:In asking for leave to introduce a Bill to amend and extend the Law relating to Factories and Workshops, I wish to say that although I do not propose to introduce it at length, it is not because in the view of the Government this is an unimportant Bill. The explanation is that, in point of principle, it is not at all contentious, but in point of detail it deals in a somewhat complicated way with a number of particular industries, and therefore it is hardly a Bill which could be conveniently discussed until it is printed and circulated, which I hope it will be to-morrow. The Bill proposes to make Amendments in the general law relating to factories and workshops as to their sanitary conditions and safety. It defines overcrowding to mean an allowance of less than 250 cubic feet of space per man, and after 8 o'clock in the evening 400 cubic feet. It gives power to the Courts, where premises are structurally unfit for a particular process, to require the necessary alterations to be made, and it prohibits the cleaning of machinery in motion by women and young persons, in addition to children, as at present. Next, as to the time of employment, the Bill provides that overtime, which is now capable of being allowed five days in any week, shall not be allowed on more than three days; and it restricts the employment outside the factory, in the business of the factory, of children, women, and young persons—that is to say, if the child has been employed in the factory during the daytime, it is not to be allowed to take out work to do at home; and similarly women and young persons are not to be allowed to take out work if they are employed in the factory. The Bill proposes to include in the law as to factories and workshops certain industries which are not at present embraced; such, for instance, as laundries. Steam laundries are to be deemed factories, and other laundries are to be deemed workshops; and special provisions are made for the ventilation of steam laundries and the keeping of the floors, &c, drained. There are exceptions for what are called domestic laundries and laundries belonging to institutions, which will be under the general law. As to docks, wharves, and places where buildings are being temporarily constructed, they are brought for the first time under those provisions of the Factory Act which deal with inspection, fencing of machinery, and notice of accident. Thirdly, and lastly, the Bill proposes in the case of what are called tenement factories, which are common in Sheffield and that part of the country—factories where different parts of the building are let out to small occupiers —to make the owner responsible for the sanitary condition of the factory, the fencing of the machinery, and a number of matters of that kind. In the case of dangerous and unhealthy employments, the Bill gives power to the Secretary of State, in addition to his present powers, to restrict the hours of employment, and altogether to forbid the employment of women, young persons, and children. Finally, the Bill proposes to amend, or rather to substitute, for what is called the "particulars" clause in the Act of 1891, a new clause, which will apply that en- actment to all piece-workers in the textile trades, and which will require employers in those trades to supply to every worker paid by the piece a plain definite form, in writing, giving such particulars as will enable the operative to compute the wages payable to him in respect of each piece handed over to him to work upon. I hope the House will now consent to read the Bill a first time on the understanding that ample time will be given before the Second Reading is taken, and that ultimately it will be referred to the Standing Committee on Trade.

Motion made, and Question proposed,

"That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend and extend the Law relating to Factories and Workshops."—( Mr. Asquith. )

Motion agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Secretary Asquith, Mr. Herbert Gladstone, and Mr. George Russell.

Bill presented, and read first time. [Bill 204.]

said that, while congratulating the Government on the introduction of the Bill, he wished to offer a few criticisms on several sweeping statements which had been made by Members of the Opposition. The hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight stated that the Nonconformist Bodies and the English Church in Wales were about equally divided; several hon. Members asserted that in Wales Nonconformity was a declining force, and that the Church was increasing in influence and in numbers; and the right hon. Gentleman the Mem- ber for West Bristol said that Wales had never had a separate national existence, and that nothing in history could support the claim for a separate Welsh nationality. Those were very sweeping statements, and upon them rested the whole case for a special Bill. But he thought they had a right to complain that not one single shred of argument, one historical fact, or one tittle of evidence had been adduced in support of those statements. As he had not the slightest doubt that every one of these statements would be repeated in every town and village throughout the country during the next 18 months, no apology was required from a Welsh Member for taking steps to at once repudiate them. As to the first, he ventured to say that if it were true that the Church and Nonconformity were about equally divided in Wales, it meant that at the last General Election, and at several previous Elections, the sentiment in favour of disestablishment must have been so strong that no less than tens of thousands of Churchmen must have voted for the disestablishment of the Church. Honesty would not permit him to accept that statement. Several speakers had commented on the assertion that the Welsh Nonconformists had refused to assent to the taking of a Religious Census. He had the official Returns of the number of registered members of the particular denominations in Wales. Now, what were the numbers? The Church claimed to have four dioceses. The number of its communicants—

:What is the hon. Gentleman quoting from?

:From the official Returns of the communicants of the Church.

:Where do they come from?

:From The Contemporary Review of this month, supplied by a statistician, whose authority, I am sure, hon. Gentlemen opposite will not dispute—namely, Mr. Darlington, a gentleman who has gone into the question thoroughly.

An hon. MEMBER: The figures are not "official."

said, the aggregate number of the communicants of the Church came to 117,900, or 6 per cent. of the population. The aggregate number of Nonconformists was 402,840, or 23 per cent. of the population. So that the Nonconformists were in the proportion of three, or almost four, to one of the Church communicants. That did not support the statement made so liberally on the other side that Nonconformists and Churchmen were in equal proportions.

:The hon. Member says he has an official Return. I should like to know if there were official enumerators? ["Order, order!"]

said, this was not the only statement made on the other side. They were told not merely that Churchmen and Nonconformists were about equal, but that Nonconformity was a declining force, while the Church was increasing in numbers. Some figures, which were not very relevant, were given in support of that startling proposition. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the Isle of Wight (Sir R. Webster) had quoted the Returns of the Nonconformist chapels from 1884 to 1886 inclusive. The very selection of that period showed the partial method and tactics of the Church Party, because these were the lowest years in the Nonconformist Returns, and there was a practical reason for it. There was great depression in trade at industrial centres. Thousands of working men—who constituted, after all, the bulk of the Nonconformists in Wales—had to leave for England, and some for America. The Church Party selected those years of depression in the history of Dissent as a fair sample of progress, but that was a thoroughly discreditable method of endeavouring to support a case. Still, he found that in 1886 the Methodists alone increased by 6,401, whilst the Church increased by 5,910; so that even in a year of great depression for Nonconformists, one denomination alone increased its adherents by 500 more than the Church. But he did not consider it fair to take one year. They ought to take at least 10 or 20 years in order to judge of the increase of the respective forces in Wales. If they did that, what would they find? Taking the years from 1872 to 1892, they found that the Methodists and the Baptists—the two bodies selected and singled out for the purpose of comparison by the other side—had increased as follows:— The Methodists in 1872 were 95,000, and in 1892 had increased to 140,000, or an increase of 40 per cent.; and the Baptists in 1872 were 63,000, and in 1892 had increased to 97,000, or an increase of 57 per cent. In the face of this they were told that Nonconformity was a declining force in Wales. With regard to Nonconformity as a whole, there had been an increase of 40 per cent. in the number of adherents. But they were told that there was a marked decline in the subscriptions of Dissenting Bodies. He had the aggregate contributions of the Methodists in 1869 and 1889—and he regretted that in the short time he had had at his disposal he had been unable to get hold of the contributions of the Baptists. The official Returns of the Methodists showed that in 1869 the amount collected was £ 104,000,and in 1889 it was £182,000, or an increase of 73 per cent. That did not look as though in that 20 years Nonconformity was a declining force in Wales. Well, what about the Church? He maintained that Nonconformity was not declining in comparison with the Church, and that its rate of progress, as compared with that of the Church, was great. In 1851 there was an official Census taken of the attendance at the different places of worship in Wales— and he was sure that the defenders of the Church in the House would not state that this attendance was under-estimated. It was found that the Church attendances amounted to 132,000, or only 21 per cent. of the total attendances. The Nonconformist attendances, exclusive of Roman Catholics, amounted to 484,000, or 78 per cent. of the whole. That was the proportion then. What was the proportion now? It was this— Church, 22 per cent.; Nonconformist, 77 per cent.; so that there was barely a perceptible increase in favour of the Church. That was not to be surprised at. Nonconformity in 1851 was in its full vigour, whereas the Church was only beginning, as it were, to awaken to new life, and it would naturally be expected that the progress of the Church would be more marked than that of Nonconformity. So much for that part of the argument. But the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells had used another argument to prove the decline of Nonconformity, and it was that the Church was making converts from Dissent. He flaunted the case of the few hundred Baptists in South Wales and the eight Nonconformist ministers, whose names had never been supplied in spite of repeated demands for particulars. In the diocese of St. Asaph there were said to be 16 of these conversions of ministers, but no names had been supplied. This proselytism in Wales was the strongest possible argument for disestablishment. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol had thought fit to charge the opponents of Church establishment with envy and jealousy of the Church, and to say that those were the two motives which influenced them in agitating for disestablishment. What must be the state of mind of anyone who charged hundreds of thousands of his fellow-citizens with acting from the meanest and most malignant motives that ever darkened the human heart?

:I did not do that.

said, that the vast majority of the Welsh people had recorded votes in favour of disestablishment. There were other motives which induced Welsh Nonconformists to protest against action which involved an inference as to the inferiority of dissent. These clerical gentlemen, who were maintained at the public expense, went to people who had received religious instruction under the best Sunday school system, he fancied, in the whole Kingdom, and who had received spiritual counsel and advice from one of the finest races of preachers that had ever appeared, at all events in Wales, and treated them as if they were devoid of the very elements of religious truth, and as if they were as proper subjects for conversion as pagan idolaters in the heart of Africa. Was it to be wondered at that the Welsh Nonconformists resented such action? These clerical gentlemen went to men and women who had spent their lives as members of religious communities, and had led perfectly consistent and pure lives, and tried to induce them to cut themselves adrift from their religious associations in order that they might be registered among the assets of this company in Wales. They knew that there was an application for a winding - up order, and that it was very important that the balance-sheet should look well. Therefore every agent of this company did his very best to get in every Nonconformist he could possibly lay his hands on in order to make the balance sheet as favourable as possible. Was it a matter for surprise that Nonconformist farmers, whose lot was hard enough, should object to be forced by law to contribute £200,000 a year towards subsidising a horde of raiders who were invading their territories and trying to capture them? The present proselytising system was creating a good deal of natural bitterness, and was, he thought, the strongest possible argument in favour of disestablishment and disendowment. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) had said that Wales never had a separate national existence. The right hon. Gentleman had not, however, suggested a single, argument in support of that contention. The light hon. Gentleman, when he was down at Carnarvon, admitted that there was a separate national spirit in Wales, although he said it was a disembodied spirit. The hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight (Sir R. Webster) admitted in his speech that Wales had national traditions, so that the national spirit had at least the power of expression. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) was perfectly prepared to admit a separate Wales for intermediate education and even for Sunday closing, but he was not prepared to have a separate Wales for disestablishment. But nationality surely was a question of fact. Either there was a separate Wales, or there was not. The right hon. Gentleman had invented a new species of fact —a considerable fact—a fact that was only a fact as long as it was not adduced in evidence. It might even be adduced in evidence in favour of a claim for intermediate education or Sunday closing, but the moment it was adduced in favour of disestablishment, not only, according to the right hon. Gentleman, did it cease to be a fact, but it never had any existence at all. Was it surprising that there were three nationalities in the House of Commons who thought they could govern themselves better than they could be governed by gentlemen whose ideas of nationality were as crude as this? No one could read the history of Wales for 10 minutes without discovering that she had a separate national existence. The right hon. Gentleman had referred to the Turnpike Acts, Intermediate Education and Sunday Closing Acts, but what about the Coercion Acts that were passed for centuries in order to keep Wales down; what about the Act of Union between Wales and England?

An hon. MEMBER: What was the date of it?

said, the Act was passed in the reign of Henry VIII., and he would give the hon. Member the date later on. It was an Act of Union between the Principality Dominion of Wales and the Kingdom of England. Was not that a recognition of separate nationality? It was, however, unnecessary to attempt further to prove a point with which any reader of history was acquainted. As to the Bill as a whole, he thought it was generally accepted by the Welsh people as being a highly statesmanlike measure. At the same time, he fancied that there was a strong feeling against what were known as the Compensation Clauses. The Government proposed, as he understood, to leave the clergy in full possession and enjoyment of their life interest for the rest of their days. He considered such treatment to be too indulgent and too generous, and he thought it would inflict a considerable hardship and injustice upon the Welsh people. It meant the postponement of the full operation of the Bill in the vast majority of Welsh parishes. He did not consider that the Government had any justification for propounding such a scheme. The right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Asquith), in proposing the Bill, treated the establishment as a State institution, the clergy as State officials, and the property as State property. Whenever the Government discharged any set of officials they of course compensated them for any loss they might suffer by being thrown upon an overcrowded market, but he had never heard of any Government assuming that officials in the prime of life were so thoroughly handicapped against obtaining other appointments that they ought to be provided with the full measure of their income for the rest of their lives. Something must be done undoubtedly to compensate these men for the losses they must necessarily sustain. They had been turned out of a certain profession and had suddenly to find other means of employment, and that undoubtedly might cause them some loss, but he did not think the Government were justified in securing them in their appointments for the rest of their lives. The Government propose to utilise the property that would be placed at their disposal for the purpose of the social regeneration of rural life in Wales. In a small country like theirs £200,000 would go a long way. The Government, however, proposed to postpone the operation of their scheme of social regeneration. He contended that they were not justified in doing so, and that the fact of their doing so would be a hardship even to the clergy. The right hon. Gentleman, in introducing the Bill, said that the Establishment in Wales was creating a good deal of exasperation and disturbance. If the Bill were passed in its present shape, instead of removing the causes of disturbance it would increase and intensify them, because the people would have an inducement to create disturbances in order to get rid of the clergy. In what way did the Government justify the course they proposed to take? They said that the clergy had vested interests which were life interests. It must, however, be remembered that these life interests were not disposable.. The right hon. Gentleman had based his compensation to the owners of rights of presentation upon the marketable value of such rights. He did not, however, propose to apply the same test to the life interest of clergymen. What was the marketable value of a clergymen's interest? It was nil. The clergyman could not dispose of it; he was bound to reside on his property and to devote the whole of his energies and time to the service of the parish, and he could not leave the parish except for a month or two without special licence. The property, therefore, was mortgaged, as it were, up to the hilt, and was not disposable. Yet the Government proposed to give the same liberal compensation for the loss of it as they would give if it were an unencumbered and perfectly fair life interest.

[Mr. ASQUITH here interposed a remark which did not reach the Reporters' Gallery.]

said, he thought that made the case worse, and that it gave away the whole case for the Bill. The case for the Bill was that the services performed by these clergymen were not needed, and that the fact that Nonconformist farmers paid for those services was the cause of exasperation and bitterness. Yet the Government were going to perpetuate a system which they admitted to be a thoroughly bad one. He said they were simply giving away any case they might have for the Bill by postponing its operation for a whole generation. What had the Welsh clergy done for Wales that would entitle them to this extraordinary indulgent treatment at the hands of a Welsh people, and at their expense? A Bill had been introduced for the disestablishment of the Scotch Church, and he believed the proposals of the two Bills were the same with regard to vested interests; but there was a great distinction between the two cases. There was no doubt that the clergy of the Scotch Church were entitled to very tender treatment. The Scotch Church was a thoroughly National Church. It was a Church which had been founded by the Scotch people, and its clergy had always been in the forefront of any struggle for the upholding of the national honour. These things could not be said of the Welsh Church, which was a thoroughly anti-national Church—a Church which had been forced upon Wales by Norman Kings, and a Church whose whole history had been a history of warfare against Welsh nationality. It was a Church which throughout its whole career had grossly neglected its spiritual functions. Under these circumstances, he was of opinion that the indulgent treatment proposed by the right hon. Gentleman was far too liberal and generous. He should like to quote a few authorities to the House to show that the Welsh Church had been an anti-national Church. He would, in the first instance, give an authority which would be received, he believed, even by Members opposite. He referred to Archdeacon PryŰe, who was a consistent opponent of Welsh disestablishment, but who had written the best history of the ancient British Church ever published. Archdeacon Pryce said—

"The subjection of the Welsh Church brought with it evils that have been perpetuated through many generations down to the 19th century. It was the policy of the Norman Kings to stamp out the Welsh national sentiment with a view to assimilation with their English subjects; and, unfortunately, the Episcopate in Wales was made the instrument for carrying out this policy."

