can point with some confidence to her educational record. The Chancellor of the Exchequer not long since told a deputation from the English provincial colleges that assistance from the Treasury would, in future, be doled out to them in strict proportion to the extent of the local contributions, whether public or private, to their funds. Wales has no need to fear the application of such a test, provided due account be taken of the relative value of her contributions to the number and the means of her population. For Wales cannot hope to compete with Liverpool or Manchester or Birmingham in respect of the actual amount of money subscribed or voted from local sources in aid of her colleges. But in any compara. tive test, in which regard is had to the number of subscribers and to the proportional value of their contributions, Wales more than holds her own against any other part of the kingdom. Wales, as we have already seen, in proportion to her population, spends on elementary and secondary education all but twice as much money as England; let one instance suffice of how the Welsh people are prepared to tax themselves for university education.

The University College of North Wales is at present engaged in the arduous enterprise of raising a fund of 175,000l. for new buildings. The site of the buildings has been provided by the corporation of Bangor at a cost to the ratepayers of 15,000l., representing a contribution of close upon 30s. per head of the entire population of the city. A municipal grant on a similar scale in Liverpool would amount to over a million and a half of money. Here, at any rate, is a cause not for a Treasury grant equivalent merely to the actual local contribution, but for a grant in some degree proportionate to he magnitude of the individual effort entailed. We trust however, that when the State comes seriously to face it obliga

claims

tions to university education in this country, the tious

the

of Wales will be considered in no niggling or cal spirit, but with a generous sympathy reciprocal of zeal and self-sacrifice which her people have so l shown in the cause of education.

ng

But the real welfare of the University, no less than o the secondary schools, depends upon higher considerations than those of finance, of organisation, or of administrative

efficiency. The University, like the schools, will need the constant stimulus of popular interest and of contact with national and civic life. But a university is, in a sense in which no system of schools, however well organised and closely united by common aims and motives, can be, the guardian of its own traditions and the shaper of its own destiny. For it is at once its highest prerogative and its prime duty, while deriving from national and popular sources both power and inspiration, to constitute itself the nursery and the inviolable home of exalted ideals of learning and of life. In the pursuit of its own proper activities it should be independent and fearless alike of the State and of municipalities, of private benefactors and of the populace. A young and, as the University of Wales justly boasts itself to be, a 'popular' university is under the constant temptation to yield to the pressure of external forces. It cannot, like the older universities, provide without fear or concern an asylum for 'lost causes,' or 'unpopular names,' or 'impossible loyalties.' It has its 'constituency' to reckon with. Here, in our opinion, lies the greatest source of danger to the future prosperity and repute of the University of Wales. The desire to be considered 'national,' in the narrow sense of being en rapport with the prevalent popular feeling or movement of the moment, may but too often divert it from the path of disinterested intellectual effort and of the dauntless pursuit of knowledge. There are, indeed, many special ways in which the University can serve the Welsh nation without any danger of becoming provincial in its aims; the creation of a really great school of Celtic learning, in which the Welsh language shall retain an honoured place, is but one of these. But the greatest of all national services which the University can render the Welsh people is to keep before them a high and incorruptible standard of work, of culture, of life, and to turn the stream of national feeling which runs so strongly in the Wales of to-day into intellectual channels which will compel the attention and the respect of the best minds of the age.

Art. XIII.-THE CASE OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES. The Free Church of Scotland Appeals, 1903-4. Edited by Robert Low Orr, Advocate. Authorised Report. Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gravity of the issues involved in the recent decision upon the case of the Free Church. Another crisis has been reached in the old controversy between Church and State, a crisis of unusual moment both to the particular Churches implicated and to the interests of religious liberty in general. Whether regard be had to the amount of the property at stake and the numbers of the population affected, or to the gravity of the differences of opinion among the judges, or to the feeling aroused in the country, or to the religious and political questions involved, it may be safely asserted that few cases before the House of Lords have equalled this one in its singular combination of material and spiritual importance. A large and flourishing Church, comprising nearly a quarter of the population of Scotland, with a national influence even greater than her numbers represent, and prosecuting extensive missions in Europe, Asia, and Africa, has been suddenly decreed to have lost her identity, through her union with another Church and certain changes in her formulæ which this union required; and to have forfeited in consequence all her invested funds and the bulk of her real estate.

