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The other three cases came directly under the cognizance of those administering the law in relation to paupers : in all three cases there is death , directly ascribable to the total want of protection ; scrutiny into the causes of death is impeded by difficulty ; and in one case , that of the pauper lunatic , it appears that a fellow-creature , in the most helpless of all conditions , is consigned to a custody over which the supervision is so imperfect , that possibly the real causes of a violent death may never be ascertained . Hitherto , we say , the Poor Laws have been laws , not for the poor , but against them .
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SCIENTIFIC CENSORSHIP OF THE ENGLISH PRESS . In a late number of Household Words the following passages occur : — ¦ " Perhaps there is no better guarantee of peace and progress to thiB country than the freedom of the press . Opinion is King of England , and Victoria is Queen . Every phase of opinion speaks through some book or journal , and is repeated widely in proportion to the hold it takes upon the public . Government is the representative of whatever opinion prevails ; if it prove too perverse it falls , —Ministers change without a revolution . Then too , when every man ' s tongue is free , we are accustomed to hear all manner of wild suggestions . Fresh paint does not soon dazzle us ; we are like children lavishly supplied with toys , who receive new gifts tranquilly enough . " Is King Opinion an honest ruler ? Yes . For the English people speak unreservedly their thoughts on public matters , and are open , though it be with honourable slowness , to all new convictions . We must add , however , as a drawback , that the uneducated class amounts to a distressing number in this country in proportion to the whole . " Since the press in England has been actually free ( and many of us can remember when it was not so ) , one fact has become every year more prominent amidst the din of parties . We have begun to see that , however much we are convinced of any one thing , those are not all and always fools who think the opposite . We get a strong suspicion of our individual fallibility ; new facts come out , and display old opinions in an unexpected light . We respect our opponents , when they deserve respect , and on the whole are teachable . " There are countries where worship is paid to demons to allay their malice , while the gods are believed in but not adored . Something like this is the conduct of Charles Dickens , who lauds the freedom of the press as one of our institutions while his own newspaper is threatened with prosecution by the Government , but who has not subscribed a penny or written a line to help those who are doing their best to procure the repeal of a law which makes him a debtor to the Queen to the amount of many thousand pounds .
The English press is not free : it never has been free , and it never will or can be free if those who wear the chain hug it us an ornament , and boast of their liberty . The English press is subject to a censorship less visible but not less efficient than any that exists on the Continent . Instead of openly curbing the exuberance of the writer it lays a tax which puts down the poor reader , and thus constructed on scientific principles it performs the work of hindrance , warily , unobtrusively , and thoroughly , not strangling the dangerous thought of the patriot in the birth , but hindering its very conception by making its future rearing utterly impossible , and all without involving the government in the obloquy of individual persecution .
Besides the duties on paper and advertisements , which , are of themselves nearly enough to make cheap newspapers impossible , we have a system of stamping newspapers bo strict in theory and so plastic in practice that the Board of Inland Revenue can foster or prohibit a great portion of the press as they please . The Newspaper Act declares that every paper " containing public news , intelligence , or occurrences printed in any part of the United Kingtoin to be made public" shall be deemed a newspaper , and be liable to stamp duty . No time is specified at which occurrences cease to be news ; we have no doubt that the almanacs for 1850 which contained an account of the death of
Queen Adelaide are illegal , nor would we predicate the contrary of those which make mention of that of Queen Anne . Nor in this ull ; any periodical published oftener than once in twenty-six days is a newspaper if it contain comments on news . Scarcely any periodical exists which does not come under one of these two bends , and a great many pamphlets which are not periodicals come under the first . In other words , it is almost impossible to publish either pamphlet or periodical without infringing the law . It in a custom lately introduced that , when a law is very tyrannical or impolitic , none but the ( jovermnent are allowed to enforce it ; this is the case with the
Newspaper Act ; informers may write letters to the Board of Inland Revenue , but the Board alone can institute a prosecution—and this they may quash whenever they please ; in short , they have the power to permit the law to be broken with impunity . And they do permit the law to be broken whenever they like ; whom they will they chasten , and whom they will they let go . For instance , last March they interfered with the Norwich Reformer , a monthly publication , for containing a little column of news , called " Record of Progress ; " but to this day they permit the Freeholder to fill all its columns
with similar matter . They threatened to fine the Wakefield Examiner £ 40 , 000 for publishing slips , but they allow London papers to do the same without interference . The law gives the privilege of free postage to stamped newspapers , not to publications ; but the Board allows fifty-one publications to be registered as newspapers for the sake of the postage , and to circulate their town edition unstamped , under pretence that they are not newspapers at all ; so that the Post-office revenue is defrauded , and the regular newspapers ( which are forced to stamp every copy ) are exposed to unfair
competition . The principle on which the Board act , so far as they act on any principle at all , is to discourage cheap and good works containing politics ; provided this subject is omitted , stamps are supplied for postage ad libitum ; nay , considerable laxity is shown even under the head of politics , but the result is worse than it would be if the law were strictly enforced . The will of the Board is felt to be so precarious , that no one dares to embark a large capital in an unstamped political paper ; the consequence is that the few cheap political publications of the day are not good , for they cannot afford to pay their contributors . The people are fed on indifferent political food , or , which Government likes still better , on trash which is not political
at all . Better far submit to an openly avowed censorship of the press than to this ; better that the Home Secretary should appoint clerks to review every thing before publication , than that this irresponsible board of obscure individuals should have power to crush thought even before it is conceived . Better the scissors and the blank space in the newspaper than this vacancy of heart and soul which is found when the newspaper is ( in certain quarters ) not allowed to exist at all . And on what pretext is this scientific censorship defended ? Does any Cabinet Minister claim it as one of our time-honoured
institutions , under which we have become the " pride of the world and the envy of surrounding nations ?" No ; the Government admit its uselessness , and will , doubtless , soon admit its iniquity ; but they want the £ 150 , 000 which it yields to the revenue , and the Liberal (?) members of the House of Commons support them in continuing it . Twenty-seven members who voted for Mr . Hume ' s motion voted against Mr . Gibson ' s motion against the Taxes on Knowledge , and forty-eight more absented
themselves from the division : these are the real friends of the censorship of the press . Henry Aglionby and Joseph Brotherton , and Mr . Henry , chairman of the Lancashire Education Society , are the true supporters of the censorship of the press . No wonder , then , that it is thus upheld by the Premier . As a specimen of the conduct of the Board of Inland Revenue , we refer our readers to the correspondence between the Newspaper Stamp Abolition Committee and the Postmaster-General , which will be found in another part of our paper .