:But that was the Church of Rome.

said, it was the Church of which this Church in Wales was the successor. It was the argument of hon. Members opposite that the teaching was continuous. The writer went on to say that in pursuance of the policy indicated the Bishops appointed in Wales were generally alien, antagonistic to the national sentiment, and prepared to obey the behests of English Kings, connection by blood with the Welsh Princes being disqualification for episcopal office. That was a quotation out of a book written by an eminent dignitary of the Church in Wales, who pronounced this Church to have been anti-national for centuries, who said that the Bishops of the Church were in the nature of policemen and spies upon the Welsh people, who were simply there to watch their movements, and to report anything in the nature of a tendency towards insurrection. It might be urged that this was a matter of ancient history, but unfortunately it was not so, for what was known as the Anglicising policy was the policy of the Church at the present moment. On this point he could quote the authority of another treatise written by a distinguished clergyman of the Church of Wales, also an opponent of disestablishment, and consequently an impartial and unprejudiced witness. What did this ecclesiastic say? He said—

"That the Anglicising section of the Church dominated its policy at the present moment, and had done so for centuries. The aim of that Anglicising policy was to stifle the sentiment of Welsh nationality, and this Anglicising section within the Church sought to obtain its purpose of attempting to assimilate the Church in Wales to that in England by depreciating the Welsh language and literature,…. by deriding Welsh patriotism, despising Welsh nationality, and even by attempting sometimes to disprove its very existence."

That was the description given only last year by a Welsh clergyman (the Rev. David Jones) of the Anglicising and denationalising policy pursued by this party to the Welsh people, and yet they were told this Church was to be tenderly treated at the expense of the Welsh peasants because it was their property. ["No!"] It was the property of the Welsh people given to a perfectly independent Church, taken away from that Church and given to an anti-national Church in spite of the protests of the Welsh people, and it was only now their claims were being listened to by a British Parliament for restitution of that property. Hon. Gentlemen might say they believed in an Anglicising policy in Wales, but he could reply to them in the words of Archdeacon Howell, who stated a short time ago that to attempt to denationalise the Welsh was to attempt to demoralise a nation. He could not conceive any deeper injury which they could inflict than to destroy that individuality of character, that sense of self-respect, that true manliness of spirit, which was the possession of every nation which had traditions, literature, and a language of its own. Yet that was what had been attempted by members of this Church from the 12th century downwards. Its consistent policy had been to destroy Welsh nationality; to use their spiritual position for the purpose of Anglicising the national sentiment of Wales. During the whole period of its history it had grossly neglected its spiritual functions. Hon. Members opposite seemed to assume that the neglect of its religious work was simply a feature of the latter part of the 18th century; but that was not so. Let them touch the history of the Church at any point, and they would not find a trace of any of those qualities which tended to make a great Religious Body. The hon. Member proceeded to read the Petition sent by the Welsh Princes in the 13th century to the Pope, in which the Princes complained that the Archbishop of Canterbury sent them English Bishops who were ignorant of the manners and language of the Welsh people, and who could not preach the Word of God to the people nor receive their confessions but through interpreters. The Bishops, the petitioners stated, neither loved them nor their land, but persecuted and oppressed them.

:May I ask if the hon. Member attempts to blame the Reformed Church of England for the doings of England when it was Romish?

said, the hon. Member endeavoured to distinguish between the Church of England in the 13th century and the present Church. He wondered if English Conservative Members were prepared to take that view? At the date of what was called its amalgamation, according to the hon. Member, it was a Romish Church. That meant it could not be the successor of the ancient British Church, because that was an independent Church. During the whole course of its existence the Church in Wales had been the persistent enemy of Welsh nationality, while it had grossly neglected its spiritual functions. It was said that at the present time the Church was active and energetic, and that it was a growing Church. But what did that mean? It meant that what this Church would not perform from a sense of duty to its people and to the religion of which it was the sole exponent, directly its social ascendancy, emoluments, and privileges were attacked it was stimulated into activity and energy. It was stimulated into activity by the presence of the very forces which now rendered its existence unnecessary. Nonconformity had provided for the spiritual wants of the people; it had its chapel in every glen and hillside. There was no necessity now for subsidising this Church, even if the principle of religious establishment were admitted at all. There was nothing to be said for a Church which could only be stirred into anything like activity when its corruption reached such a point that there was a revolt of the whole people against it. That was the case of the Church in Wales. He would not willingly offend any man in the matter of his creed, and he believed the Church of England was a great Church and had exercised a beneficial influence on the destinies of the English race; but it was for him to speak as a Welshman of what this Church had been in Wales, and he said that during the whole history of the Church in Wales she had been the enemy of the common people. She had betrayed the household which had extended hospitality to her by acting the spy; she had betrayed the people whose spiritual interests were committed to her charge by endeavouring to stamp them out as a nationality from amongst the nations of the Empire. She had betrayed the religion of which she was the sole exponent in Wales by bringing disgrace upon its authors, and he protested most earnestly against postponing projects for the amelioration of the condition of the Welsh nation for the purpose of extending exceptional indulgence to an establishment the priesthood of which, during the whole of their career, had simply had one record of betrayal of that nation's highest interests.

:Mr. Speaker, the defence of this Bill appears to have been put by the Government into commission. The exposition of its details was made in a speech of masterly lucidity by the Minister in charge of the Bill. The defence of its principles is apparently left to the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down, and I do not know what the Home Secretary thought of the method in which his general views upon the question of disestablishment were presented to the House and the nation by the exponent of Welsh Nonconformity who has just addressed us. The speech of the hon. Gentleman divides itself— very unequally I admit—into two parts. The one dealt with the details of the Bill; the other dealt with the reasons for passing the Bill. With regard to what the said about the details of the Bill I need not detain the House, for the whole of that part of his speech was occupied in explaining that it was one of the worst Bills which ever was conceived, and that the result of it must be, not to bring that peace to Wales prophesied for the Bill by the Home Secretary, but to plunge Wales into discord even greater than that in which she is now; and when the Home Secretary sought, in a humble interruption, to defend his case, the only response with which he was greeted by the hon. Gentleman was that by that interruption the Home Secretary had given the whole case for the Bill away. It is not for me to defend the Bill against the attack of the hon. Gentleman. All I need to do before coming to the Bill itself, and before leaving the speech of the hon. Gentleman, is to deal very briefly with some of the general considerations which he laid before us. The hon. Gentleman began, as I suppose he was in duty bound to begin, with a discussion of the relative strength of the various Religious Denominations in Wales. He gave us, in defence of his particular view, what he described as official statistics, which proved that the strength of the Esta- blished Church was far less than its defenders on this side of the House suppose. But when we asked him what was the source of these official statistics it turned out that it was an article in The Contemporary Review, a very able and influential journal, but not a journal which has yet risen to the dignity of a Blue Book, or which we are obliged to accept as an authentic record of facts officially ascertained. But I do not mean to enter into any contest with the hon. Gentleman in regard to these figures. I think we have wasted a great deal of time over them, for, after all, I have to point out to the House that, in the first place, our decision ought not to depend upon the relative numbers of the various denominations concerned. I have to point out, in the second place, that it does not lie in the mouths of hon. Gentlemen opposite to use that language so long as they refuse the Religious Census for which we have constantly asked. When there is a controversy as to whether accounts have been cooked or not, without examination you are safe to give it against the persons who refuse to allow these accounts to be examined, and so long as hon. Gentlemen from Wales show their terror of the Religious Census by practically making it impossible for any Government to do for Wales what has long been done without protest for Ireland, so long we are justified in saying they dare not have a Religious Census, because they know the result of that Census would destroy their case. Having dealt with the official records contained in The Contemporary Review, the hon. Gentleman went on to give his views of Welsh history, and most astonishing views they were. I do not know whether any professional and competent historians were in the House when he was speaking—whether, for instance, the right hon. Member for Aberdeen or any person of like authority was present. But it does not require one to be a competent historian to know that the hon. Member has drawn entirely upon his own fancy when he has pictured his independent Wales as existing at some period unknown and unspecified in the remote darkness of the Middle Ages. The hon. Gentleman did not give us, so far as I recollect, one single date or one single authority, except a stray reference to an Act, which I confess I had never heard of before, which he described as the Act of Union with Wales. We know of the Act of Union with Scotland and of the Act of Union with Ireland, but certainly none of us heard on either side, until he gave us the information, that there ever had been an Act of Union for Wales. I cannot help recalling in that connection a statement made by the right hon. Member for Midlothian not so very long ago, when he informed the, House

"That Wales had never been dealt with separately or on any separate principle in any Reform Bill,"

and

"That distinctions between England and Wales except in the recital of an Act of Parliament, for the purpose of indicating their unity, it totally unknown to our Constitution."

However, as the hon. Gentleman did refer me to this Act of Union for Wales, I asked a friend to procure it from the Library. I do not require to read the whole statute, which is a long one, but the House will, perhaps, be interested with a few words from its preamble. This is the statute, apparently, which indicates the separate character of Wales as a nationality, and is the foundation of her freedom. It begins thus—

"Albeit the Dominion, Principality, and country of Wales justly and righteously is and ever hath been incorporated, annexed, united, and subject to, and under the Imperial Crown of the realm … and also because that the people of the same Dominion have and do daily use a speech nothing like or consonant to the natural mother tongue used within this realm, and because some rude and ignorant people have made distinction and diversity between the King's subjects of this realm and his subjects of the said Dominion and Principality of Wales … His Highness therefore of a singular zeal, love, and favour that he beareth towards his subjects of his said Dominion of Wales," desires "utterly to extirp all and singular the sinister usages and customs differing from the same, and to bring the said subjects of this his realm, and of his said Dominion of Wales to an amicable concord and unity."

I really think the hon. Gentleman should have carefully looked at this charter of Welsh liberties before he led us to think that there were, I will not say rude, but still ignorant persons, who, in the words of the statute, did make a distinction and diversity between

"The King's subjects of this realm and his subjects of the said Dominion and Principality."

Now the third and last point which the hon. Member made consisted in an attack upon the English Church in Wales for the neglect of its duties and a comparison between it and the Nonconformist Bodies very much to the advantage of the latter. I do not mean to follow the hon. Gentleman through the embittered controversy which he initiated, and certainly I am not going to use towards the Nonconformist Bodies in Wales epithets and phrases which he was not ashamed—though he ought to have been ashamed—to use towards the members of that great communion which he was attacking. But I will only say, so far as my information goes, that there is in this respect an honourable rivalry between all the Christian denominations in Wales to do their work and to do their duty, and no denomination in Wales has a right to say that its own work is perfect, and that even the Nonconformist Bodies, so ably represented by the hon. Gentleman, have by the mouths of authorities not less than himself expressed their own view that the reason of the present crisis might be that the Nonconformist Bodies were falling behind their Established brethren in the great work in which they are both concerned. Mr. J. R. Davies, a gentleman who, I believe, was lately a Member of this House, speaking as Chairman of the Welsh Nonconformist Conference at Carnarvon, only two years ago, used, as I am informed, this sentence—

"I doubt at times whether dissent has not done its work. One thing that inclines me to this opinion is the fact that the great aim of the sects at present is the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England in Wales—an aim wholly political, a low aim for the Church of the living God, and the fact that they are swallowed up by so worldly an aim is itself an admission and a condemnation of their spiritual destitution."

