Bills embodying the principles of the report have been presented to the two Houses by the Duke of Marlborough himself, Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Cross, and it is certainly now the solution which offers the most reasonable hope of an enduring compromise to the minds of statesmen who wish well to the Church. Mr. Disraeli, it will not be forgotten, when he came out at the close of 1860 in the character of defender of the faith, embraced the no-surrender doctrine in its most extreme aspect. A year later, in his parallel speech, he dropped all allusion to it, and only denounced total abolition. The acceptance of it would be the most politic method by which Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell could mend that stupendous error of judgment, which led them at one bound to change from no surrender to total abolition at the instant of a turn of tide in favour of Church-rates; and we should hardly think that ministers, such as the Duke of Newcastle (whose antecedent reputation of good Churchmanship made his similar escapade less pardonable) and Sir George Lewis, would object to the same door of escape, now that recent events have given a fresh lease to the present administration. If they want a hint to guide them as to the irresistible stress of the popular side, they may find it in the significant fact that the Whig candidates for Finsbury and Nottingham, one of them a Cabinet Minister's heir, owe their ignominious defeat to the ostentatious and damaging patronage of that acknowledged champion of the Liberation Society, Sir Morton Peto. Anyhow, it is generally acknowledged that any Church-rate settlement must proceed from the Government of the day, and the impression is every day being strengthened that the Church will go on putting itself more and more in the right, and Dissenters more and more in the wrong, if the former continues to offer a reasonable compromise, involving personal exemption, and Nonconformity persists in rejecting it. The detail of what dissent calls 'ticketing,' is one which, in condescension to their crotchetiness, must be carefully considered, especially since that strange outburst of simulated scrupulosity which led them to defeat the religious census of last year, and thereby reduced Mr. Mann's ponderous volume of religious statistics, with which we have for some seven years been pelted, into waste paper. If the result of the whole transaction would be to lay the whole Church-rate question at rest with a tacit exemption of those who would not pay, there would be little cause for regret except on one ground, that some legislation is needed for district churches, and that if any legislation at all takes place it might as well be final. One thing is certain, that the party which endeavours to establish the perpetual liability of Dissenters
