must be limited, first, to the things in which all are agreed; secondly, to the things in which, though they may not be agreed, yet equity points out, and the public sense acknowledges, that the whole should be bound by the sense of the majority.' ('Gleanings,' vii, 146.)

It had always been part of Mr Gladstone's policy to surrender any Church privileges that were obnoxious to Dissenters; and, accordingly, he had given his vote in 1869 for the Bill allowing Dissenters to be buried with their own services in churchyards, and in 1866 for the Bill abolishing Church rates. But about this time he came into much closer contact with important members of the Nonconformist body, particularly Newman Hall, Binney, Allon and R. W. Dale, and learned to appreciate their genuine sense of religion, and to understand their point of view in ecclesiastical politics. The consequent broadening in his sympathies and growth in tolerance for conscientious convictions were compensated by some loss in the consistency of his Church and State principles.

If this was seen in his changed attitude on the Wife's Sister's Bill, it came out still more clearly in the following year, when the country passed its first Act for popular education. The policy which the Nonconformist party had agreed to press upon the Government was that of a universal universal system of secular schools, supplemented by such religious teaching as teaching as the various denominations chose, and were able, to supply. Mr Gladstone's Church principles, of course, obliged him to demand for Church children what he called the integrity of religious instruction'; and he was also in favour of allowing the children of Nonconformists to be taught their peculiar tenets with equal fullness. This, down to 1870, had been the policy of the State, which was accustomed to subsidise the existing voluntary schools through the agency of the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society; and this policy Mr Gladstone would have been willing to extend to the new schools now to be established by the State itself. But the Dissenters soon began to show, as they had shown in 1843, that they preferred no Education Bill at all to one which made provision for denominational teaching. It might have been supposed that Mr Gladstone would then have fallen back upon his new

policy, as expressed in the quotation given above, and have ensured to the new State schools instruction in as much of the Christian faith as, with inconsiderable exceptions, the nation held in common; in other words, the teaching of the New Testament as interpreted by the Apostles' Creed. The 'marvellous concurrence' of the orthodox Dissenters in the central truths of the Gospel,' of which he spoke later as 'a mighty moral miracle,' would have made this course possible, and need not have resulted in the fierce 'undenominationalism' which he characterised as a 'moral monster.' But the Dissenters were bitterly hostile to any but their own scheme of a secular system with voluntary denominational supplements. Accordingly, Mr Gladstone's second plan was formulated in their sense:

'Why not adopt frankly the principle that the State or the local community should provide the secular teaching, and either leave the option to the ratepayers to go beyond this sine qua non, if they think fit, within the limits of the conscience clause, or else simply leave the parties themselves to find Bible and other religious education from voluntary sources?' (Morley, ii, 300.)

Happily Mr Forster, who was in charge of the Bill, though at the time he had no seat in the Cabinet, was a man less at the mercy of wire-pullers. Lord Morley, who thinks meanly of his statesmanship and dislikes his education policy, allows that he was a man of sterling force of character, with resolute and effective power of work, a fervid love of country, and a warm and true humanity.' This humanity and patriotism led him, although a Nonconformist, to set his face inflexibly against the Nonconformist policy. He procured the

salvation of as many of the existing Church and Chapel schools as could be made efficient, allowed the Societies a year of grace to build as many more as they were able, and carried the scheme by which the new State schools were empowered to give any religious instruction allowed by the local authority, provided that formularies distinctive of a denomination' were excluded. • With my assent,' he had said, the State shall not decree that religion is a thing of no account.' Lord Morley finds the words ridiculous. Insist, forsooth,' he says, that Vol. 213.-No. 425.

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religion was not a thing of no account against men like Dale, one of the most ardent and instructed believers that ever fought the fight and kept the faith; against Bright, than whom no devouter spirit breathed.' But this criticism is not to the point. A man may be a saint and yet advocate a policy the practical effect of which would be to secularise a nation. Mr Gladstone was as ardent as Dale and as devout as Bright; and there are advocates of the same policy to-day who are as ardent and devout as Mr Gladstone; nevertheless it is demonstrable that their secular system, with a voluntary supplement of religious teaching, would leave in practical heathendom the greater part of the children of the working classes. Few persons think the scheme of 1870 an ideal one: it left too much scope to the jealous wranglings of Church and Chapel on the local boards; but few will deny that it gave to the bulk of English children in the past quarter of a century the rudiments of Christian instruction, which Mr Gladstone's scheme would have denied them.

