xtraction. I also admit that for myself as a party politician (if you
impose upon me that term) it is inconvenient, destructive even to
certain plans which I had formed. But putting myself altogether aside,
and allowing that for a precedent we have to go very far back into the
past, what real objections have you to urge?"

The Prime Minister was beginning to get thoroughly uncomfortable.

"It is a breach--a fatal breach to my mind," said he, "in that caste
distinction which alone makes monarchy possible under modern conditions.
I mean no personal disrespect to your Grace: were it a question of my
own daughter, I should take the same view. It disturbs a tradition which
has worked well and for safety, and has not been broken for hundreds of
years. But most destructively of all it threatens that aloofness from
all political entanglements--that absolute impartiality between party
and party--which to-day constitutes the strength of the Crown."

"I might be quite prepared," said the Archbishop slowly, "in such an
event, to withdraw myself from all political action of a party
character."

"You cannot so separate yourself from the past," objected the Prime
Minister.

"I do not see the difficulty. You yourself, in a long and varied career,
have twice changed your party, or deserted it. If that can be done with
sincerity, it is equally possible to become of no party at all."

The Prime Minister flushed at this attack on his past record, and struck
back--

"Not for an Archbishop," he said, a little sneeringly. "The Church
now-a-days has become not merely a part of our political system, but a
stereotyped adjunct of party, and a very one-sided one at that."

"To answer such a charge adequately," replied his Grace, "I should be
forced into political debate foreign to our present discussion. What
concerns me here and now is that something has taken place--pregnant for
good or ill--which you regard as impossible, and which I do not. In
either case--whatever conclusion is reached--I am called upon to make a
sacrifice. Of that I do not complain, but what I am bound to consider,
even before the interests of the State (upon which we take different
views), are the interests of the Church. When we last met you were
preparing to do those interests something of an injustice: and your more
recent proposals do not induce me to think that you have changed your
mind. If the Church is to lose the ground she now holds in the State she
must