ful litigant, the United Free
Church. Why to them? It will never do to answer this question by
saying because it is always desirable to return lost property to its
true owner, since so to reply would be to give the lie direct to a
decision of the Final Court of Appeal on a question of property.

In the eye--I must not write the blind eye--of the law, this
parliamentary gift to the United Free Church is not a _giving back_
but an _original free gift_ from the State by way of endowment to a
particular denomination of Presbyterian dissenters. In theory the
State could have done what it liked with so much of the property of
the Free Church as that body is not big enough to spend upon itself.
It might, for example, have divided it between Presbyterians
generally, or it might have left it to the Free Church to say who was
to be the disponee of its property.

As a matter of hard fact, the State had no choice in the matter. It
could not select, or let the Free Church select, the object of its
bounty. The public sense (a vague term) demanded that the United Free
Church should not be required to abide by the decision of the House of
Lords, but should have given to it whatever property could, under any
decent pretext of public policy and by Act of Parliament, be taken
away from the Free Church. If the pretext of the inability of the
Free Church to administer its own estate had not been forthcoming,
some other pretext must and would have been discovered.

Having regard, then, to 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, how ought one to
feel towards the decision of the House of Lords in the Scottish
Churches case? In public life you can usually huddle up anything, if
only all parties, for reasons, however diverse, of their own, are
agreed upon what is to be done. Like many another Act of Parliament, 5
Edward VII., chapter 12, was bought with a sum of money. Nobody, not
even Lord Robertson, really wanted to debate or discuss it, least of
all to discover the philosophy of it. But in an essay you can huddle
up nothing. At all hazards, you must go on. This is why so many
essayists have been burnt alive.

_First_.--Was the decision wrong? 'Yes' or 'No.' If it was right--

_Second_.--Was the law, in pursuance of which the decision was given,
so manifestly unjust as to demand, not the alteration of the law for
the future, but the passage through Parliament, _ex post facto_, of an
Act to prevent the decision from taking effect between the parties
a