struction of unhealthy areas, and of the rehousing of the population upon them. The County Council had done nothing, because their pride would not allow them to accept the solution of the question of betterment which was gratefully and gladly accepted as entirely satisfactory by the great corporation of Manchester, which knows much more about the subject.

On the policy of establishing municipal workshops, Mr. Chamberlain spoke with great warmth, asserting that it must lead ultimately to jobbery. On this point he wanted to ask a question. He saw that the Progressives were boasting of what the County Council had done for the working people in their employment. Well, what had they done? The question appeared to be a debatable one among the audience, and Mr. Chamberlain asked a second question. Had they done more for their workpeople than a fair and an honourable and a just employer would have done? There were cries of "No" and "Yes." Wait a minute, said Mr. Chamberlain; there were two opinions, and he would deal with both. If they had not, what on earth had they to boast about? They had only done their duty. But some said they had done more. That was a grave charge, and with a gesture which struck home the point unerringly, Mr. Chamberlain said that it was a charge of bribery and corruption. He did not bring it; it was brought by a candid friend of the County Council. They should think what that meant. It indicated that they, a public body, their servants, and trustees, were generous at their expense, and were creating a privileged body of employees who were earning more and doing less than the great mass of honest working men could earn or do. That was the beginning of proceedings which led to Tammany Hall in America, which was sustained by the corruption practised and maintained on the municipality of New York in paying to its servants more than they could have earned in ordinary employment, and in exacting from them in return political services. We are not going to descend to that level in England," said Mr. Chamberlain; and the audience demonstrated its hearty accordance with this declaration by loud and prolonged cheering.

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At a later date the London Municipal Society, which supported the Moderates, desired it to be known that the idea of splitting up London into ten municipalities entered into their policy. They desired that the London County Council should have administrative powers over the city, that the city should contribute to the county rate, that thirty or forty District Councils, each with its own mayor, should exercise locally administrative functions, whilst the County Council would, however, be left untouched, although its chief work would be deliberative, and the issue of bye-laws for the guidance of the District Councils.

The Ministry, after emerging in safety from the perils of the debate on the Address, lost no time in presenting their

measures for consolidating the Liberal party. The first group to be reckoned with was the Welsh, and in pursuance of an honourable understanding, the Home Secretary took the first place in presenting his bill "to terminate the Establishment of the Church of England in Wales and Monmouth." Although practically only an amplification of the Suspensory Bill of the previous year, many of the conditions seemed even more severe than that originally offered; but this method of tendering an extreme demand on a question eminently open to compromise was in accordance with the rules of party warfare. In moving for leave to introduce his bill (Feb. 25), Mr. Asquith (East Fife) said that it was to all intents and purposes identical with that which he had presented to the House in the previous year, and, therefore, he would confine himself to a brief recapitulation of the main provisions of the scheme. It was proposed that from January 1, 1897, the Church of England in Wales and Monmouthshire should cease to be an Established Church, and that from that date both the privileges and the duties incidental to the status of Establishment should come to an end. The coercive jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts would cease. What was now ecclesiastical law would be enforceable, as far as it affected the discipline of the clergy and the doctrines and ceremonies of the Church, by way of contract, and as far as it affected the use of property, by way of trust. Provision was made for the creation of a representative Church body, and power was given to the bishops, clergy, and laity to hold synods and to legislate on ecclesiastical matters for themselves. Coming to the question of disendowment, he observed that they were dealing only with ecclesiastical revenues arising from Wales itself, always including the county of Monmouth. They had to dispose of revenues of the gross annual value—in round figures of 279,000l. First there was the local and parochial fund of 233,000l. a year, representing the present income from benefices, and secondly there was a central fund of 46,000l., made up of the incomes derived from episcopal and capitular estates and from the revenues derived from Wales by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Private benefactions created since 1703 had been excluded from the scope of the measure. The application of the funds would be entrusted to a commission whose constitution, status, and emoluments he described last year. One of the duties of the commissioners would be to transfer the churches and parsonages to the representative body. The burial-grounds and glebes would be transferred to the parish, district, and town councils, and the tithe rentcharge, which was by far the largest asset, would be vested by the commissioners in the council of the county in which the lands out of which it arose were situated. The other property of the Church would remain vested in the commissioners themselves. The cathedrals would be retained by the commissioners with the obligation to maintain them and to keep them in

repair, but upon the request of the representative body it would be the duty of the commissioners to permit the cathedrals to continue to be used for the purpose of Divine service. It was proposed by the bill that every person now possessing a vested interest in an ecclesiastical office should continue to receive the emoluments as long as he discharged the duties of such office; and a provision was introduced enabling a clergyman to receive an annuity on a lower scale without the obligation of discharging those duties. The central fund would be charged, in the first instance, with the expenses of administering the Act, while the local funds, which constituted by far the largest item in the property of the Church, would be applied to local purposes. The revenues of the Church that were ultimately available might be applied to the erection or support of cottage or other hospitals, or dispensaries or convalescent homes; to the provision of trained nurses for the sick poor; to the foundation and maintenance of public, parish, or district halls, institutes, and libraries; to the provision of labourers' dwellings and allotments; to the support of technical and higher education, including the establishment and maintenance of a national library, museum, or academy of art; and to any other public purposes of local or general utility for which provision had not been made by statute out of the public rates. In conclusion, the Home Secretary submitted that the bill had been conceived with an honest desire to satisfy on the one hand the genuine demand of the vast majority of the people of Wales, and on the other hand to satisfy that demand with the smallest amount of hardship to individuals and with the least possible detriment to the spiritual interests of the Church.

