THE THREE KINGDOMS.

THE Great Protectionist Gun has gone off in parliament without any effect much more notable than the
bringing down of Mr. Gladstone. The aim of the thing was a motion to relieve the land of alleged peculiar
burdens; and the "cunning man" thought it so modest of Mr. Disraeli to ask for protection in that way,
that he voted for granting it, in order to prevent any more being asked for. To concede a part, he argued,
was the way to avoid all necessity of conceding any more; which was as if old Thomas Aquinas had come
back to prove to us, that the effectual way to exclude the big end of the wedge was to make no scruple of
admitting the little end. Nevertheless Mr. Disraeli's modesty, though rewarded by a somewhat larger
minority than usual, has not increased his popularity with his own party; which is manifestly a house divided
against itself, for all purposes but those of faction. The farmers now hear one batch of their friends
clamouring for protection, as a dear defunct who must be revived; while the other sensibly advertises its
readiness to be content with compensation for the departed. The choice is whether they will wait for the
chance of a dead spouse re-appearing, or "relieve their burdens" of grief by asking another spouse to
take her place; and the public has cause to be equally on its guard against both. Its interest does not lie
with the choice of either. It is not possible that the beloved of the farmers should have charms for any but
themselves: for though they quarrel mightily about their own interests, they never combine without a most
astonishing zeal against everybody else's. Their leader in the House of Lords is now conducting a powerful
opposition against equal law for Orangemen and Catholics in Ireland; and no less than eight times did their
representatives, in the House of Commons, divide the other night against amendment of the Irish franchise.
From the sense of labouring with injustice, when really strong and sincere, a certain sympathy with its
victims of every kind would seem to be inseparable. But the cry for protection is based on no such feeling.
Selfishness is the largest ingredient in it.

Nor is it confined to farmers. The Bishop of London is now clamouring for protection against Mr. Gorham
and the Privy Council, in precisely the spirit with which farmer Lennox cries out to be protected against
Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. His grace is alarmed, forsooth, and feels his conscience heavily burdened, by
the fact of such questions as are now in issue between Mr. Gorham and Doctor Philpotts, being referred to a
lay tribunal, for whose orthodoxy there is no guarantee. What the judgment is likely to be, he knows not:
but whatever it may be, the constitution of the judges forbids orthodox reliance on their wisdom. In other
words, Doctor Blomfield desires to see the church of England released from the civil bonds which separate
her, more than any other peculiarity in her institutions, from alliance with the Church of Rome. He will
have nobody but archbishops, bishops, deans, and professors of divinity, sit in judgment upon her; and for
that purpose has submitted a bill for the enactment of such a court of appeal, vice the privy council deposed,
to the house of which he is a member. It is to be hoped that their lordships, mindful of the great event
which gives Doctor Blomfield his seat among them, will know how to deal with it. It is in effect an attempt,
very thinly veiled, to assail the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. What the Bishop of London means by
orthodoxy is evasion of the troublesome fetters of the State.

It is precisely the feeling which actuates the reverend brawlers against the Government on the subject of
education. One of their bigots, a Doctor of Divinity, went so far the other day at a meeting in Willis's
Rooms, as to call down a curse on all who were engaged in promoting a particular branch of the system of
education sanctioned by the Government Council. Three bishops (Philpotts, of course, was one), five peers,
four archdeacons, and numerous dignitaries of the Church, stood upon the platform beside the reverend imprecator;
but not a voice was lifted in protest or rebuke. All present were in fact committed to the same horrible
doctrines. They proceed, as a matter of course, from the pretensions to infallibility now common with large sections
of English churchmen, and which are in fact the origin of such proposed enactments as those of the Bishop
of London. The men who hold these doctrines stigmatise as infidels all who would dispute the Church's claims
to a monopoly of education. They denounce, as worse than ignorance, all education not directly emanating from
the Church, and exclusively controlled by it. They carry out, in their thoughts and practice, an intolerance
even more awful than the intolerance with which the great Roman satirist charges the Jews, to whom he
imputes a bigotry so unfeeling, narrow, and extreme in its bitterness, that out of their own sect they would
not point the way to the traveller, nor show the thirsty the desired spring. And all this is going on in a
country where the proportion of children at school to the population is one in thirteen, and in which one
half of the population cannot write their names!

Earnest men, however, begin to see the terrible danger that threatens us in this direction, and are making
strenuous efforts to avert it. Nor, it might have seemed to a stranger present in the House of Commons
when Mr. Fox lately introduced the subject, are the chances of success for such efforts by any means
remote. Mr. Fox asked leave to bring in a bill, giving at the same time a general view of the educational
scheme intended to be embodied in it; and the mixed conciliatory and comprehensive character of this
scheme seems to have come before the house so much in the nature of a surprise, that nobody upon the
instant was prepared to threaten opposition. The effect was curious. Never till then had such a reception