Sir William Harcourt (Derby) recapitulated the charges against the Irish Government, and insisted that no answer had been given to these charges. The Government had been con-victed of illegal and unconstitutional conduct, and he agreed with Mr. Morley that much of the blame rested on the demoralisation of the police, due to Mr. Balfour's habitual encouragement of the magistrates and police to violate the law.

Mr. Justin McCarthy (Londonderry) supported the original motion, and Mr. Cuninghame Graham (Lanarkshire, N.-W.), spent a few minutes in lively banter of Mr. Morley for his zeal on behalf of maltreated Irishmen and his absence of it in the case of equally maltreated Englishmen. He quoted what he held to be a parallel case to the Tipperary disturbances-the acts of the police in repelling a London mob in Trafalgar Square when Mr. Graham was himself assaulted and subsequently imprisoned. But on that occasion Mr. Morley, instead of making any motion in the House, remained "glued to his seat," deaf to all persuasions, taunts, and sneers. There was a good deal of cheering when Mr. Graham added, apropos of his own conduct at the time, "But the House will remember that I did not whine-I knew what I had to expect-and I got it." The division was then taken, without application of the closure and without any desire in any quarter to prolong the discussion. Mr. Morley's motion was rejected on strictly party lines by 320 to 245, and the amendment was then put as a substantive motion. Mr. Healy at once moved the adjournment of the debate, and a long wrangle lasting nearly an hour ensued, the two front benches differing as to what had been the precise arrangement come to for the completion of the whole debate in one night. Sir William Harcourt endorsed Mr. Healy's view that the amendment opened up fresh ground and required further discussion. Finally the House accepted, though with some reluctance on the part of the majority, Mr. Balfour's suggestion that the Government with its majority of 75 had got all it really wanted, and the debate was formally adjourned, never to be resumed again during the

session.

The division list showed that on this occasion both sections of the Irish party had voted against the Government: 26 Parnellites and 45 Anti-Parnellites. Of the hundred members who were absent from the division more than one-half (51) were Unionists-including 5 Liberal Unionists, 32 Gladstonian Liberals did not vote, whilst the number of absent Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites was about equal.

The next occasion upon which the Radical party decided to make a reconnaissance in force of their opponents' position was on the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales, and they counted this time upon drawing from Mr. Gladstone a clearer declaration of his intentions than he had up to this time made in the House of Commons. The resolution this year was intrusted to

Mr. Pritchard Morgan (Merthyr), who since his return to this country after a protracted stay in Australia, had turned his chief attention to developing the gold-mines of the Principality. In starting the debate (Feb. 20) he spent upwards of an hour in declaiming against the "injustice of the continued existence of the Established Church in Wales." He attacked Mr. Balfour very sharply for a speech delivered a long time previously, and accused him of "showing as little consideration for the feelings of the Welsh people as for the heads of Irishmen," and of arousing as much indignation in Wales by his "contemptuous and contemptible " utterances as his "employment of batteringrams" had aroused across the water. The " Church of England in Wales" never had been, and never would be, the Church of the people, and if the people's Church was the State Church, Nonconformity should be the Established Church in Wales, though no Welsh Nonconformist asked for such a thing. The English Church was " established by force" in Wales, and had always been "out of harmony with the Welsh spirit." Wales had been the "birthplace of more saints than the whole of England," but the English Church had never produced one saint there. He gave statistics to show that the number of Nonconformists was greatly in excess of the number of Churchmen in the Principality, and he maintained that the objection to Disestablishment, and the new life and spirit which had been put into Church work in Wales, arose from the fear of the ecclesiastics that they would "lose the loaves and fishes." He denied that the Church would at all suffer from Disestablishment, though Churchmen might have to "pay a little more for their religion." He concluded by moving a resolution declaring that as the Church in Wales had failed to fulfil its professed object as a means of promoting the religious interests of the Welsh people, and ministered only to a small minority of the population, its continuance as an Established Church in the Principality was "an anomaly and an injustice" which ought no longer to exist. Mr. Dillwyn (Swansea), one of the patriarchs of the House, and a staunch Dissenter, briefly supported the motion, and then Mr. Gladstone, who was loudly cheered, spent forty minutes in advocating Disestablishment. He began by declining to accept all the statements to which Mr. Pritchard Morgan had committed himself. He objected, for instance, to the phrase "the Church of England in Wales," for it would be just as correct to speak of "the Church of Wales in England," especially as, towards the close of the sixth century, while England was still barbarous and almost wholly de-Christianised, Christianity was flourishing in Scotland and in Wales, and the missionaries sent by Gregory the Great were met by bodies of Welsh Christians. Mr. Gladstone then passed on to speak of the admirable way in which the Welsh Nonconformists had provided for their own religion, when driven out of the Church by the fact that it abandoned the use of their mother