It is not my business, and I am not going, to express agreement or disagreement with a statement made upon the authority of the Chairman of this Nonconformist meeting, but, at all events, it may teach, it should teach, the hon. Gentleman and his friends some greater humility of statement than he has permitted himself to-day, and may induce him to believe that the case against the Church in Wales is not to be defended upon some wrong, real or imaginary, that occurred in the 13th century, but is to be measured by the comparative work both the Church and Nonconformists are doing now in the cause of true religion. If he takes that as the measure of his comparison, I think, whatever may be the result of his studies, he will not again permit himself, either in this House or on a Welsh platform, to use the violent and bitter terms of reproach he has to-day hurled against men whom he evidently regards more as political opponents than as men engaged in a work with which he as a Christian gentleman ought to sympathise. Now, Sir, I pass to a very brief review of the Bill which the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary has laid before us, and I shall deal with it chiefly in respect of those points in which a different plan has been adopted from that when the Irish Church was disestablished. I shall at once touch on that part of the Bill which deals with matters connected with the Church establishment, and then with the provisions of the Bill in so far as they affect the general community. The first point on which I have to attack the proposals of the Government is the least important. It is that which is raised by their proposal in regard to Church patronage. The Government have fixed in this Bill one year's income as the proper compensation to be given to patrons, and they found themselves upon the action taken by the Conservative Government in 1874, in relation to the Scotch Act, and the right hon. Gentleman with a happy mimicry was glad to say he had shielded himself under the precedent set by Lord Beaconsfield in that year. But the right hon. Gentleman does not only desire to disestablish the Welsh Church, but he is a Scotch Member, and as a Scotch Member he ought to know—he must know—something of the circumstances which made one year a full measure of compensation in the case of Scotland, while it is an inequitable and unjust measure in the case of Wales. Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that he will not find a time, I believe, in the generation following the Act of 1843 when there was one single case in which the next presentation in Scotland was sold at all? There is, therefore, no estimate to be derived from the outside market as to the value of those presentations. In the second place, is he not aware that in 1843 an Act was passed modifying permanently the law in the Scotch Church, and practically giving parishioners the power to make objection to the presentee; and to have that objection tried before a competent tribunal, and, naturally, under those circumstances, the market value, if it ever existed, for advowsons was entirely destroyed, so that there is no parallel whatever between the case of Scotland and the cases of England or Wales, to which the right hon. Gentleman desires to apply that precedent? But that is not all. The House may not be aware that the Lord Chancellor, under a recent statute, has been empowered, and has used that power, of selling presentations in his gift. That ought to give us some measure of what advowsons sell for. Has the Government investigated what price these advowsons fetch in the market, and, if they have done so, will they give us some particulars with regard to them? I want to know if these advowsons have been sold in Wales by the English Chancellor under the statute passed by the British Parliament, by what right do you take away these advowsons so bought at the miserable compensation fixed in this Bill? A grosser case of spoliation, I think, can hardly be conceived, and unless the right hon. Gentleman shows us by investigation of facts that the value in the market of these advowsons is what the Government estimate them at, he and his friends must be open to the charge of deliberately depriving those who have bought property under the laws of the land from legitimate protection in the use of it. That, as I said, is comparatively a small question, but the next is much more important. It relates to the curates; it is the measure of justice, or injustice, dealt out to the curates. The right hon. Gentleman very naturally and properly has made a study of what passed under the Irish Disestablishment Act of 1869, and he explained to the House that in the provisions of that Act the Irish curates got a great deal more than they ought to have got. The right hon. Gentleman used the occasion for levelling at the House of Lords one of those sneers with which we are familiar. The House of Lords, no doubt, did modify the original provisions of the Bill in respect to compensation to be given to these curates, but I observe that when the Amendment was discussed in this House the Minister in charge of the Bill—the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Midlothian (Mr. W. E. Gladstone)—declared that the arrangements come to by the Lords were fair and reasonable. I, therefore, do not think it lies in the mouth of a Minister, so lately a colleague of the right hon. Gentleman, to make it a subject of complaint and accusation against the House of Lords that they had adopted this fair and reasonable arrangement. If the House of Lords were guilty—and I do not think it has been proved that they were guilty—of giving too favourable terms to curates, I want to know whether that is any justification for depriving these men of their just rights without any compensation at all. It is true that the Lords modified the original provisions in the Bill with regard to curates, but it is also true that in the Bill as originally introduced the rights and interests of these curates were dealt with, and I should like to know how the right hon. Gentleman can reconcile it with his sense of justice, or, at all events, with that measure of justice which those who introduced the Bill in 1869 thought ought to be meted out. There is something worse than giving too good terms to those who are dispossessed, and that is giving no terms at all, and treating them with the gross injustice which appears to be deliberately contemplated by this Bill. The next point of difference from the Irish Church —and all these points are points of difference for the worse—is that which relates to the provisions which the Government have made in regard to the cathedrals. It does appear to me to be their desire for no public object to inflict a deliberate insult on the Welsh Church. If they had set to work to contrive that insult they could not have done it better. The right hon. Gentleman said that the cathedrals are to be preserved as national monuments. At this moment, Sir, they would be national ruins if it had not been for the money the members of the English Church have lavishly spent in their restoration and preservation, and to hand the cathedrals over to these three gentlemen—of whom the Member who has just sat down would be one, and who spoke of the English clergymen as raiders, to hand them over to a Nonconformist body of persons who are to have possession of the cathedrals, and who are to allow those who have conducted worship in them for these hundreds of years to come in on licence to perform the services seems to me to be meting out a kind of treatment to the members of this great communion in Wales which must produce the profoundest irritation amongst them, and which can, as far as I can see, serve no public object. The right hon. Gentleman gave us some very obscure suggestions on this point. He told us that the members of the Church of England were to be allowed to celebrate their services in the cathedrals, but he did not tell us whether anybody else could do so. Therefore, it is open to conjecture whether the cathedrals are not to be handed over to every form of Christian worship or public ceremony. The fourth point on which this Bill differs from the Irish Bill is, in my opinion, the most important of all. The right hon. Gentleman told us that, in giving a 12 percent. bonus on capitalisation or commutation, he feared that too favourable terms were offered to the Irish Church. I am not going to chicane about the exact percentage which ought to be allowed, or whether any should be allowed; but that you should make it easy for the Church in Wales to capitalise its property I have no doubt whatever. And, when I see the right hon. Gentleman put on the Table of the House a scheme by which capitalisation is rendered almost impossible, I am driven to the conclusion that the hatred of hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway to their brother Christians is so great that, not content with depriving the Church of the whole of its property, they desire to deprive it of its property under circumstances and conditions which will make it as difficult as possible for that Church to do its work in the future. What will be the result? As you have framed your Bill the natural consequence of your provisions will be that each clergyman enjoying a freehold benefice will continue to the end of his life to enjoy it, and when he dies the whole property will be lost for ever to the Church of which he was a member. The only method of dealing with that is to ensure that the various incumbents should commute their life income for a capital sum to be devoted for ever to the use of the Church. But you make it almost impossible to carry out that operation at all, and quite impossible to carry it out on fair terms. And why? I will tell you. You allow every clergyman to enjoy his income in his benefice at an undiminished rate of remuneration during the term of his life, but if he leaves he has to pay a fine, a considerable fine, compared with his age. If, therefore, he goes to an Insurance Office to capitalise his interest in his benefice, he will only be able to capitalise, not upon the income which he is enjoying, but upon that reduced income which he must under any circumstances? enjoy. That is not putting the 12 per cent. bonus on the commutation on capitalisation of the annual income; it is making a large discount—in fact, inflicting a heavy fine for carrying out that provision; and therefore I say that in this provision of the right hon. Gentleman there is not a desire to deal equitably with what he must admit is an ancient and an honourable institution, but a desire to destroy it—not merely to destroy it now, but for all time to come. More ungenerous treatment of those who at least might ask for justice—they do not ask for more—has never been meted out to any body of men whose recognised rights this House has had to deal with. I now leave the points in which this Bill differs from the Irish Bill for the worse, and I come to the points which affect the community, who are made the heirs and the legatees of the property which belongs to the Church. Here I have to criticise the Bill from the point of view of the public, the parochial system which the right hon. Gentleman has adopted. He says that the central national fund of the Irish Church has been abused by successive Governments, and that the fund has been gradually plundered until within a generation the whole has been squandered; so he has determined that no such abuse shall occur in this case; and therefore he has adopted a plan by which every parish shall be made for all time the heir to the tithes which are collected within its limits. I do not agree altogether with the criticism passed upon the uses to which the Irish Church Fund has been applied. There have been one or two cases in which a Government, in order to relieve itself of immediate difficulty, has put its hand into that national fund rather than draw upon the Imperial Exchequer. I do not think that the Party to which I belong has committed those mistakes; but I do not desire to revive recollections of past controversies. When I remember that out of this fund you have created a great University in Dublin, and that out of it you have collected the resources for the Congested Districts Board, I say, looking at those two great objects and leaving out of account all minor ones, I do not think the fund has been wasted. I wish to know what security we have that, when these parishes are set squabbling over their share of the funds, and when the parishioners are set squabbling as to the purposes to which the money shall be applied, what guarantee is there that as large a proportion of jobbery and useless expenditure will not take place under the system of this Bill as has occurred under the Irish Church Act? That is not my main objection. My main objection is that the new plan is unworkable, in the first instance; and if it were workable it would produce boundless difficulties and endless controversies between all the parties who expect to share in the distribution of these endowments. I presume the right hon. Gentleman has looked into the figures, but I cannot believe that the various parties whose support is to be bought by their share of public plunder will be content with the result of their examination. However you take the figures—whether as between North and South Wales, or as between one county and another, or as between one parish and another—you will find inequalities and anomalies so glaring that I do not believe the results will ever be tolerated. Take two or three examples. The County of Glamorgan has a population of 693,000, or, say, 700,000, and the parochial tithe is £16,000. The County of Anglesey has a population of 35,000, and a parochial tithe of £12,064. Therefore, a population 20 times less has three-fourths of the same tithe. In other words, Anglesey has 15 times more tithe than she is entitled to on any just comparison of population. I dare say Anglesey will like that arrangement, but I am sure Glamorgan will not. Take two great industrial and mining counties and compare them with the rest of Wales. Glamorgan and Monmouth have a population of about 1,000,000, and the rest of Wales 800,000. Glamorgan and Monmouth have £34,000 of parochial tithes, and the rest of Wales £120,000, so that the smaller part, judged by population, has three and a half times its proper share of tithes. Take North and South Wales. They have had their quarrels before, and may have them again. Roughly speaking, the parochial tithes are the same—that is to say, that North Wales gets nearly £74,000 and South Wales £70,000; and, while the parochial tithes are nearly equal, the populations are as 451,000 to 1,325,000, so that, tested by population, North Wales has nearly three times the share of South Wales. This is a difference which is intolerable, and cannot be justified on any general principle. When you come to parishes this inequality is even greater than it appears to be when you are considering larger areas. It is greater for two reasons—because there is a great existing inequality in the distribution of the tithe as between various parishes, and also because that inequality is now partially redressed by the action of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, but their action is to be put an end to by the Bill. The town of Swansea has a population of 43,000; the parochial tithe is £142 in all; and in order more or less to redress the balance the Ecclesiastical Commissioners give £649 a year to the five parishes of which Swansea is composed. This £649 will be swept away by the Bill, and Swansea will be left with its £142 per annum for carrying out all the objects of religion. That is the case of Swansea. Take the case of the parish of Llangelynin, in Carnarvonshire; its tithe is £250 a year and its population 158; so that 158 people in the village have a much larger sum than the 43,000 in Swansea. There, again, I take it that Llangelynin will like the arrangement, but what will Swansea say to the new arrangement? Here is another case that is even worse. There is a parish in Carmarthenshire where there are two livings in which the parochial tithe is nil, the tithe goes elsewhere, but the population is 23,900, or close upon 24,000. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners meet the necessities of this case by an allowance of £439, which goes under the Bill, so that 24,000 people will be left without a single sixpence. I could give other cases, but I do not think it is necessary, because I do not believe any Welsh Member will rise in his place and pretend that these inequalities do not exist, or that they are justifiable, or indeed tolerable. But, Sir, that is not my only objection, from the public point of view, to this scheme. What will the result be from another point of view—that produced by continuing payment to a church so long as the incumbent happens to live? You will have one parish coming almost immediately into possession of what it is entitled to under this Bill, and next door to it another parish which will have to wait for a long period. Do you think that will conduce to a cordial feeling between the parishioners and the clergymen? I do not know whether I am right in interpreting something which fell from an hon. Member just now into a threat of what would happen to a clergyman if he presumed to live too long, and kept the parishioners out of their just rights—that he was to be made uncomfortable and driven from the parish.

:I did not make use of any threat at all. I simply said that the clergyman might be offered inducements to leave.

:I will not chop logic with the hon. Member; but I may assume for the sake of argument that his Welsh countrymen may resist the inducements which may be offered. I ask the House to consider what will be the position of the parish reformer in these circumstances. Take the village Hampden, with a passion for baths and washhouses—he finds the village cursed with a young and healthy incumbent. Would not the whole influence of this interesting agitator be entirely directed to the purpose of driving out the unhappy individual who stands in the way of the village acquiring the property of the Church to carry out his favourite scheme? When I remember that almost the only argument the Home Secretary condescended to use in favour of his plan was that it was going to introduce peace into the Principality in lieu of discord, it appears to me to be one of the most wonderful projects ever advanced from the Treasury Bench. Whether I consider it from the point of view of the relations of large areas of the country, or of the counties to each other, or of parish to parish, or of individuals in each parish who are going to quarrel for these funds, or of the unfortunate incumbent who will have to bear with their impatience— from whatever point of view you consider the question, whatever class you take into consideration, you are driven to the conclusion that you are asked, with full deliberation, to throw an apple of discord into Welsh social life, that will make the condition of that country perfectly intolerable. I think there is a worse aspect of this particular method of dealing with this fund. Hitherto, when we have heard of disestablishment, it has been advocated on the ground that it was better the money should be thrown into the sea rather than used for a rival sect. I do not think that that is a very honourable argument, but it is an intelligible argument, and it does not appeal to all the baser passions of humanity. The Government, however, drag in as allies every one of those passions to which they can offer any temptation. Not content, as their predecessors have been, with ministering to the envy of competing sects, they must minister also to the greed and avarice of private individuals. You are going to teach every man in a Welsh parish where there are ecclesiastical tithes to be distributed that the organisation and the man who has been ministering to his spiritual needs now stand in the way of his putting so much hard cash into his pocket; and you are teaching him to watch with eagerness the gradual transfer of the property which has been hitherto devoted to spiritual purposes to the advancement of ends which may be good enough in themselves, and which certainly are in accordance with the passing fads of the moment, but which no one on either side of the House will dare to put on a level with the great objects which the Church serves. I cannot help wondering what would be the result of a cross-examination, could we conduct it under favourable conditions, in which the examiner would be some intelligent foreigner not acquainted with our ecclesiastical squabbles, and in which the defendants would be the Members of Her Majesty's Government. I should like them to be put on their oath as to the motives which have moved them to bring in this Bill. I can understand the intelligent foreigner, who has been told that this Church property dates back from immemorial anti- quity, and has been used for spiritual purposes for hundreds of years, asking the Government why it is that the Church is to be deprived of this means of usefulness. He might say, "Have you ceased to be Christians—is it because Christianity is no longer the accepted religion of the country—that you wish to deprive a Christian Church of its endowments?" Whatever other reasons the Government might give, that is a reason which they would hasten to repudiate. Then the intelligent foreigner might ask, "Is it because the divergences of belief between the Anglican Church and the Nonconformist sects are so great that it is impossible for them, though all calling themselves Christians, to consent to work together for the same great object?" He would be told in answer that that was not the case. The greatest founders of Welsh Nonconformity were devoted members of the Anglican communion, in the very days when the hon. Member says that that communion was neglecting its duty; they lived and died members of that communion; and at this moment I understand that it is part of the charter of more than one of these great Nonconformist sects that they accept the articles of the Church of England. It is, therefore, no divergence of belief which makes these gentlemen rush for the funds of the Church to which they do not belong. "Is it, then," our foreign inquirer might ask, "because the Church of England has changed its religion and given up opinions which it once held?" He would be told that that is not so. By statute of this realm a Nonconformist Body which for 25 years professes a particular faith unchanged, may keep the property originally given to it for other purposes. The English Church has maintained for 300 years and more her doctrines unchanged. And why is she to be deprived, with this long record behind her, of the privilege which you give to a Nonconformist Body every 25 years if it desires to change its doctrines? Then the foreigner might ask, "If you are agreed that the Church in Wales preaches Christianity and a form of Christianity to which you have no objection, and has deserved to keep its endowments by consistent adhesion to its doctrines, is your object to deprive it of its endowments because experience shows that the cause of religion is not really furthered by the possession of material wealth?" ["Hear, hear!"] One hon. Gentleman appears to think that that is so. It is not the opinion of the great body of the Nonconformists of this country, who have gladly accepted, and have reckoned among their greatest benefactors, those who endowed them with the worldly goods without which even spiritual work cannot be done. Then the inquirer might ask, as a last resort, whether these funds were now useless for religious purposes because those purposes were adequately provided for from other sources; and whether these Nonconformist Bodies, of which he would have heard so much, really fulfilled all the spiritual functions necessary for the welfare and spiritual health of the Welsh population. He would be told in answer that that was not the case. The hon. Gentleman who has just sat down said that in every glen in Wales the Nonconformists had erected their chapel. But have they found a pastor in every glen to minister to that chapel? He knows that they have not. In one diocese alone about half the parishes are without any permanent pastor, and that is because the funds to provide the permanent pastor are wanting. And these bodies, who avowedly cannot carry out their spiritual functions efficiently for the population with which they deal, are nevertheless so anxious to deprive a rival community of the means of carrying out its work that all higher considerations appear to be lost in that one overmastering desire. I am afraid that the result of this cross-examination, if carried out, would be that, unless we are to draw our highest wisdom from analyses of the Division Lists of this House, there would appear no adequate reason which could move this Government, or any Government, to deprive the Church of Wales of its hereditary wealth. The intelligent foreigner would discover that, while the Government may be animated by excellent motives, they are certainly animated by the desire for political support; and that those at whose bidding they act are not so much behaving in a spirit of missionaries anxious to propagate the same truths, as in the spirit of rival traders in a neutral market. The hon. Member who has just spoken hardly concealed his view. He regarded the Church endowments as bounties placed upon trade competitors, and he thought it decent and fitting to introduce into the spiritual sphere ideas which have no place outside the domain of the market and the quarrels of ordinary contending traders. What would be thought of learned Societies if they were not content with an honourable rivalry in extending the bounds of knowledge, but were to devote their whole energies to depriving rival bodies of any advantages which they might have from State support, not for the purpose of sharing that support, but to give it to some objects wholly unconnected with science? Whatever words they used, whether they cloaked their policy under the name of scientific liberty and freedom, it would be easily perceived that they were really animated by jealousy, and by nothing else but jealousy. It would be known that they were prepared to sacrifice the ends of knowledge and the objects of science in order that they might not be outstripped in the race of discovery by some rival body of learned men. Men of science would be for ever disgraced if they adopted such a policy. I cannot see that it is less disgraceful when it is adopted by Christians than when it is adopted by merely scientific men. There is no epithet which I should be prepared to apply to men of science in such circumstances which ought not to be transferred without any alteration or diminution to the body of Nonconformists of whom the hon. Member is the representative. I cannot say how this battle of disestablishment, of which the first guns were fired on Thursday night, will end. I dare not venture to prophesy, for I do not know. But this I will say— that this is one of those causes in which, if we are to be defeated, I would rather perish with the side that loses than triumph with the side which is victorious. I suppose we all attempt to gauge and estimate the forces which are silently at work moulding the future of society; and I cannot help feeling—though I may be wrong—that they are on our side. I believe now that the prospects of Church Establishment, even in the face of this Bill, are far brighter than they were a generation ago. I think a new spirit is springing up. The democracy, which is slowly moulding for good or for evil the Creed on which it will attempt to guide the destinies of this country, is not, as I think, in harmony with the kind of speech to which we have listened to-night, or with the ideas which lie behind those speeches. I believe that they hold, as I hold, that for the welfare of the community this standing witness to great spiritual forces in every parish in the country is a vital necessity; and that they will not allow the machinery by which these great objects are to be carried out to be impaired either to satisfy the greed of a too-economical ratepayer, or to satisfy the envy of rival Nonconformist sects.

said, the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition had poured out the vials of his wrath and had censured his hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon because of his strictures on the Established Church in Wales. He confessed that the censure sounded very strange in his ears, coming as it did from one who, during a former Debate in that House, had accused the Welsh Members who were in favour of the disestablishment of the Church in Wales of being animated by envy and a desire for plunder. Last year when the Suspensory Bill was before the House the Government were taunted by the Party opposite with having brought in a half-hearted measure. They said that the Suspensory Bill would be a chain around the neck of the Church of England; that it would hamper the operations of the Church in Wales, and they demanded instead a fair and straight measure of disestablishment. The Government had accepted the challenge, and the Party opposite had obtained what they wanted. The Bill before the House was a broad and comprehensive measure; it had the heartiest. support of the overwhelming majority of the people of Wales; and the Representatives of the people of Wales expressed their sincere gratitude to the Government for having brought it forward, because—though the Bill in some of its details was not so drastic as they desired—they recognised that it was a just attempt to settle a long-standing grievance in their country. He would not argue the more technical point as to whether the Church of England was the "Church in Wales" or "the Church of Wales." He would say that it was not the Church of the people of Wales; that, in fact, it was alien to the sympathies of the people of Wales, and, as his right hon. Friend the Secretary for Scotland had said in a former Debate—

"Now that the political disabilities of the county householders have been removed the grievance of the great body of the Welsh people with respect to Church disestablishment is the most signal injustice which is still left unredressed."

