void gifts or religious endowments acquired
by the new prelates was abandoned in the course of the acrimonious
debates which followed. Other difficulties arose, and Ireland was
declared to be exempt from the operation of the measure. The object of
the bill, declared Lord John Russell, was merely to assert the supremacy
of the Crown. Nothing was further from his thought than to play the part
of a religious persecutor. He merely wished to draw a sharp and
unmistakeable line of demarcation between the spiritual jurisdiction of
the Pope over the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church in the Queen's
realms, and such an act of Papal aggression as was involved in the claim
of Pius IX. to grant ecclesiastical titles borrowed from places in the
United Kingdom.

The bill satisfied neither the friends nor the foes of Roman
Catholicism. It was persistently regarded by the one as an attack on
religious liberty, and by the other as quite inadequate as a bulwark of
Protestantism. Nevertheless it became law, but not before the summer of
1851, when the agitation had spent its force. It was regarded almost as
a dead letter from the first, and, though it remained on the
Statute-book for twenty years, its repeal was a foregone conclusion.
When it was revoked in 1871 the temper of the nation had changed, and no
one was inclined to make even a passing protest. John Leech, in a
cartoon in _Punch_, caught the droll aspect of the situation with even
more than his customary skill. Lord John relished the joke, even though
he recognised that it was not likely to prove of service to him at the
next General Election. In conversation with a friend he said: 'Do you
remember a cartoon in _Punch_ where I was represented as a little boy
writing "No Popery" on a wall and running away?' The answer was a smile
of assent. 'Well,' he added, 'that was very severe, and did my
Government a great deal of harm, but I was so convinced that it was not
maliciously meant that I sent for John Leech, and asked him what I
could do for him. He said that he should like a nomination for his son
to the Charterhouse, and I gave it to him. That is how I used my
patronage.'

[Sidenote: A MINISTERIAL CRISIS]

Meanwhile, when the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was still under
discussion, a Ministerial crisis had arisen. Finance was never the
strong point of the first Russell Administration, and Sir Charles Wood's
Budget gave widespread dissatisfaction. Mr. Locke King heightened