it seems there was no blunder of which they were not guilty was to antagonize woman suffrage. Before votes for women became the burning question in America that it has been during the last few years, women, for the reasons already given, were naturally inclined to support temperance, but they were unorganized, it was not considered proper for them to take any active part in politics, and their influence was individual rather than that of a class.

As they came to political consciousness by being given the vote in local elections they were, in the great majority, found supporting temperance candidates; and as they pressed for suffrage on the same terms as men, the liquor interests recognized they were faced with another and a dangerous foe. They opposed woman suffrage; the women quickly found out where the attack was coming from, and they were more resolute than ever in their prohibition convictions; if woman suffrage was being fought by the liquor interests because they feared the success of woman suffrage would mean the end of the liquor traffic, it was proof incontestable that liquor was indefensible morally, and it was necessary that women should have the vote so as to bring about a great moral reform.

It has been contended by the users of liquor that the American people as a whole do not object to its moderate consumption, and were the question submitted to a plébiscite in such form that every man could vote No or Yes, an overwhelming majority would be cast in the affirmative; but neither the vote in Congress nor that of the State Legislatures is a fair test, as the legislators were under the terrorism of the Anti-Saloon League, and many men, weakly yielding to popular clamor, voted for the amendment, so as to square themselves with their constitu

ents, never believing the amendment was being offered in good faith, thus being able to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds without personal inconvenience. It has further been asserted that nearly every Legislature is under the coercion of the rural constituencies, whose votes outweigh those of the large cities, and if a system of voting could be devised to amalgamate the city vote, defeat of prohibition would be complete. The argument, in short, is that if the agricultural districts want to become total abstainers no one objects, but they have no right to impose their own perverted ideas of 'morality' upon the dwellers in the cities.

There is some truth in this, but it is not the entire truth. It is true that the cause of temperance has always been stronger in the agricultural communities and the smaller towns than in the large cities, city life naturally tending to promote drinking; but I should seriously doubt the truth of the assertion that by any system of honest voting a majority could be registered for liquor. Facts prove the contrary. The cities have contributed to the 'no license' and prohibition majorities, and made it possible for prohibition laws to be enacted. Nor is it true that no large city has accepted prohibition, but has been dragooned into it by the agricultural vote.

In 1914 Denver, the largest city in the State of Colorado, rejected prohibition; in 1916 prohibition was carried by a majority of 19,000. Tacoma, one of the chief cities in the State of Washington, went wet by 2300 majority in 1914, and three years later voted dry by 10,000; Seattle, another city in the State of Washington, went wet by 15,000 majority in 1914, but it was made saloonless by the overpowering rural vote. After two years' experimentation, the same issue again

being presented to the voters, the people of Seattle voted to continue to remain dry by a majority of 20,000. Portland, the chief city of Oregon, had the same experience. Numerous other similar cases could be cited. In every instance, I believe, the chief reason prohibition was sustained was the revolt of the decent elements, irrespective of party, against the saloon in politics. If the brewers and distillers had attended to their legitimate business and not mixed business with politics they would have aroused much less resentment.

One of the curious things about the adoption of prohibition, extremely characteristic of the American temperament, is the good-natured way in which it has been accepted. Here is a business in which hundreds of millions have been invested, giving employment, direct or indirect, to tens of thousands of men. Suddenly the industry, heretofore accepted as legitimate and one of the chief sources of national and state income, is wiped out of existence, the men dependent upon it for their support are turned adrift and must seek other employment, the habits and customs of a nation, deep rooted in their heredity, are thrown into confusion. People denounce the government and Legislatures, they protest against the infringe ment of the liberty of the citizen, they

The Morning Post

declaim violently at the interference with their personal rights, but beyond that they do not go. There are no riots, and the government is not overthrown.

