WELSH DISESTABLISHMENT.
WHETHER " ploughing the sands of the sea- shore " be an exercise in righteousness or not, it is cer- tainly not an exhilarating process. Mr. Asquith was wise in making his opening speech so short, for he was hardly able even to feign enthusiasm for his task. When you propose to strip a Church of the funds which are all employed for a good purpose, and for a purpose which is increasing its good results every day, you ought at least to have some immediate prospect of touching the spoils in order to take the bad taste of the process out of your mouth. The Welsh Members have no such security, and Mr. Asquith knows that he cannot give it them. He endeavoured to persuade himself that he was employed in a holy task, but there was no real relish either in his rhetoric or the tone of his political self-approval. He not only knew that he was engaged in a very ungrateful labour, but also in a labour which would not in the narrowest sense pay for the pains expended on it within any reasonable time. It is invidious work to take away funds given for a religious purpose, used for a religious purpose, and answering adequately the ends contemplated, from a Church that is doing a great deal of good, even to the very people who cry out for its despoiling. Welshmen send half as many of their children to the Church's National schools as they send to the Board-schools, a fact which sufficiently shows that they have none of that religious horror of the Church schools which might perhaps justify such a Bill as Mr. Asquith's. Where there are 152,177 children in Wales and Monmouthshire in attendance in Board schools, there are no less than 73,875 in attendance in National schools. But there is even better evidence than this of the real feeling in the Welsh conscience of the good which The Church in Wales is doing for the Welsh people. The donations and benefactions given by avowed Noncon- formists themselves towards the funds of the Church during the last fifty years (from 1843 to 1893), amount to all but one-tenth of the sums collected from professing Churchmen for the same purpose. And this sympathy is an increasing one. In the year 1892, avowed Noncon- formists gave rather more than a quarter as much in subscriptions and donations to the Church as Churchmen gave, so that what was goodwill towards the Church fifty years ago, has grown into cordial and even generous goodwill now. Yet this is the tendency which the Government propose to check by sowing the seeds of mutual animosity and bitterness for the time to come. No wonder that the ploughman did not whistle at his plough, and that the horse,—or, as Mr. Labouchere called it, the ass,—which was drawing the plough did not proceed at any very cheerful pace.
So far v s the tithe is concerned, there is, we suppose, no doubt that the majority of the Welsh tithe-payers have, for the last half-century at least, been very unwilling givers, and there would be much more plausibility in Disendowment, if the produce of the tithes were either to be devoted to the religious purposes of all the various Welsh Churches, or simply excused as the gift of reluctant givers. But neither of these modes of disposing of the tithe are so much as thought of. Every one admits that the tithe is no longer in any sense the property of those who pay it, since land has been sold and bought, subject to the tithe, for so many generations, that even the most rabid Non- conformist cannot pretend that there would be anything but plunder in allowing the momentary occupier to ap- propriate to his own private use what he and his forefathers have been paying in tithe for generations. After Disendowment, the tithe will not remain in the pockets of those who give it unwillingly, any more than it does now. Nor will it be distributed amongst the various religious bodies in Wales, the Church included, in proportion to their numbers and needs. The only result of the Bill would be that the proceeds of an impost which have long been devoted to the religious uses of a Church that is growing every day in popularity in Wales, will be snatched from that Church and appropriated to a number of fancy purposes, of which very few will be half as respectable and honourable in the eyes even of Welsh Nonconformists as those to which it is now devoted. The endowments taken from a Church to which even Non- conformists now give voluntary aid in large proportions, as we have shown, are to be devoted to the building of cottage hospitals or dispensaries or convalescent homes, the provision of trained nurses for the poor, the foundation and maintenance of public halls and libraries, the provision of labourers' dwellings and allotments to be let at low rents, the provision of museums and art galleries, and so forth. Now we should like to know what satisfaction a Welsh Nonconformist will gain from seeing the village church and National school, to both of which he has been accustomed as an institution which gives hospitable entertainment to himself and his children, pinched for adequate means, and therefore dwindling in efficiency, in order that a dispensary, which the village hardly pretends to want, may be set up, or an art school, for which there is only a fancy demand, may rise upon its ruins. If you could get him to make honest confession, whether or not his conscience were set at ease by with- drawing means necessary for its prosperity from the village church, in order that a fancy museum might be established, we strongly suspect that he would declare himself not only none the happier for the change, but much the less happy and at ease. His feeling for the Church is one of jealous respect. His feeling for these new-fangled insti- tutions to be established on its ruins will be one of puzzled curiosity. As for his conscience, it might have been relieved if he had got a share of the plunder for his Calvinistic or Wesleyan chapel. But when he is compelled to apply all the proceeds of an Act of which he only half approves and half regards as one of spoliation, to some new object for which he has probably no respect whatever, he will "falter where he firmly trod," and wish he had never engaged in any project of the kind. The Nonconformist Welshman, no doubt, thinks that it is very hard that the tithe has gone to a church he only sometimes attends, instead of to a chapel which he constantly attends, and does not see why, if there is to be a change, the chapel should not get its due. But as for turning to the uses of the body what was intended for the uses of the soul,—that will not strike him as setting right the injustice at all. If the Bill should ever pass, we do not believe that "the Non- conformist Conscience" will be a penny the easier. The real logical mode of disposing of the Endowments of the Church would be concurrent Endowment of the Chapels ; but from that Wales is shut off, as Ireland was unfor- tunately shut off from it, by a long tradition of unreal repudiation.
Mr. Bryce's speech on Thursday was a conciliatory and excellent one from its own point of view. But the point of view itself is distinctly bad. What Mr. Bryce contended for is that the attack on the Welsh Church is not an attack, and is not meant as an attack, on the English National Church, but is meant to single out Wales as having a perfectly distinct position which justifies the Government in setting up the plea of a distinct nationality for Wales in a way in which it could not set up the same plea on behalf of Cornwall or London or East Anglia. That is a new and most important step in the direction of disintegration, and an implicit, indeed all but an explicit, adoption of the cry of "Home- rule for Wales." If the Gladstonian party really are about to adopt the line of constituting "gallant little Wales" into a separate national constituent of the United Kingdom, we are on the very verge of that policy of a tetrarchy for the 'United Kingdom, which must, we think, soon expand into a heptarchy at least, for Ireland, Scotland, and Wales will never endure to be outweighed by the enormous balk of England. As we have more than once said before, you cannot harness an elephant, two ponies, and a goat in the same team. The elephant must be exchanged for a team of creatures more on the level of the smaller animals. For ourselves, we deem it a most dangerous and mistaken policy, in the interest of Wales, to encourage these dreams of a separate nationality. As Mr. Rathbone, the Member for the Carnarvon burghs, said in his excellent farewell to his constituency, Wales will soon come to see that she has ventured on a very risky stroke of ambition, when she exchanges her present influence in English affairs for the right to predominate in her own small Principality. We do not know, indeed, where the passion for disintegration is to stop. To apologise for Disestablishment in Wales by asking (vir- tually) for Home-rule for Wales, is a most dangerous use of what Napoleon IIL used to call "the logic of facts." Indeed, it is just this use of the logic of facts which has transformed Mr. Gladstone's policy of 1886 into the new doctrine that our country should be first broken up into a, number of petty Cantons in order that these may be tied together again by a weak federal thread.
Previous page