tongue, and was given over to English ecclesiastics. He, however, "ungrudgingly recognised" the fact that the Church had of late years made great and increasing efforts to retain its hold on the people; and he admitted that there was not the slightest tendency or disposition on the part of the Welsh Established clergy to neglect their duty, or to fail in inspiring and self-denying efforts to extend the administration of the Church. But the whole question, after all, was whether the Nonconformists, who formed the vast majority of the people, were contented with the existing state of things; and the reply was that they were not contented, and were making, in perfectly constitutional form, a demand for change; and he maintained that the demand was one which Parliament ought to grant. Mr. Gladstone, with an amusing ingenuity, attributed all the credit of his own conversion on the subject to the Marquess of Hartington, who, when acting as leader of the Liberal party, declared that the question of disestablishment in Scotland must be dependent on the wishes of the Scotch people. Mr. Gladstone admitted that "the parallelism between Scotland and Wales" in the case "had yet to be confirmed," and he further admitted that one-and-twenty years before (though, as he pointed out amid much laughter, since then he had had time to be born again and to come of age ") he had declared it "impossible to separate the Church of Wales from the Church of England." But that was "an exaggeration based upon the fact that the demand for separation then was small. What he now found was that the Church of Wales, like the Church of Ireland, was the Church of the few, and not of the many, and the Church of the rich and not of the comparatively poor; and as the bulk of the Welsh people were in favour of Disestablishment, and twenty-seven out of thirty of their Parliamentary representatives supported it, he contended that it ought to be given. The Postmaster-General, Mr. Raikes (Cambridge University), excited some resentment and some scornful laughter among the Welsh members by denying that there could possibly be any Welsh "national feeling" in support of the motion, because there was "no such thing as a Welsh nation "—a statement which Mr. W. Abraham (Rhondda Valley) met with the defiant Welsh cheer of "Clwych! clwych!" to the great amusement of the House. Mr. Raikes went on to declare that, originally, there were three principalities in Wales, and they only became one when Wales passed under the English sceptre, and he reminded the House that the first Prince of Wales was an English prince. Wales, in fact, was part of England, and the Church of Wales was the Church of England, and every Englishman was entitled as much as every Welshman to have a voice in regard to it. He declined to be "beguiled by the voice of any Welsh siren" to surrender an outwork the abandonment of which would be followed by an "attack on the citadel," and he refused to "fritter away all the oneness of the realm." Mr.

Raikes proceeded to flood the House with statistics to show the real position of the Church in Wales and its great and increasing growth of late years.

Sir G. Trevelyan (Glasgow, Bridgeton), in supporting the contention that Nonconformity had largely increased in Wales in recent years, pointed out that two generations back there had been only 300 or 400 chapels in Wales, where there were now between 3,000 and 4,000; and he maintained that the only substantial argument in favour of maintaining an Established Church was when it was the Church of the poor, but there was no pretence whatever for saying that it was so in the case of the Church in Wales.

The Solicitor-General (Plymouth) contended that no speaker on the Liberal benches had attempted to grapple with the assertions in the resolution; but, on the contrary, Mr. Gladstone had borne eloquent testimony to the useful influence exercised by the Church in Wales, which he maintained was now stronger, better, and purer than it was twenty years before, when Mr. Gladstone asserted that its separation from the English Church would be "a national misfortune."