The American turns everything into a joke. In one column the newspapers fulminate against paternalism and the tyranny of the cold water fanatics; and in the adjoining column the humorous paragrapher pokes fun at John Barleycorn. Even more strange to an Englishman is the absence of any attempt to secure compensation from the state. The cry of 'vested interests' has not been raised because it would be futile. The liquor business has been ruined and capital destroyed because the people have said it is an immoral business, but there is to be no redress. The wage of immorality is destruction. It is an experiment America is try

ing an experiment profoundly interesting to the sociological student. How it will result time alone will tell, but of one thing we can be certain, and that is, it will have a fair test, and five years hence we shall be given an opportunity of reaching certain conclusions, and being able to determine whether it was a wise experiment or an idea conceived in folly. And for that reason England should be in no hurry to follow in the footsteps of America. It can well afford to wait and see the effects of the experiment on this side of the Atlantic.

THE Church of England is one of the most characteristic institutions of the English people. It differs markedly, whether in its influence on national life, in the tone of religious feeling which it expresses, in its real relation to the State, or in all three, from the other established' Churches which exist in Europe, and in particular from the Church of Scotland, which is a Presbyterian body, and which has also claimed from the first a far greater independence of the State. It is the English institution which has perhaps on the whole received least justice in the ordinary view of history. Not only this particular Church, but the whole religious organization of the English people, is peculiar; for, side by side with the established' Church, England possesses independent Nonconformist Churches exceeding in vigor, and far exceeding in number, those of any other country not colonized from these shores. 'Church' and 'Dissent' jointly, sometimes in their bitter rivalry, and all the time in their largely unconscious coöperation, have been among the greatest moulding influences on the thought and character of English people.

There is also occasion just now for English laymen to air their views on the Church. While these pages are in the press, Parliament seems likely to be passing the most important project of ecclesiastical legislation which has been before it for many years (the 'National Assembly of the Church of England (Powers) Bill,' commonly

called the 'Enabling Bill'). Neither the good nor the evil which that bill may accomplish should be exaggerated. but it marks a point in a slowly developing crisis to which ordinary Englishmen should pay attention. An Englishman who is not either a clergyman on the one hand, or a fool on the other, always suffers acutely from the national malady of shyness when he expresses himself publicly on matters connected with religion. In this, as in most cases, it is a malady which should be overcome. But the present writer, though having something to say, is aware of the gaps in his knowledge, and is also sadly apprehensive that by blunt speaking he may give pain or offense to people whom he respects some of them very deeply indeed.

It is, unfortunately, necessary to begin by explaining (for the benefit, not only of foreign, but of many English readers) some elementary points about the meaning of 'establishment' and of a 'State Church.' Our ‘State Church' is not maintained by the State, but it is in large part maintained out of property given for the purpose, and in particular out of property given long ago when there was but one Church in Western Christendom. Nonconformists would accordingly claim that if the control of the State over the Church were (as they are apt to think it should be) done away, these ancient endowments should revert to the nation.

As it is, the nation governs the Church in the sense that no change

can be made in the law, by which the discipline and (subject to certain openly condoned illegalities) the ceremonies of the Church are regulated, except by Act of Parliament. The Bishops and other dignitaries, again, are appointed by the Crown on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The parish priests are appointed by a variety of authorities or, in a vast number of cases, by private persons (sagacious Englishmen suspect that the abuses of this anomalous system come to less than the evils which they think they observe in the systems of other Churches).

Of this archaic constitution as a whole, it cannot be denied that its imperfections are many and glaring; chief among them is perhaps the slowness with which Parliament is brought to sanction needful change. Yet it cannot for a moment be alleged that the Church as a whole has, for generations past, lacked vitality; and the patent result of its constitution has been to make the Church surely responsive to the slowly moving force of lay opinion. This summary, however, must not close without reference to the somewhat complicated system of assemblies (created recently and without legal power) which include or consist of laymen. Those of them which have a national character suffer very much from the extreme reluctance of the typical church-going Englishman (at least in the hitherto influential classes) to put himself forward in ecclesiastical matters, especially outside his own parish. Their members would not claim for these bodies the weight which either an effectively representative character or any other cause might bestow upon them.