Hon. Gentlemen opposite had challenged the Welsh Members to bring forward statistics in support of their case. His hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon had that night brought forward statistics which were absolutely unanswerable, and he should look with curiosity to the manner in which hon. Gentlemen opposite, who were the stalwart defenders of the Church on Church Defence platforms, would meet those statistics. But statistics were not necessary to prove the case for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. They relied on the fact that 31 out of the 34 Members elected by Wales were pledged to disestablishment, and also on the words of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, who had described Wales as "a nation of Nonconformists." He would remind hon. Gentlemen opposite, who asked that a Census should be taken on the question, of the grossly dishonest methods which were resorted to in order to obtain signatures to Petitions against the Suspensory Bill last Session. If he went fully into the matter he would probably be, on that occasion, out of Order; but he was in a position to prove that in his county the names of children 6 months and 18 months old were put to the Petitions against the Suspensory Bill; that in one case, at least, the signature of a lunatic was obtained, and that a large number of farm servants were induced to sign the Petitions by statements that the object of the Bill was to rob the clergy of their fees, and that it would mean the imposition of a heavy tax on farm servants. And he could further prove that the name of a woman who objected to sign had been literally forged to a Petition, and had been subsequently erased by the clergyman, at the instigation of a leading Nonconformist. Those were some of the methods adopted by the Church Party in Wales to obtain signatures against the Suspensory Bill; and if that was to be the system adopted to obtain the views of the Welsh people on disestablishment, the friends of disestablishment would have no part in it. He frankly made hon. Gentlemen opposite a present of one fact. He admitted that to a certain extent in urban districts there had been a slight increase in the numbers attending the Church in Wales. But would it be contended that because of a system of proselytism—in some cases possibly fair, and in other cases unfair—there had been a slight increase in the number of Churchgoers in Wales, a real solid argument in favour of an Established Church in Wales existed? Wherever the English language was spoken in urban districts, the greater social attractions of the Established Church, which was attended by a greater number of rich people, had frequently the effect of increasing the numbers of that Church. But if they went to the rural villages of the country they would find that Nonconformity was overwhelming. In the county which he represented five out of every six in the rural districts—or even more—were Nonconformists and opponents of the Established Church. He knew of a church, the roof of which had fallen in 60 years ago, and had never, at any rate until a recent date, been repaired, and yet the people of the district in which it was situated had to pay tithe in support of the parson of that district. He could not conceive of a greater fraud than that, and yet such instances were very numerous throughout Wales. How could the people of Wales have any respect for an Establishment under which such things were possible? He invited hon. Gentlemen to witness these things for themselves rather than to rely upon the fallacious statements of Church Defence emissaries. As he had said before, the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition had censured the Welsh Members for their strong language in respect to the Church. But this was what the right hon. Gentleman himself said in the House in 1892—

"I quite admit, and I fully and freely admit, that there are a very large number of gentlemen who are in favour of disestablishment upon abstract, general, and historical grounds; but I cannot admit, with the facts before me, that those who desire the disestablishment of the Welsh Church desire it upon abstract or historical grounds. They want disestablish- ment, because they want disendowment. Disestablishment is on their lips; disestablishment is in their resolution, but what they want is disendowment. It is not reform they desire, but plunder. Envy—envy, not piety, is the motive of their action."

Envy of what? he would ask. Of an ancient and wealthy institution, tottering to its very foundation? And yet the right hon. Gentleman had the cool assurance to censure the Representatives of the people of Wales for their strong language. But the right hon. Gentleman was not singular in his invective. The hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight had said—

"The funds which have been devoted to the Establishment will lighten the rates, and your object is to take in the poor man;"

and his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom, echoing the Leader of the Opposition, had said that the Nonconformists were animated by "envy and jealousy." He could say that hon. Gentlemen opposite very much mistook the feelings of the people of Wales if they thought they cared only for the paltry pounds, shillings, and pence of the Establishment. The people of Wales sought to put an end to the Establishment from a sense of justice, and in order that there might be absolute religious equality in the Principality. The voluntary principle was the principle on which Nonconformity had succeeded in Wales. There were 4,000 Nonconformist chapels in Wales, and every year £400,000 were subscribed for their maintenance. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition had talked about "honourable rivalry" between the two sections of the Christian Church in Wales. There was a rivalry between them; but it was not altogether an honourable rivalry. The Church of England in Wales still possessed—notwithstanding all the efforts of the Nonconformists—the great advantages which she had enjoyed for hundreds of years. For the past 100 years the Church of England had had all the advantages, yet the rivalry which had been referred to had deprived the Church of her influence, and had made of Wales a great Nonconformist community. He would not detain the House longer than to remind hon. Members that in America and in our Colonies no State Church existed, and absolute religious equality prevailed, and there were no feuds between the religious sects. There was a wide distinction between the Saxon and the Celtic races. The Saxon may cling to episcopalianism, but the Celt will not tolerate it. He and his friends knew that they were at the outset of a keen struggle, but they awaited the result with absolute complacency, knowing that they had the Welsh nation as well as the great body of the Liberal Party at their backs. Although hon. and right hon. Gentlemen might retard disestablishment, as the Tory Party had retarded great reforms for centuries, he assured them they could only delay for a time the fulfilment of the aspirations of the Welsh people for the establishment of absolute religious equality in their country.

said, he would not follow all the criticisms which had been made by hon. Members, but rather would address himself to certain broad aspects and large considerations which the Bill brought before them. Vital as the Bill was to the highest interests of Wales, far-reaching as must be its ulterior consequences, should it pass into law, to the Principality, it was not of less vital import, and its consequences would not be less extensive or less serious for England as a whole. Every Member of the House, and every member of the Church of England, was, therefore, entitled to take an interest in the discussion of this measure. The principle on which the introduction of the Bill was justified had been stated with the utmost frankness and clearness by the Home Secretary. It had been urged that the proportion of Welsh Members in favour of disestablishment was a sufficient justification for the Bill; but he would remark that Wales had not yet a separate Parliament, and it was the duty of every Member of the Imperial Assembly to consider this and every question from the point of view of what was best for the whole Kingdom. The figures 31 to 3 were not claimed as representing the proportionate number of electors in Wales who voted for or against disestablishment. So long as the Religious Census was refused, they lacked the primary and most essential document for the investigation of that aspect of the matter. No doubt the Church question played a prominent part in many elections in Wales; but did no other issue, such as Home Rule for Ireland, contribute to the results of recent elections? And, as to the Church issue itself, had there been no appeal to mere cupidity and jealousy? A local demand, not free from ambiguity, was made the ground for destroying a national institution. With regard to the nature of the national institution, he remarked that they had heard throughout these discussions much more about endowment than about establishment. The Church had been considered as a number of Ecclesiastical Corporations, sole or aggregate, severally holding properties. The establishment had in these Debates been regarded only under the aspect of privilege. When the Home Secretary introduced the Suspensory Bill last year, he spoke of the privileges appertaining to the status of the establishment—a phrase correct in itself, but corresponding with an inaccurate conception in the popular mind. The establishment of the Church had been spoken of as if, once upon a time, the State had singled out this denomination from other religious denominations, had set it up, and had attributed to it, by means of certain privileges, a higher spiritual rank than that which was accorded to other religious denominations. Everyone knew, however, that the State never did anything of the kind. The word "establish" did not only mean "to set up." It also meant "to settle," "to confirm in rights," "to ratify." In this sense it occurred in the Statute of Provisors, where Parliament was described as having "ordered and established" such or such a thing; in Acts of Uniformity of the 16th century, in reference to the Liturgy of the Church, and to the Book of Common Prayer; and in the Act of Union between England and Scotland, in reference to the Protestant religion in England and to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland respectively. The establishment had its origin in a time when the Church had as yet no spiritual competitor. The Church possessed great power, liable to be affected by foreign influence; and the State thought it prudent, as a matter of public policy, to take from the Church certain securities against possible excesses of uncontrolled ecclesiastical power. It was then enacted that the Ecclesiastical Law and Courts should become part of the public law of the realm. The nature of the alliance between Church and State was not so much the bestowal of privileges upon the Church as the imposition upon the Church by the State of certain limitations of power. They had heard a good deal about religious equality, but he would remind the House that there was something still more vital, and that was religious freedom. It might fairly be claimed for the Anglican Church, and would not be denied even by those most unfriendly to her so long as they were unbiased and unprejudiced, that throughout the centuries she had been the greatest bulwark against spiritual and religious tyranny, and had afforded the best guarantee for religious freedom. If they sought a contrast, need they look further than to some of the provisions of Mr. Gee's now celebrated scheme, or the spirit which had inspired a speech they had heard that afternoon? He would not attempt on the present occasion to go into the details of statistics, but would refer only to the general features of the case. The most important fact to be noted in connection with the Established Church in Wale3 was that she had latterly experienced a revival of activity. It was admitted, indeed, that there had been such a revival. On November 20, 1883, a conference on disestablishment was held at Carnarvon, at which a Dissenting minister read a paper, afterwards published by the Liberation Society, in which he fully and fairly admitted the fact of this revival, and of this growing energy and zeal in the Church. He then said—

"I know that this revived activity of the Church is taken by some as an argument why we should let the Church alone, and allow her to go on doing good, but I take the argument to be just the reverse."

There could not be better confirmation of the remark of his hon. Friend (Sir R. Webster)on Thursday last, that the present moment had been chosen for the attack because it was seen that the Church was so rapidly gaining ground. In view of this testimony of the progressive activity of the Church, why should it be beyond hope that this growing activity of the Church should gradually win back some of those who were estranged from her, and that she might establish with the rest some tolerable modus vivendi ? That question had been raised by gentlemen on the other side, and in each case the answer was summed up in the words "Too late." "Too late" was a sorrowful answer, when the question was one of reconciliation between different Christian denominations; and he declined to accept those words as a final answer to such a question without, at all events, further examination. He would not adduce recondite facts, but merely such as could be learned from books accessible to all. What was the origin of Welsh Nonconformity? The right hon. Baronet (Sir G. O. Morgan) had remarked that the origin of Welsh Dissent might be summed up in the two words, "English Bishops"; but the right hon. Baronet knew that under the Tudors and the Stuarts, when 44 Welshmen in succession occupied Sees in Wales, the people of Wales were not disaffected towards the Church. The change dated from the time of the Revolution. It was the policy of sending to Wales as Bishops Englishmen, who were not only ignorant of the Welsh language, but had no sympathy with the Welsh people, which began to estrange the Welsh people from the Church. Another cause was the extreme poverty of the Church in Wales during the 18th century. A writer in The Quarterly Review for January, 1890, said that in the year 1720, in the diocese of St. Davids, there were no fewer than 233 livings of which the value was not more than £50, and, among these, 154 of which the value did not exceed £30. Along with those things came that torpor and apathy which unhappily was not peculiar to the Church in Wales, for during the 18th century it affected, more or less, the whole Church of England. It was in that state of things that the old Welsh Methodism began. That movement was begun by Welsh Churchmen, and it arose within the Church. It remained within the Church, and was always entirely friendly to the Church. Daniel Rowlands lived and died a Churchman; so did Griffith Jones, the father of Welsh national education, and the originator of the itinerant ministry; so did Howell Harris, the great lay preacher, who was buried near the altar in the church of Talgarth—by his own wish, because it was at the rails of that altar that he first experienced a sense of his own shortcomings. Meanwhile what was the position of Welsh Dissent? During the 18th century, Welsh Dissent, as distinguished from Church Methodism, was confined to small numbers of three denominations—Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians. At the beginning of the present century came (in 1811) the great separation of Nonconformists from the Church in Wales; but the separation was not associated on the part of the Nonconformists with any such attitude towards the Church as they unfortunately saw in some hon. Gentlemen on the other side of the House. Thomas Charles of Bala, who left the Church, retained, to his death in 1814, a strong affection for it. The phrase, "alien Church," is of recent coinage. When Mr. Watkin Williams introduced in that House in 1870 a Motion for disestablishment, he said—

"The Church establishment in Wales is an ancient and a venerable institution. It is not, like the Church in Ireland, an alien Church, thrust upon the people by a conqueror and an oppressor. It is not, I think I am right in saying, regarded by the people with any feelings of hostility. Indeed, in many cases, it is regarded with feelings of veneration and affection."

When the right hon. Baronet the Member for East Denbighshire discussed the phrase "alien Church" the other evening, he did not confine himself to the historic sense of "alien," as meaning a Church of foreign origin, but also spoke of it as a Church which was fundamentally foreign to the character and temper of the Welsh people; it was too "cold" and "formal" for them; in other words, he used the word "alien" in the sense of uncongenial. Those words, he confessed, rang strangely in his ears. He wondered whether the right hon. Baronet had ever read how in the last century great congregations came together in Wales from the mouth of the Conway to the mouth of the Wye, to hear the leaders and founders of the old Welsh Methodism—clergymen of the Church of England using Church of England formularies? Did he also forget one great service with which this "alien" Church must be perpetually associated in the minds of Welshmen—the fact that the Welsh version of the Scriptures was brought out by William Morgan in 1588, under the auspices of the then Archbishop of Canterbury? And when one generation later (in 1620) a revised version of the Welsh Bible was produced, by whom was it brought out? By Parry, who had succeeded Morgan as Bishop of St. Asaph, and Dr. John Davies, Rector of Mallwyd, in Merionethshire. It had been said of this version of the Bible that it was " the book which had fixed the Welsh language," and was "practically the dictionary of the Welsh people." Thus that language of which Welshmen were so proud, when drooping and ready to perish, had been enshrined in its noblest monument by this very Church which hon. Members opposite were seeking to disestablish. Now, one word as to a topic touched on by the Leader of the Opposition. In the explanation the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary gave as to what was to be done with cathedrals, he said—

"We have come to the conclusion that they ought to be preserved as national monuments."

He (Mr. Jebb) must confess that that phrase had astonished him. The cathedrals had never been used and never been intended for any other purpose than the worship of the Church of England. If the Church in Wales was not a national but an alien Church, how could the cathedrals be national monuments? Or if the meaning was that when transferred to the new triumvirate they would become "national," why then "monuments"? He hoped in his heart that no such hopeless irreconcilability between Nonconformists in Wales and Churchmen existed as was assumed by hon. Gentlemen opposite. The Church of England, like every other human institution, had had its shortcomings and failings, but at almost every period of its history it had known how to conciliate and attract; it had been an influence tending to soften the sharper conflict of interests, to mitigate causes of social strife, and to bring people of various classes and divergent opinions into relations of mutual goodwill, or at least of mutual forbearance. The tendency on the part of the older Nonconformist bodies of England was to come nearer to the Church, and he wished the same beneficial agency of conciliation and goodwill might also become operative in Wales. If he were a Welshman, there was nothing he should be more sorry to say or to hear said of his country than that it was the only part of the United Kingdom where the conduct of the people was inaccessible to an agency of conciliation, and where their ears were for ever sealed against a message of peace. Suppose this Bill became an Act, and the Church in Wales was disestablished, what would be the result to the poor in Wales? He had never uttered a syllable in disparagement of the Nonconformist ministration, but he believed it was admitted by many earnest Nonconformists that the parochial system of the Church in Wales had been enabled to do a work which it had not been in their own power to do. If the Bill were carried into law, the possibilities of that parochial ministration would be greatly circumscribed. Wales would also suffer in the matter of education—and it must be borne in mind that in the diocese of Llandaff alone there were 30,000 children in the church voluntary schools. And so far as the Church in England itself was concerned, what would be the effect of the passing of this Bill? Every diocese not already disestablished would exist at the mercy of local agitation. It would only be necessary to show or to allege that in Cornwall or Yorkshire a local majority existed against the Established Church, and the diocese concerned must go. The right hon. Baronet the Member for East Denbigh, in 1870, had said—

"I do not like this long agony of piecemeal disestablishment. It is like putting a man to death by tearing him limb from limb."

