The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1836-09-06 00:00:00

DR. CHALMERS AND HIS CALUMNIATORS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EDINBURGH ADVERTISER.

Bruntisland, August 23, 1836.
St observe that the recent publication of a letter written
by me to Mr. Campbell, of Monzie, in Perthshire, has put cer-
tain of your city newspapers into a state of violent agitation,
which better, perhaps, might be lett to a natural process of ex-
haustion by the workings of its own effervescence. It might
possibly he wiser not to depart from this very usual course, un-
der the many attacks by which, notwithstanding my love of
peace, 1 have been repeatedly signalised ; but I can perceive
that, at present, some of my best friends are pained and dis-
tressed by the fierceness of an outcry, to which I mysoll, under
the.long and frequent discipline of a sitnilar appliance for more
than twenty years, have now become insensible; and more for
their sakes than my own, I beg your insertion of the following
statement, with its accompanying remarks, which, I trust, will
have the effect of quieting their fears, if not quieting the wild
uproar which has occasioned them.
In the month of December last I was honoured by a letter
from Mr. Campbell, of Islay, complaining of the injustice to
which he had been exposed from his opponents in Argyllshire,
who, because he was the enemy of persecution, represented him
as an enemy to the Church of Scotland ; and he requested me
to state in writing what I thought or knew of his feel►ngs in re-
gard to our ecclesiastical establishment. I sent him the follow-
ing reply:—

" Edinburgh, December 31, 1835. I
Dias have a very pleasing remembrance of your
'riendly and seasonable interposition, on the occasion of our in-
.erview with Lord John Russell; and such was my own confi-
dence, and that of my colleagues, in your attachment to the
Church of Scotland, 'that we took the liberty of suggesting you
as one of the cotnini- inners of inquiry into our claims.
" I am not aware of any circumstance in your history which
can justify the imputation of your hostility to our ecclesiastical
establishment--certainly there is nothing in the bare circum-
stances of hostility to religious persecution, which can serve to
substantiate such a charge. But give me- leave, in return for
the confidence by which you have honoured me, to state, with
all frankness, that I have oftener than once met with an incli-
nation to confound two things which I hold to be essentially
and sp.eciticalVistinct from each other. The strict and proper
opposite of perskotion is toleration; and by stopping there, we
make full actliftal of ourselves as the enemies of religious per-
secution. But to tolerate is one thing, and to endow is another.
When we tolerate popery, for example, we prove ourselves to be
not the enemies of the rights of papists. But when we endow
popery, we prove ourselves to be the positive friends of the te-
nets of
,popery—or at least act as if it were so, and thus lie
open to a far more serious condemnation. I write this in per-
fect ignorance of your views on the Irish Church Appropriation
Bill; but I thinkit were treating you unfairly, while I am writ-
, ing on the subject at all, not to state that I hold this to be a vi-
tal question—and that (though unwarily, I have no doubt,- by
many,) the principle of a Protestant establishment was coin-
promised by those who supported the alienation of any part of
its revenues from the• Established Church-of Ireland, which I

hold to be far-the likeliest organ, if but well patronised, for the
moral and economical regeneration of that unhappy land.
" God grant that the wise and the good of every shade and
diversity of politics hitherto, may now break up their parties,
and re-unite on principles, that by the junction of the truly pa-
triotic, who have heretofore stood aloof from each other, the
two-headed monster of Infidelity and Popery, may be com-
pletely and conclusively overborne.
"I have the honour to be, dear Sir,
"Yours most respectfully and sincerely,
(Signed) "THOMAS CHALMERS."
What use Mr. Campbell of Islay made of this letter I do not
exactly know; nor have I been in the least careful to. inquire.
Only I have been told that the fact of my having written him a
letter has been made known; that by a strange understanding,
it was working the very reverse of the effect which it ought to
have done; that my views were misrepresented and miscon-
ceived; and that my name, humble as it is, was employed for
the express purpose of allaying the distrust and the discomfort
which the vote of Mr. Campbell, of Islay, in Parliament, had
awakened in the breasts of some of his constituents. When I