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MOVEMENT OF SECTS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND . Doom bangs over the Church of England , but she has her choice of awaiting the slow decay of passive degeneracy , or breaking up by internal discord . If she venture upon action , indeed , the day for the slow and passive process seems to have passed : by flinging the whole State into the Anti-Catholic agitation , Lord John Russell has forced the Church of England into action ; and no sooner does she move than her real condition is disclosed
—she is not one homogeneous body , whole and sound , but a mere congeries of separate sects , awaiting disruption . For once at least the Times is out of date in mooting the antiquarian questions , why the statue of J upiter becomes that of St . Peter ' whether the Pope ' s chair belonged to Mahomet and whether St . Peter was ever at Rome . The * Pope occupies the chair , he fulminates bulls with " the Heal of the fisherman , " and Jupiter is kissed as St . Peter : tliene are " great facts , " and no antiquarian lore can shake them . The Pope will not
be unseated by so much rationalizing as the Church of England can venture upon . And if you question the chair and keys for the Pope ,, how stave off the ugly question—Upon what ground stands the Church of England , which recognizes " reason " and private judgment ? Put a parallel question to the Sacred Congregation at Rome , respecting the tenure of the Catholic Church , and the answer will be firm , unflinching , absolute . Put the same question to the Church of England , and you will have
no answer , unless it be an evasive compromise between reason and dogma , advanced on no corporate authority ; or a Babel uproar of divided claims and divers creeds . There is no central authorityno body that can speak for the Church of England The Primate will speak only in replies that may cover every difference and fit every event . It is the Judicial Committee of Privy Council which professes to expound the tenets of the Church . Meanwhile the separate sects of which the Church consists have different objects , different councils .
The Bishop of Gloucester has just published a letter to his clergy , advising them to meet Romish proselytism by counter-proselytism among the " dense masses left destitute of adequate spiritual instruction from our present parochial system . " Thus the Bishop confesses that the Church of England is dead to its true function ! He announces a revival—a committee " to collect and employ a Reformation Memorial Fund , " applicable to church extension . Very good ; let the earnest
members of the Church give full scope to their conviction , with all the zeal that is in them ; honesty should oblige them to do so . But practical politicians will remember that if the Church of England enters into competition with other sects for possession of thought and soul , it should be treated merely as a sect , having equal freedom , but not more than equal freedom with every other sect . If it backs its mission with State authority , it becomes no better than an active English Popery , against which all defenders of freedom will unite .
Dr . Biber convenes a great High Church meeting , to ask a Royal intervention for restoring convocation ; the speakers describe the Church to be in the most deplorable condition—heaving with internal discord , embittered by internal calumnies , helpless for want of that synodal government which is possessed by the Romanist , the Scottish Presbyterian , the Wesleyan—in short , by every church except the Church of England . It is perfectly fair that the Church should have its synod : we cannot hear what it has to say , we cannot
perceive the good which is in it , unless it have the means of corporate utterance . At the same time , it is plain that any definite utterance by any one of the sects now comprised within the Church of England , would jar so harshly against the others , that they would be shaken off ; and even if the Church were to make good its claim to Convocation , the whole country would enforce the promise of Dr . Biber , that it should have no secular power —no power beyond its own limits , none , in fact , but a sectarian power .
In the congregation of St . Saviour ' s , at Leeds , we see the representatives of a th ^ rd sect within the Church . Under the " pressure from without " of the anti-Catholic agitation , the Bishop of Ripon has recently instituted an inquisition into the service of St . Saviour ' s and the ministrations of its vicar , the Reverend Thomas Minster . Six hundred and sixty of his parishioners have presented to him an address complaining of this treatment , and most particularly of being debarred from their " baptismal birthright , " the use of confession . They say a " life of confession once begun is too precious to be broken off without the greatest injury , perchance , alas , even to the ultimate ruin of the soul . " Their pastor entirely sympathizes with them : —• " But how , " he Huyfl , in his reply , " are we to deal with the interposed authority of our Bishop ? If ho is right in treating the directions of the Church of England , not as instances of , but as rare exceptions to , her own rule on the subject , then , indeed , hi « Lordshi p will have done much to make our course clear . For then he will have proved that the Church of England , substituting for the Catholic rule a false one of her own , denies
to her members what , our Lord himself , in Holy Scripture and b y the voice of his Universal Church , has provided for the souls of such as need it : and then it will be my duty to endeavour , as well by word as by example , to lead you to seek elsewhere that i / reat gift , the denial of which by our Church would ' of itself destroy her claim to bo your guide . Hut if the Bishop is wrong (»« we fully believe he iH ) in supposing that the Church of Kngland does not , in thin particular , follow the rule <> f the Church Universal , then we have to perform the more difficult duty of so dealing with his authoiity as not to contradict or disobey that of our Church . "
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Jan. 18, 1851, page 60, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1866/page/12/
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