If the army or navy or any department of the civil service were so constituted, the demand for reform would be insistent. “We will not endure,” the public voice would proclaim, “that an instrument on whose fitness we depend shall be so ineffective. It is not enough that the members of the profession are prevented from injuring one another. Our concern is not their feelings, but our protection.” It is characteristic of the indifference to religious interests that an instrument, so costly and so capable of use as a cathedral establishment, has been left to rust through so many years, and that the troubles of a Chapter should be matter for jokes and not for indignant anger. A Royal Commission, indeed, was appointed in 1879. It was in the earlier years presided over by Archbishop Tait, who showed, both by his constant presence and by his lively interest, how deeply he had felt and how much he had reflected on this subject. The Commissioners had 128 meetings, and issued their final report in 1885; but notwithstanding the humble and almost pathetic appeal that something should be “quickly done” to remedy the abuses they had discovered, and forward the uses which they saw possible, nothing whatever has been done. The position of the Cathedrals still mocks the intelligence of the people they exist to serve, and the hopes which the spread of education has developed. The Commissioners recognized the change which had been going on in the feeling with regard to the tie which binds together the cathedral and the people, and their recommendations lead up, as they themselves profess, to “the grand conception of the Bishop of a diocese working from his cathedral as a spiritual centre, of the machinery there supplied being intended to produce an influence far beyond the cathedral precincts, of the capitular body being interested in the whole diocese, and of the whole diocese having claims on the capitular body”. This conception, apart from its technical phraseology, may be taken as satisfactory. “A live Cathedral in a live Diocese” is, in the American phrase, what all desire. It may be questioned, however, in the light of thirteen years’ further experience of growing humanity, whether their recommendations would bring the conception much nearer to realization.