driven back and routed. Since then there has been a truce. In sundry new parishes, thanks to a recent judgment of Dr. Lushington, the rate has for the first time been levied; in others an obscure series of fights has gone on; in the greatest number they have been quietly paid; in a minority never thought of; while the 'liberation' faction has sat by in an ominous attitude of sulky silence. Happily, the Church Institution and the dependent societies, in spite of much good will that way on the part of many of their members, have always been induced to pull up at the point of advocating the No-surrender policy, and the Establishment party, comprising leading High and leading Low Churchmen, have never as a whole been compromised to that tenet. We have not shrunk in the time of Church-rate discussion from advocating, as the only possible and one desirable compromise, the exemption of Dissenters, coupled, for those who will pay, with the maintenance of the existing system under renewed legal sanction. To this we adhere in these days of lull. When the storm again rages, we hope the time will not be past to advance that which is now, we feel, a theory of the closet, into a plan of practical adjustment.
The confiscation of the revenues of the Irish Church, a scheme which holds the same place on the platform of the unfettered Liberal as the confiscation of the Maynooth endowment does on that of the unimproved Tory, was for some reason forgotten by Mr. Disraeli. He probably concluded that Oxford would neither feel nor pretend any interest in the sister kingdom. As a political question, there can be no doubt that this confiscation would be a direct and long first step towards breaking down that which all true politicians have for many years been striving to create—a complete assimilation between England and Ireland. In equity, too, the Established Church has held those revenues quite long enough to have set up many Statutes of Limitation; even if she could not prove that she was by episcopal descent the representative of the old Irish Church, as against the antagonistic Romanist hierarchy, descended as that is from a new importation of bishops, hastily consecrated from Rome in place of the former conforming prelates. Besides, as a merely practical question, the revenues are not so very excessive as not to be at least quite as useful in fostering the soil over which they have been so long spread, as they could possibly be if dissipated over a much wider area. Again, what would that wider area be,—the Anglican, Roman, and Presbyterian communities rateably accommodated, or a miscellaneous mob of educationists, philanthropists, and jobbers in general, each jealously clamouring for his share of the plunder? We believe, in a word, that the two confiscations, that of the long held property of the Established Church, and that
