It was never anticipated by Sir Robert Peel, Lord Russell, and other Church reformers, that the net income of the Common Fund of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would be over one million per annum. Any person who would have said so then would have been considered insane. In 1840 the idea of enfranchising all the leasehold property of the church was not for one moment thought of, and if it were, that it could never be realized. Without going into the history of the Ecclesiastical Commission, it is essentially necessary to state that this Commission has cleared away, as far as public patronage is concerned with Acts of Parliament, the gross, yes, the disgraceful waste of church endowments. For instance, the present Archdeacon of Surrey, instead of receiving about £6,000 a year, of which £4,539 came from the tithe-rent charges, has a canonry in Winchester Cathedral, gross income £1,000 per annum, and the vicarage of Frensham, with net income £400 and house. An Order in Council divided, respecting vested interests, the Archdeacon’s enormous income among poor benefices and endowed new churches in the parishes where the tithes arose. This is a good specimen of all the operations of the Commissioners. Incumbents possessing enormous incomes, whose benefices were in public patronage, have been dealt with by Orders in Council, and by private Acts of Parliament, in a similar manner, on the next avoidances, when the new incumbents were appointed, on very reduced incomes, and the residue divided among the poorer incumbents in the same parishes. Then as regards the episcopal, capitular, and prebendal revenues, the Commissioners allow the bishops and chapters their incomes as set forth in Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council, and with the residue of the immense property, they satisfy local claims of parishes where the tithes arose or landed estates were situate. As for the prebendal properties, separate estates of capitular offices, sinecure rectories and dissolved canonries, the Cathedral Act of 1840 vested them in the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for the good of the Common Fund, but Parliament allowed local claims on the tithes only. In a subsequent Act (1860), the local claims were extended, rather unwisely, to all kinds of church property. Hence we find many country parishes, with a population of a few hundreds, richly endowed and furnished with comfortable, well-built parsonages. The incumbents claim this by virtue of the extension clause of the local claims. The Commissioners have therefore been bound to satisfy local claims of hundreds of parishes with populations varying from 150 to 300, while the teeming populations of the town parishes have to go without help from the above resources. About £360,000 per annum has been given out of the Common Fund to satisfy local claims up to 1890. The Commissioners were opposed to this extension clause, and it was not in the Bill, but was inserted and carried by