and not a law of the system, which, like every other, must claim to be judged by its laws and not by its accidents.

33. At this point, however, we are encountered by an objection which is conspicuous among the inventions of the day, an objection of a political rather than a religious cast, and one that seems to form, after all, the staple and the groundwork of the generality of the reasonings, as well as the passions, that are marshalled against the principle of national religion. It is commonly couched in this form; that governments have no right to apply funds of the State, which are the produce of taxation, to the promotion of religion; and that in so doing they are actually guilty of malversation and breach of their trust; because these funds belong to the individuals who have paid the taxes, and not to their rulers. This seems to be unhesitatingly laid down as an universal affirmative proposition. I will, however, state the objection in the words of one of those who advance it. "The individual devotes that which is his own, in the exercise of a natural and inalienable right, to his own ends ; the sovereign, in endowing a particular faith and worship, devotes what is not his own, but his people's, to ends that please himself, without consulting them.”*

34. I begin by asking, in what sense it is meant to be asserted, that the funds in the public treasury are

Dr. Wardlaw's Lectures on National Church Establishments, lect. vi. p. 251. Sce also pp. 32, 33, 47. See also the Voluntary System, pp. 151, 189.

the property of the tax-payers? Surely it cannot be in a legal sense. They have neither the custody, nor the power to appropriate, nor the power to alienate. But are these funds constitutionally, if not legally, the property of those upon whom they were levied? I know not whether, in any of the conventional constitutions of recent years and generations, there be such a phenomenon as a limitation of the taxing power; but if there be, it has no application to countries which have ancient prescriptive constitutions, as, for instance, England, where deeds such as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, however important their practical operation, are in their principle purely declaratory, because they purport to state and to guarantee the security of pre-existing and indubitable civil claims, which had formerly been liable at particular times to be questioned, or to be overridden by power. would be very difficult to argue that the constitutional practice of England gives any sanction even to the doctrine, that the money of the State is strictly the property of the tax-payers, subject to the condition of being administered at the will of their representatives; and this proposition, if proved, would still be very far from satisfying the objectors, who impugn the right of these representatives themselves to dispose of the produce of taxation for the purpose of promoting a national religion.

It

35. The arrangements of the British constitution appear to have been elaborately and wisely constructed, in the manner least calculated to favour

abstract theories of right, but most likely to avoid all real difficulty and injustice. The members of the House of Commons bear the mixed character of representatives of the people and counsellors of the sovereign. They have the exclusive right of passing money resolutions, and of introducing and altering money bills. But no such resolution can be passed, that is to say, no money can be given by the House of Commons, except upon the motion of the crown, to which the initiative is reserved; and no money bill becomes law unless it receives the assent of the Upper House and of the crown in its legislative capacity. It is true, indeed, that monies are from session to session made applicable to their specified purposes, on account of the inconvenience resulting from the suspension of funds necessary for the immediate demands of the service of the State, after they have been voted in the Lower House, but before they have been definitively appropriated. This, however, is an arrangement of public convenience, made under an ordinary act of the legislature, not grounded upon any constitutional right or principle; and the power thus conceded, we are to remember, is granted upon conditions which are to be fulfilled, not by the single action of the House of Commons, but by the joint action of the House of Commons and the Crown.

36. Thus, then, the immediate power of granting money is divided between the executive and the popular portion of the legislature; and only by

*By a clause in the Bills of Ways and Means.

annual statutes is the House of Lords, with its own consent, limited in its means of intervention to a subsequent stage. And those who, on behalf of the people, enjoy a portion of this power, are themselves as truly called to act for the Crown and the State in general as for the people themselves. If their power were absolute, and their character were absolute, it might with some colour of plausibility be contended, that by virtue of such exclusive derivation the funds of the State were still in a constitutional, if not in a formally legal, sense, the property of the taxpayers; but, on the contrary, we see that their power is partial, and their character is mixed: they are free to refuse, but not free to give; and their freedom to refuse implies, not that the funds of the State when legally granted, are still the property of the people at large, but that every security ought to be provided on behalf of the people, through the instrumentality of their representatives, against the undue and improvident abstraction or waste of that which is their property until granted, but ceases to be so when granted.

37. Great confusion, over and above all other evils, infallibly arises, when things that have received their determinate form only from positive institution, are attempted to be dealt with as matter of natural and inalienable right. Such is the case with the right of property. Paley, indeed, has pronounced it to be really the creature of law;* for it was his habit to seize

* Moral and Political Philosophy, b. iii. ch. iv.

upon some clear, palpable, and proximate idea for the solution of questions, which have a deeper ground in the nature of things; he is therefore much more perspicuous than true. Were his doctrine unequivocally sound, it would reach far beyond the purpose of my argument; but let us admit, in qualification of his principle, that certain real rights must have arisen out of the original grant by the Creator of the earth and the things appertaining to it.* Yet still those rights only receive their determinate form from civil law, which divides among individuals that which was given to the race, and draws the lines of demarcation which prevent the right of one man from growing into the wrong of another. Undoubtedly the grant to mankind at large implied the necessity of such subsidiary regulations, and therefore, when considered in general, they are under Divine sanction; but the details of the arrangements are most clearly referable, when considered singly, only to human law as the efficient cause of their existence. How, therefore, can any natural and inalienable right be pleaded to a particular form of that, which only receives its definite palpable existence from positive institution? How can any such right be termed property, when all property is essentially determinate and precise, and when such a right is essentially indeterminate and vague? How can a right of property, strictly so called, be pleaded against the power from which alone it derives its existence? There may, indeed, be moral or constitu

Gen. i. 26-29; ix. 3.