accidentally met Mr. Campbell, of Monzie, in the middle of last
July, he made it a topic of conversation with me, and even in
circumstances of purest indifferency, I would have stated my
views to him, or to any other gentleman who required the ex-
planation of them. And the strange misconceptions that had
gone abroad of my letter to Mr. Campbell, of Islay, certainly
made the call for explanation all the more imperious. Mr.
Campbell, of Monzie, wished me to write him on the subject;
and I had no wish, but the contrary, to keep back from him as
distinct and explicit a contradiction as I could give to any mis-
statements that might have been made of my views respecting
the appropriation clause, and more particularly its bearing on
the interests of our own religious establishment. In the act of
writing that letter; I was but vindicating myself, and without
the most distant imagination of giving law to a county; I was
but repelling an injustice which I had personally sustained, and
most certainly without the slightest movement of ak ambition
which I never felt, and which would have been perfectly new to
me—that, to use the language of my calumniators, of wielding
the destinies of Argyllshire.
1 did not anticipate the publication of either of these letters;
but neither, at the same time, did I forbid their publication.
Both gentlemen were most welcome to their respective com-
munications; and both were alike free to any fair and honour-
able use which they might have been pleased to make of them.
If an illegitimate use have been made of either, I have the sa-
tisfaction of thinking that all at least was most legitimate on my
part. It surely was quite legitimate to return a frank and Civil
answer to the communication by which Mr. Campbell, of Islay,
honoured me in the month of December last. And after my
views as stated in that letter had been either misinterpreted or
grossly misunderstood, it was equally legitimate in me to make
the fullest explanation of them either to Mr. Campbell, of Mon-
zie, or to any one else, in the month of July last. My letter to
Monzie was the legitimate offspring of the letter which I had
previously written to Islay ; or, in other words, the letter sent
to the one Campbell was the legitimate parent of the letter af-
terwards sent to the other. I have been accused of obtruding
myself unasked on the politics of Argyllshire. Had it not been
for the asking of Mr. Campbell, of Islay, my name would never
hayelleen associated with these politics. And after all, the one
gentleman was as much entitled to -a frank communication from
me as Wes the other. But the first, my letter to Islay, or rather the
"known fact of any having written to him, seems to have lighted
up no little indignation among the gentlemen of the press.
It is the second, my letter to Monzie, at which, in their own
style of consistency, they kindle into madness, and put forth all
their invectives of fire and fury against the political clergyman.
Meanwhile it is enough for this clergyman, that, without vio-
lating the properties of the minister, the storm of all this foul
obloquy has come upon him, merely because he has acquitted
himself of the courtesies of the man; that, in the act of observ-
ing the duties and the decencies of social life, he has dealt
equally between the two gentlemen who have been pleased to
consult him ; and that at the impulse of no other feeling than
that of honest and heartfelt attachment to the protestantism of
these realms, he has given forth the same declaration and
spoken the same language to them both.
It is interesting to observe the sort of family likeness which
obtains amongst the numerous disciples of the mock patriotism
of our day, who all profess to worship at the shrine of liberty,
yet with whom it is a mortal offence that one should dare to have
an opinion of his own, if it thwart any object of theirs, and an
offeVee still more unpardonable that he should dare to give it
utterance. The London Courier has been pleased to denominate
the part I have taken as an extraordinary interference with the
politics of Argyllshire, and it is not many weeks ago since a
vacant professorship, that had been previously much canvassed
for, was disposed of by the magistrates and council of Edin-
burgh. In common with others I happened to be consulted on
the occasion, and wrote one or two letters to my own special ac-
quaintances. I was called on to write several more, either in
compliance with the wishes, or in return to the communications
which I received from various members of that honourable body.
On the day of election, when my opinions happened to be quoted
at the city board, the effusion of a Councillor Robe' tson, as re-
ported in the public prints, was, that " we have had enough of
Dr:Chalmers's interference." I would have been spared this
piece of 'coarse impertinence had I chosen to be so ungentle-
manly or uncivil to Bailie M'Farlan and others, as to take no
notice of their communications. Nevertheless, I shall continue
to act as heretofore; and neither the insolence of an unmannerly
town coUncillor, nor the ferocity and falsehood of all the liberal
newspapers shill deter me from the privilege and the duty of a
free-born citizen, which, in its very humblest form,- is to speak
when'he is spoken to, and write when he is written to.
And has it come to this, that, in deference to a party most
tremblingly alive at every pore to its own interests, all other
interests must stand in. abeyance; and must we all look passively
on, whilst they are speeding forward the advancement of a
cause, the triumph of which we honestly believe, would issue in
the ruin both of the church and of the country? I have been
written an electioneering letter for
already accused of having
'
the county of Argyll; and though at the hazard of the one I
now write being termed an electiuneering letter for the whole of
Scotland, I will not disguise toy wish that throughout all its
towns and its provincesthere might be a general awakening to
the danger which now hangs over us,—nor my hopes, that the
fever of our present delusions will at-length pass away, and the
people of our beloved land will yet prove true to the. religion of
their forefathers.
I fondly trust that this declaration, once for all, will save me.
from the trouble of any further correspondence on the subject,
with gentlemen on either side of politics. In.particular, I hope
that the Campbells of Argyllshire will -henceterth know how, to
manage for themselves, and allow me to prosecute the labours
of my own vocation in peace.
I have no fear, indeed, of any further disturbance from the
-gentlemen wha are,eugaged in ihis_WerfAre. As for the bullies
party who have ehosen to hiensil me,
_there
oisr
no
ow lre
other
rlaingof a
ltesinative.
I should imagine, thatjustto acquiesce
in it as I would in any other necessity of these strange times,;
and leave them to rage and revile and falsify as her,etufore.
I hive the honour to be, Sir,
Your very obedient. Servant.
TnomAs GinArAtEns.
beg you will send copies of your Raper to the Editors
of the Edinburgh Scotsman, of the Caledonian Mercury, and of
the London Courier. The only reparation which I demand for
the rash and reckless attacks of which, if not the authors, they
are at least the publishers is that they will give this letter a
place iu,their columns; and that henceforward. they will either
make sure of the ground on which they denounce me, or have
the goodness to let me alone.

