their spiritual needs, it was associated with their ways, their hopes, their past, and their future. If an overwhelming majority in any country could claim the right, by virtue of their majority, to set up and maintain any institution, the Protestant population of England could claim a right to set up a State Church. But every word that could be said in support of the English State Church was a word of condemnation and of sentence on the State Church in Ireland. The Irish State Church was the Church of so small a minority that, when allowance had been made for the numbers of dissenting Protestants in Ireland, it was doubtful whether one in every twelve of the whole population could be claimed as a worshipper in the temples maintained and endowed by law. Moreover, the Irish State Church was a badge of conquest, and was {217} regarded as such by the whole Celtic population of the island. The tithe exacted from the Irish Catholic farmer was not merely a tribute exacted by the conqueror, but was also a brand of degradation on the faith and on the nationality of the Irish Celt who was called upon to meet the demand. The student of history will note with some interest that, at a day much nearer to our own, the Lord Stanley whose name we shall presently have to bring up in connection with this debate on Mr. Ward's motion made use, in the House of Lords, of an appeal which suggested the idea that he had not heard or had forgotten George Grote's speech on which we have just been making comment. Not very long before his death Lord Derby, as he had then become, was declaiming in the House of Lords against the proposal to disestablish the Irish State Church, and he warned the House that if the fabric of the Irish Church were to be touched by a destroying hand it would be in vain to hope that the destruction of the English State Church could long be averted. [Sidenote: 1834--Lord Derby] Lord Derby had always a very happy gift of quotation, and he made on this occasion a striking allusion. He reminded the House of that thrilling scene in Scott's "Guy Mannering" where the gypsy woman suddenly presents herself on the roadside to the elder, the Laird of Ellangowan and some of his friends, and, complaining of the eviction of her own people from their homesteads, bids the gentlefolk take care that their own roof-trees are not put in danger by what they had done. Lord Derby made use of this passage as a warning to the prelates and peers of England that, if they allowed the Irish State Church to be disestablished, the statelier fabric of their own Church in England might suffer by the example. It was pointed out at the time, by some of those who commented on Lord Derby's speech, that George Grote had answered this argument by unconscious anticipation, and had shown that the best security of the English State Church was the fact that it rested on a foundation totally different from that of the State Church in Ireland.