Be its constitution what it may, the Church of England has been and is the home of a memorable and distinctive

type of Christian thought and life. Without disparaging this, members of other Churches have been apt to remark that their own community owns no head but Jesus Christ, while, from the time of that in many ways undesirable monarch. Henry VIII, the Church of England has groveled under the headship of an earthly King. With great respect, this time-honored observation is a somewhat blasphemous absurdity. The Vatican and Salem Chapel (in Mrs. Oliphant's powerful and painful novel), or any other Protestant Nonconformist community, are each alike controlled by some person or persons far other than Our Lord; their control is often much less restrained and tempered than that which any King or Parliament has exercised in the Church of England; the ultimate allegiance of all Churches to no earthly King is, of course, the

same.

What is true is that the Church of England, governed, as in fact all Churches are, by human beings, has from the Reformation to this day never yet been at the mercy of that class of human being which avowedly or covertly lays claim to be the embodiment of spiritual authority. The substitution of the 'Royal Supremacy' for that of Rome had really much more in it than the dirty by-ends of Henry VIII. It was in effect an insurrection, and an insurrection which had lasting success, of the ordinary lay person against despotic spiritual authority as such. The King did not attempt to place himself thereby in any position corresponding to that of the spiritual power which he had overthrown.

To a very great extent, founders of other Reformed Churches, at least the Calvinistic Churches, did set up new Papacies-new infallible systems more rigid than the old, and new sets of persons, often a good deal narrower

than the old, to interpret and enforce these systems. The historic glory and the abiding influence for good of the later or Calvinist Reformation lies wholly in the fearlessness and high aspiration of its revolt, not in the least in the doctrine or the discipline which it established. It was far otherwise with the foundation of the modern Church of England. The King (except when he was a fool) could claim no sort of infallibility; he was not a spiritual authority at all. What, as the temporal ruler, he could do was to insure for his people that their spiritual pastors and masters should know their place and their function—know the true relation between pastors who were not more, and flocks who were not less, than human.

In every ecclesiastical change that Henry VIII made (save his plundering of the Church's goods), he was necessarily dependent upon ecclesiastical advice, and, for this, policy and inclination (for we may grant him some good inclinations) made him seek, as his advisers and instruments, divines who had over his people the real authority which belongs to acknowledged learning and piety, not the false authority which can be asserted by any hierarchical machine. He did in fact turn for help to the genius (poor vacillating man though that genius may have been) to whom mainly we owe the marvelous Book of Common Prayer.

If I pursue this subject of the character acquired from the first by the Reformed Church of England a little further, I must not be supposed to ignore the darker aspects of its origin, or its later story. Much less do I ignore that the Reformation did more for us in England beyond giving its present form to the Church. Its greatest effect was, of course, to put the Bible in the hands of mere men and mere women. The next greatest, it may be, was that

the character of the English revolt from Rome conduced to the springing up of Nonconformist. bodies and eventually led (slowly enough, but sooner in England than anywhere else, except the State of Rhode Island) to full toleration. It may be freely conceded that without Nonconformity the Church would be dead, but it may be submitted also that modern Nonconformists owe more than they sometimes say to the life and teaching of the Church.

To proceed, then, it has been asserted so far that the 'Royal Supremacy' meant fundamentally, not the creation of an upstart and obviously contemptible spiritual authority, but the complete abandonment of that idea of spiritual authority concentrated in particular human beings which would tend to make Christianity as petrified a thing as Mohammedanism. This was perhaps not done with full consciousness; many Churchmen from Henry VIII's time to this day have opposed and do oppose the radical denial of a final authority somewhere resident in the Church here on earth; only they have not in practice settled for us where authority lies, or demanded much in the way of blind obedience to its decrees. We must now observe something more important, which was quite consciously done, and has been quite consciously continued. The reformed English Church attached itself with reverence to the real authority of a Christian tradition, undefined and unformulated and incapable of any decisive exposition, but none the less living for that, a slowly-growing, continuously-modified thing, operative in the hearts and minds of endless succeeding generations.

The cautious and conservative procedure of the English Church Reformation, as contrasted with the enthusiastic reception of a new outpouring