Assignees and other persons concerned in the admninistratio
of bankrupt estates should be aware of the coming into opera-
tion of the act of the sth and 6th of William IV., cap. 29, which
directs the manner in which unclaimed dividends are het eafter
to be disposed of. This act renders it incumbent on all as-
signees to estates which have declared any dividends previous to
August 21, 1835, the date of the passing of this act, which divi-
dends shall not have been claimed within twelve months follow-
ing the date of the act, to file certificates in the secretary of
bankrupts' office, containing the names of all persons, with the
amount, to whom such dividends are due. The failure of com-
pliance with this clause of the act subjects the parties who still
rg
tainsuch dividends, and do not put in a certificate in the
manner described, to a payment of interest on the amount so
retained at the rate of from 5 to 20 per cent, per annum, at the
discretion of the commissioners of the court of bankruptcy.
Within one year after the filing of the certificate, the amount of.;
such dividends i 3 to be paid to the accountant in bankruptcy to
the credit of a fund entitled the " unclaimed dividend" ac-
count. In the case of dividends declared subsequently to the
passing of the act, the same course is prescribed within three
months after the expiration of one year from the declaration
of dividend. Any undivided surplus existing at the date of the
act is also directed to be certified in the same mann,er and paid
to the same account, and any future undivided surplus within
three months after the ep.piration of one year after the decl.tra-
tion of a final dividend. The wording of the clause relating to
the retention of unclaimed dividends, or undivided balance is
very strong and precise, so as !o include not only the actual
custody of such dividends, .&c., but the knowledge - that they
::re "in the hands of subject to the disposition of any con-
signee or co-assignees." This law came into operation, as re-
gards dividends declared previous to ;:ie 21st of Atgo.t, 1535,
on the 21st instant, and there have already been a great num-
ber of old commissions brought forward for the purpose of re-
gi.dering the unclaimed portion of the diviciends in the manner
prescribed.

The sight of the Duke of Sussex is improving, and daily
7,ains strength. His Royal Highness can now see to read the
various types of a newspaper without difficulty.