Ashley's While other previous occasions, found a spokesman in Lord Ashley men were seeking for means of alleviating the unquestioned depression of the labouring classes, and tracing it, with its consequences of discontent and riot, to physical and economic causes, to Lord Ashley it seemed that much at all events of the more distressing and dangerous part of the present social disorder was to be found in the moral darkness of the workman. It seemed to him that in the universal haste to appropriate the advantages of improved appliances, and to accumulate wealth, a dense population had been called into existence and left to fight its way with no rule of guidance but the necessities of a fierce competition, and the imperative desire to acquire the necessaries of life. Under this impulse parents lost their natural care for their children, and regarding them only as instruments for obtaining money plunged them from their earliest years, without a shred of education, into the hardships and temptations of the mines, the workshops, and the streets. What could come from such a system but ignorance and crime? It was the duty and the wisdom of a State which by its arrangements had created an ever-increasing population to see at least that the children were educated. For their physical well-being Lord Ashley had already done much and was trying to do more. He now brought forward in Parliament a motion that an Address should be sent to the Queen begging her "to take into her instant and serious consideration the best means of diffusing the benefit and blessings of a moral and religious education among the working classes of her people." He had no difficulty in making out his case. The population of England and Wales in the last forty years showed an increase of more than seven millions. The lowest estimate of those who required education was 3,000,000, and after all deductions had been made for those who were educated privately, and for pauper children, there would still remain 1,800,000 for whose training the public were answerable. In the existing schools, whether of the Established Church or of the Dissenting bodies, somewhat over 800,000 pupils were taught, leaving nearly a million children to whom no education was given. The result was such as might be expected; the statistics of the great towns showed the most terrible youthful depravity. The statistics of the prisons showed an enormous percentage of ignorance; and the working of the existing system was brought into sharp relief when it appeared that the expenditure for the punishment of crime was £600,000 a year, the annual vote for education, which might tend to prevent it, was still only £30,000. As usual, when he laid Feb. 28, 1843. 1843] GRAHAM'S FACTORY BILL 97 bare the shortcomings of English society, Lord Ashley met with respectful hearing and approbation. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, declared that not only was he ready to support the Address, but that Government had already had the intention of doing something to further the cause of education. It was preparing a new Factory Bill, containing clauses insuring the compulsory education of pauper and factory children. The Address was agreed to without division, and on the receipt of the Queen's answer on the 8th of March Sir James Graham produced his Bill. Sir James Graham's The Home Secretary had in view two distinct objects, the extension and amendment of the existing Factory Acts and the improvement of education. He desired to limit the hours of female labour to twelve, and to reduce the time during which children might be employed to six and a half hours a day. Those hours were to be consecutive, either in the morning or afternoon, and the stipulation already existing that no children should be employed without certificates of school attendance was to be continued. Upon this limitation he made an attempt to found a general system of education. Certificates were only to be received from schools fulfilling certain conditions. Of these, Government inspection was the first, but religious instruction also formed an integral part of the scheme. Upon this rock, as has so often happened, the plan was wrecked. Although great care was taken to avoid any arrangements or restrictions which could be regarded as injurious to perfect liberty of religious creed, the Dissenters and Roman Catholics found in the Bill traces of Church supremacy, and plied the Government with petitions against it, while the Radicals eagerly pressed their favourite scheme of wholly secular education. Sir James Graham, finding that what he had intended to be a general and comprehensive measure winning the approval of all parties afforded only ground for sectarian opposition, yielded to his opponents, and withdrew the Bill. His second carried. May 1844. In February of the following year he reintroduced it shorn of its educational clauses. But the opposition offered was no less violent. Lord Ashley wished to introduce a clause limiting the working hours of young persons (that is, those between the age of thirteen and eighteen) to ten hours a day. The feeling of the House was curiously divided on the subject The rigid economists, siding with the Government, regarded the interference with free labour as highly injurious. Several votes, direct and indirect, were taken upon the subject, with such varying results VICT. G that Sir James Graham declared that inextricable confusion had arisen, and that either a compromise must be effected or leave be given him to withdraw the present and introduce a new Bill. He stated that a compromise appeared to him out of the question. He believed that the restriction of hours would be injurious to the master manufacturers, and through them to the welfare of the country, that it must be followed by a diminution of wages, and would thus be injurious to the workmen also; that consequently he and his colleagues had determined to maintain the twelve hours limit. In the course of his speech he referred to an argument which had been used by his opponents, that a new social condition had come into existence which was to be met by new principles and new schemes of legislation. Legislative interference was to become the general rule. Adopting a phrase which had been used in a paper on this subject, he declared that he did not think it exaggeration to say that this was a commencement of a Jack Cade system of legislation. It was one of those unfortunate expressions which (like the word "aliens" used by Lord Lyndhurst with respect to the Irish) inevitably become a party catchword, and are permanently affixed as marks for popular disapproval to the statesman who utters them. Sir James Graham was at once regarded as the arch enemy of the labouring