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some of his own flock, and a few more, were sincere believers in the gift of tongues; that of those who sat in that church in the gray of the wintry morning, listening for the shrill, unearthly sound from the lips of the "gifted," many believed that the end of the world was at hand; as, indeed, did some who were not usually superstitious. But Irving felt himself, for the last seven years of his life, neglected; and to him to be neglected was to be forlorn. He could not acquiesce; and he wore himself out in the effort to keep up incessant excitement in himself and his sect, and to draw in towards himself notice, wonder, and sympathy from without. On the 2d of May, 1832, he was excluded from the Scotch Church, on the ground of heresy. It was after this that he betook himself to the little chapel in Newman Street, where the worst exhibitions of eccentricity took place. Through all these, he was believed by Dr. Chalmers "to be a man of deep and devoted piety." We have seen what he was as "the blooming young man. "The last time I saw him,” says the same recorder, "was three months ago, in London. Friendliness still beamed in his eyes, but now from amidst unquiet fire; his face was flaccid, wasted, unsound; hoary as with extreme age; he was trembling over the brink of the grave." His last words were: "In life and death I am the His death. Lord's." He was in his forty-third year. The body of his followers did not immediately melt away, and the name of an Irvingite may still be heard here and there; but there was no distinctive doctrine to hold them together, scarcely a bond but that of belief in Irving and the tongues; and the sect stands on record chiefly as an eccentricity, — as a rebuke of the intemperance of the time.

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In such a period, it is not wonderful, that some, sickened with the apparent fruitlessness of the religion of unity, peace, and charity, should turn towards a profession which combined social with religious objects, and should become eccentric in their turn. The system called St. Simonism was preached in St. Simonism. England in 1832, offering a new law of love and human equality, in the place of that Christian one which it assumed, from existing appearances, to have failed. Attempts were made to laugh it down; but the strife of the Christian world gave it a weight which could not be got rid of by mere scorn; and many listened, with new hope and a long-forgotten cheer, to the preaching of the golden rule of this new faith, that every one should be employed according to his capacity, and rewarded according to his works. Society was to be ruled by persons of genius and virtue; and, under them, all were to have a fair start, to be allowed the free use of their best

1 Carlyle's Miscellanies, iv. p. 83.

powers, and reap their natural reward. The spiritual, intellectual, and industrial concerns of each and all were to be combined in a closer union than ever before; and thus work was to be worship, and affectionate co-operation was to be piety. Amidst much that interested some of the best hearts, and engaged some of the noblest minds of the time, there were doctrines and provisions that would not stand a close examination. While it was supposed that the rulers would be persons of virtue and genius, the proposed organization offered a scheme of a hierarchy which might easily, and would probably, become an intolerable despotism, a locked framework, in which individual freedom might become impossible. Still, from the nobleness of its social rule, from its union of religious appeal with social sympathy, and from the humbling and embarrassing condition of the religious world at the time, the disciples of St. Simon were not few in England, and their quality was of no mean order. At meetings in London, the French chief of the St. Simonian Church in London presided, in the costume of the sect, and told, by the lips of English friends, the story of its propagandism; for its missionaries were abroad, from Constantinople to the Mississippi.1 Among the speakers stands the name of the virtuous Rowland Detrosier, the chairman of the Manchester Political Union, an inquirer and assistant, not an advocate; and it may be noted among the signs of the times, that a system of communism, elevated, just, and spiritualized enough to engage the inquiring sympathy of men of his class, should then, amidst the haughty claims of the churches, obtain any footing in England. Rowland Detrosier died the next year, directing his remains to be devoted to the purposes of science;" and St. Simonism did not long survive him. There may be wardrobes where the dress of the sect is laid by in lavender, and now and then wistfully looked at; there may be times when families and friends revert to the golden rule of labor and its recompense, and speculate on when it will come into practice; but St. Simonism has long taken its place among the religious and social eccentricities of its day.

