The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-11-21 00:00:00

COURT AND FASHION.

On Wednesday, her Majesty and Prince Albert left
Windsor Castle, to pass a few days with the Queen Dow-
ager, at Bentley Priory, near Stanmore. The Earl Howe
and the Earl of Denbigh arrived at the Priory on Tuesday,
and a select circle had the honour to receive invitations to
meet the Queen and the Prince Consort.

On Thursday, the Queen and Prince Albert, accom-
panied by the whole of the illustrious party then as-
sembled at the Priory, honoured Harrow School with a
visit.

The Queen anti Prince Albert arrived at Windsor Castle
on Friday, from the Queen Dowager's seat at the Priory,
Stanmore.

According to present arrangements the Court will leave
Windsor for the Isle of Wight on Thursday, where it
will remain:for about three weeks, returning to the Castle,
for the-winter, the third week in December.
The Princess Royal is eight years old to-day.
A PIANO IN IVORY.—The Queen has purchased the
splendid piano in ivory, manufactured by M. H. Pape, of
Paris, which excited so much admiration at the exhi-
bition.

When her Majesty was last in Scotland she inspected
the process of distilling whiskey. On Friday, a huge pun-
cheon of this spirit was received by her Majesty, as a pre-
sent from the distillers, and is now in the vaults of
Buckingham Palace.

SECULAR EDUCATION ALONE, TRIED AND

FOUND WANTING.

Some time ago, we published the plan of education
suggested by the " Lancashire public school association."
The scheme has been condemned by the greater portion
of the " religious public ;" and a Mr. Corns, in two re-
cent letters to the Manchester Guardian, has shown that
the plan is virtually that which has been already tried in
America, and, after two hundred years of experience, is
found to work badly. In his last letter, Mr. Corns
says :
" I stated that I would, in this letter, state some of
the evils which have resulted from excluding religious
teaching from the public schools in America. lam fully
convinced, from all I saw and heard in America, that
nearly all the crime which exists in that country is fairly
attributable to that source. It is commonly supposed
that there is much less crime in the United States than
there is in this country. I believe there is a great mis-
take about this matter.

There may be less crimes against property in the Uni-
ted States than in England, the reason probably being
because the people can readily and easily supply their
bodily wants, that there is scarcely any temptation to
commit petty thefts, which form:the great mass of the
crimes that figure upon the English criminal records, and
not because they have more schools.

Crimes against persons are much more numerous in
America than in England. There must be some cause
for this state of things. I believe it arises from the young
not being trained " in the way they should go" during the
time they are at school. Many American writers state
that their public schools exert scarcely any moral influ-
ence on the community. One of them says :—" The
present aspect of things in our country forces upon us one
of two conclusions, either that there is something exceed-
ingly faulty about our plans of popular education ; or else
that the hopes which we have entertained of the benefi-
cial influence of education on society are fallacies ;_ for it
is certain that in no part of the United States has it had
the effect contemplated, as necessary by the theory of our
government."
Another, and more recent American writer, and one,
too, who is now, and has been far many years, a school-
master, says :—" Is there not a visible, confessed, and sad
deterioration in the moral and manners of the young ?
Is there not a woeful and wide-spread disregard of
parental, and by consequence, of all other rightful
authority ? The school-book itself is expurgated, not of
licentiousness, but of religion—not of falsehood, but of
historical fact. History, that tells all, may not speak in
some public schools ; and morals rest not on the will of
G)d, but on utility and honour. Herod and Pilate come
together, shake hands, and embrace each other, even now.
A narrow inspection of some public school libraries would
discover licentiousness and infidelity."
I believe that no mere secular education, such as the
Lancashire Public School Association proposes to give will
ever lessen the number of our criminals, or implant virtu-
ous principles in the minds and hearts of the yonng. The
prevalent cause of crime in our country, as Baron Alder-
son said last year in his charge to the grand jury at the
Liverpool assizes, " is not the want of information but
the want of good principles. No doubt reading and writ-
ing are a good assistance; but they are.not the whole nor
a great part of the education of the people. The real
education of the people consists in training them in the way
they should go ; in giving them principles of action which
shall sustain them in temptation, and deliver them in time
of trouble." I said in my last setter. that in many parts
of America, " the people are taking the schools from under
the control of the state." I made this statement on the
authority of a document, entitled " Parochial Schools,"
printed in 1847, by W. S. Martien, Philadelphia. In this
document there is the following paragraph :
" The increasing abandonment of the state plan by va-
rious sects of Christians, affords a proper occasion for the
presbyterian church to reconsider her position in regard
to the work of education. The papists, with that church-
worldly wisdom which is so pre-eminently theirs, have
adopted the plan of educating- their own children—and
ours, too, as far as they can. Their institutions of learn-
ing have all the efficiency of an independent religious
organization. Papal colleges, seminaries, and church
schools, of every kind, are in active operation all over the
country, and especially at the west. If we would save the
lambs of our flock from the St. Mary Christianity of the
Man of Sin, our schools must engage our efforts and
our prayers. The episcopalians, with characteristic zeal,
are also establishing large and small institutions, on a
denominational basis. Many of their churches have pa-
rochial schools, while Presbyterians scarcely know the
meaning of the word. The Methodists, in addition to
several denominational colleges, have academies in all
their conferences, and are in this respect setting an exam-
ple of well-manned popular church institutions. Whilst
other denominations are more and more defining their
position in favour of Christian education, under their own
supervision, Presbyterians are reminded of their obliga-
tions to develop the resources of their own church in this
great cause."
The Bishop of Pennsylvania, one of the most liberal
and enlightened men of his day, in a conversation I had
with him, in his own house in Philadelphia, confirmed the
above statement, as far as it concerned the Episcopalian
church.

