Amidst the vehement assertion of Protestantism, its famous right of private judgment was practically as much denied, with impunity and applause, as it could have been under popish ascendency. The fact of the illegality of bequests for the encouragement of popery was brought prominently before the public in 1828, by a claim of the crown against the Bishop of Blois. The Bishop of Blois had put out a book, when resident in England at the beginning of the century, which he believed might serve the cause of religion permanently; and he invested a large sum of money, appointing trustees, who were to pay him the dividends during his life, and apply them after his death to the propagation of his work. It seems as if the bishop had discovered that his bequest was likely to be set aside as illegal, at the present time of eager controversy; for he petitioned in the Rolls Court that his bequest might be declared illegal and void, and that the stock might be retransferred to himself. But here the crown interposed, demanding the stock in question, on the ground that the money, having been applied to a superstitious use, was forfeited to the crown-any proviso of the testator in prevention of such forfeiture being an evasion of the law. The master of the rolls, however, decreed justice to the bishop, giving him back his money, while deciding that he must not put it, in the way of bequest, to such a superstitious use' as spreading a book in advocacy of the faith that he held. The whole transaction looks like one not belonging to our own century. The laws were ancient; but the use made of them by the crown, on the plea of the contrariety of the book to the policy of the country, is disheartening to look back upon as an incident of our own time. One small advance in religious liberty was, however, made in 1828, when the question was raised whether baptised Jews should be permitted to purchase the freedom of the city of London. In 1785, the Court of Aldermen had made a standing order that this privilege should not be granted to baptised Jews; and an application now, nearly half a century afterwards, by the brothers Saul, who had been always brought up in the Christian faith, though. children of Jewish parents, was thought a good opportunity for one more struggle for religious liberty, after the failure of many in the intervening time. Much discussion having been gone through, the old-fashioned order was rescinded, and the petitioners were directed to be sworn in. Some extraordinary and painful scenes which took place during this period at the marriages of Protestant Dissenters, foreshewed the near approach of that relief to conscience which was given by the Dissenters' Marriage Bill. One wedding-party after another delivered protests to the officiating clergymen, and declared to persons present their dissent from the language of the service, and that it was under compulsion only that they uttered and received it. One clergyman after another was perplexed what to do; and there was no agreement among them what they should do. One refused to proceed, but was compelled to give way; and another took no notice. One rejected, and another received, a written protest. CHAP. XI.] CALCUTTA PRESS-PROTECTOR OF SLAVES-SPRING-GUNS. Some shortened the service as much as possible; and others inflicted every word with unusual emphasis. Such scandals could not be permitted to endure; and more and more persons saw that the Dissenters must be relieved and silenced by being made free to marry according to their consciences. Two or three awkward questions arose at this time in our dependencies on questions of liberty, which were in each case decided in favour of the subject against the government. The East India Company were so rash as to attempt at the same time to coerce the press at Calcutta, and to impose a stamp-duty of doubtful legality, when the period of the expiration of their charter was drawing on. The council at Calcutta prohibited the publication of any newspaper or other periodical work by any person not licensed by the governor and council; and the licences given were revocable at pleasure. Englishmen were not likely to submit to such restrictions on the liberty of printing, at any distance from home; and the men of Calcutta, after the regulation had been registered there, looked anxiously to see what would be done at Bombay. Two of the three judges of the Supreme Court of Bombay refused to register the regulation, as contrary to law; and the Calcutta authorities were therefore ignominiously defeated. And so they were, by the ordinary magistrates, about the same time, on another occasion of equal importance. The government wished to pay the expenses of the Burmese war by a new stamp-duty, which was pronounced by the whole population of Calcutta unjust and oppressive, and even illegal. All argument of counsel, all petition and remonstrance being found unavailing, the inhabitants resolved to petition parliament. They obtained permission from the sheriff, as usual, to meet for the purpose; but the sheriff was visited with a severe reprimand from the council, and the meeting forbidden. The next step was to hold a meeting as an aggregate of individuals, instead of in any corporate capacity; and public notice of this intention was given. The council, while professing to have no objection' to the inhabitants petitioning parliament-a thing to which they had no more right to object than to the inhabitants getting their dinners-sent an order to the stipendiary magistrates to prevent the meeting, and, if necessary, to disperse the assemblage by force. The magistrates consulted counsel, and finding that each of them would be liable to an action for trespass for disturbing a lawful meeting, they declined acting, and the meeting took place. Here was foreshewn some of the future under the new charter. In 1827, we first hear of the new functionary, the protector of slaves, and of proceedings instituted by him. An order in council was promulgated in Demerara, in January 1826, which had, after vehement disputes, been previously promulgated in Trinidad, by which, among other provisions, a protector of slaves was ordained to be appointed, who was to be cognizant of all proceedings against slaves, and against persons declared to have injured slaves; and to see that justice was done to the negroes. He was to assert and maintain the right of the slaves to marriage and to property; and to 309 look to their claim to emancipation. In 1827, the first claim of a slave to purchase liberty was made in Berbice; and the protector carried the cause. The opposition set up by the owner of the woman whose case was in question, exhibited the vicious