That is the opinion of the most prominent of living Americans, who is now devoting the whole of his very considerable energy to trying to extirpate corruption from American politics.

Between statutory corporations and Trade Unions there is no distinction which is germane to the present issue. Both are bodies possessing statutory privileges: both control funds subscribed for other than political purposes; both include members who differ from one another in political views. This last point was strongly pressed in the debate on the London and North Western Railway Company's Bill above referred to. Liberal critics of that Company pointed out the unfairness of using, for the benefit of one political party, funds which were the joint property of persons of all shades of political opinion. Exactly the same consideration applies to Trade Unions, and is aptly illustrated by the debate and division in the Trade Union Congress at Sheffield upon the question of secular education. In spite of the protest of the Roman Catholic members of the Congress, the majority passed a resolution committing all Trade Unionists to a demand for the establishment of a national system of education under full popular control, free and secular, from the primary school to the university.' Under the operation of this resolution, money subscribed by Roman Catholic Trade Unionists will be used to promote a cause to which they are passionately opposed. Trade Unionists who object to such a use of their money are in even a worse position than shareholders of a company suffering from a like injustice; for the shareholders can always sell out, and sometimes at a profit, but the Trade Unionist who refuses to pay the Parliamentary levy for the advancement of a cause which he dislikes will, if the Osborne judgment be reversed, be expelled from his society and will thus forfeit valuable benefits for which he has paid, and may subsequently find as a non-Unionist that most avenues of employment are closed to him. It is difficult to understand how any politicians calling themselves Liberals can calmly contemplate such a violation of the primary liberties of the subject.

An almost equally serious objection to the proposed reversal of the Osborne judgment is the effect which it

must sooner or later have upon the conduct of Parliamentary elections. Among the privileges conferred upon Trade Unions by the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 is the very wide immunity from legal proceedings contained in section 4. The section is as follows:

'An action against a Trade Union, whether of workmen or masters, or against any members or officials thereof on behalf of themselves and all other members of the Trade Union for the recovery of damages in respect of any tortious act alleged to have been committed by or on behalf of the Trade Union, shall not be entertained by any court; provided that nothing in this section shall affect the liability of the trustees of such unions to be sued in the events provided for by the Trade Union Act, 1871, section 9.'

A typical example of a 'tortious act' is slander or libel. It follows that, if a Trade Union promotes the election of a candidate for Parliament, the members and agents of the Union will be free during the contest to slander or libel the opposing candidates with absolute impunity. Whether Parliament foresaw this possibility when the Trade Disputes Act was passed is doubtful, but it may safely be said that it was not the intention of Parliament that the privileges conferred upon Trade Unions by the Act should be used for such a purpose. The very magnitude of the privilege conferred by this clause implies that the use of the privilege must be limited to specific purposes. That indeed is the basis of one of the most important arguments used to condemn the expenditure of money by the London and North Western Railway for political purposes. It is rightly argued that a railway company, having obtained large privileges for specific purposes, must confine its operations to those purposes; but, unless the same rule is applied to the operations of Trade Unions, a very palpable injustice would arise. For a Trade Union of railway servants would be at liberty to spend money on political agitation, with the object of improving their position at the expense of the shareholders of the company, while the latter would be debarred from defending themselves by similar methods.

It is impossible that so grossly one-sided an arrangement could long continue; and, as a matter of fact, the

law already provides a way of escape. Employers who find themselves injured by the conversion of Trade Unions into political organisations can respond by establishing Trade Unions of their own which will have exactly the same privileges as those formed by the workmen. For the sake of greater precision it is worth while to quote the definition of a Trade Union in the Act of 1876 :

"The term "Trade Union means any combination, whether temporary or permanent, for regulating the relations between workmen and masters, or between workmen and workmen, or between masters and masters, or for imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business, whether such combination would or would not, if the principal Act had not been passed, have been deemed to have been an unlawful combination by reason of some one or more of its purposes being in restraint of trade.'

