In the case I have in mind there were two claimants to the subject-matter—­the Free Church and the United Free Church—­and the House of Lords, after a great argle-bargle, decided that the property in question belonged to the Free Church.

Thereupon the expected happened.  A hubbub arose in Scotland and elsewhere, and in consequence of the hubbub an Act of Parliament has somewhat coyly made its appearance in the Statute Book (5 Edward VII., chapter 12) appointing and authorizing Commissioners to take away from the successful litigant a certain portion of the property just declared to be his, and to give it to the unsuccessful litigant.

The reasons alleged for taking away by statute from the Free Church some of the property that belongs to it are that the Free Church is not big enough to administer satisfactorily all the property it possesses; and that the State may reasonably refuse to allow a religious body to have more property than it can in the opinion of State-appointed Commissioners usefully employ in the propagation of its religion.  Let the reasons be well noted.  They have made their appearance before in history.  These were the reasons alleged by Henry VIII. for the suppression of the smaller monasteries.  The State, having made up its mind to take away from the Free Church so much of its property as the Commissioners may think it cannot usefully administer, then proceeds, by this undebated Act of Parliament, to give the overplus to the unsuccessful 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.