side of human nature through a magnifying glass. Great theologians have held that the standard of conduct which the apostles describe, those counsels of perfection' on which they so earnestly dwell, are incapable of being reduced to practice in a sinful world and by imperfect creatures. But if you go farther than the apostles, if you enormously exaggerate the number of ways in which God's law may be broken, what is the result? The moral balance is upset. You obliterate the distinction between right and wrong. It is impossible for merely mortal men and women to observe the whole body of your ecclesiastical legislation, to keep within the desperately narrow path in which you require them to walk. What then? The men and women who have been brought up at your feet, who have been taught that looking at the flowers on the Sabbath-day, or dancing, or theatre-going, are deadly transgressions, feel, when they do these things, that they have become sinners, and have rendered themselves obnoxious to the punishments inflicted on sinners. But they are men and women, and these things they cannot help doing, not innocently, like the rest of the world, but with a guilty blush on their cheeks. The next step is inevitable. They have crossed the boundary line - once, twice, daily, hourly. They have danced: they have been at the theatre: they have read Les Misérables. Their pastor tells them that they are great offenders: that they have broken God's law: that they have incurred His righteous displeasure. They feel that this is true; but they have grown reckless --repeated and continuous transgression has blunted the moral perceptions, and hardened the conscience. Even now they are sinners-one sin more or less cannot signify so very much. And if these slight pleasant delinquencies earn eternal damnation, as they have been taught to believe, what heavier penalty can attach to dishonest dealing, or an unchaste life? Such scholars are ripe for CRIME.

Against the 'secular' results of this teaching, therefore, the moralist

is entitled to protest. He is bound also to warn his audience that the spirit of ascetism has been, per omnia secula, the same. It is the spirit of persecution-a fierce and a cruel spirit. Some of the Spanish assistants of Torquemada were, I dare say, kindhearted men enough; but in course of time they came actually to relish an auto-da-fé. Many a merciless sentence (leading to the death or madness of its victim) is minuted in those records-the records of a Protestant assemblyfrom which I have already quoted a page. And when I inquire whether, however modified and refined, that spirit still survives, Doctor Diamond is ready to answer me with a page from his own experi

ence.

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There was a man,' quoth the Doctor, for whom I had a warm regard. He was a profound historical inquirer. He loved a manuscript which time had stained with an almost parental affection. I never knew a more devoted or unselfish student. His knowledge was various and exact, the earlier history of our nation could not have found a more competent and faithful chronicler. His nature was very unworldly

singularly guileless and childlike. He was distinguished, it is true, by certain little eccentricities,-odd, old-fashioned heresies about kings, and churches, and peoples,—heresies which he aired at times in a delightfully grotesque way; but they were eccentricities only the quaint blemishes which we love, knowing how they issue out of the simplicity of a gentle heart. Well, a great public official discovered that there was a special aptitude in this man which might be made of service to the State. A mighty heap of historical papers required to be analyzed, classified, and arranged; and my friend was probably better qualified to do this work thoroughly than any other man in England. The great man appointed him; but he had barely time to justify the sagacity of the choice, ere the vile slanders of "Protestant" newspapers, and "Protestant" associations (as they called themselves) drove him from his post. For-hinc

illæ lachryma-my friend was a Roman Catholic. So these gentry, who had thriven upon the doctrines of civil and religious liberty, denounced him with unscrupulous zeal and industrious bitterness. His temper was warm and sensitive, and when it was publicly announced that he, being at the least a thief and a forger, was unfit to occupy a situation of public trust, he was stung to the quick. The more fool he, poor fellow! for he ought to have known of what base metal his accusers were compacted. Even on his death-bed, however, the smart of the foul blows which they had dealt him, hurt him painfully. He has gone,' the Doctor continued, 'ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. But this one thing I know, he died of a broken heart. They tried, in their shame, indeed, to invent a new disease, and they succeeded perhaps in mystifying themselves. The man whose constitution has been ravaged and undermined by fever, is carried off by a slight attack of bronchitis. It is the bronchitis, I suppose, and not the fever, which is the cause of death? But that these men-whatever be the measure of their guilt— really hunted him to his grave, I entertain no doubt whatever. They I will have to answer for his death at the judgment-seat, as surely as if they had tied him to the stake, and lighted the faggots with their own hands. And then, God have mercy on their souls!'