assurance which was an understood characteristic of West India slaveholders. The plea-there, in that spot where marriage among slaves had been a thing unheard of, and where purity of morals was, naturally, equally unknown-was, that the money with which the slave desired to purchase her freedom had been obtained by immoral coursesthe woman having had a mulatto child. The plea, odious from its hypocrisy, was rejected on a ground of law. The protector claimed for himself, as the legal officer concerned, the power of determining whether the money had been honestly earned. He had ascertained that it had been honestly earned. The result was, that the woman and her child were declared free on payment of a sum fixed by appraisers. Thus, not only was a great inroad made on the despotism of slavery, but a prophecy was given forth to the whole world, that greater changes were impending. The wedge was in, and the split must widen. In the same year, a treaty for the abolition of the slave-trade was made with Brazil, the emperor engaging that the traffic should cease in three years from the ratification of the treaty; after which the act of trading in slaves was to be considered as piracy. A proceeding, big with prophecy of the fate of all remnants of feudality, is noticeable in the Scotch High Court of Justiciary in 1827. A gamekeeper of Lord Home being indicted for murder for having set and charged a spring-gun, by which a man was shot dead, the counsel of the accused began his defence, by asserting the legality of the act of setting and charging a spring-gun. Certain English judges-Abbott, Bailey, and Best-had delivered an opinion, a few years before, that the act was lawful, and morally defensible. As the practice was abolished in this same year, 1827, we may spare ourselves the pain and shame of citing the arguments-the prejudices under the name of opinions-which English judges could bring themselves to deliver at so late a date as the nineteenth century. The men and their judgments are gibbeted in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. The Scotch judges now, after hearing full and fair argument, decided against the legality, as well as the morality, of the act; and declared the accused liable to prosecution for wilful murder. 'The general doctrine of the law, even in England,' their lordships agreed,' was, that it will not suffer, with impunity, any crime to be prevented by death; unless the same, if committed, could be punished with death. Poaching would not be so punished. Spring-guns were secret, deadly, and, at the same time, dastardly engines. . . It was an aggravation that they did in a secret, clandestine, and dastardly manner, what durst not be openly attempted.' To ordinary persons, the case always seemed clear enough. The man who set a spring-gun either meant to shoot somebody, or he did not. If he did, he was guilty of murderous intent. If not, why set the gun at all? Much was said, in the days of spring-guns, and very properly, of the number of persons, not poachers, who were shot; of the constant danger to children, old people gathering sticks, or, as Sydney Smith has it, 'some unhappy botanist or lover.' But the one point of murderous intent, if any intent at all, is enough-enough to stamp our age with barbarism to the end of time. 'If a man is not mad,' says Sydney Smith, 'he must be presumed to foresee common consequences; if he puts a bullet into a spring-gun, he must be supposed to foresee that it will kill any poacher who touches the wire; and to that consequence he must stand. We do not suppose all preservers of game to be so bloodily inclined, that they would prefer the death of a poacher to his staying away. Their object is to preserve game; they have no objection to preserve the lives of their fellow-creatures also, if both can exist at the same time; if not, the least worthy of God's creatures must fall-the rustic without a soul; not the Christian partridge-not the immortal pheasant-not the rational woodcock, or the accountable hare.' If it appears an idle task to be presenting matters so plain, even after it had long been decided that it was unlawful to kill a dog which is pursuing game in a manor-Lord Ellenborough declaring that 'to decide the contrary would outrage reason and sense'-we can only say that we are presenting a picture of the times under our hand; times when such a remonstrance as this was needed in England. There is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death-machinations against human life under every green tree-traps and guns in every dusky dell and bosky bourn; the feræ naturâ—the lords of manors, eyeing their peasantry as so many butts and marks, and panting to hear the click of the trap, and to see the flash of the gun. How any human being, educated in liberal knowledge and Christian feeling, can doom to certain destruction a poor wretch tempted by the sight of animals that naturally appear to him to belong to one person as well as another, we are at a loss to conceive. We cannot imagine how he could live in the same village, and see the widow and orphans of the man whose blood he had shed for such a trifle. We consider a person who could do this to be deficient in the very elements of morals-to want that sacred regard to human life which is one of the corner-stones of civil society. If he sacrifices the life of man for his mere pleasures, he would do so, if he dared, for the lowest and least of his passions. He may be defended, perhaps, by the abominable injustice of the game-laws, though we think and hope he is not. But there rests upon his head, and there is marked in his account, the deep and indelible sin of blood-guiltiness.' This is the deep and indelible sin which is marked in the account of the nation, under the head of its game-defences, till, as before recorded, Lord Suffield obtained a parliamentary prohibition of man-traps and spring-guns, in the session of 1827. As a winding-up of the improvements of this period, and in rank the very first, we must mention the systematic introduction of cheap literature, for the benefit of the working-classes. A series or two of cheap works had been issued before, chiefly of entertaining books meant for the middle classes; and there was never any deficiency of infamous half-penny trash, hawked about the streets, and sold in low shops. The time had now arrived for something very different from either of these kinds of literature to appear. Immediately upon the establishment of mechanics' institutes, it was found that the deficiency of attainable books in science and literature was a serious misfortune. Men can learn little from lectures, unless they can follow up their