TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR ROUNDELL PALMER'S PROPOSAL.
AMAN is not always wise because he is always conscientious, and Sir Bounden Palmer's grand self-denial cannot blind us to the weakness of his proposals as to the Irish Church. The speech in which he expounded his views upon that great ques- tion to his constituents in Richmond may raise his fame as a Conservative lawyer, and will undoubtedly exalt his reputation for fairness and good feeling, but it will not deepen the Liberal faith in his capacity as a statesman. With the exception of Sir J. Karslake s, it is, perhaps, the least complete speech yet delivered upon Mr. Gladstone's proposals. To those proposals, and to the leader who made them, Sir Roundell Palmer, as might have been expected from his character, is studiously fair. He brushes away Tory cobwebs with a heartiness which almost disgusts them with his advocacy of their dogma, the sanctity of corporate property, and has done, we doubt not, more good to Mr. Gladstone himself than injury to his cause. There is not a man in England whose statement on a matter of fact would be more implicitly accepted than Sir Roundel" Palmer's, and the following narrative disposes for ever of a popular charge against the Liberal leader. The Tory journals are always asserting that Mr. Gladstone attacked the Irish Church to recombine the Liberal party, and Sir Ron,pdell, who regrets that attack, declares, "In the year 1863, at a time when no one was bringing forward this question, or seemed very likely to do so, Mr. Gladstone had told him privately that he had made up his mind on the subject, and that he should not be able to keep himself from giving public expression to his feelings. How far or near that might be practicable he (Mr. Gladstone) could not foresee ; but, under the circumstances, he wanted his friends connected with the University of Oxford to consider whether or not they would desire for that reason a change in the representation of the University. This communication, made so far back, had taken him by surprise at the time, but thenceforward he had known that Mr. Gladstone's mind was made up on the subject in the sense he had lately given expression to before Parliament." He dismisses with generous impatience the notion that Mr. Gladstone had personal objects of his own, and he treats the argument about the Sovereign's oath, which worries some very good Liberals, with something not easily to be distinguished from intellectual scorn. "To imagine that it could have been intended by an Act of Par- liament, introduced in consequence of King James H.'s abuse of executive power, to tie up for ever the course of legislation in this country on ecclesiastical subjects, and to make Parlia- ment necessarily incompetent to change the law, because the Sovereign was to be made incompetent to assent to such a change, was a proposition so monstrous and extravagant that, but for the certainty that there were some honest men who did entertain it, one could never have thought that it could have been seriously brought forward." Sir Roundel' Palmer is a great lawyer, a man of sincere personal piety, and a friend to the Irish Establishment, and his authority will weigh with hundreds whom argument would never have convinced, though it might have made them sub- mit. He is equally contemptuous of the cry about the danger to the supremacy of the Crown, telling those who raise it in briefest fashion that there is "no subject upon which greater nonsense is every day talked," and sneers at the argu- ment derived from the Act of Union as an admission that "a minority of the Irish people could perpetually fetter the action of the Imperial Parliament."
Bat with all this fairness, a fairness springing, as all his ideas spring, from a conscientious regard for justice, Sir Roundel" Palmer when he approaches the real issue shows himself a lawyer in grain, a man unable to con- ceive of a power higher than that of a regularly established court. He will not consider whether the political security of Ireland demands the removal of a gigantic grievance, whether it is just or unjust that the religious endowment of Ireland should be monopolized by a creed in which the bulk of the Irish people do not believe, but treats the whole question as if it were one of property alone, and of property in the narrowest legal sense. The tithes, he said, were paid by the owners of land, the owners of land were usually Protestants, and they had therefore a better claim to the benefit arising from tithes than strangers, an argument in which every step involves -either an unfounded assertion or a fallacy. The owners of land are not generally Protestants, the numbers of the creeds being about equal, though no doubt the acreage in Protestant. hands is larger, much larger, than the acreage belonging to. Catholic landlords. The tithes are not paid by the owners, but partly through them, and partly through the tenants—. the proportion varying with the competition for land,—and ultimately by the consumers of agricultural produce. And no one is proposing to give the tithe to "strangers," but it to anybody, to those masses for whose religious benefit it was originally levied, and who now derive no benefit from it whatever, but rather hurt. The grants of land are in the. same position, as Sir Roundell indeed admits, for he says they were given by kings, and therefore were "in a sense public' endowments," the fact being that they were assignments by State officers of State property for a special duty, which it is no longer expedient for the State to exact. The only property of the Church which is in any sense private property consists of gifts. from individuals, such as the Dublin Cathedral, which may be said to have been " given " by Sir B. Guinness, and which no one proposes to take away. Were the question worth fighting, we should contend that this also was State property, being, in fact, a gift to a department of the State, to be used as the State may choose ; but that point