Yes, it was like that—but with a difference. In ancient and in modern times men had been slowly hacked to pieces; but that was not after a mere condemnation of an arm or a leg; it was after some sort of trial held, and some sort of judgment passed, on the person as a whole. He asked that before the Bill passed into law the Government should take the collective sense of the country upon the fate of the Church as a whole. MR. H. ROBERTS (Denbighshire, W.) said, he differed from the arguments as well as the facts of the hon. Member who had just sat down, but he appreciated the moderation with which he had spoken, for he had avoided attributing unworthy motives to those who felt so strongly in favour of the Bill. His (Mr. Roberts's) principal object in rising was to emphasise the strength of the sentiment in Wales in favour of this Bill. During the last Parliament the constituency he now represented was represented by a Unionist, who was returned by a majority of over 1,500 votes. At the last Election the majority disappeared, and in place of it 2,300 votes were registered in favour of the candidate of the Government. Now, how was that brought about? It had undoubtedly been brought about, to use a phrase of the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, by the "magic" of disestablishment. The Leader of the Opposition had treated somewhat scornfully the argument that 31 out of 34 Welsh Members were pledged to support this Bill. They contended that that was the determining argument in this Debate. The issue which the House of Commons had to decide was a political issue; but if that argument was objected to, he would fall back upon the fact that last year not only a majority from Wales was disclosed in favour of this Bill, but a majority of 56 was obtained from the whole of the Kingdom. The right hon. Baronet the Member for West Bristol had attempted to minimise this argument, and had pointed out in the first place that no attempt had been made to bring this question prominently forward in the country. For the last 20 years the demand for disestablishment had been made in Parliament by Members from Wales, and with an increasing strength and unanimity. In the year 1870, before the Ballot Act was passed, only seven Members for Wales voted in favour of a Disestablishment Resolution; in the year 1889,28 voted for the proposal, and only 5 against it; in 1891, 29 voted for it and 4 against it; and in 1893, 31 voted for it against 3, or 10 to 1. When they remembered that the Irish Church was disestablished, when the majority of Irish Members in favour of disestablishment was 69 to 33, they would at once see with how much greater urgency Welsh Members could press their claim. In 1885 the voters in Wales who voted for disestablishment numbered 31,000; in 1892 that number was increased to 58,000, including Monmouthshire. Not only had the matter been brought forward in Parliament, but it had been brought forward at every General Election in the country. In 1890–91 a Campaign Committee was formed in Wales, and through the agency of that Committee, £5,000 having been raised from the people for the purpose, the subject was properly ventilated on almost every political platform throughout the length and breadth of the country. It was the second question on what was called the Newcastle Programme, and the time was ripe for dealing with it, and for definite action. By some it was said that disestablishment was not the most prominent question before the Welsh electors at the last General Election, and that the chief subject upon which they voted was "Home Rule." They had an authority upon this point of no less importance than Lord Salisbury himself, who, writing in the Autumn of last year to one of the Reviews, said that the Parliamentary majority in favour of Liberalism was, undoubtedly, achieved owing to the aversion of the Welsh people to the Established Church. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir M. Hicks-Beach), who spoke in opposition in the present Debate, said the Welsh were animated in this demand to a large extent by a spirit of robbery and sacrilege.

:I did not say that.

said, he thought that the right hon. Gentleman had used the words "robbery and sacrilege." Well, there were two sides to this question. They did not, as representing Nonconformists in Wales, stand there that day as aggressors, but as the aggrieved. [ Cries of "Oh!"] They did not make this demand with a wish to rob or commit sacrilege. They were there simply to demand justice and equality, and adequate reparation of what in his opinion had been during the last half-century a very grievous injustice done to them by the Establishment in Wales. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells cited the case of Brymbo as an instance of the Church's activity and progress. He (Mr. Roberts) would put before the House another case known to him personally in his own constituency. One day last week considerable excitement took place in the town of Denbigh because the goods of a farmer in a neighbouring parish had been distrained upon for tithes amounting to £5 8s., and were sold by public auction. The parish was 12 square miles in extent, with a tithe rent-charge of £650, and the farmer farmed 140 acres in that parish. There was only one Church, with services only on Sundays, and nine Nonconformist chapels, with services on Sundays and week-days. Four thousand five hundred pounds had been raised by voluntary subscriptions to build these chapels, and the people contributed a large amount annually towards keeping up the work of the ministry. Last Sunday week a census was taken in the parish of the worshippers at the church and the chapels. At the church there were 88 persons present during the services, and at the chapels 1,189. Was it strange that in a parish of that description, with the conditions of church and chapels such as he had described, that a farmer who lived four miles away from the church, who had never seen the face of his rector upon his farm, should refuse to pay £5 8s. tithe rent-charge, and was it not somewhat degrading to a church to collect that money, which ought to be a free-will offering from a parishioner, at the point of the bayonet and through the humiliating process of the County Court? If they desired to have a perfectly impartial view of the present position of the Church and of Church work in Wales they ought to go outside the boundaries of the Principality, and ask those who were not personally interested in the Church and in the present controversy. He would only quote the evidence on this point of the Bishop of Norwich, who, speaking on Welsh Disestablishment in Liverpool in 1892, when, as the Rev. J. Sheepshanks, he was the Rector of St. Margaret's, Aufield, said—

"And it appears to me that if we take a calm and impartial view of this matter, there are important considerations which may be put forward on either side of the question. In the first place, it is undoubted that a very decided majority of the Welsh not only are not members of the Established Church but are eagerly desirous for disestablishment and disendowment. And, moreover, it is stated that the small minority of the Church people in the Principality consists largely of English residents and visitors and the well-to-do classes; whereas the masses of the Welsh people are strenuously Nonconformists. Upon this I could simply express my own opinion that if in any self-governing country the Established Church is in a decided minority, and if the large majority of the people are unitedly hostile to its continuance as an Establishment, in that case its maintenance as an Establishment, even if practicable, would be to the detriment of religion, and therefore to the true interests of the Church. And this leads us to ask the question, the very suggestion of which will doubtless anger the heated partizan, whether it is not at least possible that the disestablishment of the Church in Wales might not be for the advantage of the Church herself."

Among the Welsh population in America to day there were from 450 to 500 Welsh Nonconformist churches, but not a single Welsh Established Church. How did the matter stand in Liverpool? There was there a very large Welsh population, and there were 30 Welsh chapels, and only two Welsh churches; and in 1892 a census was taken of those present at those churches and chapels on a Sunday evening, and it was found that 4,832 were worshipping in the Nonconformist chapels, and only 165 in the two Welsh churches. The Leader of the Opposition, speaking in Manchester last winter, said the measure of disestablishment and disendowment of the Welsh Church which the Government intended to introduce into Parliament was deliberately intended to destroy a living branch of the Church. From the very outset of this controversy they had always made it a point in regard to every speech delivered and every pamphlet written to show that they had no animosity whatever against the Church as a religious institution. From their hearts they wished the Church success in the future. There was plenty of work in Wales both for the Church and for Nonconformity. Therefore, he wanted it to be made clear that they did not object to the Church as a Religious Institution, but as a Religious Establishment. Upon the merits of the Bill he had only, as a humble Member from Wales, to express his entire satisfaction with the measure in its main provisions, and to say that it would be received by the people of Wales in the spirit in which it had been conceived. Its introduction was one of the most important events in the history of Wales. He ventured to think that the Government having once taken this step could not recede from it, and that the time was not far distant when they would see it carried into law to the great good of the country which they represented. Further, he wished to express his personal gratification that the Bill had been introduced in a form which showed that the Government intended to deal with this old grievance of Wales in a comprehensive and statesmanlike way. Their action in this matter should earn for them the lasting gratitude of all those who had at heart the true welfare of Wales.

said, the hon. Gentleman opposite had sought to show that the promoters of this Bill ought not to be looked upon as aggressors of the Church. So long, however, as the Party to which he belonged sought to take away the property of the Church and apply it to their own benefit, so long must they be content to be looked upon as aggressors. He had no objection to the tone of the hon. Member's speech, but when he drew conclusions from the number of those who attended Welsh Church services and Dissenting chapels in Liverpool, surely he must forget that that argument was disposed of last year by the hon. Member for Plymouth, when he pointed out that the English - speaking Welsh people naturally attended the English churches in Liverpool. No argument of any kind could be drawn from the point which the hon. Member had mentioned. The hon. Member for West Denbigh had told them that he wished well to the Church of England. Who were they to suppose was the guiding spirit in this matter— the Member for West Denbigh or the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs? The latter hon. Member, in the course of his speech, had misrepresented the position of the Church of England in Wales in every possible way. An hon. Member who spoke later in the Debate— the hon. Member for Pembrokeshire— asked how they were going to reply to the unimpeachable argument of the Member for Carnarvon. When argument resolved itself into calling documents official which proved to be taken from The Contemporary Review, and speaking of an imaginary Act of Union between the two countries of which nobody else had heard, he thought that argument of that sort answered itself, and might be taken as a fair gauge of the accuracy of the rest of the hon. Member's remarks. There was another point to which he would like to refer. The hon. Baronet the Member for one of the divisions of Denbighshire told them that they ought to accept this Bill lest they should get something worse. That argument had been advanced by free-booters and blackmailers ever since the world began, and to such an argument any man with spirit would make but one reply. Whenever this spirit of plunder was abroad the Church was always the first and easiest prey, and he would remind those who, though not feeling strongly on Church questions, had some respect for the rights of property, that when the attack began it would not stop with the Church. It would go on to other kinds of property. They had only to look at Ireland to be satisfied of that fact. What was the reason for taking away this property from the Church? It was not that she was misusing it. The Home Secretary himself had paid tribute to the self-sacrifice and devotion of its ministers. The only reason that could be alleged for taking away this property was that other people wanted it. What was the charge against the Church as a whole? That it was the Church, in the words of the Home Secretary, of a comparatively small minority, and consequently that she was a foreign or an alien body? As to the first charge, the Government refused to put the question to the test. They desired to have the Church's property, but they shrank from producing their title to the property. They knew very well that behind this charge, that it was the Church of a small minority, there lurked the fear that if her progress was not stopped she would become the Church of the majority. What was the difference between the supporters and the aggressors of the Church in this matter? The promoters of this Bill made allegations that they did not prove, or if they did substantiate them their facts belonged to a period so long past that they had really ceased to have weight. They who defended the Church said that if it was the Church of the minority in Wales it was the Church of a large minority, a minority increasing, according to the admissions of hon. Member opposite, in membership, in activity, and in zeal. They established that fact by a list of communicants, the number of baptisms, the number of new churches built, and the children attending the schools. When they said that there were some dissenting sects in Wales who were decreasing in number they based their statements upon what they read in the Welsh papers— The Barter and other papers—which admittedly represented the views of the Welsh Nonconformists, and which very sensibly and properly were constantly urging them to greater activity, and telling them that the Church was gaining in the race, and that they ought to keep pace with her advancement. Besides the charge against the Church as a whole, there was the charge against the clergy of the Church that they used their influence politically against those who were attacking the Church of England in Wales. How unreasonable would it be that they should do anything else? The Dissenting ministers were active in supporting those who were attacking the Church, and it was natural that the clergy of the Church of England should take the best course they could to defend it. He should like to say a few words about the cathedrals which he understood, under this Bill, were to be permitted to be still used for the religious services of the Church of England. They knew pretty well how much money in recent years had been spent upon the restoration of these edifices. How much did anyone suppose had been subscribed by Dissenters? Not much, he was sure. But how much had been given by Church people, and how much would have been given by Church people if they had had any idea that these cathedrals would be taken away from the objects to which they were now applied and used for purposes not only at variance with, but repugnant to, the feelings of the benefactors who had spent money in their maintenance and restoration, and worshipped within them? With regard to the case of the curates, the Home Secretary said cavalierly that the curates had no vested interest, and that therefore there was no reason whatever for giving them compensation. He would like to remind the right hon. Gentleman that the curate was not the servant of the rector, but of the cure, and that he could not be removed, except for misconduct, and by the order of the Bishop on the complaint of the rector. He agreed that the curate had not so substantial an interest as the rector, but he did not think he could be looked upon as having no more interest than a private servant who could be sent away at a month's notice and nothing more to be said. Hon. Members might think that because a man was rich they were justified in robbing him, but that, at all events, did not apply to the Welsh curate. If there was any body of men who should be treated with generosity it was the Welsh curates. With regard to the owners of advowsons, his opinion was that in offering them a year's purchase the Government was either doing too much or too little. Either the owners of advowsons must be regarded as having no vested interest at all or, if they had one, it must undoubtedly be worth more than a year's purchase. The arrangement as it stood was inconsistent and unreasonable. Whatever else this Bill might be, he hoped it would be understood that it was a direct attack upon the cause of religion. [ A cry of "No!"] An hon. Member expressed dissent. He would show him why he said so: it was because money left for religious uses was to be diverted and applied to secular uses. [ A cry of "Not necessarily!"] At all events, a portion of it was to be so applied. He would ask hon. Members whether technical education was a religious use. Of course not, but that was one of the objects put forward as showing the great benefits that this Bill would confer. What had happened to make this Bill more desirable now than in the past? Outside the House everything had gone in the contrary direction. The Church in Wales was doing its work well and increasing its members. Whatever the proportionate increase amongst Nonconformists might be, admittedly her activity was so great, that that very fact promoted the hostility of certain persons against her. That being so, he asked again what had happened to cause this Bill to be introduced? He could not describe the reason better than by quoting a threat which the hon. Baronet the Member for East Denbigh held out to the Government some time ago, when he said there was a compact body in the House counting 56 votes on a Division. That was the influence to which they owed this Bill—not to any consideration of justice nor to the failure of the Church to do its duty, but because there were gentlemen in that House who acted solidly together, and who represented 56 votes on a Division. What was that but the most shameless bribery on the part of the Government? But they could set against hon. Members opposite the fact that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Midlothian had all his life through, strongly and most powerfully (and as everybody on that side of the House would admit with a peculiar knowledge of this question) flouted and denied the arguments they had heard advanced by gentlemen opposite—and this, not in his salad days when he was green in judgment, but as late as 1891; and so far as they knew these were his sentiments today. He agreed with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Cambridge University that any Englishman, even if he had never set foot in Wales, had a right to be heard on this subject, and that if he was a member (as he was) of the Church of England, and saw a proposal to destroy, as he believed, and rob of her moneys the western portion of that ancient Church in Wales, he was entitled to put forward his protest. As Lord Grey said—

"A man must have more than the simplicity of a child who could be made to believe that so great a blow could be successfully inflicted upon one part of the National Church Establishment without being speedily followed by other attacks of the same kind, and probably in the end by its overthrow."

Of course they knew that if this Bill passed, though he was confident it would not pass, it would be the beginning of the end. Naturally, they were being attacked in the weakest place. The principle once conceded, everybody knew that it would be only a question of time before the whole of the Establishment was destroyed, and its income taken away and diverted to other purposes. It had been said that this Bill bore a strong resemblance to Mr. Gee's scheme, and the Home Secretary's reply was that he had never seen that scheme. That, no doubt, was literally true, but only literally, for it was obvious that the Home Secretary had seen somebody who had seen the scheme who had conveyed it to him, and in order to prove that, he should read a few lines from Mr. Gee's scheme, and he would defy anybody to say that they did not appear to be quoted from the speech of the Home Secretary. Mr. Gee said—

"The duty of carrying out the administrative work of disendowment in Wales (which should be considered as including Monmouthshire) should be entrusted to three Commissioners appointed by the Crown.

