kingdom, subject to the authority of the Poor-law Commissioners.  And by a second bill they farther proposed that the registries to be thus established should be offices at which those who desired to do so might contract purely civil marriages.  Previous clauses in it provided that members of any sect of Protestant Dissenters might be married in their own chapels, and by ministers of their own persuasion.  After enactments removing all the civil disabilities under which Nonconformists had labored for one hundred and fifty years had been placed on the statute-book, it was clearly inconsistent in the highest degree to retain still more offensive and unreasonable religious disabilities, and to deny to them the right of being married by their own ministers, according to the rites most agreeable to their consciences or prejudices.  And though some of the details of the ministerial measure were objected to and slightly altered in its passage through Parliament, the general principle was admitted by the warmest friends and most recognized champions of the Established Church, who wisely felt that a bulwark which is too ill-placed or too unsubstantial to be defended, is often a treacherous source of weakness rather than strength, and that a temperate recognition of the validity of claims founded on justice was the best protection against others which had no such foundation, and that measures such as these adopted in a spirit of generous conciliation could only strengthen the Church by taking at least one weapon from the hands of its enemies.

Another of the measures relating to the Church, of which Peel had prepared a sketch, had for its object the removal of a grievance of which the members of the Church itself had long been complaining, the mode of the collection of tithe.  It would be superfluous here to endeavor to trace the origin of tithes, or the purposes beyond the sustentation of the clergymen to which they were originally applied.[240] They had undoubtedly been established in England some time before the Conquest, and the principle that the land should support the National Church was admitted by a large majority of the population; it may probably be said with something nearly approaching unanimity on the part of those who really paid it, namely, the land-owners.  The objection to the tithe system was founded rather on the way in which it worked, operating, as Lord John Russell described it, as “a discouragement to industry; a penalty on agricultural skill; a heavy mulct on those who expended the most capital and displayed the greatest skill in the cultivation of the land.”  The present mode of levying the tithes forced the clergy to forbearance at the expense of what they deemed to be their rights, or led them to enforce them at the expense of the influence which they ought to possess with their parishioners, compelling them to lose either their income by their indulgence, or their proper weight and popularity in the parish by the exaction of what the law gave