Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/149

 1899.] The Tithe Bent Charge Bill. [141

that the maintenance of the poor was as strongly attached to the payment of tithe as the title to receive tithe. The rates were not levied on the clergyman in respect of his tithe, but on the tithe itself, and it was impossible to allege that there was any personal grievance. Colonel Milward {Warwick, S.W.), a Conservative landlord, ridiculed the argument that the poor were being made to contribute to the relief of rich clergymen. The fact was no poor person would under any circumstances contribute a farthing for the relief of the clergy. The whole provision was to come from the probate duty grant, to which, of course, the poor contributed nothing ; and, more than that, it was to come from the increment of the grant, so that it was money that never had gone to the poor. Mr. Birrell (Fife, W.) supposed that the House must soon part with the bill, which would seek its fortunes elsewhere. To any one who loved irony, or delighted in an ironical situation more than in justice, there was something particularly charming in the spectacle of a council of lay impropriators — of men holding the great tithe once devoted to religious and charitable purposes — meeting in solemn conclave to consider how best to relieve the necessities of the owners of the small tithe, still devoted to religious pur- poses, at the expense of the public exchequer. However, the only point which he was really desirous of making was that, in his opinion, it was a public scandal and a constitutional wrong that a measure of this sort should be put through the House of Commons from beginning to end sub sUentio as far as the Chancellor of the Exchequer was concerned. Major Easch (Essex, S.E.), a Conservative representing probably the most tithe-stricken county in the kingdom, failed to understand why the Government should have introduced this bill within what had been called "the zone of a general election/' when they could easily have dealt with the matter three years ago in con- nection with the Agricultural Eating BilL As things were, he should say from his knowledge of public feeling with regard to the bill that if an election were fought on the question in his part of the country a good many of his friends and himself would be "food for powder." At any rate he had done his duty; he had supported the Government in every division, because he believed in the principle of the measure, whatever he might think of its timeliness. Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman imagined that the policy embodied in the bill was one of giving pecuniary relief to certain favoured classes politically useful to the party in power, who received the subsidy and were expected to be grateful for it, while the funds to enable this to be done were provided in such a manner as to ensure that those out of whose pockets it was to come should be as little as possible conscious of the contribution they were making. As to -the operation of the bill, the poor vicar or curate labouring in the shims of great cities would get nothing, while the poorer country clergy would get hardly anything. Substantial relief was re-