The Year 1869 page 2

To this must be added the annual value of glebe-lands farmed by incumbents, which was not, however, very considerable.

An important and difficult question immediately presented itself, to the solution of which Mr. Gladstone devoted all his powers of analysis and all his resources of expression. It was this: among the various endowments enjoyed by the Irish Church, - which were of a public nature, and had accrued to it as the representative of the ancient endowed Church of the country P which were, on I the other hand, of a private nature, and were made with the full knowledge and intention of the donors that they were assisting by their benefactions the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland, bound by such and such articles, and using such and such a liturgy? In the adjustment of so complicated a matter, mathematical accuracy is out of the question; but Mr. Gladstone considered that substantial justice would be done by fixing a date, all endowments anterior to which should be deemed public, and those posterior to it private. This date he proposed to fix at the epoch of the Restoration, 1660, on the ground that the Irish Establishment did not. attain its regular organisation and definite Protestant character much before that date. On the whole, he thought that the value of the private endowments, so limited, did not exceed half a million sterling; and this sum the Act awarded in compensation for them to the disestablished Church.

By drawing the line at the year 1660, Mr. Gladstone excluded from the category of private endowments the grants of lands in Ulster, which James I., after having planted in large numbers of his Scottish countrymen in the room of the exterminated native proprietors, assigned to the dominant Church. These lands were commonly known as the Ulster glebes. A strenuous effort was made in the House of Lords to effect their retention for the Church, on the ground that they partook rather of the nature of private than of public benefactions. But Mr. Gladstone stood firm, and refused to allow these royal grants, the original motive for which was unquestionably in large measure political, to be treated differently from the general mass of the Church property.

An important item of the material belongings of the Establishment, yet one which could not easily be made to enter into any financial estimate, consisted in the churches themselves. As to these, the Act provided that, wherever the " governing body " made an application, accompanied by a declaration that they meant either to maintain the church for public worship, or to remove it to some more convenient position, it would be handed over to them. In the case of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and about a dozen other churches partaking of the character of national monuments, the Commissioners were empowered to allot a moderate sum for their maintenance. Churches not in use, or in ruins, were to be handed over to the custody of the Board of Works.

With regard to glebe-houses, Mr. Gladstone announced that he had changed the opinion which he had expressed in the preceding year. Then he was inclined to consider them as " marketable property," like lands or tithes, and as such to withhold them from the disestablished Church, and allow only a life interest in them to their present possessors. But having investigated the matter more closely, and discovered that although an expenditure of £1,200,000 upon them could be distinctly traced, their annual value could not be rated above £18,600, while there was a quarter of a million of building charges upon them, which the State would have to pay on coming into possession, he had come to the conclusion that the glebe-houses were not, in the strict sense of the words, " marketable property." The Act therefore proposed to hand over the glebe-houses to the Church body, on their paying the building charges; and they would also be allowed to purchase a certain amount of glebe-land round the houses at a fair valuation.

The burial-grounds adjacent to churches went with the churches, all existing rights being reserved; and other burial-grounds were to be handed over to the Poor Law Guardians.

The scheme being thus far developed, the aspect of affairs at the end of two years promised to be this - the churches and glebe-houses, together with strips of land around the latter, would then be the permanent property of the disestablished Church, while the tithes and Church lands, subject to various life-interests, would be vested in the State, through its organ, the " Commissioners of Irish Church Temporalities." But that the State should long retain all this mass of real property in its own hands was most undesirable. Mr. Gladstone therefore propounded an elaborate scheme for the final extinction of the tithe rent-charge within forty-five years, and for the conversion of the lands into money. Landlords would be allowed, if they chose, to purchase the rent- charge, so far as it affected their own properties, at twenty-two and a half years' purchase paid down; but if they declined to avail themselves of this option, power was taken for disposing of it to them by a compulsory sale, at a rate which would yield per cent, interest, they being at the same time credited with a loan at 3£, payable in instalments in forty-five years. Thus, if a landlord's property were burdened with the tithe rent-charge to the extent of £90 a year, the State would compel him to buy it out and out for the sum of £2,000; which sum, how ever, he would not have to pay immediately, but only by instalments coming in the shape of an annual rent of £70, and terminating at the end of forty-five years. How greatly the landlords were gainers by this trans action is obvious. With regard to the Church lands, the tenants on them were to have a right of pre-emption, and three-fourths of the purchase money might be left on the security of the land; one way or other, they were to be converted into money with all practicable dispatch.