Having thus passed in review some of the more striking incidents in Mr Gladstone's career as an ecclesiastical statesman, we may sum up briefly the extent of the change they exhibit in his theory of the religious obligations of the State. His first view, as we saw, which depended in some degree upon his early Toryism, was that, as the State stood in a paternal relation to the people and was bound to consider not only their tastes but their needs, it had a responsibility towards them of spreading the Christian faith by every means in its power. When the growth of democratic ideas and the increase of popular representation seemed likely to reduce the function of government to that of 'the index of a clock worked by a pendulum,' Mr Gladstone for the moment abandoned his theory altogether and denied that a popular State could have any conscience at all. This he does in a letter to Newman (Letters, i, 71). But the period of depression was short-lived. When he next considered the subject in a formal treatise, he says of the thirty years which had succeeded his first essay: During those years, what may be called the dogmatic allegiance of the State to religion has been greatly relaxed; but its consciousness of moral duty has been not less notably

quickened and enhanced. I do not say this in depreciation of Christian dogma. But we are still a Christian people (Gleanings,' vii, 150). Consequently, after the recovery from his first disillusionment, he remained steadfast to the resolve to fight every inch of ground in defence of the alliance of Church and State, because of its beneficent effects on English social life.

'It is' (he says) 'by a practical rather than a theoretic test that our Establishments of religion should be tried. . . . An Establishment that does its work in much, and has the likelihood of doing it in more; an Establishment that has a broad and living way open to it, into the hearts of the people; an Establishment that can command the services of the present by the recollections and traditions of a far-reaching past such an Establishment should surely be maintained' (ib.).

...

It should specially be noticed that Mr Gladstone shows no mercy to a disestablishment policy, somewhat in favour to-day, which rests on the assumption that alliance with the State must inevitably impair the witness of the Church. He attacks it vigorously in his first essay, and recurs to the subject in his 'Chapter of Autobiography.' He points out that the familiar quotation from Dante's 'Inferno' about Constantine, so often applied, among others by Mr Gladstone's biographer, to the alliance of Church and State, refers not to this but to the supposed donation of temporal sovereignty; and contends that, by the combined evidence of friends and foes, the alliance proved a powerful influence in extending the truth of religion. He insists further that, if Christ died for the whole race, it is better to have a somewhat lower average tone over a large area than for Christianity to be restricted to a private society. We may add that it is always possible, even for an Established Church, to maintain an intensity of heat and light at the centre of the system, even if it only nominally embraces the greater part of a community; and we may well doubt whether, if the Church does not do so under an Establishment, it would do so in any other circumstances.

Art. 11.-THE NAVAL CRISIS.

1. The Navy League Annual. Edited by Alan H. Burgoyne. London: Murray, 1909.

2. The Naval Annual. Edited by T. A. Brassey. Portsmouth Griffin, 1910.

3. Fighting Ships, 1910. Edited by Fred T. Jane. London: Sampson Low, 1910.

4. The Campaign of Trafalgar. By Julian S. Corbett. London: Longmans, 1910.

5. The Naval Operations of the War between Great Britain and the United States, 1812-15. By Theodore Roosevelt. London: Sampson Low, 1910.

THE naval supremacy of Great Britain is in grave peril. It is already apparent that a determined effort will be made, before the Navy Estimates for next year are laid before Parliament, to convert the Cabinet-if conversion is necessary to a policy of ruinous economy on the British fleet in face of immense expenditure on foreign fleets, and to subvert the judgment of the predominant element in the electorate, the working classes, for whom the Navy means work and food. The leader of the new anti-navy campaign is not a free-lance politician, speaking from a public platform, but a responsible Minister of the Crown, speaking from the Treasury Bench. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has set out on the new crusade with the support of the Home Secretary and other members of the Cabinet. The line of attack was indicated in his Budget speech. Mr Lloyd George did not attempt to show that our fleet is larger than the situation demands; he did not indulge in such platitudinous laments over its cost as Chancellors in the past have frequently made; but he suggested that a rivalry exists between adequate measures for national defence by sea, and measures for improving the lot of the working classes at home. Turning to the Radical and Labour benches, he stated that

'if the taxes fulfil their promise, and come up to the Government's expectations next year, and if we return to the normal naval expenditure in the following year, we can see our way to start next year on a great national scheme of insurance