"The principles according to which compensation was given to the clergy, &c, under the Irish Church Act, 1869, should not, on any account whatever, be adopted in this Act. A pension, as explained in the next paragraph, would be a fair and equitable settlement of the question, and satisfy all parties.

"The tithes should be collected by officers appointed by the County Council. Each Parish Council or Vestry should receive its share of the surplus according to the amount of its tithe, from the tithe fund annually, which should be applied as follows: To enable parishioners to erect rooms for parochial purposes, and for libraries; also, as loans to assist farmers, labourers, and mechanics to erect cottages upon freehold allotments.

"All churchyards, and other public burial grounds, should be transferred, and should be under the exclusive control of the Parish Councils."

He admitted there were certain alterations which decency demanded, but in two particulars it was even less generous than the scheme of Mr. Gee. The latter proposed that curates who were in the actual service of incumbents at the passing of the Act should also receive a pension, and it was only when cathedrals were unused and allowed to go out of repair that they were to be handed over to the County Councils. What was this national feeling which they were told had prompted this movement against the Church? Was it not a feeling of rapacity exacerbated by envy? That, he believed, was the feeling which was at the bottom of this movement, and so long as it could not be shown that this Bill was required, either in the interests of national justice or in the interests of the people, so long should he oppose it.

said, he desired to say a few words in regard to the Act which the hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs had called the Act of Union, and the first words of the preamble of which had been quoted by the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition. It seemed to him unjust that the references which had been made to the hon. Member for the Carnarvon Boroughs should go unnoticed. To Welshmen this Act was perfectly well known, and the astonishment which the quotation of it caused to the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition merely arose from the fact that he, not being a Welsh Member, did not regard it as any kind of importance to him how the political truth of the Welsh had come about so far as it connected them with the English nation. Of course the right hon. Gentleman knew, and everybody knew, that the Tudor Sove- reign Henry VIII. was well affected to the Welsh Dominion, and it was in order to give that Welsh Dominion a share in the British Administration that this Act was passed. It began, no doubt, as quoted by the right hon. Gentleman; but, unfortunately for the understanding of the Act by the House, he confined his quotation to the first half-dozen lines of the preamble. The last half-dozen lines of the preamble showed conclusively that this really was, and was naturally thought to be by the hon. Member for the Carnarvon Boroughs, an Act of Union. The latter part of the preamble stated that

"The said country or Dominion of Wales should stand and continue for ever from henceforth incorporated, united, and annexed to and with the realm of England,"

the people enjoying the same rights and privileges as were enjoyed by the English people. It was quite clear that Wales and England were looked upon up to that time as under different Administrations and different laws, and they were by this Act incorporated and united together into one United Kingdom. There could not be any better definition of this Act than that it was an Act of Union, and the Act itself was indexed as "Wales, Incorporation of, with England." The Act gave the first Members to Wales to represent that country in the British House of Commons. That being so, he asked whether the charge of ignorance ought to be levelled at the hon. Member for the Carnarvon Boroughs, who had quoted this Act as an Act of Union, or whether it ought not rather to be levelled at his critic?

said, he did not flatter himself that he could add anything new to this great controversy, but still there were times at which people should speak out and use plain and direct language.

Notice taken, that 40 Members were not present; House counted, and 40 Members being found present,

went on to say that a large number of his constituents looked upon this Bill with dread and detestation and contemplated it with feelings akin to horror. He felt bound to give voice and expression to these feelings. The Welsh supporters of the Bill were never tired of reiterating that this Bill ought to pass because it was approved by the large majority of the Welsh Members. Englishmen would never admit that argument in a matter in which the whole of England as well as Wales was concerned. If it were admitted the whole country would be divided up into petty interests, and the Heptarchy would be restored. Though the Welsh Members pressed this argument unremittingly because it suited their policy at the time, they would never admit it for a moment in reference to England. This Bill was intended to destroy one of the outworks of the Church of England in its totality, and, therefore, the Church of England itself might be in some degree in danger. If the English Members had alone to decide the English question, everybody knew that there would not be the slightest danger to the Church of England in this generation, or probably for many generations to come. Whence, then, did the probability of danger arise? It arose from the fact that Irish and Scotch votes might be brought in to counterbalance the English majority. In a matter where England was concerned the decided majority of the English Members would not be allowed to prevail. Under these circumstances, why should a majority of Welsh votes be allowed to prevail in a Welsh matter? Let it once for all be understood that the Welsh Members' argument would never be admitted by those who sat on the Opposition side of the House. Inasmuch as disendowment was added to disestablishment, it was as well to look at the moral aspect of the question. The hon. Member for Carnarvon (Mr. Lloyd-George) seemed to imply that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) accused ministers of blunder and sacrilege in connection with this Bill. He (Sir R. Temple) was not sure that his right hon. Friend (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) in a great debating speech with which he had delighted the House had used those words, but there was no reason why a private Member should not speak unreservedly in the matter, and whether his right hon. Friend used the words or not he (Sir R. Temple) meant to use them, and he was sure that Members who sat near him would use them also. He said that the Bill was actually plunder, and that it was virtually sacrilege. Plunder meant taking away forcibly from a person or a Corporation that which belonged to him or it. The Church as a Corporation was as much able to hold property as any individual, and he contended that the tithes were indisputably, unquestionably, undeniably her property. This Bill proposed to take that property away. Of course it was not to be done by brute force or violence; but, nevertheless, as there was such a thing as judicial murder, there was such a thing as plunder by legislation, and that was what this Bill involved. In the next place, he said the Bill amounted to sacrilege. Sacrilege was the taking away violently of property of a sacred character which was intended for sacred purposes. This property belonged to the Church, and it was being alienated from sacred purposes. It was to be abstracted from sacred purposes in order to be used for secular purposes. How was the House to differentiate this process from that of taking as a thief took property from the inside of a church? This peculiar form of sacrilege seemed to him to be made peculiarly clear in the case of cathedrals. As the fabrics of the parish churches were to be left to the Church, why were the cathedrals to be taken away? Were they not built by exactly the same authority and from the same sources as the parish churches? In what sense were they "national monuments?" They were of course in a sense sacred monuments, and they were national as the Church was national. The peculiar injustice that was to be done was made clearer by the fact that the cathedrals had been maintained and restored by the money of Churchmen in modern times. What were the secular objects to which the Church property was to be misappropriated? The Home Secretary (Mr. Asquith), in his lucid and emphatic manner, had described the way in which Church property in Ireland had been squandered and wasted, but, at all events, it had been used for large, charitable, and beneficent purposes—sometimes for the relief of famine, sometimes for improving national education, sometimes for increasing the emoluments of the national school teachers, and sometimes for a great object like the relief of congested districts. The only possible instance of misuse was the proposed application of the small residue of the fund to the reinstatement of evicted tenants, but even that was a far larger object than the petty purposes mentioned by the Home Secretary in regard to the Welsh Bill. In Wales the tithes, amounting to some£250,000 per annum, were to be devoted to the parochial work of the Parish Council. If there was ever a temptation to waste a fund it was afforded by this Bill. There might have been something to be said for giving the money to voluntary schools, where at all events religions was taught, but the Parish Councils had nothing to do with education. It actually came to this: that money which had been devoted for many ages to the service of religion, to the preaching of the word of God, to the celebration of the Communion, to the ministrations of the Church, and to the parochial charities of all kinds, was to be used for such purposes as parish rooms, and he supposed public gardens or any like purpose which the Parish Council might be pleased to favour. Ho did not wish to disparage these parochial purposes, but he asked the House to consider their character in comparison with the sacred character of the services to which this money had been for so many centuries devoted. It could not be forgotten that the parish purposes to which tithes were to be applied were the very purposes for which rates were to be levied, and that there was absolute justification for what had been said by one of the leading organs—namely, that this Bill was nothing more or less than a gigantic bribe to the ratepayers of Wales. Could any Welsh Member say that any good could be done to religion by taking these great resources away from religion, and giving them to secular purposes? Much had been said about the Bill having the overwhelming majority of the Welsh people at its back. No doubt it had the great majority of the Welsh Members at its back, but the Opposition apprehended that that majority had largely been returned by political agencies. If it was said that the majority of the Welsh people were at the back of the Bill the House had a right to look at the electoral statistics and consider how many votes at the one or two last General Elections had been cast on the one side and on the other. When those statistics were examined it would be found that there was not an overwhelming mass of the Welsh people at the back of the Bill. He be- lieved the majority was a slender one. If the present political agitation were brought to an end the Opposition believed that there would be no majority at all in favour of disestablishment. Then as regarded the Census. He was amazed when he heard the hon. Gentleman the Member for Pembrokeshire speak of that. The Welsh Members might be assured that to the end of this controversy the Opposition would taunt them with their hesitation and unwillingness to go to the test of a Religious Census. The Opposition, though they entertained the most charitable and friendly feelings towards their Welsh fellow-countrymen, could not but believe that there was some reason in the background for refusing this plain and clear test of the Census. What reason had the hon. Member given for refusing the test? Why, that the Welsh people would be dragooned or coerced into saying that they were members of the Church of England when they were not so in their hearts. He (Sir E. Temple) did not think he had exaggerated the hon. Member's main contention. He could not imagine how any Welshman in the House could dare to say that of his countrymen. The Welsh must be very unlike Englishmen or Scotchmen or any other inhabitants of Britain if at the latter end of the 19th century they could be treated in such a way as that. He (Sir R. Temple) refused to believe this cruel imputation on his Welsh fellow-countrymen. He declared that no Churchman would descend to such proceedings, and if they were attempted no Welshman would ever submit to it. The thing would be the utter fiasco it would deserve to be. A Religious Census was really refused by Welshmen opposite, because they believed it would be dangerous to their case. It was not denied that Nonconformity was predominant in some country places in Wales, but was that an argument for disestablishing the Church in Wales at large? Wales, picturesque as it was and interesting as it was in its physical characteristics and industrial developments, was not altogether made up of rural districts. It had industrial centres and an urban population. All sections of the people must be taken together. It did not follow that because Nonconformity might be predominant in isolated localities that, therefore, for these localities altogether the Church in Wales was to be disestablished and disendowed. As to the injustice of paying tithe to which the hon. Member for Carnarvon had referred, it should be borne in mind that the Welsh farmer would not be let off the payment by the Bill. If he disliked paying tithe to the Vicar, it would be equally distasteful to him to pay it to the County Council. The necessity for the payment was the real crux of the grievance, therefore the hon. Member's argument came to nothing. Then, more than one Member from Wales had denied that there was any jealousy at the bottom of the Bill. Well, he (Sir R. Temple) would like to ask, if the motive was not jealousy, what could it be?

An hon. MEMBER: Justice.

said, that jealousy was not necessarily an ignoble motive. It sometimes pervaded the noblest of minds. If the Welsh Nonconformists would gain anything by the transfer of the tithes from the Church to the County Council, one would be able to understand their attitude. If it was to go to their own organisations he could understand it. But that was not so. Nonconformity in Wales certainly had nothing whatever to gain materially by this attack on the Church; what it had to gain morally he did not know. What motive, then, remained? He refused to admit, from friendliness to the Welsh people, that greed was at the bottom of their desire for the property of the Church, for he considered the Welsh people above that, although it might be said that there was an appeal to the cupidity of the ratepayers. He could not believe, however, that that was the true motive underlying the policy of Disestablishment. Neither was the motive one arising from a sense of injustice. If something was given to the Church by Parliament to which the Nonconformists had a fair claim and an equal title he could then understand a case of injustice; but that was not the case in the matter of tithes. Tithes were not given to the Church by Parliament. They were antecedent to Parliament itself, and coeval with property in this country. There was really a motive of jealousy; but he would not admit that that was wholly responsible for the introduction of such a dangerous and revolutionary measure as this. The hon. Member for Carnarvonshire had spoken of a political issue, and there, at last, was the true motive revealed. He would take care to point that out to his constituents, and he hoped the statement would be quoted, and requoted, and treasured up in the minds of Englishmen. This Bill could never be withdrawn. It might be defeated, it might be "knocked out," it might go for a referendum to the people, but it could not be withdrawn from the House of Commons. He promised the Government that it would receive unrelenting opposition from Members on his side of the House. They firmly believed that the Bill would be defeated, and that it had no chance of passing, but although it was merely held out as a thundercloud, as a war menace and a deadly threat to the Church of England, they trusted that Welshmen would not suffer themselves to be misguided. They had confidence in their Welsh fellow-countrymen. They held a high opinion of the Welsh Nonconformists, who were essentially religious men, and he was sure they did not wish, in their hearts, to strike this grievous blow at religion and so sacred a cause. They held that the Welsh Church was not an alien Church, but was a tender branch of the English Church, and they were confident that if she be left alone to work her way and minister among the Welsh people she would sooner or later re-establish herself in the position which she held in the days of old.

said, he must invite the attention of the House to the fact that not a single Representative from Wales on the Opposition Benches had said one word in opposition to the proposals of the Government. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Bristol (Sir M. Hicks-Beach) had issued a solemn warning that after the next General Election a good many of those who were sitting on the Ministerial side would stay at home. He (Major Jones) ventured to give prophecy that any Representative from Wales who opposed the Bill would have the satisfaction of staying at home after the next General Election. They had contented themselves with handing over their case to the right hon. Gentleman (Sir M. Hicks-Beach), the hon. and learned Gentleman (Sir R. Webster), and others, who had no knowledge whatever of the lives, the aspirations, and the aims of the Welsh people, else they would never have made the accusations they had made during the Debate. Much had been said as to the motives which animated the Welsh people in the present movement. They were told that money was at the bottom of it all. Apart from the fact that money involved a great principle, it had nothing to do with this case, and he ventured to say that tens of thousands of his fellow-countrymen regretted that money and property had anything to do with the question. They were asking for no experiment. The question of the disestablishment of the Church had been tried out for them, as many another problem had been tried out, in the United States. We had given charters to the American Colonies, and had insisted upon giving them also an Established Church, but when independence came and the Constitution of the United States was framed, an amendment was made by the wise statesmen of that time, and passed, and he would venture to read a passage on the subject from an authority which he thought would be received with respect. Judge Story had made use of these words—

"The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the National Government. It thus cut off the means of religious persecution (the vice and pest of former ages), and of the subversion of the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age. The history of the parent country had afforded the most solemn warnings and melancholy instructions on this head; and even New England, the land of the persecuted Puritans, as well as other Colonies, where the Church of England had maintained its superiority, would furnish out a chapter as full of the darkest bigotry and intolerance as any which could be found to disgrace the pages of foreign annals. Apostacy, heresy and nonconformity had been standard crimes for public appeals, to kindle the flames of persecution, and apologise for the most atrocious triumphs over innocence and virtue."

