A.D. 1869.]

BISHOP MAGEE'S SPEECH.

163

House.1 The Right Reverend Prelate began by brushing aside certain arguments on which great stress had been laid by the defenders of Establishment :

I am free to confess I cannot regard this bill as a proposal to violate the Coronation Oath. The Coronation Oath seems to me to be the seal of a compact between two parties; and I cannot understand how because one of the parties appeals to the Divine judgment to punish a breach of the compact, both parties may not agree to an alteration of the compact. In the second place, I cannot regard this measure as a violation of the Act of Union. I regard the Act of Union as a treaty not merely between two Legislatures, the members of which may be, and for the most part are, no longer in existence, but as a compact between two nations which still exist, and have a right to modify the terms of the treaty mutually agreed on between them.

Neither did he found on the inviolability of corporate property, for, accepting the proposition that there was a distinction between corporate and private property, he used that as the very ground on which to base his stoutest

1 A certain well-known Scottish baronet, then in Parliament, noted rather for the force than for the length of his contributions to conversation, rode into the Park after listening to Bishop Magee's speech. A friend inquired if it had been a success, and what line of argument had been pursued. "Oh," said Sir Robert Anstruther, "it was the finest thing you ever heard. He said that Gladstone had appealed to them in the name of the Almighty to vote for the bill, but that for his part he would be dd if he did so."

resistance to the proposal for disendowment, and uttered the following memorable and profound sentences:

You will always observe in history that corporate property is always the first to be attacked in all great democratic revolutions. Especially is this so in the case of ecclesiastical corporate property, because ecclesiastical corporations for the most part are very wealthy, and at the same time are very weak. . . Revolutions commence with sacrilege, and they go on to communism; or to put it in the more gentle and euphemistic language of the day, revolutions begin with the Church and go on to the land.

The course of the speech was marked by outbursts of applause in the Strangers' Gallery, a breach of parliamentary decorum which, unusual in the highest degree in either Chamber, is peculiarly at variance with the staid and impassive atmosphere of the House of Lords. Lord Derby, in opposing the second reading, took up those weapons which the Bishop of Peterborough had flung aside, and took his stand on the Treaty of Union and the Coronation Oath; whereas the Marquis of Salisbury condemned such arguments as "involving the inexpressible absurdity that an oath taken in the days of Adam may have lasted to this time, binding the whole human race under circumstances absolutely dif ferent from those of the Paradisiacal period, and

A.D. 1869.] DISESTABLISHMENT OF IRISH CHURCH. 165

that the duties of mankind may have been settled for ever by the act of one single individual at that time, and we might never be able to escape from them."

The division on the second reading was a remarkable one

Contents

Non-Contents

Majority for the Bill

179

146

33

It

It is not without interest, even a quarter of a century after these events, to examine the composition of the majority in this division. contained a large number of Conservative peers, including the Marquis of Salisbury, the Earl of Carnarvon, and Lord Lytton, and one Bishop (Thirlwall of St David's). Thirteen English and two Irish Bishops voted against the bill, while the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce) refrained from voting. Many of those peers who thus supported the bill on second reading did so on the understanding that it would be largely altered in the Committee stage, and this, in effect, was done on such a scale that when their lordships' amendments came to be considered in the Commons, Mr Gladstone, confident in the force of a great majority, led the

House to disagree with the Lords on all such amendments as could be regarded as at all important. Ultimately, after much fierce talk of the usual character about mending or ending the House of Peers, a compromise was effected, and the bill received the Royal assent on July 26.

CHAPTER VII.

1870-1871.

VISIT TO

PARIS

STATE

OF

ON

PARTIES IN PARLIAMENT THE
SMOKING-ROOM OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS-IRISH LAND
BILL ELEMENTARY EDUCATION BILL-SMITH'S MOTION
THE THAMES EMBANKMENT-DEFEAT OF THE GOVERNMENT
THEREON-LETTER ON AFFAIRS IN FRANCE-SMITH ELECTED
ΤΟ FIRST LONDON SCHOOL BOARD-RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY
ARISING THERE SETTLED ON HIS MOTION-ASSISTS EMIGRA-
TION TO CANADA — DEBATES ON ARMY BILL, BUDGET, AND
BALLOT BILL-DAMAGED POSITION OF THE GOVERNMENT-
IRISH HOME RULE-MR GLADSTONE'S SPEECH AT ABERDEEN.

IN In the beginning of 1870, the year destined to see the fall of the French empire, Smith went to Paris, in order to prosecute inquiries into the management of the poor in France. The thorough way in which he set about his investigation there may best be illustrated by a few extracts from letters to his wife :

PARIS, 15th Jan. 1870.

I wrote very hurriedly yesterday, as I had been kept out by my friends much longer than I expected. Maynard took me first of all to M. Dubard, an Officer of the Guard.