is one settled by universal consent, and not worth serious discussion. But, says Sir Roundell, the property of the Church, however acquired, is property ; and as it has not been misused, and as no decree of forfeiture has been pronounced against it, it ought to remain, in the hands of those to whom it properly belongs. The con- tention of the Liberal party is that a decree of forfeiture has. been pronounced by the nation, though not by a court, and that the property, therefore, reverts to the community which gave it ; but even this argument is surplusage. The single necessary point is, that the property was granted in trust for certain purposes, which purposes have not been and cannot be fulfilled, and the property, therefore, on the extinction of the life interests, reverts, like other property without owners, to, the State, which has as much right to dispose of it as of any other property similarly situated. That it will be highly expedient to dispose of it for the spiritual or intellectual good of the people we not only admit, but contend ; but the State- has a moral right, if it pleases, to pay it away in bounties to encourage the capture of sharks. There is no need to advance- the extreme argument that all property, being the creation of law, belongs ultimately to the lawmakers, or to repeat Mr. Mill's admission, that Ireland can be pacified only by revolu- tion. The Church, as a State establishment, is a body entrusted with functions, just as much as the Custom /lona- is, and when those functions cease the right to payment ceases. with them. Of course, there may be tacit or express contracts with individuals, which must be respected, and in dealing with old establishments kindliness is- always expedient, lest the State have to pay more in its next bargain ; but of right beyond the life interests the corporation has no trace. The State is dealing with its own, and is bound by no law save the laws which ought to regulate its dealings with Hyde Park or the Phcenix.
But, asks Sir Roundel' Palmer, as we understand him, why disendow ? Why not be content with disestablishment, that is, with the expulsion of four bishops from the House of Lords For two distinct reasons. First, that the tithe is a tax assigned for the religious culture of the people, and that if it continues. to be so assigned it should be assigned for the religious cul- ture of the majority ; secondly, because the State has no- right to assign national property without looking after its. disposal ; and if the State watches the administration of pro- perty by the Irish Church, the Irish Church will be held by the people, rightly or wrongly, to be the State Church, a Church possessed of certain official advantages and privileges other Churches do not possess, in fact, of an ascendancy over other Churches. The single object with which true Liberals move in the matter is to abolish not only the reality but the appearance of that ascendancy, to show to all Irishmen of all creeds that the nation intends, in ecclesiastical matters, to be just. That justice, we fully admit, could be secured by equal endowment, and we, at least, are not yet convinced that equal endowment would not have been the wiser course. The nation, however, Catholic as well as Protestant, has decided almost unanimously against that course, and the only alternative is the disconnection of the State equally from all creeds. To this Sir Roundel/ Palmer will not consent. He will give up the State control, but will not discontinue State aid; will give 300,000/. a year, raised by land-tax, to the Church of the minority, and some
5D,000/. a year, paid from the Consolidated Fund, to the Church of the majority ; and then wash his hands, and say the ascendancy is none of his making. All religions are equal before the law, although only one of them obtains its dues by legal aid. If, he says, you give the parsonages and the churches to the Protestant Church, why not also give the means to maintain them ? Just because the people who furnish those means from year to year do not choose to do it, and because it is highly unjust to make them do it, as at present, by sheer physical force. The truth is, Sir Roundell Palmer cannot conceive of property changing hands except by virtue of a decree of Court, is in this matter lawyer and not statesman, and it is for this reason that the Liberal party, which, of all men alive, would prefer him for Chancellor, is compelled to postpone the fulfilment of his otherwise undoubted claims.
There is one other argument advanced by Sir Roundell Palmer, which we should be hardly concerned to answer, but that it seems to weigh strangely with some minds, and that is the plea ad miseri cordiam. The Protestant Churches in Ireland have, he says, been organized for centuries on the idea that they would receive State aid, they do not know how to do without it, and they ought therefore to receive it as they have always done. They have not had it longer than the Church of Scotland, and the half of that Church which seceded a few years since in a day, without any of the premo- nitions the Church of Ireland has had, has done exceedingly well. If it has not, that is no reason why the funds contri- buted by another Church should be forcibly diverted by the State to its exclusive benefit. The State is not a rich man who can be asked to give to the feeble out of his abundance, but a trustee, responsible, if not to man at least to God, for the use it makes of the revenue entrusted to it by the population. In Ireland that revenue is paid by a Catholic majority, and were Ireland alone in the world, it would not be paid for five minutes to propagate or support the faith of a Protestant minority. Is it just,—for, after all, that is the true question,— that we should so pay it simply because we can Would Sir Roundell Palmer as Chancellor hold that a trustee who gave his ward's property to the blind, was justified because the blind wanted it even more than his ward ?
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