will probably soon be found absolutely needful, to save Dr. Wilberforce and his brethren from a stringent
measure of Church Reform, or any ministry which declines to grant it from prompt destruction. People are
already beginning to make strange comparisons, and to discover that it is really no part of the necessity of an
episcopacy that its members should make the accumulation of enormous sums of money the whole end and
aim of their existence. In some statistical returns upon the subject which have been opportunely published,
they perceive that the late primate of the Church of France, who perished on the barricades of Paris in the vain
attempt to arrest the horrors of civil war, was content with a stipend of sixteen hundred pounds a year,
enjoyed in a single palace, whose expenses were defrayed from that sum; and they meditate on the fact that
the late primate of the Church of England, who, on the very day when his brother Primate so perished, was
quietly travelling to Canterbury with a well-stocked hamper of champagne to give a public breakfast on
occasion of opening a collegiate institution there, enjoyed an income of more than fifteen thousand a year,
possessed two palaces, and during his incumbency had spent on the repairs of those palaces no less a sum
than sixty thousand pounds. They are struck by the announcement, that the whole annual expense of the
Episcopacy in France is little more than forty-two thousand pounds a year, while that of the Episcopacy in
England is something more than two hundred thousand. And with these curious items, they couple the
reflection, not less curious or impressive, that a population of thirty-five million souls, of which only one
million are dissenters, can be spiritually "overlooked " at a charge of nearly a hundred and sixty thousand
a year less than is required for the spiritual overlooking of a population of fifteen million souls, of which
at least one-third are dissenters declining the favour altogether of being so overlooked.

In short it is quite certain that every year will now make more imminent the necessity for a well-devised
plan of re-arrangement and re-distribution in regard to ecclesiastical revenues. For years, the necessity has
been felt; but, unfortunately, the means adopted have only subjected the bishops to an increase of the very
temptation from which they most required to be saved. The men are not nearly so much to blame as a
system which tends to turn even the most modest and honourable men into partisans interested in
maintaining it. The bishops must not again be permitted to remodel and reform themselves. Of their apparent
incapacity to take just views of these matters, even amid the painful excitement caused among the best
and warmest friends of the Church by the recent disclosures, the last act for which they may be deemed
responsible in the now closing session is a remarkable proof. Nothing has so directly induced the monstrous
pecuniary abuses so damaging to the bishops as the unsettled state of the law regarding ecclesiastical leases and
fines in renewal. In such fines alone, during the last seven years, there appears to have been something like
an amount of six hundred and fifty thousand pounds received, in every one of which instances, it is needless
to remark, the Church lost in proportion as the bishop gained. But the House of Lords, acting on the
advice of its right reverend bench, has just refused to entertain a most moderate proposal of compromise
offered by Lord Carlisle, of which the effect would have been to cure at least some of the crying defects of
subordinating the ecclesiastical interests so wholly and exclusively to the episcopal. And this they profess to have
done in the interest of the Church, just as, not many days before, they had voted in horror against the admission
of a Jew into the House of Commons, lest it should seem to proclaim their indifference to the purity of the
faith of which they claim to be the depositaries and representatives. Nevertheless the clatter which they
may expect to be raised about their ears before many sessions are over, on this and other cognate questions,
is but faintly foreshadowed by the noise which Mr. Alderman Salomons has been making ever since their
vote of disqualification against the lawful "elected" of Greenwich.

Into Mr. Salomons' resolute storming of the House of Commons, and all the various speeches which have been,
and may yet be, made thereupon; into the worthy Alderman's gallant aspirations after the fame of Pym
and Hampden, not to speak of his prudent accompanying hopes that the English people will hold him harmless
in regard to any penalties or fines his patriotic rashness may have incurred; it is not necessary that we
should enter. It does not seem probable that the result of his agitation on the mere question of the efficacy
of certain words in the oath, as connected with the statute for the relief of tender consciences, will advance
the question much beyond where it was left by the debates in Baron Rothschild's case; but if the constituencies
themselves now resolve to take up the question in earnest, and return some half-dozen Jews when they
have the opportunity, it is not doubted, even by the Lords themselves, that further contest with the will
of the people in the matter would be quite idle and unavailing.

The great subject of Law Reform may be well said to have taken a step in advance, during a month
which has seen the Queen's Attorney-General rise in his place to propose the second reading of a bill
embodying so great a principle of improved jurisprudence as that of admitting, in our superior courts, the
evidence of parties to suits. This was the change for which Bentham pleaded, all his life, so earnestly and
vainly. It deserves to be noted, also, that the principle of a yet greater reform, on which some remarks
were made in our last publication, not only came under incidental discussion on that provision of the bill
which authorises the Common Law Courts to compel the inspection of documents in all cases where a
Court of Equity would grant a discovery, but elicited as well from the Attorney and Solicitor-General as
from distinguished lawyers of less liberal political opinions, a hearty approval of the clause on the distinct ground
of its being the first step towards a fusion of law and equity. Sir Alexander Cockburn expressly hailed it in his
able speech as the commencement of a new era in our system of judicial proceeding, and did not hesitate to
declare his hope that "we were now getting in the fine edge of the wedge, and that it must end in that
fusion of law and equity, short of which he was convinced that the public would not be satisfied." This
is language which marks out the speaker for a great share in the great work which still awaits the labourers
in this field of reform. Uno avulso non deficit alter. "I hope," Lord Brougham had said, not many days
earlier, after describing the incalculable blessings of such change as would make one uniform system of our
English law,—"I hope that those who are younger than I am, may live, without living long, to enjoy the
happiness of seeing this gigantic improvement in our jurisprudence completely and efficiently consummated."
And if this should be so (and seeing the signs around us, who would condemn the hope as oversanguine or
premature?)—in no small degree will it have been due to the exertions of Henry Brougham. Never will
that name be dissociated from this great cause. Never will his countrymen in distant times forget, when
the memory of less grateful passages in his career shall have passed away, that to the promotion of law
reform, and the extension of popular education, Lord Brougham devoted the best years of his life, his most
practical and powerful talents, his most consistent and unwearied energies.