tries to be thus
established should be offices at which those who desired to do so might
contract purely civil marriages. Previous clauses in it provided that
members of any sect of Protestant Dissenters might be married in their
own chapels, and by ministers of their own persuasion. After enactments
removing all the civil disabilities under which Nonconformists had
labored for one hundred and fifty years had been placed on the
statute-book, it was clearly inconsistent in the highest degree to
retain still more offensive and unreasonable religious disabilities, and
to deny to them the right of being married by their own ministers,
according to the rites most agreeable to their consciences or
prejudices. And though some of the details of the ministerial measure
were objected to and slightly altered in its passage through Parliament,
the general principle was admitted by the warmest friends and most
recognized champions of the Established Church, who wisely felt that a
bulwark which is too ill-placed or too unsubstantial to be defended, is
often a treacherous source of weakness rather than strength, and that a
temperate recognition of the validity of claims founded on justice was
the best protection against others which had no such foundation, and
that measures such as these adopted in a spirit of generous conciliation
could only strengthen the Church by taking at least one weapon from the
hands of its enemies.

Another of the measures relating to the Church, of which Peel had
prepared a sketch, had for its object the removal of a grievance of
which the members of the Church itself had long been complaining, the
mode of the collection of tithe. It would be superfluous here to
endeavor to trace the origin of tithes, or the purposes beyond the
sustentation of the clergymen to which they were originally
applied.[240] They had undoubtedly been established in England some time
before the Conquest, and the principle that the land should support the
National Church was admitted by a large majority of the population; it
may probably be said with something nearly approaching unanimity on the
part of those who really paid it, namely, the land-owners. The objection
to the tithe system was founded rather on the way in which it worked,
operating, as Lord John Russell described it, as "a discouragement to
industry; a penalty on agricultural skill; a heavy mulct on those who
expended the most capital and displayed the greatest skill in