'There was a meeting at Cambridge on Wednesday to organise
the establishment of a Cambridge House for South London,—a scheme which the Bishop of Rochester (Dr. Talbot) had set his heart upon, and which has been taken up by the University with great enthusiasm. The principal speakers were the Vice-Chancellor of the University, the Bishop of Rochester, the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott), and Mr. Balfour, of whom the two last made very remarkable and impressive speeches. Dr. Westcott ex- pressed his deep conviction that social ignorance, "the ignorance of one class of the feelings and aims of another class, the ignorance of one man of the feelings and aims of another man," is the greatest peril of the present time, and that it is the natural privilege of a University, which has studied and mastered the lessons of wisdom, of love, of knowledge, and of hope which might be learned from the records of the past, to lessen and partially at least to remove that ignorance. Mr. Balfour said that the employer in great cities lost the sense of personal responsibility to the em- ployed when he was dissolved into joint-stock concerns, whose chief aim is to provide dividends for the shareholders, and though they ought in their corporate capacity to do what the individual employer used to do, they have very often lost the motive and stimulus to do it. Though the new Settlement in South London might wisely accept the guidance of the clergy, Mr. Balfour holds that it is by the agency of the laity that the work must be carried on, and he looks to these University Settlements among the poor to organise charity, thrift, and recreation for the masses who live in the midst of such dull and monotonous streets and tasks. That is very good, but if the work is to bear its best fruit, the charity should not be condescending but sympathetic, not to say even reverent; the thrift should be disinterested, not avaricious; and the recreation should create anew the spiritual as well as the physical energies of life. These moral enterprises are amongst the very best signs of our rather exhausting and exhausted era.
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