THE ENDOWMENT QUESTION AND CONSER-

VATIVE UNION.

(From .l3lackwood's Magazine.)
There is but one topic more to which we would fain al-
lude before concluding the present article. The late re-
bellious outbreaks in Ireland seem, in certain quarters,
to have revived the notion of the expediency of a state en-
dowment of the Roman Catholic priesthood. We place
very little faith in the sincerity of an announcement which
some time ago was put forth, on hierarchical authority, in
the public prints, to the effect that, even were such an en-
dowment to be offered, it would be peremptorily refused.
But, sincere or not, that statement may serve as an an-
swer to the writer in the last number of the Quarterly
Review, who supports the endowinent scheme with an
unction which we were certainly not prepared to expect.
His argument, from first to last, implies the same un-
happy yielding to agitation and terrorism, which, when
applied to civil matters, has ended in rebellion, and which,
if applied to ecclesiastical affairs, would infallibly result
in the total overthrow and annihilation of the Protestant
Church in Ireland. Does he really believe that—to as-
sume no argument of a graver nature—the people of Great
Britain will be ready, in the present desperate stateof
their finances, to submit to additional taxation for the
purpose of establishing, in permanent comfort, the true
instigators of the, disturbances which have cost us so
much anxiety and pain ? Why, if such endowment can
be vindicated upon any intelligible principle, is it to be
confined to the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland alone,
and not extended to the dissenting denominations through-
out the width and breadth' of the land ? On what plea
could the Free and Episcopal churches in Scotland,or the
Wesleyan Methodists of England, be excluded, if such "a
proposition were for a moment to be seriously maintained?
The reviewer professes to reject, in tote, any idea of the
confiscation of existing church property, and therefore he
must fall back, as a sole resource, upon government en-
dowment, which means simply a new tax on the people of
Great Britain, for the benefit of Ireland—a country which
is already exempted from her share of our heaviest bur-
dens, and annually receiving eleemosynary aid to an
amount which has grievously contributed to increase our
late monetary pressure. It may be that some such pro-
ject is in contemplation,"for we never have been able to
comprehend, without some such motive as this, the extra-
ordinary anxiety exhibited by the present Whig govern-
ment in carrying through their bill for the establishment
of diplomatic relations with Rome, at the very moment
when the last fragment of .temporal power was passing
from the hands of the Pope. But whether this be so or
not—whether this is a mere private crotchet, or a prepared
scheme, to. come forth in due season—we are perfectly sa-
tisfied-that it will be met throughout the country with a
righteous storm of indignation. The Protestantism of
Britain has been its strength and its glory; and-it was
only when called upon to choose between that sacred
principle and the hardly less revered one of loyalty, that

Nov. 21, IS4S.