From the contemplation of so miserable a tragedy, I am glad to avert my eyes. There are timestimes when we are pained by the meanness and baseness of our contemporaries-when it is a relief to turn to the great masters of our

English,' who fought as well as wrote for the liberty which they loved-to the noble English of Milton, to the scarcely less noble English of Macaulay. Among the men who have maintained inviolate their fidelity to principles, which though borne down at times by senseless clamour, are yet strong with the strength, and immortal with the immortality of truth,' Lord Macaulay has a right to a not undistinguished niche. His constancy to the cause of religious freedom was the heroic element in a life that at some points was not that of a hero. There is a passage in an early speech, which he has not reprinted, but which I think almost more admirable than any other passage in his speeches. He had been charged, because he loved liberty, with supporting an infidel policy: this was his reply :—

We hear it said that a policy which does not give a decided advantage to one sect over another, is an infidel policy. According to this authority, justice is infidelitymercy is infidelity-and toleration is liberalism, and liberalism is only another name for infidelity. It is infidelity, it seems, to think worthily of God, and justly of His laws, and not to encircle with worldly defences that religion of which the weapons are not carnal, and whose kingdom is not of this world. And it is infidelity to direct attacks rather against the evils of gross immorality, than against altars which, though differing from ours in form, are not perhaps heaped with less acceptable incense, or kindled with less celestial fire, must be content to bear this reproach, as it was borne by the great men of former days--by Tillotson, Locke, and Sydney; and the only regret we ought to feel when we hear it, is, that men who profess, and perhaps sincerely feel a zeal for religiou, should bring disgrace on those truths which are the last restraint on the powerful and the last consolation of the unhappy.

We

observed a sum of £400; and on the 5th December two sums of £300 and £190 respectively. On the 3rd January, 1863, 'N. B.' (very appropriate initials), had sent £840; on the 13th February the receipt of a still more enormous sum-£1360— was acknowledged to 'No. 20;' and in the following month we noted five payments averaging £200. We could cite other remittances meanwhile of from £50 to £100 and upwards, and many other smaller payments were acknowledged; but we have quoted the largest sums because as individual payments for additional income-tax they are strikingly high, and show-independently of evidence of other kinds -that it cannot be right to depend continuously (or at least to so great an extent as we now do), upon a tax which admits of such large concealments from the assessors, whether made with fraudulent intentions or not. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the signal opportunity for escape thus manifested is pretty commonly embraced. Thus the income-tax for the year 1800 (its second year), based upon the returns made by individuals of their total incomes from all sources, produced at the rate of two shillings in the pound, less than 64 millions; but when the present system of taxing income from property at its first source was introduced in 1803 (the next year of which the accounts are preserved), the produce of the tax was upwards of 5 millions, although the rate was only a single shilling in the pound. The difference affords a striking instance of the light in which the mass of the people regard tax-paying, and income-tax in particular. All are still ready to join in the reprobation of this tax which is expressed both in conversation and in the press; and the fact that this antagonism does not take the form of active opposition is owing, as official people well know, to the too general adoption of the principle,-every man for himself, and let Mr. Gladstone take the hindmost. Even black-mail is likely to have been much more equitable than a tax which leaves the payer to say how much he shall pay. It has

the double vice that it is almost powerless against those who choose to evade it, and that this very helplessness increases its burden upon those who are conscientiously desirous of abiding by the law.

