Hume cannot abandon his dissecting propensities, and dismiss his fraternal cares. They approach too closely to the Malay practice of eating relations seasoned with lime-juice; and Mr. Hume's lime-juice is certainly not wanting. We object as much to the engagement of the Clergy in commercial pursuits, as it is possible, but do not like the clandestine manner in which it is tolerated in this Act. We are well aware of the discussions on the subject, but think, that existing interests should have been protected; for the retrospective tendency of legislation is always, and must be always, a serious evil. People act on the faith of the laws:-if that faith be broken, they are damnified. New laws should therefore be directed to new objects, and never should be passed without provisional exemptions in favour of those acting under statutes in operation before their enactment. But, as the Clergy should be debarred from trade, on the same principle the integrity of their Ecclesiastical incomes should be preserved and guaranteed to them; nor should it be pilfered from them by such shuffling clauses as the 58th and others. Again, the manner in which sequestrations are enforced, is very iniquitous; and Satan in this case does not appear as an angel of light. Whatever may be the causes of sequestration (and in this Bill they are as numerous as cruel), some provision should be made for the support of the incumbent, whom other laws in active force prevent from earning his daily bread. The principle is acknowledged in the Bankruptcy laws; and in the Insolvent Act, as far as military and naval men, and officers of the Crown and East India Company, are concerned; but why it should not in the latter case be extended generally, and, as in a former Act, be inclusive of the Clergy, is an anomaly which the Solons of Palace-yard should explain. In one instance, this Act makes the grant of an allowance lawful, but not imperative on the Bishop; but this clause should have been more distinctly expressed. And if in this one instance an allowance be lawful, why is it not lawful in all others? Why should a principle be admitted and not be generally practised? The Act also has a great fault in not stating how sequestrators should be called to an account for mal-administration or deterioration of the sequestered property, and in not defining the penalties to which such conduct should subject them. It seeks to impoverish, rather than to support the Clergy, and allows to Curates the very privileges which it takes from Incumbents. It is radically radical. The discussions on this bill in its passage through the Commons, and the conduct of Lord J. Russell, the self-styled Champion of the Church, betrayed on the government side a spirit of disgusting animosity and indefatigable persecution. Is it not outrageous, that a body of commissioners, partly laical, and all by different interests subservient to the government, should be instituted to govern the Church? and that they should separate or unite benefices, that they should alter boundaries, and exert an authority beyond that vested in the Episcopal Bench? Is it right, that Bishops should, by certain clauses, be controlled, and by others placed in the way of temptation to exceed the bounds of strict justice? Is it proper, that there should be any interference in an Incumbent's nomination of his Curate? Was it not evident, when the provision was made, that it would induce hostilities, and be detrimental to the Church? If the framers of the act wished to sever the Clergy from their charges, their adopted plan will succeed; but it would have been more manly to have expressed their hostility, than to have partially thrown over it the mask of Championship. This and the Cathedral Bill, shakes the tenure of all Ecclesiastical Property, and may be precursive of one intended to abolish our venerable formularies:- we fear these Danaos et dona ferentes, and much suspect a wooden horse to be among their presents. If abuses exist in the Church, the Bishops, not a mixed Ecclesiastical Commission, should rectify them: but what abuses exist in any way apportioned to those, which this bill, if it become a law, must produce? How many of these alleged abuses are retraceable to clamour and dissent alone, not to allegations founded on truth and justice? At all events, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, an unprecedented body in the State, are the very worst people who could be employed to rectify them; for they would proceed to things beyond their cognizance, and would exert their extraordinary powers on experiments, if not on experimental vexations. Their unlimited authority must lead to unlimited evil; and as they may be easily identified with the ministry, the ratification of the Sovereign is merely an idle provision. The action of this contemplated act, and the influence of these Commissioners over the future Clergy, must be considered by every reasoning person, as a primary attempt to subvert our ecclesiastical establishment; the secondary attempt, if not impeded, may be entire. The whole bill is faulty, and many of its parts are peculiarly unsound: it is open to various constructions, which should not be the case in any legislative enactment; and these men, of course, would be its interpreters-men, who by their disregard of the remonstances made to them, shew their inadequacy to interfere in the Church. But the bill has not passed the Lords, and we trust that it never will. Therefore, while there is time, the Clergy of every order should be on the alert, and from every archdeaconry within the kingdom memorialize the Peers, praying that its objectionable clauses be rescinded, and that a proper dignity be maintained in the Church. At the same time, deputations should approach the Throne, praying that the royal signature be withholden from these oppressive measures; and that, mindful of the faith of her ancestors, her Majesty hand not the Church over to the spoilers. The whole body of clergy should unite in one vigorous attempt to avert the threatened evils, being sure of support from the most respectable of the Laity, nor desist from their endeavours, until they shall have defeated these machinations of their enemies. Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito, should now be every man's motto. ART. XII.-The Prospects and Policy of a Tory Administration. By J. BUDWORTH, Esq. Mitchell: London. 