Mr. Byron Reed (Bradford, E.), rising at five minutes to twelve o'clock, moved the adjournment of the debate, upon which Mr. Dillwyn moved that "the question be now put," and, this being agreed to, a division was taken on Mr. PritchardMorgan's resolution, when it was negatived by 235 to 203.

The narrowness of the majority excited very considerable surprise among Conservatives and Churchmen-especially as, with the addition of fifty-three pairs, only 106 members were left unaccounted for. Mr. Chamberlain and six other LiberalUnionists voted in the minority, as did thirty-two Irish Nationalists and sixteen Parnellites; whilst in the majority only seventeen Liberal-Unionists joined with the Conservatives in protesting against the thin end of the Disestablishment wedge.

By this time the Estimates for the year had been laid before Parliament, and, as customary in recent years, those for the Army and Navy had been accompanied by explanatory papers, which took the place of introductory speeches by the Ministers in charge. The Secretary for War (Hon. E. Stanhope) stated that the estimated expenditure for 1891-2 for Army Services, including the Ordnance Factories Vote, would be 17,545,400l. (with grants in aid of 2,844,207., making a gross total of 20,389,5071.), of which 3,092,000l. was for non-effective services, showing a net decrease of 292,000l. on the Estimates of the preceding year. The number of men on the Army establishment, exclusive of those serving in India, but including the general and departmental staff and men on miscellaneous establishments, was 153,696, being an increase of 213 on the year 1890-1, a few men of special skill having been added in view of the more complicated armaments in use, and a small addition

being made to the Ordnance Store Corps. The grand total, however, of men of all classes on the regimental establishmentsof the Army and Auxiliary Forces was 707,242 men, classified thus -Regular forces, 143,849; Army Reserve, first class, 71,800; second class, 910; Militia, home, 135,827; Channel Islands, 3,996; Malta, St. Helena, and Bermuda, 1,665; Yeomanry, 14,086; Volunteers, 262,613, making a total of home and colonial establishments 634,746, and with 72,496 Regular forces on the Indian establishment, the total mentioned above707,242, although the number of effectives of all ranks amounted to only 616,642. The number of men on home and colonial establishments, exclusive of India, was originally set down at 153,696. The approximate cost per head of the personnel of the forces was-Regular forces, 84l.; Militia of United Kingdom, 12l. 48.; Militia of Channel Islands, 5l. 10s.; Yeomanry, 91. 9s.; Volunteers, 4l. 12s. 5d.; Army Reserve, 8l. 15s.; the remainder of the total estimate being made up by stores and supplies other than personal equipment and provision, and by charges for administration. The number of horses and mules (exclusive of officers' horses) on the establishment of the Regular Army was estimated at 14,531, as against 14,432 in the previous year, and in India 11,303, against 11,312.

At the close of the preceding year the enrolled Militiamen showed a decrease of 1,865, owing in a great measure to the revival of trade and to the facilities given to militiamen to purchase release from their engagements. The Yeomanry remained almost stationary in point of numbers, whilst the Volunteers showed a reduction of nearly 3,000 enrolled members, brought about mainly by the more stringent conditions of efficiency; but also to the efforts of the War Office to increase the artillery branch in some districts, and to discourage in them the further increase of the infantry. The Secretary of State expressed his conviction that the Volunteers were far more efficient than formerly, but regretted the continued dearth of officers, "mainly due to the disinclination of gentlemen of means and leisure to make the necessary sacrifices," whilst the falling-off of local subscriptions had thrown heavier expenses on Volunteer officers. Eighteen brigade camps had been held during the preceding year, at which 79 batteries with 316 guns attended, and gave proof of excellent organisation not only in their transport and supply, but also in their medical and sanitary services. With regard to the cost, Vote 1, for Army Pay, &c., showed an increase of about 42,000l., due to large payments of reserved pay to men passing into the Reserve; Vote 9, Warlike Stores, a reduction of 202,500l., due to the approaching completion of the pro-gramme undertaken in 1888 under the Imperial Defence Act; and Vote 10, Works, an increase of 51,500l., due to improvements in barracks and sanitary services and for increased rifle-range accommodation.

A preliminary attack upon War Office administration was