THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENT AND WHAT NEXT?
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Sin,—A straw will tell which way the stream goes, and an event quite trifling in itself may show as clearly the run of public opinion. Ten days ago the Dean of Lincoln came to Hawarden to address a meeting on the Welsh Church Bill and to tell us why, as a Liberal and because he is a Liberal, he hates it. To this meeting came five hundred, mostly men, from just round about our village of no great size, in nearly every house of which hangs the portrait of the Grand Old Man, and upon which his own broad-minded and tolerant Liberalism has been indelibly impressed. Such a gathering would have been impossible here even a year ago. Had we tried a year ago to organize a meeting on so large a scale in Hawarden two resolutely held ideas would have baffled us. One was that the Bill would never really come to anything. " They'll never do it; you'll see," was our local way of putting it ; the other was that, even if it did pass, it would be so shaped in the process that not much harm would come to the Church, that some good would come to someone else, and that we should be able to say at the finish : " Anyhow, it's turned out pretty well for both sides after all!" With the passage of the Bill through the House of Commons has gone at last this deadweight of unbelief that the thing would ever happen ; gone, too, are our hopes that we should End in the Bill, in its final shape, a fair basis for a give-and- take agreement. Quite suddenly our local happy-go-lucky attitude has changed to one of something like consternation ; and we reached this month, but only this month, our first real chance of starting an effective protest in Hawarden—and Hawarden is typical of otherwberes. Some would have us believe that we have reached the end of any useful agitation against this Bill. We have reached an end right enough ; but don't let HE make a mistake about which end—it's the beginning end, and not the other ! Alike in Wales and in England has come now, and only now, the psychological moment for an agitation altogether more striking and more potent than anything we have yet had a chance of achieving. Its potency will be irresistible if for its objective is wisely chosen something quite modest, and something of which the ordinary man, be he Church or chapel or neither, be he Liberal or Tory or both, can say, " Well, that would be fair and reasonable anyhow." Such an objective is not far to seek. We must (for we have no alternative) have yet one more petition—not that the Bill may not be passed under the Parliament Act, but that, before it does so, we may have an official religious census, or better still, if practicable, a Referendum at least in Wales itself, on the two distinct departments of the Bill, taken separately, so that we may get the real facts and the real issues made absolutely clear.
(1) Do you approve of the Disestablishment Clauses of the Welsh Church Bill ?
(2) Do you approve of the Disendowment Clauses of the Welsh Church Bill?
Many of us believe that on the first of these two counts the ayes would have it; many are now quite sure that on the second the noes would overwhelmingly exceed the ayes ; and surely no reasonable man wants to see this Bill become law unless it is certain that it does express the deliberate wishes of the people of Wales—now that they are beginning to understand what it means. If the census justified the current assumption that " the people of Wales" and " the Welsh Nonconformists " are convertible terms because the Church folk of the Principality are a negligible handful, or if the Referendum showed that this Bill does really express the wishes of a clear majority, we who are opposing the Bill because we do not believe that Wales wants it, will make haste to put our energies into something better than an opposition that must in the end prove futile. No one can deny the fact that there is some real doubt, few would wish to deny to " the Old Mother" at least the benefit of the doubt; and a petition that the doubt itself may somehow be cleared up would unite all who love fair play, all who care for the religious peace of Wales, all who have any real reverence for those principles of justice, righteousness, and true Liberalism which we have learned to associate with the name of the greatest of the sons of Hawarden and its Church—William Ewart Gladstone. Such a petition could hardly be ignored by those who claim to have inherited, and in this very Welsh Church controversy to be wearing, his mantle. And if, incidentally, an almost ideal field and subject for an experiment in the Referendum was provided for the State, the providing of it might prove to be the last, but probably it would not be the least, of the services rendered to its younger partner, prior perhaps, to a final dissolution of their partnership, by the ancient Church of Wales.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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