toast if he had been permitted to. A curious
condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea
and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who
didn't want to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!

#Dead Cats#

For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting
with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men
of England who wished to educate the masses of the people. In 1807 the
first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the
Archbishop of Canterbury as "derogatory to the authority of the
Church." As a counter-measure, his supporters established the
"National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the
Doctrines of the Established Church"; and the founder of the
organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a
school, and insisted that the children of the workers "should not be
taught beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council
on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" that "the first purpose
of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits
of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion." In
1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the
country "a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870,
Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the
parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into
savages."

As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to
abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored
to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred
emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of
London laid down the formula of exploitation: "Christianity and the
embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil
property."

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the
cultured classes of England:

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest
political controversies of the last fifty years, whether
they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce,
whether they affected religion, whether they affected the
bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject
they touched, these leisured classes, these educated
classes, these tit