By passing that amendment all religions were made free and equal before the law. The voluntary system had been on trial in that country for about 100 years, with the result that when the last Census were ' taken 62,000,000 of people were found to be living in the United States, and out of that total, accommodation was furnished for religious worship under the voluntary system for no less than 43,000,000 people, a proportion of something like 68 per cent. Mr. Horace Mann, in his Report of the religious statistics of this country, gave 58 per cent. as the real requirement of the community. Now, with regard to Wales, the Welsh Representatives made no war upon the episcopal form of worship, they only objected to its connection with the State. They maintained that the State Church, through a political agency working at its head, had been used for the purpose of annihilating the nationality of the Welsh people. ["No!"] He knew that was an unpalatable gospel to preach, but he ventured to say that if they had been 10,000,000 instead of 2,000,000 people the justice of their contention would have been recognised long since. At all events, there was the fact established that the voluntary system had provided religious accommodation for 65 per cent. of the entire population of Wales, against 25 per cent. supplied by the Church of England in the Principality. A claim had been set up by the hon. and learned Gentleman (Sir R. Webster) that if all the Nonconformists were ranged on one side and members of the Church on the other, the number would be about evenly balanced. This was the most sublime instance of human credulity he had ever heard of. The communicants of the Church of England in Wales to-day, according to the official Year Book of the Church, amounted to 6 per cent. of the population, whereas taking the four leading denominations of Nonconformity—namely, the Calvinistic Methodists, the Independents, the Baptists, and the Wesleyans, the number of their communicants reached 21 per cent. of the population; simply these four denominations, exclusive of Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Quakers, and other minor denominations. More than that, the numbers of the Calvinistic Methodist Body were more numerous than those of the Church of England in Wales. ["No!"] The Independents were stronger, and it was a very close thing indeed between the Baptists and the Church, so that the Church, giving it even the best position it could claim, would be only third in strength of all the denominations in the Principality. The numerical argument then could not hold good against the claim for religions equality. But he did not rest the case on statistics and the counting of heads. He contended for the great principle of religious equality, and it was nonsense to talk of religious liberty while there was a privileged Church, a privileged class, and a privileged Chamber in the Legislature. He declared his opinion, and without any ill-will towards the Church, that historically the Church had been in Wales an engine for crushing the spirit, stifling the language, and breaking the hearts of the Welsh people. The Welsh had been denied a place among the nations. But they planted Britain; and their history was old before English history began. Such sneers at an ancient nationality was not the way to treat the founder of the firm, having regard to the coming federated Empire. For himself he thanked the Government for bringing in this measure of justice so long sought for—a measure which did not give all that the Welsh people wanted, but which would put an end to the partisanship of a great Religious Body, and sever the Church for ever from the political institutions of the country.

said, he was especially anxious upon this occasion to protest, though it might be for the last time, against legislation which he believed to be equally injurious to the State and to the Church. He was desirous to protest against it on this occasion rather than on the Second Reading for two reasons. In the first place, he considered that when one's objection went to the root of the Bill, when one believed that no Bill brought forward for the purpose of disestablishment and disendowment, whatever might be its details, could be other than a mischievous Bill, one was right in coming forward to oppose it on such an occasion as that. Whether it should be opposed by vote as well as by voice depended partly on considerations of strategy into which he need not enter; but if anybody did go into the Lobby against the introduction of this Bill he (Mr. Gathorne Hardy) would not be far behind. .The second reason why he was desirous of speaking on this stage of the Bill was that, in common with almost every Member, he did not believe that they would have the privilege of seeing the Bill before them again for the Second Reading. They were being treated to a series of dissolving views of the Newcastle Programme. Those views were being displayed with all the illumination which the enthusiasm of Members on the Liberal side could give them, and they would then in the great majority of cases be dusted and put away in an old cupboard, possibly never to re-appear in the same form, or possibly to be touched up in accordance with the wishes of one or the other sections. Anybody who knew the position with regard to the business and the time of the House must know that, whatever might be the pressure of the Welsh Members, it was impossible that the Bill could go further than the present stage during this Session. Now, he did not intend himself to introduce any element of bitterness into that discussion. He endeavoured to appreciate the motives of other Members of the House, however much they might differ from him, and however different might be their desire with regard to legislation. But he opposed this Bill because he believed that it was a measure not merely for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, but because he believed that it was a measure aimed at the Establishment in England as well as in Wales. He believed that the great majority of its supporters in the House were really only supporting it because they believed that the Welsh branch was the weakest branch of the Church of England, and when they had cut away one portion of what was, after all, a great united Church they would find it easier to go further still. He might be told that he was using a two-edged argument; that he was doing an unwise thing in binding up the existence of the Church of England with the existence of the Church in Wales. He had heard that argument over and over again before, but they did no good by hiding the issues from themselves, by putting their heads into the sand like the ostrich, and trying to conceal from themselves what was the real drift of measures like this. They would not in the slightest degree hasten the disestablishment of the Church of England by binding it up with the Church of Wales, nor would they in the least degree put it off by endeavouring to conceal from themselves that every logical argument which was aimed at the Church in Wales also hit the Church in England. Of course, he knew there was one argument—the argument as to nationality— which was put forward with regard to the Church in Wales, and was not put forward with respect to the Church in England, but notwithstanding that, he was satisfied that when the enemies of the Church of England came forward to attack that Church they would not refuse the aid of Scottish Presbyterians, Welsh Methodists, or Irish Roman Catholics, because they had disestablished, or endeavoured to disestablish, the Welsh Church in the name of nationality. He was speaking on the present occasion because he believed the attack which was being made was an attack on all connection between Church and State, and because he believed that if it succeeded it would have far-reaching consequences which he firmly hoped some of those who supported the Bill did not anticipate—consequence which he firmly believed would be prejudicial to the State even more than to the Church. For his part, he believed that whatever they might do the Church rested on a more sure foundation. It was high as Heaven, and they would never cast it down, but they were not for that reason to throw away the temporal aids which had been given to the Church, not for National purposes only but for National purposes in connection with religion, and for those alone. With regard to those aids, they had seen a great development through the range of history. It had been to a certain degree, no doubt, a development, but there was such a thing as degeneracy as well as development. He should not like to go back to the first stage in the history of that question, when every sect was not only satisfied to preach what they believed to be the truth, but persecuted to the death those who differed from them. Then came the second stage in which, though persecution no longer existed, the full measure of toleration was only given to one particular branch, and others had certain civil disabilities attached to them. He was not going to argue the third stage of the question, when they took away certain endowments given to the Church for purposes of education and handed them over to other institutions, but he was bound to refer to what he conceived to be the fourth development with regard to this question. Not merely were they told that they must tolerate every descripsion of faith—not merely were they told that they must not inflict any disability on those who differed from them, but that they must strip the existing establishments of the endowments which were given to them and remove them from the position which they held because they were, owing, forsooth, to those endowments and the position which the State gave them, placed in some position of 'vantage' with regard to various Nonconformist Bodies. He did not like to prophesy, but he could not help believing that if this was carried out they would find here what they had found in other countries where the attempt was made to divorce a State from religion—they would find that it would be said that religion was the enemy of the State, and it would become the business of those who occupied positions on the Ministerial Benches in great measure not merely to sever the connection between the State and the Church, but to strive to the best of their ability to do away with all kinds of religious teaching whatever. He saw the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Bryce) making a note of this remark, and had no doubt that if the right hon. Gentleman did condescend to take notice of his statements he would tell them that the arguments he had just been using did not find support from the experience of the United States. The right hon. Gentleman would, perhaps, ask him whether he believed in that great Anglo-Saxon community of the United States the fact that there was no State religion had to any degree done away with the fondness for religion there? But a wide distinction should be drawn between the history of the United States in this matter and the various communities which existed in Europe at the present moment. The fact was to be borne in mind that the American Commonwealth started its existence at a period when nobody had any hostility to religion as religion. Moreover, although it was true they never established any State religion in that country, the right hon. Gentleman, if he had read, as of course he had done, The Scarlet Letter, or the history of the times with which The Scarlet Letter dealt, would admit that, although there was no establishment of religion by the State, there existed certainly no indisposition to put even penal laws in force in America for the purpose, not of establishing this or that branch of religion, but the religious principles and the morality which it was his desire on the present occasion to defend. He was convinced that the English people, who, after all, were the masters in this matter, would be hostile to the Bill if they understood its full bearings; and, personally, he wished them to realise for themselves what was the full measure of confiscation which was at the present moment proposed with regard to the Church endowments. They had on Thursday last a speech of great ability from the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary in asking leave to introduce the Bill. No one who listenad to it could doubt that the right hon. Gentleman entirely understood almost every detail of the plan which the Government proposed, but hon. Members would agree that it was a speech as different as possible from what they would have had in like circumstances from the Member for Midlothian. It was not the speech of a man who was trying to cure a disease or do away with a fault in an institution, but rather the speech of a man who was dissecting a living organism before a class. It was a speech of a vivisector and a critic rather than of a sympathiser in any shape or form. He was not going to deal with the details of the measure; but he should like to contrast it with the measure for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, brought forward by a man who was, at any rate, sympathetic with the religious idea. No one who heard that marvellous speech could forget the allusion which the right hon. Member for Midlothian made to the Archbishop of Dublin—

"Nee te tua plurima, Pantheu,

Labantem pietas nee Palladis infula texit."

There was nothing like that in the speech of the right hon. Member for Fife. If this measure had been designed merely for the purpose of getting rid of an open sore, there would, no doubt, have been the same method of commutation as that which existed in the Bill with regard to the disestablishment of the Irish Church. He did not say it would have been so with regard to all the details, but he did say that unquestionably there would have been, as there was with regard to the Irish Church, a method of commutation. It would have been in the Bill, in the first place, because it would have brought the measure into working order in a short time; and, in the second place, because it would have allowed the Welsh Church to go away with some endowment of her own, and not to go into the cold absolutely stripped and naked. Although everything pointed to commutation, and although the Welsh Members who desired to see this Bill brought into effect as soon as possible might on that ground have desired commutation, yet, merely because it was impossible to conceive a scheme which would have left the Welsh Church with some endowments as the Irish Church was left with its endowments, the Government had thought proper to give the go-by to the natural method of dealing with such a question as this. They had merely left the Welsh clergy with their life interests in the performance of duties which he prophesied very shortly indeed it would be unnecessary for them to perform. The Government handed over the churches to the Welsh clergy. He did not thank them for that. The churches were held by no other title than the title by which the Welsh Church held its other endowments, and he believed the sole reason why the Government had left the churches to the Welsh Church was because they knew how repugnant it would be to the feelings of every right-minded man to see those buildings put to uses which any person might think proper. The hon. Gentleman in his speech sneered at the manner in which those who had the interest of the Irish Church at heart dealt with the question of endowment, as if it was a case of the greed of the individual which induced them to obtain as much money as possible. He did not think anyone who had really studied the history of that question, and who desired to do justice to opponents, did not know that the object of all the various measures which were taken at the time was to save as much as possible of the endowments which were given to the Protestant religion in Ireland. They were justified in doing everything which was possible to save what they could for the Disestablished Church. An endeavour had been made on the present occasion to draw a parallel between the question of patron- age in the Scotch Church and the question of patronage in the present case. He did not propose to go into the very interesting facts put forward by the Leader of the Opposition; but he could not help thinking, when listening to the speech of the Home Secretary, that he was hardly doing justice to himself or to his opponents in drawing a parallel so fallacious. Would anyone who candidly dealt with this question deny that the circumstances were completely different? Apart altogether from any motives of greed, he, for one, would do what he could to get as much compensation as possible for the purpose of handing it over to the sorely-despoiled Church. With regard to the question of churchyards, it was useless to shut their eyes to what the consequences would be if the Bill was carried into effect. When the Burials Bill was being discussed in the House of Commons they were told how wrong and cruel it was to bring their political fights into graveyards. Then he and those who opposed the Bill said they would be delighted to see Dissenters buried in those churchyards, but that if the measure was carried it would be put forward as a ground that they should be taken away from the Church. He was no untrue prophet, for that very thing had taken place. This Debate must necessarily be a short one, and he knew there were many others who desired to speak on the Bill. He probably should not occupy a place in another House of Commons, and if this was the last speech he made in a House where he had occupied a seat for nearly 20 years, he should be thankful that he had been given the opportunity to protest against legislation which, he believed, was for the worst interests both of the Church and of the State. He himself had never said an uncharitable word against the great Nonconformist Body; but he should like to hear what those great men who were the founders of Welsh Methodism, and who took up the cause of religion at a time when he was free to admit the Church was to a great extent neglecting its duties, would say if they were alive at the present moment. What would they say of a measure which said that money dedicated to the service of God might be devoted to any purpose other than that of religious instruction and teaching? He himself believed that if, instead of these political controversies, all those who had the fear of God before them would strive as far as possible to combat the forces of irreligion and atheism, instead of wasting their strength against one another, they would be strong indeed. God forbid that he should say a word against the great Nonconformist Bodies. He knew what his Master said when He found men casting out Devils in His name, and others strove to forbid them because they followed not Him. He knew that the great Dissenting Body, like the body to which he had the honour to belong, had cast out the devils of intemperance, and crime, and foul living, and God forbid that other bodies should say them nay, but rather that such as could should band themselves together against these iniquities, and unitedly strive to advocate what they nil held dear.

said, he made no apology for trespassing on the patience of the House, because whilst he had been in the House for half a dozen years he had never spoken on this subject, although it was the one of all others in which his constituents had a deep interest; and, moreover, he might not have an opportunity at a later stage of the Bill. It seemed rather hard, and as far as he could gather this was the argument of the last speaker, to say that they should not have disestablishment in Wales because hon. Members in England did not want it for their country. The hon. Member said the only ground which differentiated the case of England from that of Wales was that of nationality. But he claimed they bad a very much stronger reason than that. Some of his friends around him, he knew, did not attach as much importance as he did to the statistical argument, but it was that which really made their case. It was the fact that Wales had an overwhelming preponderance of opinion in favour of disestablishment; that constituted their grievance, and gave them a claim to come to Parliament and ask for separate treatment. He attached the greatest importance to the statistical argument. The right hon. Member for West Bristol said it was not enough for them to show they had 31 to three in favour of Welsh disestablishment, but that electoral votes should be taken into account also. He was quite prepared to meet the right hon. Gentle- man on that ground. If the aggregate net majority cast at the last Election for Liberal candidates in Wales were divided among the Liberal Representatives in this House, it gave them something like a majority of 2,000 apiece. It was not merely 33 to 1, but their majority was larger on this question than any majority the House had ever known on any great question that had come before the country. Supposing the same line of argument was taken with regard to the majority which the Conservative Party had at the Election of 1886 they would find, if they took the aggregate net majority of the Conservative Party of that year and divided it by the number of the Conservative Members who constituted the majority in the last Parliament, that their majority was not 10 per cent. of the majority the Liberal Members for Wales had upon this question. If they went back to the Election of 1874, he believed it was an absolute fact that the Conservative votes then recorded at the polls were less than the aggregate Liberal votes, and yet the Conservative Party were returned to power with a large majority in this House, and though they had received less votes than the Liberals they professed to represent the feelings and the wishes of the people of this country, and for six years they stuck like leeches to the Treasury Bench. He should like also to say something about the character of this majority they had in Wales, and he would give evidence the value of which he did not think hon. Members opposite would be prepared to dispute or question. He referred to a sermon which was preached a few years ago almost within the shadow of this House—namely, at St. Margaret's, by a very high dignitary of the Church in Wales, Archdeacon Howell, who was respected by all who knew him, friends and political opponents alike. The sermon was published in pamphlet form, and The Western Mail, the Conservative paper of Cardiff, described the sermon as one of the best Church Defence pamphlets ever issued. What did Archdeacon Howell say as regarded the majority in Wales? He said—

"Above all other causes was the weakness of the Church due to the fact that so much of the best blood of the nation no longer ran in her veins. Those who were banded together for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church were men of unquestioned religious character, whose lives bore witness to their piety and sincerity; and with regard to the unquestionable fact that the majority of the people were not found within the pale of the Church, there was the equally unquestionable fact that her adherents were largely made up of English settlers and Anglicised Welshmen, not of the Welsh-speaking masses, who held the future of the Principality in their hands. Hence her opponents spoke of her not as historically an alien Church, but as now the Church of aliens."