The Free Church of Scotland, which in 1900 combined with the United Presbyterians to form the United Free Church of Scotland, consisted at that time of over 1100 congregations, distributed throughout the country in pursuance of her claim to be a National Church. Her communicants were nearly 300,000; her Sunday classes contained over 200,000 scholars; and, if to these be added her children outside her Sunday schools and her adult adherents not in full communion, it will be seen that she included in her care about a million of the Scottish people. Abroad she had 200 missionaries, 1350 native agents, and nearly 12,000 communicants. But it is not only this multitude who are concerned. The property they brought into the union has for four years been combined with

that of their partners in a fashion which makes the loss of it scarcely less serious to the latter than it is to themselves. To ascertain the full numbers affected, we must take the membership of the United Free Church when the judgment was delivered. In a report to her General Assembly in May last this is given as 501,535, exclusive of adult adherents not in full communion.

The property involved is of two classes. There is, first, that formerly held by the General Trustees for the Free Church as a whole, consisting of invested funds to the amount of about 1,200,000l. and real estate in Scotland and abroad. The value of the latter is doubtful, for only part of it is specified in the case. But the Church's three theological colleges are insured for more than 70,000l.; her offices and assembly hall cannot be worth less than 50,000l.; and the other heritable subjects in Scotland alone must be worth at least 30,000l. more. Secondly, there is the congregational property of over 1100 churches, most of them with manses and halls. It is hardly possible to calculate the money value of the latter. But the most moderate estimates of the whole property, including that vested in the General Trustees, reach four or five millions sterling; and the real amount may be much more. The money value, however, is not everything. The property at stake represents the habitation, machinery, and equipment of an organisation whose work at home and abroad is to a great extent dependent on the right to use it, and whose energies, if not paralysed, are embarrassed beyond reckoning by its loss.

All this estate and means of beneficent labour have been taken, then, from a Church of some 300,000 communicants, with over 1100 ministers, besides general officials (to speak only of the Free Church's forces at home), and assigned to what was at the date of the judgment a mere fraction of the Free Church-some thirty ministers with 4000 or 5000 communicants, almost all of whom live in the Highlands and islands. It is, to use Burke's phrase, as 'terrible a revolution in property' as was ever effected by law; and the way in which it has roused public feeling is not surprising. In Scotland the controversy is even greater than that stirred by Mr Gladstone's Home Rule policy. The nation is bitterly divided. A leading journal, which two years ago, when

the Scottish Courts had decided in favour of the United Free Church, declared that a contrary decision would be 'little short of a national calamity,'* now, when the Court of Appeal has given a contrary decision, applauds it with fervour; while other journals of equal standing describe it as an error,'' unjust' and 'monstrous.' The division among the judges and the probability that, but for the death of Lord Shand after the first hearing of the appeal, the decision would have gone the other way, have provoked debate, among not only laymen but lawyers, as to whether the judgment, if sound in law, is correct in fact. Other facts-that most of the property taken from the United Free Church was conferred by men who approved of the union or actually entered it, and that the remnant is apparently too small to administer the trust assigned to it-have raised the question of equity. Nor are lighter causes of excitement wanting. For years the leaders of the Free Church have aimed at the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland; and the irony of the situation, in which, partly because of that policy, they now find their own Church disendowed, is obvious. To multitudes who take no interest in religion, the large financial stakes at issue, as well as the oscillating fortunes of the case, have brought all the exhilaration of a colossal hazard.

There are, of course, problems involved of greater moment than so large a transference of property-the conflicting claims of Church and State, the dangers to religious liberty and theological growth in general. To these we shall return. But our first duty is to review the facts, as well as the processes of law by which such amazing results have been reached, in order to understand not only the points at issue, but the serious differences existing among the judges.

The Free Church of Scotland was formed in 1843 by disruption from the Established Church. For some years the majority of this Church-evangelical in doctrine but 'high' in their conception of the Church's authority-had been asserting her 'spiritual independence' of the courts of the realm. They admitted the jurisdiction of the latter

* The 'Scotsman,' July 5, 1902,