Monthly Supplement to "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS.

THE THREE KINGDOMS.

THE language contains not many better pieces of writing than the few lines of prose prefixed by Dryden, at a time of much actual disaster and worse anticipation, to the first edition of his "Annus Mirabilis." He addresses himself to London as to the most renowed and late flourishing city; deplores what she has suffered from exhausting war, consuming pestilence, and more consuming fire; casts around her temporary decline the incense of a regal flattery, and ends by laying his poem at her feet. "Heaven never made so much piety and virtue to leave it miserable. | I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation. Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause becomes so general.'

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absolutely impossible. The incapacity of each was shown to be complete. The Protectionists had a millstone round their necks, with which even a show of action and progress was not compatible; the Manchester men laboured under the disadvantage of professions in advance of opinions, as well as of opinions decidedly in advance of facts; and not only were the Peelites in the painful dilemma of having a personal position at war with their public one, but, with too few followers to form a ministry, of having too many leaders to act with one. The inevitable conclusion presented itself, that there was nobody but Lord John for the place, but that Lord John was not strong enough for it, and that the good ship the State would soon be helpless among the breakers. Passing from At the commencement of a year which has opened this with saddened thoughts, the reader would next with too much of the prospect of another Annus Mira- observe, by the subject which next invited his attenbilis, the old poet's remark may help the reader to a tion, that, not content with leaving our wooden walls somewhat easier digestion of the not very inviting to the dry-rot of inefficient superintendence, our fare served up in our narrative of the month. As he public men had by careless and profligate ignorance contemplates the aspect of affairs abroad and at home, exposed large bodies of our seamen to be poisoned by as his eye wanders over the neighbouring shores of provisioning the navy with preserved meats unfit for France or through the distant bush-land of Caffraria, human use. Then he would take note, that, such as he reads of Hungary, of Germany, of Italy, and being our treatment of the navy, our treatment of the seems to see everywhere the clouds gathering more army had of late proceeded on the not less absurd as and more darkly, let him still derive comfort from well as cruel principle of providing, by means of the thought that "Providence is engaged too deeply aimless muskets, awkward accoutrements, and scarlet when the cause becomes so general." That such is coats, that they should always miss and never be the instinct of a people themselves when they find missed by the enemy. Thoroughly disheartened by themselves in such circumstances, would seem to be these unpalatable truths about the two great beyond a doubt. When we penetrate beneath the services, our student of the times might then surface of any apparently general calamity, nothing is pass with something like hope (short-sighted man!) so strange as to find the ordinary currents of human to the next topic that awaited him, perceiving life moving on with little suffering or disturbance. that it related to a branch of civil life and peaceful The student of our great civil wars is continually startled industry, in which British skill is confessedly prein this way; and every one knows with what an appe-eminent, and of which the British Islands possess tite Mr. Pepys and his friends, "all of us, to dinner, almost a monopoly. But here, alas! he would find, upon a good venison pasty, and mighty merry," amid that, an unhappy dispute having arisen between the London half-depopulated by the great plague, and master engineers and their workmen, no less than more than half consumed by the great fire. thirty thousand of the best machinists and practical artisans in the world were just about to be turned adrift without employment, with a certain result of misery to the men and of distress to the masters incalculable, as well perhaps as of ruin irremediable to the machinists' trade, and a total destruction of the fund out of which engineering labour should in future have looked to be remunerated. Nor, though he might reasonably suppose himself by this time to have had his fill of doleful news for one day, would the lamentable record spare him even yet. Still there awaited him the announcement of a terrible fire at sea, unequalled in the records of such calamity; and, on the same woe-fraught page, the miserable tidings of new disgrace to our army in South Africa, and lamentations for the deaths of several officers high in the service of England, in a mean and unworthy conflict with hordes of untutored savages.

It is not many months since a jocose representation was made in this Narrative of the various evil signs and tokens which, at that time, taking particular facts to justify general conclusions, seemed to announce the near dissolution of all order and society throughout the three kingdoms. Yet it may now be admitted in more sober seriousness that the mishaps which have signalised the opening of 1852 bear with a gloomier portent of disaster on the general interests and common welfare. Take as an illustration of this the five or six several topics, which, in gloomy succession, were the subject of editorial comment, in that single number of the leading journal which was published on the seventh morning of the new year. First came the announcement that certain ruin impended over us unless the country could find a stronger government than that which has present possession of Downing Street, and after it an Such being the character of the day's comment in a aborate disquisition to prove that the state of parties single journal on the news of a single day, it would as such as to render any stronger government | be useless to attempt, by any amount of smiling philo

VOL. III.

What remains to be done which M. de Persigny himself may be found a too delicate instrument to do, after seizing upon private property with as little scruple as his predecessor laid hands on the public liberties? One feels it must be much that will arrest a service so eager and unblushing; and upon the work that may yet await the successor of M. de Persigny, therefore, the imagination forbears to dwell.

IT

NARRATIVE OF POLITICS.