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The most evident practical result of the religious conflicts of the period was the quickening of the purposes of the Proposed government to get out the ecclesiastical commission ecclesiastical which was to inquire into the condition of the Church commission. in England, and redistribute its temporalities. This commission was set to work in 1835. As for the rest, it may be hoped that a multitude remembered at the time, as we do now, that noise and confusion are in their very nature superficial and fitful. Turbulence is on the surface; calmness is within the depths. Christianity in England was far from being like what this

1 Annual Register, 1833, Chron. p. 153.

narrative of critical phenomena, taken alone, would represent it. For every conspicuous personage who was announcing or denouncing, or remonstrating or propounding, or anathematizing or demanding, there were hundreds or thousands of quiet Christians at home, humbly living by their light, and religiously following peace with all men. Because the faith was, visibly, before the eyes of all men, corrupted in high places, it was not necessarily spoiled to the multitude who dwelt below. To the thousands who sat on the grass in the wilderness of life, Christ might be breaking bread, while his handful of preachers and witnesses were contending which should be greatest. If it was scarcely possible at the moment for all to help visiting some of the pain and shame of such contentions on the religion which was their ostensible theme, it would be folly and ignorance for us to do so now. The controversialists and brawlers of the time were not the British nation; and those to whom the Christian religion was dear as glad tidings of peace and good-will, lived in that sunshine, and only wondered at the far-off blackness and tempest which did not overcloud their sky.

CHAPTER XI.

Finance.

If the unreasonable expectations of the country were a hardship upon the Whig Administration generally, there was no particular in which such expectations were more perplexing than that of finance. The nation ought to have known that this was a point on which the Whigs must be weak in practice, if not in conception. There is, perhaps, no office of the government so difficult to fill well as that of Chancellor of the Exchequer; and certainly none in regard to which it is so impossible to anticipate correctly whether any man will fill it well or ill. He may have gone through all the preparatory. offices, and be deservedly looked up to for all the qualities which all these offices can elicit; and yet, when he takes the one other step, he, for his part, may find himself in a wholly new world, for which his previous training may have done little to fit him, and everybody else may find him a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer. The only certain point about the matter is, that a man who has had no training, and who is moreover a novice in executing politics altogether, cannot fill the office well. This was Lord Althorp's constant plea, — urged even pathetically. He was wont to say that he was forced into the office against his will; he was wont to solicit information, as an alms, on every hand; he entreated every one to observe the tentative character of his proposals, and to believe that he was quite ready to give them up; and he conveyed the impression, every time he opened any financial subject, that he supposed the chances to be against his information being correct, and his plans feasible. Yet, with all this candor on his part, the people were slow to learn the incapacity of Whig administrations in matters of finance. When the sayings of the Whigs in opposition were remembered, their complaints of heavy taxation, their demands of reform, their criticisms on financial measures, the multitude, including whole classes who ought to have known better, looked for a large immediate reduction of taxation, a prodigious lightening of the national burdens, as soon as a liberal Minister should take the national accounts in hand. At the end of their first term, when Lord Grey went out of office, there was some

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thing ludicrous as well as humbling in looking back to see what had been done. The ministers and their friends complained of factious opposition in Parliament, and of faithlessness and impertinence in their underlings: complaints which were a mere confession of weakness; for the Duke of Wellington's government had practically shown their willingness to reduce the national burdens; and there was no party, in or out of Parliament, which was not ready for as much financial reform as the Whig government was able to conceive of: and, as for the underlings, this was a sort of business which it was not in their power to obstruct, if it had been pursued on any broad and clear principle, such as Parliament and the country were able to understand and to sustain. But there was no principle in the case, nor the remotest conception of any; while there was a wholly gratuitous violation of principles, as Lord Althorp himself avowed, on the very first occasion of producing his budget.

At the outset of his explanations, the Chancellor of the Exchequer declared that the government adopted the principles and views of Sir Henry Parnell, in his work on financial reform; a declaration which the author, who was present, would naturally wish unmade, when he heard, year after year, Lord Althorp's recommendations of his budget.

The subject was opened on the 11th of February, 1831, when it was yet too early for much more than a declaration First budget. of intentions. Lord Althorp referred to the national expectation of great reductions of abuse and expense, and said that the government proposed to reduce eventually 210 places under its own appointment.1 The reduction would for some time be merely of patronage, and not of expense; and of the 210, 71 were officers of the dock-yards, 60 in the Irish post-office, and 46 receivers of taxes in England, whose salaries could not be large; so that the benefit was more in the example than in any immediate relief. The surplus this year would be small, about 300,000l.; an amount which some of the friends of government considered too small to justify any reduction of taxation; but Lord Althorp seems to have considered himself bound to make some immediate changes. He seems to have been unaware, that a mere transposition, such as he proposed, can give little relief, while any disarrangement is in itself an evil requiring relief to compensate for it; and that a partial reduction of several taxes tells far less than a total abolition of a few, because the expenses of collection and management remain, instead of being swept away. In both these points, his scheme was faulty; and Sir Henry Parnell presently took occasion to deny its being formed on his principles. He approved of taking off taxes; but 1 Hansard, ii. p. 404.

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