our forefathers thought themselves justafied in summon-
ing an alien to the British throne. What cost us then
both tears and blood is an operating principle now; and
if, through the grace of God, we have seen order main-
tained, and rebellion crushed at home, at a period when
half of Europe is plunged in the horrors of anarchy, we do
not fear the charge of bigotry if we attribute our preserva
tion as much to the religious establishments of the land
as to the free institutions which Protestantism has ena-
bled us to maintain. Loyalty is not a thing to be bought:
it is a spontaneous feeling, unpurchasable at any price ;
and if the Irish Catholic clergy have it not now, the most
liberal endowment will work no change in their political
feelings. _

One of the arguments most commonly urged by those
who advocate this system of endowment, is, we think,
both erroneous in its assumption and weak in its applica-
tion. They maintain that the Catholic clergy, if in the
pay of the state, would have less power over the peasantry
of Ireland than at present. Is that altogether a state of
matters which it would be desirable to bring about ?
Would it be well to sap the influence of this moralpolice?
There is not a Roman Catholic priest in Ireland at this
moment who does not know, that were he to give open
countenance to rebellion, he would not only be amenable
to the laws of his country, but, under a firm executive go-
vernment, would be selected as the earliest example. The
situation of Ireland is such, that we can never calculate
upon the loyalty of a large portion of its population. Cen-
turies have rolled by, and still the Celtic race persist in
being aliens from our own. We cannot tame them, can-
not cultivate them, cannot win their hearts by any ima-
ginable sacrifice. They persist in their cry of Ireland for
the Irish, and will not see that the thing is as impossible
as the reestablishment of the Saxon heptarchy, and, were
it possible, would be tantamount to delivering them over-
to the horrors of a barbarian war. It is no use disguising
the fact—we must deal with men as they are ; and who can
doubt that there does exist a great amount of rooted dis-
affection among the people of Ireland ? And now it is
seriously proposed to cure the disaffection, by taking
means calculated to weaken the influence of the priest-
hood over the peasantry ! In other words, to give up the
only hostages we hold, and leave the most turbulent and
uneducated population of Europe, freed even from reli-
gious control, to be worked up to frenzy by the first lay
demagogue who has the art to make them believe that
treason is a synonymous term with patriotism. Even
worldly wisdom would repudiate such a surrender, and
the argument is so weak, that it bears with it its own re-
futation.
We have gained nothing whatever by tampering with
Roman Catholicism in Ireland. Neither the moral nor
the social condition of the people has been improved
thereby ; on the contrary, each successive step towards
conciliation has been met by augmented turbulence. We
cannot afford to push the experiment further ; and surely
it would be a strange thing, if, while the Romish clergy
themselves distinctly repudiate such an arrangement, and
refuse to become the stipendiaries of the British govern-
ment, any body of men who may be called to the respon-
sible situation of her Majesty's advisers, should persist in
tendering the obnoxious and repugnant boon : least of all
do we expect that any such proposal can emanate from
the Conservatives. We know that upon this point various
opinions have been expressed, and that Lord George
-Bentinck was at one time supposed to be not unfavoura-
ble to such a scheme. No man, we firmly believe, ever
had the good of Ireland more thoroughly at heart ; and,
had his plan for ameliorating the Irish distress been
adopted last year, and the money which was uselessly
squandered been applied to the construction of permanent
works eminently calculated to open up and develop the
resources of the country, we might ere this time have seen
the foundation laid of a new era of social and industrial
prosperity. But the Whig cabinet, perverse to the last,
could not bring themselves to acknowledge that the poli-
tical sagacity of an opponent was greater than their own ;
and, therefore, the money which we gave with so lavish a
hand, has disappeared without leaving the smallest trace
of its employment. But, in ecclesiastical matters, Lord
George Bentinck professed a latitudinarianism which was
not responded to by the great bulk of his party. They
were not disposed to unchristianise the high assembly of
Britain by the introduction of men who openly avowed
their denial of the faith of the Saviour; nor would they
consent to put forth their hands against the ark of the na-
tional churches. And there -ore it was said that, upon
more than one occasion, the Protestant party, while
cheerfulA, acknowledging the great public services of the
late, departed nobleman, did not attempt to conceal that,
upon points so serious as these, there could be no sympa-
thy of opinion between him and them.