classes. The second course as to the Factory Bill was adopted; a new Bill was introduced which did not repeal but only amended the existing Statute. It diminished the working hours of children to six and a half, and insisted upon those hours being consecutive, to allow time for their schooling. It extended the twelve hours limitation to include women as well as young persons. It rendered stricter the certificate of age and health required, and guarded against the use of dangerous machinery. With some difficulty—for the preceding events had heated the Opposition-this Bill was carried, but even at the time it was not regarded as a final settlement of the question. Although Sir James Graham's whole scheme thus failed, it must be laid to his credit that he recognised the necessity of general education, and did not shrink from producing a measure conceived with considerable liberality as a first step towards it. This was not the only proof the Government gave of its recognition Peel's Church districts. of its moral duties. Sir Robert Peel introduced and carried a plan for the establishment and endowment of Church districts. Leaving the building of the new churches to private liberality, he allowed the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to borrow capital from Queen Anne's Bounty, and to employ it under certain 1844] THE SCOTCH CHURCH 99 restrictions for the endowment of the incumbents. By this means the very large and unwieldy parishes which had given rise to much spiritual destitution were gradually broken up. Religious the time. In acting thus Peel showed his recognition of the great religious movement which went along with the other reforming impulses of the time. It had assumed in England, strangely movement of enough, a shape which is generally connected with a dislike to reform. For it was ostensibly the apprehension of the introduction of liberalism and liberal principles into religion which mainly excited the activity of the leaders of the Oxford movement. But, looked at somewhat more closely, it will appear that the real groundwork of the movement was the recognition of the dangers attending the close connection of Church and State, the risk which lay in that connection of slothful acceptance of worldly position and of State orthodoxy, to the detriment of more real spiritual life. The same impulse is to be traced in the lengthened struggle which had divided the Church of Scotland, and which this year terminated in its violent Disruption. In both cases it was the indignant rejection of the idea that the spiritual interests of the nation can be subordinated to temporal authority, and the Church in its highest functions be other than supreme, which lay at the bottom of the movement. In both cases, too, there was an undercurrent of democratic feeling thoroughly consistent with the impulse of the time. Church. In Scotland a direct quarrel arose as to the limits of the authority of the Church on the one hand, and the State on the Position of other. The question of lay patronage had always been the Scotch a difficult one in the Scotch Church. The statutes which regulated the relation in which the Church stood to the State had varied on this point in accordance with the views of the Government of the time. But in 1707, at the Union, when the maintenance of the national Church became an integral part of the treaty, doubtful passages with regard to patronage were repealed, and the right was vested in the heritors and elders of the respective parishes. But subsequently, in the tenth year of Queen Anne's reign, the Statute of 1690, chapter v. (that is to say, the part settling the Scotch Church), was repealed, “in so far as relates to the presentation of ministers by heritors and others mentioned therein," and the right of presentation was restored to patrons, Presbyteries being obliged to receive and admit qualified persons when presented by the patron, and on the same conditions as before the making of the statute. Up till 1784 the Church had constantly complained of this, The Veto Act. 1834. It but the patrons appear on the whole to have consulted the parishioners, and no very important quarrel arose. From that year the protest of the Church ceased, and the nomination to parishes had fallen entirely into the hands of the patrons. To the more ardent members of the Church this appeared at once to deprive the people of their voice in the appointment of their ministers, which they regarded as a fundamental principle of their ecclesiastical state, and to allow the interposition of secular interests and secular authority in matters of the highest spiritual importance. The General Assembly therefore, or rather the permanent committee of the Assembly, in 1834 passed what was known as the "Veto Act," by which, upon a protest of the male heads of families, being communicants, in any parish, the Presbytery was bound to reject the nominee, and this although no ground of objection was stated. was this Act of the Assembly which produced the Disruption. The two chief cases in which the conflict between the Church and the Law Courts arose were known as the Auchterarder and Strathbogie cases. Immediately after the passing of the Veto Act, the Earl of Kinnoull, as patron, presented Mr. Young to the parish of Auchterarder. The male heads of families there objected to him, and he was rejected by the Presbytery. The patron and the presentee proceeded against the Presbytery at law. The General Assembly undertook the case of the Presbytery. After a lengthened trial decision was given by the Court of Session, in March 1838, against the Presbytery. Thus the Veto Act was declared illegal. The case was carried to the House of Lords, and the highest Court of justice dismissed the appeal and upheld the judgment of the Court of Session. On this, in the General Assembly, the Church and State party, headed by Dr. Cook, moved that the Veto Act, having been declared illegal, should cease to be enforced. The "Non-intrusionists," as they were called, headed by Dr. Chalmers, on the contrary took up the position that the Civil Court could declare to whom the emoluments might go, but could not set aside an ecclesiastical law of the Assembly. A considerable majority upheld Dr. Chalmers's view. In the second case, a Mr. Edwards had been presented by the lawful patron to the parish of Marnoch; the heads of families had exercised their veto; the seven ministers who constituted the Presbytery of Strathbogie, in which Marnoch was, refused to admit him, and Mr Edwards obtained a decree from the Supreme Court against the Presbytery. The seven ministers preferred fulfilling the obvious duty of obeying the law rather than the questionable duty of obeying the The Nonintrusionists. May 22, 1839. |