sharp skirmish between Mr. Disraeli and the House 88 to
the rights of Private Members. We have described the main features and course of the debate in another column, but may mention here that no speech made a greater impression on the House than Mr. Walter's appeal to the High - Church principles of Hooker, as against the High - Church principles of Mr. Orby Shipley and Dr. Littledale. Only, like all the other abler speeches in favour of the Bill, Mr. Walter spoke not for what he professed to advocate, but for a very different thing, the extinction of Ritualism,—which it is by no means clear that the Bill will produce, while it is clear that it will produce much else for which nobody wishes. Mr. W. E. Forster made a very strong point of the impossibility, if we once enforce the Act of Uniformity strictly, of stopping at ritual, and not pursuing the remedy to the doctrine behind the ritual ; and Mr. Richard, M.P. for 'Merthyr, in a speech of some weight, but one which came to no practical conclusion as to the speaker's intended vote, maintained that while as an Independent Dissenter he had no sort of wish to see the Church of England smothered under Romanising practices, he did not believe in the strict enforcement of a law of Uniformity as a conceivable remedy. He had much sympathy with Mr. Gladstone's wish to give a certain congregational freedom to the separate local customs, and much, too, with Sir William Harcourt's horror of a paid clergy who broke their compact with the State ; but the only adequate remedy for the imbroglio was disestablishment.