The largeness of the payments above instanced reminds us of Mr. Gladstone's 'fixed opinion,' that there is no portion of the incomes of the country on which the tax is more accurately and fully levied than it is upon the lower class of incomes, and that this cannot be said of a good many persons having superior means. This fact is especially illustrated in the case of clerks and other business-assistants. There is indeed no reason to complain that employers are asked for the names of those of their assistants whose salaries are of an amount that renders them chargeable with income-tax. But it would be ludicrous if it were not so grossly unfair that whilst employés are thus surrendered to the tax-gatherer, it is so impossible for him to lay hold with any certainty upon the gains of the employer himself. Thus in the Inland Revenue Report of 1862, as an example' of the deficient returns of profits under Schedule D, a person who is unfortunately known to infamy only as A. B.' returned his assessable income as £15,000; but the Commissioners raised the assessment to £20,000, and he paid accordingly. The following year he made no return at all; this time he was charged on £45,000, and still he paid. The next year he again made no return, and this time they tried him at £60,000; and on this he paid too! Surely the Commissioners should never have left off asking.

Yet though so impotent in the main, the income-tax law is overwhelmingly energetic in minutiæ. Observe in the petty matter of the exemption of life-assurance premiums a most signal example of worthless pains. The man who makes his return under Schedule D sets out his net income on the first page, and on the third the particulars of his life-assurance premiums; and as he is trusted as to the amount of his gross income and of the de

ductions he legally makes therefrom, it might be supposed that he would be treated with similar confidence as to the small portion of his income which he may devote to life-assurance. Far otherwise. The official mind has decided that he shall be charged in the first instance upon the full income; and in order to reobtain the tax charged upon the premiums, he and every one of the thousands under the same schedule who effect assurances are expected to fill up another return again setting out income and premiums, and to send this statement with the assurance_receipts themselves to Somerset House. He then receives a promise that his claim shall go through the usual forms of examination,' and after a couple of months or so he receives his warrant for obtaining repayment. A comparison between his first and second returns is perfectly valueless, but the details have been registered;' and the officials rejoice in their scrupulous check of the subtraction which has been demanded, whilst they are hopelessly uncertain as to the correctness of the minuend. Surely this deserves the epithet which Reynolds applied to unprofitable details in paintings:- the laborious efforts of idleness.' To the loss of revenue occasioned by the cost of clerks' work, stationery, printing, and postage, involved in this senseless process, we have to add the excessive commission obtained in the first instance by the income-tax collectors, because they are saved the trouble of a subtraction! present system' can be of no use for statistical purposes,' for the shortsighted concocters of the

6

The

scheme must surely have failed to see that most people will not voluntarily incur this trouble of obtaining repayment, and this risking of their assurance receipts, but will make the deduction for themselves before stating their net earnings. If statistical information were an object sought, it would be obtained with far less trouble to every one concerned by direct communication with the assurance companies. The total amount assured by persons having incomes of less than £100 a

year (and therefore not chargeable with income-tax) being comparatively small, perhaps the Government could pay each company a sum equal to income-tax upon the premiums received, and could leave the company to make such allowance in detail to the assurers upon receiving their money; just as the Government takes income-tax from railway companies, and leaves them to distribute the charge in paying their dividends. The degree of publicity that might be thus secured to the affairs of assurance companies would be no disadvantage. At all events, for the Government to trust a man as now so blindly in respect of his entire earnings, and then to require the most stringent proof of his statement of the small portion of them which he devotes to life assurance, can only be satisfactory to those who cannot realise the axiom that the whole is greater than its part.'

Surely it is time that something better should be found as a permanent tax than one which is not only so weak against fraud, but which abounds in other inequalities, and involves a strange and costly labour of making repayments to a multitude of persons who allege that their incomes are less than £200 a year. Regarded as we have hitherto considered it, nothing can be so desirable as its entire abolition. But as no such resource has been found during war, and the machinery for raising it has been gradually improved through the experience of more than twenty years, we cannot but acquiesce in the opinion that it should not be absolutely extinguished in time of peace, but that its machinery should be preserved, so as to allow of the instant increase of the rate in the pound as our great resource in the emergency of war. From the termination of the Russian war to the present time the tax has however averaged eightpence in the pound; and an income-tax levied at this rate in time of peace has not a reserve of sufficient strength. In the case of a European war-especially if instead of having the French for our allies as in the Crimea, we should unfortunately be