The Church’s “nationality” is proved even by the peculiar character of her property. It is territorial. It is (as he emphasised in a speech of 1862) “... so distributed throughout the country, that it makes that Church, from the very nature of its tenure, a national Church; and the power of the Church of England does not depend merely on the amount of property it possesses, but in a very great degree on the character and kind of that property. Then I say that the Church, deprived of its status, would become merely an _episcopal sect_ in this country. And in time, it is not impossible it might become an insignificant one. But that is not the whole, nor, perhaps, even the greatest evil, that might arise from the dissolution of the connection between Church and State, because in the present age the art of government becomes every day more difficult, and no Government will allow a principle so powerful as the religious principle to be divorced from the influences by which it regulates the affairs of a country. What would happen?... The State of England would take care, after the Church was spoiled, to enlist in its service what are called the ministers of all religions. They would be salaried by the State, and the consequences of the dissolution of the alliance between Church and State would be one equally disastrous to the Churchman and to the Nonconformist. It would place the ministers of all spiritual influences under the control of the civil power, and it would in reality effect a revolution in the national character....” De Tocqueville has proved that the French clergy were the staunchest upholders of civil liberty before the Revolution; but he has also acutely shown that the Roman priesthood, devoid of domestic ties, looks to the Church as its sole fatherland, unless it can itself become a proprietor of the soil. The French Revolution disempowered it for that purpose, and evicted it from its heritage. The English clergy, on the other hand, are linked to civil life both by the land and the home. Contrast for one moment the landscape of a French village with that of an English, and the difference becomes typified. In the one the church stands aloof and dominates the hamlet. In the other it nestles among the cottages, and helps the daily life around it.