He could give more extracts to the same effect, but he would not detain the House with them, and he would now deal with the hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight, who referred to the progress made by the Church, in the Rhondda Valley especially. He had not a word to say against the clergy in Wales at the present day, and he did not want to go into ancient history. . He believed the clergy to-day were an extremely earnest and zealous body of men, who were prepared to make great sacrifices for their religion, but that was not the point at all. He was not prepared to say that in some districts possibly the Church might not have made some little progress, but the progress, such as it was, was very small indeed. With regard to the progress of the Church in the Rhondda Valley, he had sat on the local Board of the district, and knew the district well. It was true that a number of churches had been built there in recent years, but in the district there was a population of 100,000 people, which had not sprung up altogether during the last year or two, and he asked the House how it would have fared with religion in the Rhondda Valley had not the Nonconformist chapels been erected in the proportion of six to every church? And with regard to the churches that had been built in recent years, he found by the Llandaff Church Diocesan Calendar for the present year that while the population of certain districts of the Rhondda Valley was 80,000, there was only church sitting accommodation for 5,838. There was not sitting accommodation in the churches for one-tenth of the population, a fact which did not say very much for the progress of the Church in the Rhondda Valley. The hon. and learned Member for the Isle of Wight had also said that as certain statistics showed that barely 50 per cent. of the population of Wales belonged to the Nonconformist denomina- tions, it was right to argue that the other 50 per cent. necessarily belonged to the Church. Surely that was a most ridiculous argument for any reasonable and fair man to put forward in an Assembly like the House of Commons. He did not think that the Church could claim 10 per cent. of the population of Wales as regular attendants—his hon. Friend the Member for the Carmarthen Boroughs had put the Church communiants at 6 per cent. That, however, in his judgment, was at least double the actual figure; but supposing the Church showed that 10 per cent. of the population of Wales were regular church-goers, would the Nonconformists be right in saying that the other 90 per cent. belonged to them? And yet, that was what the argument of the hon. Member for the Isle of Wight amounted to. He would like to offer some criticism on one material point in the Bill. While he approved heartily of the Bill generally, he had a serious objection to the proposal, in which he had been anticipated by the Leader of the Opposition, as to the allocation of the funds. The Home Secretary proposed in this Bill to divide the ecclesiastical endowments into two funds—a central, or national fund, to which the monies now going to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were to be returned, and a parochial or local fund, to be made up of all the parochial endowments now going to the incumbents of the various parishes. That was a great and vital change from the principles of the Irish Church Act. He regretted that the Government had departed from the principle of the Irish Church Act in this matter, and had treated tithe as parochial rather than as national property. The Home Secretary stated that he had endeavoured to meet the wishes of the Welsh people on this point, but he did not know how the right hon. Gentleman had ascertained them, and, certainly, the right hon. Gentleman had thought fit to carry out the wishes of the smaller portion of the Welsh people. A few months ago the North Wales Liberal Federation passed a resolution practically in the direction of the policy which had been adopted in the Bill; but shortly afterwards the South Wales Liberal Federation passed a resolution to the effect that tithes, being national property, should be devoted to national and not to parochial purposes. The South Wales Liberal Federation covered an area which was, as regards population, three times that of North Wales, but the right hon. Gentleman had thought fit to carry out the wishes of the small portion and not the larger portion of South Wales. They had always fought this question on national, and not on parochial grounds. They had always maintained that tithes were national property, and should be devoted to national purposes, and he was surprised to see what he conceived to be a change of front on the part of the Government in this matter. He was surprised the Government should have embodied this particular policy in their Bill, because the last time the Chancellor of the Exchequer was down in Wales at Carnarvon he put forward the national view, and not the parochial view of this question. The right hon. Gentleman said—

"I was reading only the other day a speech by one of the Liberal Unionists, Mr. Courtney. He is an excellent man, but a little bit cranky. He is a very honest man. Indeed, he is so honest that he is not able to agree with any one except himself. He made what I think a very sensible remark about Welsh disestablishment. He had not made up his mind; he was going to keep an open mind. I have always observed that, when a man has an open mind, it means that he has not a mind at all."

So it was clear the Chancellor of the Exchequer had definitely made up his mind in that time. He said that the time had arrived when the Church of Wales must cease to exist. He went on to say that the tithe must not be frittered away. One of the objections he (Mr. Thomas) had to the proposed scheme for the allocation of the funds was that they would be frittered away and be devoted very largely to objects which were already provided for by the rates, and that by so doing they would ultimately be putting the money into the pockets of the landlords. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in that speech had gone on to say that he wanted this national property to be

"communicated and communicable to the whole people," and "to be suitable and attainable by everyone of the Welsh people."

But by the Bill five-sixths of the tithe would go to the parochial fund and one-sixth to the national fund. He hoped the latter fraction did not measure the influence of the right hon. Gentleman among his colleagues, for he attached far more value to the political sagacity and experience of the right hon. Gentleman than he did to that of some of the doctrinaire experimenters who sat with him in the Cabinet. But the "final settlement," he understood, had been arrived at in a somewhat hurried manner, and must, therefore, not be too closely scrutinised at this stage. By the Bill tithe would be most unfairly and inequitably distributed. The people of the parishes from which the tithes were derived would, in many cases, get only a very small share, if, indeed, any direct benefit from them at all. He trusted that there would be a Return made of what the parochial endowments of the different parishes really amounted to. Such a Return should certainly be laid on the Table of the House before the Second Reading of the Bill. There were many parishes, as the Bill then stood, in which nearly the whole of the tithes-rates would pass into the pockets of the lay impropriators. It was no exaggeration to say that from a fourth to a fifth of the tithe rent charge in Wales went to lay impropriators. Surely such a state of things was never contemplated by the pious ancestors who were alleged to have given those tithes in ancient days. In his own constituency, in the Aberdare Valley, numbering over 50,000 persons, no one would gain anything at all out of the parochial fund. On the other hand, in the parish where his house was situated, when the tithe, which was worth nearly £100, came to be allocated, the wishes of his only two fellow-parishioners, a small farmer and a blacksmith, and himself would have to be mainly and primarily considered. He would call a meeting as soon as he got down there, and see how best they could divide the sum for their uses and wishes, although he hoped it would be some time before his friend the rector gave them the opportunity of dividing it. He would only, in conclusion, congratulate the Home Secretary on having introduced the Bill. He was much gratified at its introduction, and although he objected to some of its important details, yet he should give it his hearty support.

^* said, the arguments of the promoters of the Bill must be founded either on principle or expediency. They must, how- ever, have felt themselves precluded from founding them on principle, since the Prime Minister had declared to the country that he was equally in favour of establishment or disestablishment. They must therefore have founded their argument on expediency, and it was very remarkable that the same Government who founded their arguments in favour of disestablishment in Wales, on the ground that the majority of the people demanded it, should at the same time refuse to give the majority of the Irish people any choice in the matter of establishment in their Home Rule Bill. He would like to examine the exact weight of the figures put forward by the supporters of the measure. The Home Secretary based his argument on the return of 31 out of 34 Members. But what did the votes show? In 1885 the votes cast for disestablishment were 125,000, and against 80,000. That gave the Church more than one-third of the voters. In 1892 the fight was not a fair and square fight, because some of the Unionist Members were in favour of disestablishment, and he not only subtracted all the votes given for those candidates from the votes given for the Church, but he had added them to the votes given for disestablishment. The result was 139,000 for disestablishment and 69,000 against. Therefore, in 1892 one-third still remained favourable to the Church.

:May I ask the noble Lord whether he has taken any account of the uncontested elections?

said, that in an argument of this kind one was obliged to take the figures that were available, and could not go into hypothetical matters such as what would have happened if there had been contests in the uncontested constituencies. But the figures were perfectly good for the purpose of his comparison, because the figures of 1885 and the figures of 1892 were extraordinarily approximately similar, and about the same number of constituencies were contested at each election. Therefore, in the General Election of 1892, one third of the electors still remained in favour of the Church and against disestablishment. The last example was to be found in the bye-election for the County of Montgomery. In that constituency the proportion of votes recorded for the Church candidate in 1885 was three out of seven. In 1886 it was eight out of 17, in 1892 three out of seven, and in 1894, 16 out of 33. He thought that put on its true basis the argument deduced from figures. But figures were absolutely worthless, because they precluded the votes of half the population. No women could vote on this question, a question of all others on which, as the late Professor Fawcet— himself a strong disestablisher—had said, . women had as much right to be heard as men.

:The women are the strongest disestablishes in Wales.

said, that might be, or might not be; but he maintained that the women had a perfect right to vote. Another argument was that the Church was in Wales an alien Church. But it had been proved that the founders of Noncomformity in Wales had been strongly attached to the Church, a fact which showed that in their view it was not an alien Church. An attempt had been made to show that during the great Methodist movement of the last century the Church was really alien to the religious sentiment of the people of Wales. But the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Midlothian had conclusively disproved that in his great speech on this subject in 1870. But the hon. Member for Carnarvon had taken them back 700 years, and had tried to harrow their feelings by recitals of the differences between Welsh Princes and Welsh Nationalists, and Norman Kings and Prelates, in the Middle Ages. It was absurd to ask them to judge these events by the standards of the 19th century, by the standards of the 12th and 13th centuries—at the very time when an analogous struggle was being made in England, and not when the Saxon Bishops were being ousted by the Norman Bishops, and when even the English language was tabooed in favour of Norman French. It was beside the question to take the House back to those days in order to show that religious differences existed in Wales. It was making discussion ridiculous to ask them to hold up their hands in horror because some persons resented the action of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King of England with regard to Wales in the 13th century. The right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary only touched lightly on this argument. He had said that the existence of the Church was associated with injurious and humiliating memories. He Viscount Wolmer) agreed with the right hon. Gentleman. What was the history of these memories? It was the history of the action of the Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers of the last century, who had used the Church in Wales for political purposes just as the present Government were trying to use it. The whole of this discussion had centred round the question of disestablishment, but, as had been pointed out, disestablishment was not the question. Was there any Welsh Member who would accept disestablishment without disendowment? Not one. But there were many who, supposing they could not get both, would take disendowment without disestablishment. The right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary had made no attempt to deal with the question of principle. He was reserving himself for the Second Reading. All he had told them was that the Church was an aggressive sectarian power singled out by the State for certain privileges. Aggressive! By that they meant proselytising. No Church worthy of the name could be other than aggressive in this sense. To charge the Church with sectarianism when her opponents who had separated themselves from her were responsible seemed to him a singular mode of conducting the controversy. And when was the Church singled out for certain privileges, and why was she singled out, and who singled her out? When they came to the question of Disendowment, really the Home Secretary might have taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the elements of the case. He talked of national property. Perhaps on the Second Reading the right hon. Gentleman would kindly explain what researches he had made to prove Professor Freeman wrong when he said—

"The endowments of the Established Church rest on exactly the same ground as the endowments of Dissenting Bodies. People sometimes forget that there are such things as Dissenting endowments. Now, the difference between these endowments and the endowments of the Church is simply this, that the endowments of the Church are much greater in extent and of much older date than those of the Dissenting Bodies."

After alluding to this question in his speech on the Suspensory Bill last year, the right hon. Gentleman said he would relegate to the museum of political antiquities all talk about sacrilege. Well, the word "sacrilege" was one which had been a good deal abused and misunderstood. He would quote again from Professor Freeman, who said—

"The question must not be confused by talk about national property on the one hand and about sacrilege on the other. It is simply a question whether a great and supreme change, but one which the supreme power has a right to make, is or is not called for by the general interests of the country."

The Government accepted Professor Freeman's statement that there was in this matter no question of sacrilege, they must also accept his assertion that there was equally no question of national property, and the only difference between Church and Nonconformist endowments was that the former were more numerous and of greater antiquity. He (Viscount Wolmer) believed that the best use to which property could be dedicated was the service of religion, and to take it away from that service and devote it to municipal purposes was a frightful degradation of its use. An hon. Member asked whether the original donors intended that the tithes should go to lay impropriators. Of course they did not, but it was Henry VIII., the true political ancestor of the present Government, who first diverted them.

:And the Reformation.

:Henry VIII. was the political power of the time.

:He was a great reformer.

:A truly moral guide!

^* said, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted himself to be the political successor of Henry VIII., and he would not dispute his ancestry. It was Henry VIII. who was responsible for the existence of lay impropriators; and in the verdict of history there would be very little to choose between the dedication of Henry VIII. of the funds of the Church to his personal favourites and their dedication by the present Government to their political supporters. The Home Secretary had promised to carefully safeguard all vested interests, but one class of people for whom the Bill showed no consideration were the parishioners who now enjoyed the legacies of their ancestors. The Home Secretary said that the Nonconformists raised £400,000 a year, and asked whether the Church could not do as much. At the present moment the Church in Wales raised £250,000 a year, absolutely apart from her ancient endowments, for the work of her communion in that country, and not taking into account strictly private donations. Her endowments were, roughly, another £250,000 a year, so that, if the Bill passed, £500,000 a year would have to be raised simply to maintain her present position by a Church, which was said by her enemies to represent only a tenth or twelfth of the inhabitants, against £400,000 raised by the Nonconformists, who were said to be many times more numerous.

An hon. MEMBER: And four times as poor.

^* :But the landlords of Wales, who the enemies of the Church declared to be the main support of the Church in that country, were far from being rich men, and they were not in a position to find that large sum. What would be the spiritual condition of that country if the Church were compelled to rest upon her oars for want of funds? Though the Nonconformists were now present, it was the Church who covered the ground. He knew this point had been raised before, but, as it was a complete refutation of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, he ventured to raise it again. How could the Home Secretary maintain that the voluntary contributions of the Nonconformists covered the ground when he knew that 90 parishes in the diocese of St. Asaph alone had no resident Nonconformist minister? Was the right hon. Gentleman willing that there should not only be an absence of Nonconformist ministers, but of ministers of the Church as well? Did the right hon. Gentleman contemplate with equanimity that the Church and Nonconformity would both fail to cover the ground, which was covered at present? The hon. Member who had addressed the House last had excused the shortcomings of this measure on the ground that it had been prepared in a hurried manner. He did not know what ground the hon. Member had for making that statement, but as the Government had not denied it, it might be taken that the Bill had been prepared in a hurried manner. Well, in the Second Reading speech of the Home Secretary, to which they were all looking forward with so much anxiety, he hoped the right hon. Gentleman would make good the defects and omissions in the Bill. The preparation of the measure must have been extremely hurried. The only point not hurried was probably the determination to give worse terms to the Welsh Church than that given to Ireland. He was not going to dwell on that point, but would simply ask the House to imagine what this Bill meant. There was to be no commutation—no allowance at all. It was the starting out of a Religious Body for which they all professed unbounded good wishes with a year of grace to remodel its organisation, with the endowments of seven centuries taken away from it in a single Session. The Government said, "We are perfectly certain that the Church is hampered by its connection with the State, and that she will show more fruitful work when disestablished." Had they considered that it would be necessary that this Church, which had been devoting its energies to combating irreligion and vice for the past 700 years, would be called upon to reorganise itself in 12 months? Had they considered that the best work and intellect of the Church would have to be devoted to reorganisation for a generation, and that funds would have to be found to replace the endowments which had been taken from her. The Government intended that she should start afresh, and would send her out—apart from vested interests —penniless. He refused to give the Government any credit for not taking the fabrics of the churches, which had been so long maintained by voluntary contributions. It would have been an act of villainous robbery to take from Churchmen the fabrics they themselves had built and maintained. No Nonconformist body ever started under such conditions as those under which the Disestablished Church was expected to reorganise itself in 12 months. Curates were essential to the work of the Church; and when the Home Secretary said that the incumbents and wealthy laymen must find the means of paying them, he forgot that the Bill cast upon the clergy and the laity the whole task of re-supplying the endowments of the Church. At the very moment when counselling the Church to maintain its assistant clergy, he refused to help it to maintain its existing obligations. In order to avoid what all admitted to have been a scandal in connection with the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Bill would produce another scandal in Wales by leaving curates unprovided for. He had only one word to say as to the destination of the present endowment funds. He was prepared to say that the destination of the money taken from the Church was the relief of rates, and that meant nothing less than replacing the tithes into the pockets of the landowners. The money was to go for the building of public parish or district halls (which meant saving the rates), or to instituting public libraries, or supporting higher education, and allotments, and so forth, all of which meant saving the rates or taxes. They had hardly hoped to see the time when the advocates of Disestablishment would propose a Bill putting back into the pockets of the landowners the money they had paid in tithes.

:From whose pockets does it come?

:From the pockets of the landowners. Was anyone still to be found to say that tithe was paid by the tenant and not by the landowner? if so, he would not find any support on the Treasury Bench. If the tithe were abolished to-morrow, the whole benefit would go to the pockets of the landowners, and the application of these funds to the rates was nothing more nor less than returning the tithes to the pockets of the landowners.

:There were two or three Bills in another place in which it was attempted to impose it on the tenants.

:Is the hon. Member not aware that the late Government passed a Bill to collect the tithe from the landowners?

:But the Opposition tried to put it on the tenant.