between the two Houses was avoided, and the Bill for Disestablishing and Disendowing the Irish Church—which Mr. Gladstone had enthusiastically and somewhat sanguinely believed to be a message of peace to Ireland—became law. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been one of the chief instruments in the negotiations, writes in his diary: ‘We have made the best terms we could, and, thanks to the Queen, a collision between the Houses has been averted; but a great occasion has been poorly used, and the Irish Church has been greatly injured without any benefits to the Roman Catholics.’ In Ireland the scheme was met with mingled emotions. The Church party were in despair, and their attachment to England was undoubtedly weakened. One of the ablest of Irish patriots—Mr. John O’Neill Daunt—wrote: ‘The scheme, as set forth, is to some extent undoubtedly a disendowment scheme, but objectionable in not going so far in that direction as Mr. Gladstone might have done with propriety and with full consideration for the vested interests of existing incumbents. His capitation scheme is, in fact, a plan for re-endowment, by which several millions of money, obtained by the sale of Church property, will be permanently abstracted from the Irish public and appropriated to the ecclesiastical uses of the present State Churchmen and their successors. This is anything but equality, and cannot be accepted as a final settlement by the Irish nation.’ Again he writes: ‘The Lords have passed Mr. Gladstone’s Bill, with some mutilations, to which the Commons finally assented in a conference. The Bill is a wretched abortion—in fact, it is such a sham as might have been expected from an English Parliament. It pretends to disendow the State Church, which it re-endows with about five-eighths of the Church property in a capitalized shape. . . . If Gladstone were an honest friend of Ireland, he could have averted all this danger by withholding the power to capitalize. To be sure, it is a queer disendowment that sends off the parsons with five-eighths of the money in their pockets.’ Again he writes: ‘On the whole, I dare say we have a sort of qualified triumph—nothing to boast of, considering that the result of nearly thirteen years’ agitation is a measure that enables the parsons to walk off with ten or eleven millions of our money in their pockets, _that still exacts from us the rascally rent-charge_, and that swindles Ireland of the amount of Irish taxes heretofore kept in the country by Maynooth and the _Regium Donum_.’