ENGLISH POLITICAL HISTORY 505 



which would be unaffected), and of the 260,000 derived from endowments the Bill 

 would take away 172,500, representing (according to the Liberal view) national 

 property; but this reduction would only be gradually effected in about forty years by .the 

 Welsh Commissioners appointed to manage the transfer, existing interests being 

 maintained and existing incumbents being paid their present stipends, so that in 

 that time the Church would have the chance of making good the loss of income by 

 increased voluntary contributions. The disestablished Church was given power to 

 set up a representative body, which might be incorporated by charter; and to this body 

 the Welsh Commissioners would hand over the cathedrals, episcopal palaces, churches 

 and parsonages, and also the modern endowments and such part of the glebe as was 

 not considered to be part of the ancient endowments to which the Church as such 

 was strictly entitled; as a dividing line the date of 1662 was taken as that after which 

 property of uncertain origin now owned by the Church might be regarded as her own. 

 The funds which by degrees would be taken from the Church were to be applied 

 partly to charitable and public purposes by being handed over to the County Councils 

 and partly to the colleges of the University of Wales (library, etc.). 



The rather moderate extent of the disendowment thus proposed was somewhat of a 

 surprise. Extreme Liberationists had to console themselves with the prospect of a 

 success for the principle of disestablishment rather than any considerable acquisition 

 of Church property for secular purposes. On the other hand, from a Church point of 

 view, the smallness of the operation on its financial side made the whole transaction 

 seem one. of peculiar meanness; for a paltry result, the work of the Church admittedly 

 now. well done, .as had been proved before the Welsh Church Commission, whatever 

 its shortcomings in the past^-was to be crippled and hampered. Defenders of the 

 Church,: notably the Bishops of St. David's and St. Asaph's and Lord Hugh Cecil, 

 could point with cogent force to the fact that the Church was the largest single religious 

 body in Wales, and the only one which was represented in every parish by a regular 

 organisation. Their argument for its being better entitled than any other denomina- 

 tion to be the national Welsh Church, and administer as such the " national " property 

 it had so long possessed, represented one side of the case against the Bill. The ecclesi^ 

 astical indivisibility of Wales and England was a more fundamental objection, the 

 Welsh dioceses being from the Church point of view .an integral part of the Church of 

 England. The case for the Government, granted the principle of disestablishment at 

 all, was however fairly simple. Their precedent was the case of the Irish Church in 

 1869: it was equally a part of the Church of England, and disestablishment and dis- 

 endowment had done it good rather than harm. The answer to those who contended 

 that the Church really was the national Church of Wales was that the Welsh people 

 thought otherwise; at election after election, almost unanimously so far as political 

 representation showed, they demanded the change as an act of justice. On the first 

 reading of the Bill (April 25), which was carried by means of the closure by 331 to 253, 

 Mr. Lloyd George emphasised this point in a somewhat rhetorical plea for the right 

 of his own nationality to have the religion it chose and not to be nationally misrepre- 

 sented by a Church which, however well it worked, was English and not Welsh. On 

 May i3th the second reading opened with a slashing criticism from Mr. F. E. Smith, 

 but on the i6th it was carried by the closure by 348 to 267, and the Bill was then hung 

 up till the late autumn. Its introduction satisfied the Welsh party, but otherwise^ it 

 excited no real parliamentary enthusiasm. In recent years disestablishment had 

 ceased to interest any large section of. Liberal politicians; and the Bill, while alienating 

 many Liberal Churchmen and rallying to defence of the Church numbers of voters who 

 are normally indifferent to ordinary political issues, was not of a nature to help Liberal 

 or Labour electioneering outside Wales itself. 



In making an Irish Home Rule Bill their chief measure in 1912 the Government 

 were more fortunate in one respect than Mr. Gladstone had been in 1886 and 1893, 

 when the whole Irish question was still associated in Great Britain with the prejudice 

 and hostility aroused by the agrarian war, with all its incidents of cattle-maiming 



