons on Tuesday. We do not wish to attach an exaggerated importance to the information thus persistently withheld from us. We have hitherto got on very well without a religious Census, and in all probability we shall not miss it much more in the future than we have in the past. But the refusal to give us the information is an interesting illustration of a not uncommon desire to remain ignorant of whole classes of facts. It may make little or no practical difference whether in this or that part of the country the members of the Estab- lished Church are more or less numerous than those who do not belong to it ; but that may be equally true of other columns in the Census paper. Facts have an importance in the eyes of the student of statistics quite other than that which they possess in the eyes of the newspaper reader, and now and again a careless public is astonished to learn what valuable material these seemingly idle figures have proved to yield to the historian or the economist. By what arguments can the exclusion of this particular question, the religion of the people of Great Britain, be defended ? The Welsh Member who led. the opposition to Mr. Rawlin- son's amendment seemed to be chiefly anxious to throw a veil over the character of the Church of England. A religious Census, he said, would show that it contained a great number of men of no particular religious belief, and the great majority of the criminal classes. But these facts, if they are facts, have an interest of their own, and we fail to see why Mr. W. Jones should be so anxious to keep them secret. It is no discredit to the religious body to which he belongs that the Established Church should possess these two types of adherents. As a Christian no doubt he must regret that criminals and men of no particular religious belief should exist anywhere ; but given that they do exist, we should have thought that he would be glad to have it made plain that they chiefly belong to the Communion of which Welsh Nonconformists have so many hard things to say. Instead of this, it is Churchmen who ask to have these damning facts stated, while it is the Nonconformists who wish to keep them back. This is surely a Quixotic anxiety on their part. Let the truth be known, and the Established Church shown in her true colours. After all, her work is to make the indifferent zealous and the criminals virtuous, and the first step towards this end is to know how the figures really stand. Neat we have the administrative objection stated by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board. He is only anxious not to incur trouble and expense. England, he says regretfully, is not in the same happy case as Ireland. There the sects are clearly and sharply defined Every man, and still more every woman, is either a Roman Catholic or Protestant. Here there are hundreds of sects, and every one of them would have to be tabulated. It seems to us a very arbitrary and unscientific thing for a Minister to choose what statistics shall be obtained and made public, with nothing to guide him in the process beyond his own notion of what particular information will repay the public the money it will cost the Govern- ment. Treated solely from the point of view of expense, it might be difficult to make out a case for half the folio volumes of tables that descend upon us so frequently during the Parliamentary Session. Yet there is not one of these tables that does not in its time help some expert to a conclusion which without them he might never reach, and we are at a loss to understand why figures relating to religion should be so far below all others in point of interest. Mr. Burns used the same facts as Mr. Jones, but he handled them differently. He was evidently surprised that Lord Hugh Cecil should not have profited by Mr. Jones's warning and abstained from drawing attention to the statistical harm which thousands of people are doing their own faith. Ninety per cent. of the prisoners in our gaols put themselves down as members of the Church of England. As things are, this fact is hardly known beyond the precincts of the prison, but in a religious Census it would become the property of the whole country. Mr. Burns is no more able than the other speakers on the same side to understand that any one can love facts for themselves. He forgets that, as Lord Hugh Cecil very justly said, the supporters of Mr. Rawlinson's amendment are not demanding " a rehearsal of the day of judgment." They are asking for a religious Census. They want, that is, to know what religious body a man belongs to, and for this purpose they are quite willing to take his own statement. The object of a religious Census is not to discover whether a man is a good Churchman or a bad one. It is simply to ascertain whether he calls himself a Churchman or some- thing else. It may, indeed, be argued that numbers count for nothing in religion ; but this contention is hardly in place in the mouths of Nonconformists. Why do they lay so much stress upon the comparative strength of Anglicans and Nonconformists in Wales if it be not to show that numbers do count ? If the advocates of Disestablishment are really as strong in the Principality as they contend they are, and if they give their numerical superiority over the Established Church so high a place in the statement of their case, what is the ground of their objection to having the figures plainly set forth ? Nor has Mr. Verney's plea that there is a vast number of people who belong to more than one religious denomination, " in the sense that they often attend church in the morning and chapel in the evening," any more force. No one proposes to make the Census an instrument of discipline, or to use the fact that the same man goes to church and chapel as a means of compelling him to give up one or the other. What the Census would ascertain would. be simply what he pre- ferred to call himself. If he is so nicely balanced between the Church and Nonconformists that he cannot decide to which he belongs, let him put himself down as both or as neither. His special difficulty is no reason why millions of people who have managed by some process best blown to themselves to class themselves under one or other heading should be forbidden to communicate the result of their self-examination to the world. They have satisfied themselves that they belong either to the Estab- lished Church or to one of the various forms of Noncon- formity. That is all that a Census can tell us, and we are not in the least disposed to demand impossibilities from Somerset House. Nor does Mr. Verney's plea that many loyal members of the Church of England favour Disestab- lishment affect the argument. They do not favour it to such an extent as to drive them out of the Church because it is established, and so long as they remain in it they are proper objects of a religious Census. That such a Census would be used for purposes of intimidation is too wild. a suggestion to have any practical value. If a man is a Churchman or a Nonconformist, the circumstance is usually known to all for whom it has any interest ; and if he thinks it necessary to conceal it, he will do so as much without a Census as with one. The purpose of a religious Census, we repeat, is simply to note to what religion a man on his own showing belongs. Beyond this the Census does not profess or attempt to go, and if any landlord or employer or customer wishes to punish him for being what he professes to be, they are as much, or as little, able to do this without a Census as with one.
The opposition to a religious Census belongs to the same type as the opposition to a Referendum. Both have their origin in the dislike of inconvenient facts. Certain English Radicals have not been slow to give us a reason for their dislike of this seemingly innocent proposal. They are anxious—genuinely anxious—to carry certain measures through Parliament, and, under the present distribution of electoral forces in this country, they hope to be able to do this. This is no question of breaking down interested opposition by the overwhelming force of the popular will. Were it this that they sought to bring about they would demand the Referendum as loudly as they now denounce it. The real cause of their alarm is the very opposite of this. They fear, with, as they think, excellent reason, that the popular will is not on the right side, that the measures they are bent upon getting passed are not really desired by a majority of the electorate, that the cause of such success as they have obtained is that their own friends have from time to time gained a. Parlia- mentary strength which is quite out of proportion to their strength in the country, and that any expedient which brought this fact to light and enabled the electors to express their real mind on the measures which the House of Commons has adopted, sometimes by large majorities, would inflict a disastrous check on the "forces of progress." In other words, a Referendum would. show facts as they are, instead of enabling the advocates of revolutionary change to make them out what they would have them to be. By the side of the Referendum a religious Census is infinitely unimportant. But the opposition of certain Radicals to the minor change is of the same order as their opposition to the greater. Both have their origin in a common unwillingness to allow certain facts to become visible.
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