In accordance with a custom which had grown of recent years, the Opposition exercised their right of protesting against the introduction of a measure to which they felt the utmost hostility, and Sir M. Hicks-Beach (Bristol, West) was put forward as the spokesman of the Conservatives. He was too practised a Parliamentarian to fall into the mistake of those who followed him, and delivered themselves of speeches more properly applicable to the second reading of the bill. Sir M. HicksBeach began by animadverting on the omission on Mr. Asquith's part to say a single word concerning the policy which led to the production of this bill. The truth was that the country fully recognised the unreality of the proceedings in which the House was now engaged, and, indeed, Lord Rosebery himself had admitted that there was no earthly prospect of the bill becoming law. The Opposition were thoroughly hostile to the scheme of disestablishment and disendowment embodied in the bill. He emphatically traversed the assertion that the Church established in Wales was an alien institution. On the contrary, the Christian Church flourished in Wales at a period when paganism prevailed in England, and as for Nonconformity in Wales, it was a modern

and even, it might be said, a foreign growth. At the present day the Church was doing admirable work in the rural districts of the Principality, and there was every reason to believe that she would convert the minority into a majority. Surely, then, the time selected for depriving her of her temporal possessions was singularly inopportune. Sir M. Hicks-Beach then went on to cite facts, and to refer to deeds in order to show that the original endowments of the Church were of a private nature, and that they had not been turned into State endowments by anything which occurred at the epoch of the Reformation. Instead of providing a better guarantee for religious freedom, this bill, he maintained, would produce ecclesiastical anarchy in Wales, and tended to disestablish the Church of England piecemeal.

A long discussion ensued, lasting over two evenings, the final speech on behalf of the Government being made by Mr. Bryce (Aberdeen, South), whose sympathies for similar treatment of the Established Church of Scotland had been frequently expressed. The bill was at length (Feb. 28) brought in and read a first time without a division.

In contrast with the hostility shown to the measure dealing with the Established Church in Wales, a few hours later Sir Charles Cameron (Glasgow College), without a word of opposition, introduced a bill "to put an end to the Establishment of the Church of Scotland, and to deal with the public endowments thereof on the occurrence thereof," and this was at once formally read a first time (Mar. 1).

The day intervening in the discussion of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill (Feb. 26) had been devoted to an academic discussion of the abstruse question of bimetallism, ending in the acceptance by the Government of a harmless resolution which committed nobody to anything proposed from the Ministerial side of the House, and supported by the Opposition. The ostensible object of Mr. Everett's (Woodbridge, Suffolk) resolution was that the Government should co-operate with other Powers in reassembling the International Monetary Conference, which had adjourned sine die after its last abortive meeting in Brussels in 1892 (see" Annual Register," pp. 274-7). The importance of the debate lay in the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who spoke as a strong monometallist, and with forcible reasoning, was so little sure of his following that he hesitated to press his arguments to their logical conclusion, the rejection of Mr. Everett's motion. The debate followed, moreover, a vote of the German Reichstag in the same sense, notwithstanding the opposition of the Government, and the defeat of the President of the United States (Mr. Cleveland) in his effort to make gold the only legal tender in payment of national debts. In both countries, Germany and the United States, the idea of the agricultural classes was that "the depression under which they were labouring in all parts of the world would

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be remedied by the substitution of two metals for one, their relative value being fixed by convention instead of by the laws of supply and demand. The adherents of this view had of late made several noteworthy converts, amongst whom Mr. A. J. Balfour, the leader of the Opposition, and Mr. Leonard Courtney, an authoritative economist, were the most prominent. They claimed further to have half convinced Mr. Goschen, Mr. Lidderdale, who had been governor of the Bank of England during a trying time, and also the head of the English house of Rothschild.

Mr. Everett's motion declared that the House of Commons viewed with increasing apprehension the constant fluctuations and the growing divergence in the relative value of gold and silver; that it heartily concurred in the recent expression of opinion by the Government of France and by the Parliament of Germany as to the serious evils resulting therefrom; and therefore urged the desirability of co-operating with other Powers in an international conference for the purpose of considering what measures would be taken to remove or mitigate those evils. Beyond the fact that they both represented purely agricultural constituencies there was little in common between the proposer of this resolution and the seconder, Mr. H. Chaplin (Sleaford, Lincolnshire), whose Conservatism was such as to bring him almost into touch with the extinct doctrine of Protectionism. He had recently taken a prominent part in the bimetallic controversy, and on the present occasion explained in a very lucid speech his reasons. He began by asking what was the cause of the extraordinary fluctuations and the growing divergence in the relative value of the two metals. In his judgment it could be traced to the great changes which occurred some years before in the monetary laws in the United States of America and in half a dozen countries of Europe. In consequence of those changes all the gold and silver that could be found anywhere in the world was, so to speak, potential money. All that was found could be taken to the mints, and converted into money at a given rate per ounce. It all went into circulation, and pro tanto it increased the volume of money throughout the world. The additions to the volume of money regularly made by a constant supply of both the metals was formerly just sufficient to meet the increased demands and to keep prices comparatively steady for many years. This state of things was, unfortunately, changed when the law was altered after the Franco-Prussian war. The mints were closed to the coining of silver, while they were still left open to gold. The price of silver at once began to fall, and it continued to fall steadily from that time down to 1893. Then another mortal blow was aimed at silver by the action of the English Government in closing the Indian mints. It fell 8d. an ounce in a week, which was a thing absolutely unknown before in the history of that metal. He had shown that there were serious evils which ought to be considered and, if possible,