Wanganui Chronicle and TURAKINA & RANGITIKEI MESSENGER.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume XIII, Issue 1030, 22 May 1869, Page 2

Wanganui Chronicle and TURAKINA & RANGITIKEI MESSENGER.

SATURDAY, 22th MAY, 1869. It is pleasant to have a dip into English politics after our dead-and-alive huxtering here for some time back. The English mail has reached us this month with agreeable promptitude, and we turn to its contents with much relish. The Irish Church, of course, forms the prominent topic of parliamentary discussion. Mr Disraeli opposed the second reading of the Disendow ment Bill in a speech, which, from a hurried perusal, has struck us as commonplace where it is not manifestly sophistical. It seems as if his heart were not in the work. His speech lacks all the fire of a champion, who even with the full knowledge that he must be defeated fights with his whole strength, because he believes his cause to be good and true. There is an air of insincerity about Mr Disraeli’s statements which makes even the strongest of them comparatively weak. He gave it as his opinion that the connection between Church and State was the best guarantee for religious freedom and toleration. We fail to see it. But his argument was that the Roman Catholic and the Dissenter refused the rites of their Churches to those who were not of their communion; whereas the Establishment dared not take any sueli course, but had doors open to all the nation, and no man could shut them. Supposing, that this was granted, does it follow that the Established Church, which is certainly showing its tolerant spirit in a curious way at present, is to lose all its good qualities with its separation from the State ? Mr Disraeli is surely not prepared to say so. The Established Church, whatever it has been in Eugland (and the case of England is not before us) has in Ireland represented penal laws, and penal laws of a very galling description. Again Mr Disraeli has a perfect horror of confiscation. He fears that no property will be safe if the Church in Ireland is diseudowed. If, he said, the State should seize, without a cause for the spoliation, upon the property of a corpora, tion, then it would be confiscation. Perhaps so, but in this case, as we understand it, the State will do nothing of the kind, so that the entire premise falls to the ground. For, first, there is an excellent cause in the fact that the reason for the endowment is found by the experience of three hundred years to have been a mistake ; the Church was established to make Ireland a Protestant country, and it leaves it more Catholic than it found it. Secondly, the property is the State’s, bestowed on a corporation for a purpose, and now reclaimed, as it was claimed, when that corporation was endowed from another Church. And lastly, there is an excellent cause for the disendowment in the fact that it is the nation’s will to deal in that way with what is its own.—We rea. son thus, not in any antagonism to the Irish Church, —it is a matter of perfect indifference what anyone here may think or say on such a subject, besides our own conviction is that disendowment will really strengthen the Church as a power in the country,— but these arguments of Mr Disraeli are of world-wide appplication, and therefore they are deserving of some little attention even here. The result of'the division is what we were led to expect. It proves that no internal dissensions have yet arisen to weaken the Liberal party under the leadership of Mr Gladstone. The Budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer promises some reductions in taxation, and keeps the balance on the right side. But along with vast wealth there comes up great and ever-growing poverty in England, which is already beginning to cast its shadows over coming events.