subjects by reading; and hearty efforts were made to collect libraries, and form reading societies. These efforts convinced all concerned in them of two facts-that books were dreadfully expensive, and that many that were eminently wanted did not exist; elementary treatises on scientific subjects, by which students might be introduced into the comprehension of a new subject by a more rational method than through a wilderness of technical terms. The friends of popular enlightenment began, upon this, to consider whether the want could not be supplied; whether works truly elementary could not be issued so cheaply as to meet the needs of the members of mechanics' institutes; and in April 1825, Mr Brougham, Lord John Russell, Dr Lushington, Mr Crawford, William Allen, and others, formed themselves into a society, under the name of the 'Society for Promoting the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.' Large subscriptions were offered, and all looked promising, when the commercial convulsions of the time stopped the progress of the work; and little more was done than in the way of preparation, till November 1826, when Mr Brougham assembled the friends of the enterprise, and the organisation of the society was completed. The issue of works began on the 1st of March 1827, in the form of pamphlets of unexampled cheapness; and the publication was continued fortnightly for a long period. The subscriptions declined when the society was once fairly in operation; and after the first year, it was mainly supported by the sale of its works. The society was incorporated by a charter in 1832, and before the virtual expiration of its efforts and powers, it had done great service to the existing generation; though not precisely-as happens with almost all social enterprises-to the extent, or in the mode, contemplated. The profession-and, no doubt, the intention-was to teach the elements of all the sciences, moral as well as natural; politics, jurisprudence, and universal history as well as physical science. As Mr Brougham said, in his Treatise on Popular Education: Why should not political, as well as all other works, be published in a cheap form, and in numbers?' and he proceeded to assign good reasons why they should; but it was not done. In the laudatory and exulting notice of the operations of the society, some months after its works were spread over the kingdom, the Edinburgh Review slides in a hint: We trust, however, that the appearance of the ethical and political treatises will not be unnecessarily delayed.' They never came ; and the consequences to the society and to the public were very serious-too serious to be passed over without grave mention. Some of the leading CHAP. XI.] SOCIETY FOR DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE. promoters of this society became the rulers of the country a short time afterwards. Those whom they had invited to be their readers were aware of their own lack of political and historical knowledge; and that this knowledge was, at that period of our 311 history, of the highest importance to them. They desired it, and asked for it; it was promised to them, but not given. It was promised by men about to enter into office; and when they were in office, it was not given. While a vast change was taking place in the constitution, and a multitude of men were eager to learn the history and bearings of this change, they were put off with treatises on dynamics and the polarisation of light. Explanations of the fact might, perhaps, be easily given; but the fact was injurious to the spread of the knowledge which the society was willing to afford. The calm observers of the time presently saw that the position of the Whig ministry, after the passage of the Reform Bill, was seriously affected by the popular persuasion, whether right or wrong, that the Whigs desired to preclude them from political knowledge. So much for what this important association failed to effect. It is very animating to observe and note what it achieved. The actual distribution of tens of thousands of copies of works of a high quality, is by no means the leading fact of this case-great as it is. A more important one is the raising of the popular standard of requirement in literature and science. It is no small matter to have issued the Penny Magazine at the rate of nearly 200,000 copies per week; but it is a greater to have driven out of the market the vast amount of trash to which the Penny Magazine was preferred. The society's Almanac is a great boon; but a part of the good is, that it excluded the absurd old-world almanacs, and immediately caused an improvement in those issued by the Stationers' Company. Other cyclopædias and family libraries followed upon the different series issued by the society; and the Christian Knowledge Committee set up their Saturday Magazine, after the model of the Penny Magazine. There being, as provided by the charter, no division of profits in the society, the gains from their more popular works went to set up works of great value which could not possibly pay; such as their Statistics of the British Empire. A reduction in the cost of maps generally followed the appearance of the society's Atlas. When to these great benefits we add the consideration of the value of the works published-the Penny Cyclopædia, the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, the Journal of Education, the Gallery of Portraits, the geographical and astronomical maps, with many a series besides-we shall see that the institution of this and the tidings of her death were chiefly interesting the principle and precedent of cheap publication | Würtemberg, she had little connection with England; Within two years after the death of the Duke of York, happened that of his sister, the Queen of Würtemberg, the eldest daughter of George III. After she became the second wife of the King of In January 1830, a death happened in the political world, which occasioned extraordinary relief to all dull, or indolent, or in any way incapable or unworthy members of the House of Commons. Mr Tierney, the castigator-the unremitting satirist of incapacity and unworthiness in any sort of functionary-died suddenly on the 25th of that month. He had long been known to be suffering under an organic disease of the heart; and he was found, dead and cold, sitting in his chair in the attitude of sleep. The most notorious single event in the political life of Mr Tierney, was his duel with Mr Pitt in 1798, the fault of which appears to have lain wholly with Mr Pitt, who charged Mr Tierney with a wish to impede the service of the country,' and refused to retract, when time and opportunity were afforded. |