impossibility of finding the requisite funds to support the institutions
necessary to grapple with the evils, on a scale at all commensurate to
their magnitude? The Established Church could not spread for want of funds
to erect and endow churches; meanwhile the population in the manufacturing
districts and great towns was rapidly increasing, and, in consequence,
part of the people took refuge in the divisions of dissent, part in the
oblivion of practical heathenism. Thence the multiplication of sects, the
spread of pauperism, the growth of civilized heathenism in the state. The
poor-laws dated from the dissolution of the monasteries; the forty-second
of Elizabeth stands a durable record of the real origin of that burdensome
tax. It was the appropriation of the funds of religion and charity to the
gratification of secular rapacity, which has been the cause of the chief
religious and social evils under which Great Britain has ever since
laboured; and it is it which still presents an invincible obstacle to all
the efforts which are made for their removal.

But the confiscation of the church lands and tithes to the use of the
temporal nobility was not a necessary part of the Reformation, any more
than the confiscation of the estates of the church and the emigrants was a
necessary step in the progress of freedom in France. In both cases, the
iniquitous spoliation was the result of human wickedness mingling with the
current, and taking advantage of the generous effort for religious or
civil emancipation on the part of the many, to render it the means of
achieving individual robbery for behoof of the few. The Reformation might
have been established in the utmost purity in Great Britain, without one
shilling being diverted from the service of the church, or the maintenance
of the poor, and with the preservation of a fund large enough to have
provided for the permanent support of the unfortunate, and the progressive
extension of the Established Church, in proportion to the increase and
wants of the inhabitants. In like manner, the Revolution might have been
conducted to a successful and probably bloodless termination in France,
without the unutterable present misery and hopeless ultimate prostration
of religion and freedom, which resulted from the confiscations of the
Convention, and the division of all the land in the kingdom among the
peasants. In neither case are we justified in stigmatizing the cause of
freedom, on account of