led classes have been in the wrong.

The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes ", for he
belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record
will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which
Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It
opposed all the social reforms of Lord Salisbury. This noble-hearted
Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion
supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself as
distressed and puzzled "to find support from infidels and
non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or
declaimers."

And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops
voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The House of
Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed
Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this
establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen,
used the vivid phrase: "This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life."
He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about
ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin.
Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, has
written of their record and adventures:

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody
penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every
political or social reform; and they had their reward from
the nation outside parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his
palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep
an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone
him. The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life
after preaching at St. Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop
Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary visitation, was
insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a circuitous route
to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On the 5th
of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt
in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop
Howley's chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown
at him, when the Archbishop--a man of apostolic
meekness--replied: "You should be thankful that it was not a
live one."

The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find they
have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me qu