When by these sales the property of the Irish Church should all have been realised, and its affairs wound up, Mr. Gladstone calculated that the balance-sheet would stand as follows. The tithe rent-charge would have yielded £9,000,000; the lands and perpetuity rents would have been sold for about £6,250,000; these sums, together with a balance of £750,000 in money, would make a grand total of £16,000,000. Of this, the bill would dispose of £8,650,000 - viz.: Tested interests of incumbents, £4,900,000; ditto of curates, £800,000; lay compensation, £900,000; private endowments, £500,000; building charges, £250,000. To these would have to be added the sums required for the commutation of the Begium Donurn and the Maynooth Grant, the particulars of which will be given presently, amounting to £1,100,000; and, finally, the expenses of the Commission, £200,000. Consequently there would remain, after the satisfaction of all claims, a surplus of between £7,000,000 and £8,000,000. After discussing various suggestions for the disposal of this surplus, and giving his reasons for not devoting any part of it to the endowment of any religious body or institution, Mr. Gladstone stated that, in the opinion of the Government, it would be most fitly and profitably applied to the relief of "unavoidable calamities and suffering," not provided for by the Poor Law. Assuming that the surplus fund would produce an annual return of about £311,000 a year, the Act would allot £185,000 of this revenue to lunatic asylums, £20,000 to idiot asylums, £30,000 to institutions for the harbouring and training of the blind, and of deaf mutes, £15,000 to training-schools for nurses, £10,000 to reformatories, and £51,000 to county infirmaries; thus disposing of the whole revenue.

The arrangements for the extinction of the Begium Donum and the Maynooth Grant have still to be considered. The sum to be dealt with amounted to about £70,000, of which £26,000 was the Maynooth Grant, and the remainder was distributed among the various denominations of Presbyterians. The expectation of life among the clergy being known to be between thirteen and four teen years, Mr. Gladstone had fixed fourteen years' purchase as the basis of commutation in the case of the incumbents of the Irish Church, and he now adopted the same scale for the Presbyterian Churches and for Maynooth. A sum amounting to fourteen times the annual grant in each case was to be set aside out of the Irish Church Fund, and devoted to the satisfaction of life- interests, or to their commutation, on conditions substantially agreeing with those already explained in the case of the Establishment. About £1,100,000 would be required for the purpose, two-thirds of which would go to the Presbyterians.

At the conclusion of his speech, Mr. Gladstone invited criticisms and suggestions as to the details of the bill, which it was the desire of its framers to render as little harsh and onerous as possible, consistently with the complete and final execution of the task which they had undertaken. " I trust, Sir," he said, " that although its operation be stringent, and although we have not thought it either politic or allowable to attempt to diminish its stringency by making it incomplete, the spirit towards the Church of Ireland, as a religious communion, in which this measure has been considered and prepared by my colleagues and myself has not been a spirit of unkindness. Perhaps at this time it would be too much to expect to obtain full credit for any declaration of that kind. We are undoubtedly asking an educated, highly respected, and generally pious and zealous body of clergymen to undergo a great transition; we are asking a powerful and intelligent minority of the laity in Ire land, in connection with the Established Church, to abate a great part of the exceptional privileges they have enjoyed; but I do not feel that in making this demand upon them we are seeking to inflict an injury. I do not believe they are exclusively or even mainly responsible for the errors of English policy towards Ireland; I am quite certain that in many vital respects they have suffered by it; I believe that the free air they will breathe under a system of equality and justice, giving scope for the development of their great energies, with all the powers of property and intelligence they will bring to bear, will make that Ireland which they love a country for them not less enviable and not less beloved in the future than it has been in the past. As respects the Church, I admit it is a case almost without exception. I don't know in what country so great a change, so great a transition has been proposed for the ministers of a religious communion who have enjoyed for many ages the preferred position of an Established Church. I can well understand that to many in the Irish Establishment such a change appears to be nothing less than ruin and destruction; from the height on which they now stand the future is to them an abyss, and their fears recall the words used in 'King Lear,' when Edgar endeavours to persuade Gloster that he has fallen over the cliffs of Dover, and says: -

'Ten masts at each make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell;
Thy life's a miracle!'

