The next step may bring universal “manhood suffrage.”  The County Council and Parish Council acts (1888, 1894) greatly extended the power of the people in all matters of local government, so that now every village in England controls its own affairs.

601.  Compulsory Church Rates abolished; Disestablishment in Ireland
     (1869).

While these great reforms were taking place with respect to elections, others of great importance were also being effected.  From its origin in 1549 the established Protestant Church of England (S362) had compelled persons of all religious beliefs to pay rates or taxes for the maintenance of the Established Cuhrch in the parish where they resided.  Methodists, Baptists, and other Dissenters (SS472, 496, 507) objected to this law as unjust, since, in addition to the expense of supporting their own form of worship, they were obliged to contribute toward maintaining one with which they had no sympathy.  So great had the opposition become to paying these “church rates,” that in over fifteen hundred parishes in England (1859) the authorities could not collect them.  After long debate Mr. Gladstone carried through a bill (1868) which abolished this mode of taxation and made the payment of these rates purely voluntary.[1]

[1] Church rates were levied on all occupiers of land or houses within the parish.  The Church of England is now supported by a tax on landowners, by its endowments, and by voluntary gifts.

A similar act of justice was soon after granted to Ireland (1869).[2] At the time of the union of the two countries in 1800 (S562), the maintenance of the Protestant Episcopal Church continued to remain obligatory upon the Irish people, although only a small part of them were of that faith.  Mr. Gladstone, now Liberal Prime Minister, succeeded in getting Parliament to enact a law which disestablished this branch of the National Church and left all religious denominations in Ireland to the voluntary support of those who belonged to them.  Henceforth the English Protestants residing in that country could no longer claim the privilege of worshiping God at the expense of his Roman Catholic neighbor.

[2] The Disestablishment Bill was passed in 1869 and took effect in 1871.

602.  The Elementary Education Act, 1870.

In 1870 Mr. Forester, a member of Mr. Gladstone’s Liberal Cabinet (SS534, 601), succeeded in passing a measure of the highest importance, entitled The Elementary Education Act.  This act did not undertake to establish a new system of instruction, but to aid and improve that which was then in use.  In the course of time, however, it effected such changes for the better in the common schools that it practically re-created most of them.