1838. THOSE who call us Alarmists, in the sense of party, know nothing of us. But, if to feel that the country is degraded by the degraded tenure of its existing Administration; that it is sinking into foreign contempt by the palpable weakness of its foreign policy; that it is preparing days of massacre in Ireland, by its fatal sufferance of popish councils; and, as the result of all, that it is hazarding a radical revolution at home; if this constitute Alarmists, then we shall not shrink from the title: we do feel the deepest alarm, and we call upon every man of honour and conscience in the empire, to be alarmed along with us. First, of the Cabinet. A British ministry has great power, and ought to have great power. It must be invested with means to meet the emergencies of the State; it must provide for the essential relations of the country with the world; it must lay down the principles of those laws which regulate the whole system of national society. For purposes like those, it is obviously required to be at once intelligent, high-principled, and high-charactered; it must command the national acquiescence in measures previously to their trial; and, uniting the duties of sovereignty and stewardship, must at once act and be accountable, at once possess the acknowledged right to conduct the empire, and be prepared to stand the test of national inquiry when the service is finally done. But great power in the hands of corruption, ignorance, or imbecility, must inevitably be the instrument of great evil; and a worthless administration may effect in an hour mischiefs, which it would take ages to heal. We have no desire to speak of the personal habits of the present ministry :-let those who can find in them either manliness, virtue, or ability, congratulate themselves upon the exclusiveness of their discovery. But who now speaks of the Cabinet with any show of respect? What man passing by Whitehall, can see its present masters emerging from the walls once tenanted by the mighty ministerial names of England, the Burkes, the Chathams, the Camdens, the Pitts, without some such sensations as vex the heart at seeing the fisher drying his nets on the ruins of Tyre and Sidon; or the beggar and the juggler exhibiting their meagre physiognomies and rabble tricks among the arches of the Roman amphitheatre? Our satirists may spare all description of the degeneracy of the age, when we can point to such living evidences stalking before us. What would William Pitt have thought of them? What language would have been enough for his contemptuous surprise, or the vexed keenness of his ridicule, if he could have dreamed of being succeeded, at the remotest period of British change, by the individuals who now play the farce of greatness? What taunt could be more stinging to that native loftiness of mind which regarded the leadership of the British government, as at once the first trial of the first abilities and their most distinguished employment, than to see it in the hands of a race who bring to it nothing beyond the qualities of petty intrigue, and unhesitating flexibility; who rely on bowing at a levee, or whispering at a court dinner, as substitutes for manliness in council and ability in debate; whom every man who knew them had consigned to hopeless mediocrity, and who knew themselves so well, that they laid their only claim to office on the purchase of the rabble, and confirmed it only by an alliance with the Papist; the men who professed to invigorate the Constitution, by trafficking with its avowed assailants, and to sustain the Church, by adopting its most rancorous enemies. What a subject for contemplation would be Pitt, reversing the vision of Virgil's hero, and compelled to mark as they rose out of the shades of the future, the growing burlesque of all that he had established as the character of a British administration. "Nunc age, et obscuram prolem quæ deinde sequatur, Ille, vides?" "See on his couch yon son of dalliance lie, Not sixty years have quenched his roving eye. His wit, just equal to a billet-doux, The dear deceiver of a fading blue! See yon thin poet, plunged in desperate ink, Kiss all their slippers, and be kicked by all! And those are the governors of the greatest dominion that the sun shines upon; legislators, whose decision involves the hourly welfare of a hundred millions of mankind; depositories of the noblest trusts of principle and power ever committed to human hands for the benefit of ages to come. We would ask the most headlong adherent of the ministry, whether he thinks that there is on those men any one mark of the qualities essential to such duties; whether he is not, in his hours of soberness, utterly astonished at the caprices of fortune which could ever have taken Lord Melbourne from the sofa and the opera box, to plant him at the table of the council, or lifted any of his associates there from the humblest situations of nameless life into publicity:whether he would not consider any dozen men from the clubs or the coffee-houses as likely to have been chosen, and as fully to answer the purpose; and whether he is not, more than all, astonished at the patience of England, in enduring any one of them for an hour together? We ask, what man talks of the Administration as having any hold on the country, as having any independence of the scornful mercy of the Opposition, as having any probability of standing for a moment beyond the time when that Opposition shall decree its fall: we challenge any man to speak of it as, in fact, any thing more than a mere exhibition of "Tom Errand dressed in Clincher's clothes," a temporary display, in which the heroes of the barn "attempt the legitimate drama;" strut in tragic tinsel and hereditary gestures, and murder common sense for their receipts-their play a parody, and their performance a caricature. Or with what still stronger disgust, if that be within human capacities, must we see the true prompters of the game-Popery forming the impulse, and Faction the means-the whole system nothing but a Harlequinade, in which one bustling and intangible Irish knave leads all, drives all, dupes all, and evades all. We have, too, the full complement of characters:—the foolish old lover, aping youth-the little mi Lor Anglais, the burlesque of all manliness-the clown, gluttonous and gaping-the Spanish Donthe crowd of menials, made only to be tossed and trampled-all joining in the chase, while Harlequin himself, now beggar now barrister, now statesman and always knave, runs through his whole round of trickery, with the whole posse coursing at his heels, until the plot is ripe, and the curtain falls in general explosion. Or, if from the principles we come to the conduct of those men, what retrieval can we find there? In private life the most disgraceful stigma which society can stamp upon the individual is, that he falsifies his word, that he is a thing of expediency, that he shifts his principles according to every changing conception of his profit. Sir Robert Peel has pronounced the ministry, "from-hand-to-mouth men;" and this stamp alone is enough to justify the scorn of the nation. Another brand is the notoriety of living a slave: this brand has been burned in on the ministry by the public proofs of their gross, ridiculous, and trembling |