It will be seen from this definition, which still holds good, that the privileges of a Trade Union are not limited to associations of working men. Any group of persons acting in combination to regulate wages or prices or otherwise restrain trade can be registered as a Trade Union. It must therefore be clearly understood that the reversal of the Osborne judgment would open the door for the maintenance of Members of Parliament on a wholesale scale by groups of rich men with axes of their own to grind. That means a complete change in our whole conception of representative government. Hitherto the House of Commons has been very jealous of its reputation for financial purity. For generations it has not been even suggested that a member of the English House of Commons could be induced to sell his vote for hard cash on any question. It is now proposed to legalise a new system under which certain members, in return for so much a year, will sell their votes on all questions.

HAROLD Cox.

Art. 13.-SPAIN AND THE VATICAN.

THE clerical problem in Spain, which has wrecked one Cabinet and raised another to European eminence, is commonly believed to be ripe for radical solution. Indeed, it is confidently asserted to be at the bottom of the national crisis which has broken out over the whole Peninsula ; and foreign observers are now curious to see what further aspects the ailment will assume in the most Catholic country, and what specific remedies or palliatives will be applied to it. The diagnosis has been made by two Spanish Premiers, each of whom has prescribed a course of treatment for the malady; and the opinion of MM. Moret and Canalejas has been emphatically confirmed by their republican and socialist adversaries. All are agreed that the nation is sick almost unto death, and that its chief ailment is clerical cancer. But, while Señor Moret holds that the only efficacious remedy is an operation to extirpate the cancerous growth, Señor Canalejas, the present Prime Minister, is of opinion that less drastic means will effect a cure. He is convinced that restrictive laws against religious congregations, the taxation of their property, and the laicisation of the schools, will be adequate to the present requirements of the case. In accordance with this opinion he is drawing up his legislative programme amid the plaudits of democratic Europe. The only matter for discussion in Spain at the present moment is, which of the two schools of political medicine is right that which calls for the dissolution of all religious communities, and the entire separation of Church and State-measures that involve a change in the Constitution; or that which deems sufficient those severe checks and impassable barriers which the State can apply without straining the Constitution or doing violence to the Concordat. The tracing of the symptoms to the organic malady is on all hands assumed to be correct; judgments do not begin to diverge until the treatment of the ailment comes up for discussion.

Now from this consensus of opinion we respectfully venture to differ. The diagnosis appears to have been hastily and arbitrarily arrived at; and the politicians who made it seem to have bejen swayed, unconsciously no

doubt, by irrelevant considerations. It is not suggested by a closer study of the symptoms, nor borne out by a more careful analysis of the history of the disease. That there is a clerical problem in Spain, no one acquainted with that country will deny. The statistics of the religious congregations there, the sums of money which they collect and distribute, the large share of the nation's commerce and industry which passes through their hands, their sharp and successful competition with professional tradesmen, leave no doubt on that point. Clericalism, in certain of its aspects, is therefore a real grievance, calling for immediate and efficacious remedies, which the State has it in its power to apply at any moment. But to pass from this moderate statement of a demonstrable fact to the sweeping proposition that it is the question of questions, to the solution of which all Spanish policy ought to be subordinate, is, it seems to us, to pass from the region of concrete facts to that of illusion.

Spain is in the throes of an ordeal from which, whatever the upshot, it will ultimately emerge a transformed nation. For the crisis is not ministerial, nor political, nor dynastic; it is largely of an economic character, intensified by national, political and dynastic elements. To simplify these complex issues by reducing them to one, and to label that one clericalism, is to misstate the problem. If Senor Canalejas were to break with the Vatican to-morrow, to dissolve all religious communities, to confiscate their property, and even to divorce the Church from the State, he would be able to announce the death of clericalism in Spain. But the palsy which has stricken his high-spirited and richlyendowed countrymen would continue unabated. Only one of the hydra's heads would have been severed from the body, and that the smallest of them all. The expulsion of the religious orders would not brighten the dismal outlook of the mining population around Bilbao. A rupture with the Vatican will not bring the nation, even by a hair's breadth, nearer to a solid educational reform. The disestablishment of the Church will not give a fillip to Spanish commerce and industry, or provide with constant sources of livelihood the numerous and restless section of the population which has neither settled income nor permanent employment, and is doomed