They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of their ruling caste. But this time they did not "muddle through"--they had to come to America for help. As I write, our Congress is voting billions and tens of billions of dollars, and a million of the best of our young manhood are being taken from their homes--because in 1910 the mind of England was occupied with Dean Goode "On Eucharist", and the ten volumes of Gibson's "Preservative". The Elders What the Church means in human affairs is the rule of the aged. It means old men in the seats of authority, not merely in the church, but in the law-courts and in Parliament, even in the army and navy. For a test I look up the list of bishops of the Church of England in Whitaker's Almanac; it appears that there are 40 of these functionaries, including the archbishops, but not the suffragans; and that the total salary paid to them amounts to more than nine hundred thousand dollars a year. This, it should be understood, does not include the pay of their assistants, nor the cost of maintaining their religious establishments; it does not include any private incomes which they or their wives may possess, as members of the privileged classes of the Empire. I look up their ages in Who's Who, and I find that there is only one below fifty-three; the oldest of them is ninety-one, while the average age of the goodly company is seventy. There have been men in history who have retained their flexibility of mind, their ability to adjust themselves to new circumstances at the age of seventy, but it will always be found that these men were trained in science and practical affairs, never in dead languages and theology. One of the oldest of the English prelates, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently stated to a newspaper reporter that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time to form an opinion on the labor question. And now--here is the crux of the argument--do these aged gentlemen rule of their own power? They do not! They do literally nothing of their own power; they could not make their own episcopal robes, they could not even cook their own episcopal dinners. They have to be maintained in all their comings and goings. Who supports them, and to what end?