It may be said, indeed, that the Prime Minister made no attempt to defend the Welsh Church. He abandoned it to the strongest condemnation pronounced upon it by its adversaries, for the 'gross neglect, corruption, nepotism, plunder,' to use his own words, by which it has been marked; and only tried to account for these evils by laying them all to the charge of 'Anglicizing prelates.' He admitted that, even granting what Churchmen claimed, namely, about one-fourth of the population as belonging to the Establishment,--a claim, let us say in passing, which in the face of notorious facts is simply preposterous--'the disproportion is very remarkable in the case of a Church purporting to be the Church of the nation.' He admitted, moreover, as a circumstance seriously militating against the Welsh Church, that 'so large a proportion of her members belong to the upper classes of the community, the classes who are most able to provide themselves with the ministrations of religion, and therefore, in whose special and peculiar interest it is most difficult to make any effectual appeal for public resources and support.' But while acknowledging all this, he resists the proposal for its disestablishment. On what grounds? First, on this ground--that there is no hostility in Wales to the Church Establishment, and that its existence does not, as in Ireland, produce alienation or bitterness of feeling between different classes of the community. But this argument, if it were well founded in fact, which unhappily it is as far as possible from being, does not address itself in the least to the reason or justice of the case. Even if the Welsh people were so devoid of spirit and self-respect as to feel it no grievance to have a costly Church Establishment, which exists almost exclusively for the benefit of the rich, saddled upon their necks, surely that is no proof that it is right to perpetuate the privileges of a body, whose history for generations has been marked by 'gross neglect, corruption, and nepotism,' and which, purporting to be the Church of a nation, does not pretend, even according to the claims of its most audacious advocates, to number among its adherents more than one-fourth of the nation. But Mr. Gladstone is wholly misinformed as to the fact. Because the Nonconformists of Wales are an eminently peaceable, loyal, and orderly people, and do not proclaim their grievances with clamour and menace, it is imagined that they do not feel the gross injustice and indignity of the position they occupy. They do feel it deeply, and they are made to feel it, by events continually occurring in their social and political life, which all spring from this one root of bitterness. We need only refer in illustration of what we mean to the circumstances which attended and followed the last general election. Every form of unfair pressure was brought to bear upon the people to induce them to vote against their convictions, and many of those who had the courage to