ch, if it were not a source of profit to
themselves, they would not tolerate for an instant. Instead of
compelling the Dissenters to be married in church, if they had
been really penetrated with any devotional feelings, or by any
considerations of delicacy and charity, they would long ago have
complained of this necessity as a grievance, and besieged the
Legislature with entreaties to relieve the Church from the
scandal, and themselves from so painful and odious a duty. But it
was a badge of inferiority and dependence forced upon the
Dissenters, and a source of profit to themselves; and therefore
they defended and maintained it, and this is what they call
defending the Church; and when the Dissenters themselves pray to
be relieved from the tax and the humiliation, and liberal men
support their prayer, a cry is got up that the Church is in
danger. When the Dissenters, having prayed in vain, grow louder
and bolder in their demands, and the cries of the Churchmen
gradually sink into a whine, which is at last silenced in
submission, the Church really is in danger; and then, when it no
longer can be refused, it becomes perilous to grant the boon which
justice and wisdom have so long required. So it is, and has been
with all obstinate and senseless denials, followed by reluctant
and tardy concessions--with Catholic emancipation, the Test and
Corporation Acts, Parliamentary Reform, and with everything else;
and thus, one of the great difficulties which beset Peel and his
Government is, that they stand in an utterly false position. As a
statesman, it must be mortifying to him to reflect that all the
great measures which his political life has been spent in opposing
have been carried in spite of him, and that whatever danger may
have resulted from this cause is in great measure owing to the
opposition he was enabled, by his great talents and his influence,
or rather the influence of the party which he led, to give to
those measures. He contrived totally to fail in preventing the
success of the measures themselves, but so to mar and delay them
as to obviate the good that might have been produced by timely and
voluntary concessions; and now, coming forward as he says, 'to
resist the pressure from without,' he finds himself compelled to
yield to that pressure; for what, after all, is the language which
he now holds, what are his addresses, his speeches, his promises,
his Church Commission, but a surrender to the spirit and the
pr