And yet but a little while after the old man is relieved from Ids delusion, and finds he has not fallen at all. So I trust that when, instead of the fictitious and adventurous aid on which we have too long taught the Irish Establishment to lean, it should come to place its trust in its own resources, in its own great mission, in all that it can draw from the energy of its ministers and its members, and the high hopes and promises of the Gospel that it teaches, it will find that it has entered on a new era - an era bright with hope and potent for good.... This measure is in every sense a great measure - great in its principles, great in the multitude of its dry, technical, but interesting details, and great as a testing measure; for it will show for one and all of us of what metal we are made. Upon us all it brings a great responsibility. We upon this bench are especially charge able - nay, deeply guilty - if we have either dishonestly or even prematurely or unwisely challenged so gigantic an issue. I know well the punishments that follow rash ness in public affairs, and that ought to fall upon those men, those Phaetons of politics, who, with hands unequal to the task, attempt to guide the chariot of the sun. But the responsibility passes beyond us, and rests on every man who has to take part in the discussion and decision on this bill. Every man approaches the discussion under the most solemn obligations to raise the level of his vision and expand its scope in proportion with the great ness of the matter in hand. The working of our constitutional government itself is upon its trial, for I do not believe there ever was a time when the wheels of legislative machinery were set in motion under conditions of peace and order and constitutional regularity to deal with a question greater or more profound. And more especially, Sir, is the credit and fame of this great assembly involved. This assembly, which has inherited through many ages the accumulated honours of brilliant triumphs, of peaceful but courageous legislation, is now called upon to address itself to a task which would indeed have demanded all the best energies of the very best among your fathers and your ancestors. I believe it will prove to be worthy of the task." The right honourable gentleman concluded by moving for leave to bring in a bill.

The leader of the Opposition, Mr. Disraeli, said that his own opinion, and that of his party, remained un altered; they thought disestablishment was a political blunder, and disendowment a legalised robbery; but as the sense of the country had been clearly expressed in favour of dealing with the question, he should not object to the introduction of the bill, but should offer it a determined opposition on the second reading. The bill was then introduced, and read a first time, and the 18th March was fixed for the second reading. On that day Mr. Disraeli moved in the usual form that the bill be read a second time that day six months. In his speech there was little that was remarkable except where he protested against the confiscation of the Church property on the ground that it would probably end in the sole benefit of the landlords. He ridiculed in particular the project for the extinction of the tithe rent-charge, predicting that the end of the whole operation would be that the property of the Church would go into the pockets of the landlords; and the consequence of these sacrilegious proceedings must be such deep discontent, that either there must be restitution, or the same principles must be applied to the English Church, - and this, he declared, Mr. Gladstone by his language clearly contemplated. Our English experience of the absorption of commons and forests by the large landowners justified, it must be owned, a jealous and rigorous examination of this part of the measure; which on the very face of it, as- above explained, made a present to the landlords of full twenty-two per cent, of the tithe rent-charge to which their properties were previously liable. Mr. Bright made a telling speech in favour of the measure; and the same may be said of Mr. Lowe. On the other side, Sir Roundell Palmer, who had braved the loss, or, to speak more correctly, the postponement of high professional promotion, because he could not go with Mr. Gladstone on this question, disputed the doctrine that the State had the power absolutely to strip the Church of its property, though he admitted its right to restrict or reapportion it. Mr. Gathorne Hardy, who, among the abler opponents of the bill, was perhaps the only one who spoke with absolute and entire conviction, delivered a bold and trenchant philippic, based on the old data of the superiority of the Protestant religion, and the right and duty of England to govern Ireland, not according to the wishes of the Irish, but upon principles approved by the majority of Englishmen. After a four nights' debate, the House divided on the second reading, with the following - for the Government - triumphant result: for the second reading, 368; against it, 250; majority, 118. With so compact a majority against them, in a very full House, it was useless for the Conservatives to attempt to make considerable alterations in the bill in committee. Substantially unchanged it emerged from the ordeal of committee, and the third reading was carried by a majority of 114 votes.