It appears from the Revenue Returns for the year and quarter ending the 5th instant, that the revenue of 1851 has fallen short of that of 1850 by rather more than half a million. The receipts in the first and third quarters of 1851 were greater than in 1850; in the second and fourth they were less; but the fourth has been the most unfavourable. In that quarter, the decrease in 1851, as compared with the corresponding period of 1850, is 713,5477. The decrease on the year has taken place principally in the Stamps, Taxes, and Property-tax. The falling-off in the receipts from Stamps (162,0927.) may be traced to the working of the new Stamp Act (which has lightened the burdens on the transfer of Taxes (796,2167.) to the circumstance that the Windowproperty); and the falling off in the receipts from tax has ceased to be levied before the House-tax has come into play. In the Customs, there is an increase of 146,1897. on the year; in the Excise, of 89,2097.; in the Post-office, of 244,000l. The increase in the last item has been attributed in a great measure to the Industrial Exhibition: and the falling-off in the receipts from Customs (37,1937.) and Excise (162,9507.) during the last quarter of the year, has been ascribed to a reaction among the spending part of the community-a disposition to economise in order to make up for the extra expenditure incurred by visits to the Great Exhibition.

sophy, ingeniously to turn it into "all for the best." The outlook is bad, and the only best thing we can make of it, or the reader can make of it, is to admit as much; with the reassuring addition that there is neverthe less little call for despondency, and not the remotest for despair. It may turn out that we really wanted such a warning to set our house in order; and that, having got rid of that noisy fellow Brag, we shall find ourselves on a better understanding with our more discreet friend Holdfast. There is no saying whether even the successive tocsins of alarm now sounding with every touch of the electric wire submerged beneath the Channel, may not prove to be the very best counter-irritants that in such a state of things could happen to us. After the first few shocks the nerves recover strength, and confidence becomes habitual. We begin to perceive that there are worse things than Caffrarian wars; that the disasters of a too easy and idle way of governing are better borne than the whips and scorns of another kind of government; that what a free people sees to be necessary, involves no great trouble or time to obtain, when once the determination is taken; and that we should take at the same time the hint of danger supplied by an unscrupulous neighbour to ascertain what it really is that we want for our own security, straightway setting about its acquisition, concentrating our future care on our own concerns, and abating our Quixotic propensity to settle the concerns of other people. All which being perceived and acted upon, it is not at all impossible but that the student above described may yet be able to find our next month's Narrative a miscellany of agreeable reading. It may even have the pleasant task of announcing to him that already our soldiers are better clad, our sailors better fed, and a better understanding exists between our workmen and their masters; that thus early the dreaded chances of a war have become remotely distant, because our fleets, recalled from Portuguese and African waters, are once more riding in the English Channel; that a common danger has happily re-knitted classes and interests too long divided, in England, by a supposed unassailable security; that even our Government has had spirit to strengthen itself, in the extremity, by a sufficient measure of reform; and that, confident of the best because provided against the worst, the good citizens of London in their intervals of rifle-practice, to which, as a manly amusement, they have very recently had the good sense to resort, are again able to look steadily and calmly in the direction of the French coast, and ask themselves, not without grave interest for the fate of a gallant people,—what Governing with surprise and concern the attempts made by parties

ment next?

It is a question which M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte will probably at that very time again be asking of himself. He has had some eight or ten in the course of as many months, and each has marked broadly a definite step in his course, whether downward or upward it would as yet be premature to say. M. Odillon Barrot was unfit for the work which M. Leon Faucher did not scruple to undertake. M. Leon Faucher could not handle the work which M. Baroche was found perfectly at home in. M. Baroche had perforce stopped for breath when M. de Thorigny came in and relieved him. But even M. de Thorigny started back when the work of the 2nd of December was to be done, and left his place to be taken by M. de Morny. And now M. de Morny himself, the gay, the audacious, the unscrupulous, even he appears among the

A large public meeting has been held at Newcastle to petition Parliament against the renewal of the Propertytax in any shape whatever. Mr. Hodgson Hinde moved the principal resolution, with arguments that no proposal would unite all interests in its favour except that of total abolition; but at last it was resolved, that the original resolution should be modified so as to demand income derived from trades and professions. In this the abolition of the tax only so far as it applies to shape the resolution was carried by a large majority; and it was resolved that a petition in accordance with the resolution should be sent to the House of Commons.

A Declaration in support of the decision in the Gorham Case, signed by 3262 names, nearly one fourth of the officiating clergy of the Church of England, has been forwarded to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York who have expressed their approbation of its tenor. The document contained these passages;

"We, the undersigned clergy of the Church of England, viewholding office in the Church to invalidate and nullify the judgment recently delivered by the Sovereign, as 'supreme governor of this realm, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal,' by the advice of the Privy Council and the Primates of the Church, in the case of 'Gorham versus the Bishop of Exeter,' hereby testify our thankfulness for the judgment so delivered; and feel ourselves called upon, under present circumstances, (whether holding or not the view which called forth the judgment,) humbly to state our conviction that it was a wise and just sentence, in accordance with the principles of the Church of England.... Such attempts we hold to be equivalent to the enforcement of a standard of doctrine in our Church, by unauthorised individuals, opposed to that established by its supreme authority; and consequently, to be irreconcileable with the first principles of all church polity, and necessarily to lead to a state of disorder, strife, and confusion in the Church.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury replied, that he had He great satisfaction in receiving the declaration.

observed

tians may differ without reproach to themselves or injury to "There are many questions in theology upon which Chrisothers. From the Reformation until the present time, numbers of our clergy have subscribed the same articles, have used the same formularies, have ministered in the same churches, whose

sentiments, if they had been obliged to state them with logical precision, would have been found to vary, more or less from one another, both with regard to regeneration and to the effect of infant baptism. But this difference has not prevented their harmo