The Henson Journals

[55]

Monday, September 16th, 1912. Winnipeg.

A reporter from the "Winnipeg Tribune" came to see me about 9.15 a.m. He was named Stubbs, & said he was connected with the bishops of Oxford & Truro, & had a cousin in Brightman of the Pusey House.

Then I was called to the telephone to communicate my views on the religious situation in Great Britain! I discoursed a few platitudes on the Welsh question. For the rest of the morning I worked very unsuccessfully at those Lectures which are becoming a night mare.

In the afternoon Aubrey & I walked into the City. There I changed a cheque for £25 on my letter of credit, & sent £10 to Montreal to retain berths in the 'Baltic' for our return to England on Nov. 21st. Next I went to a Barber's & was shaved & shampooed. The artist who performed on my head said that he had been 32 years in Winnipeg. He tried to sell me real estate in the intervals of his professional activity! There was a plot of 50 feet frontage at 25 dollars a foot, which I might have at once! This place reeks with the talk of speculators in 'real estate'; and one overhears calculations in dollars at every corner! The papers are so full of the Oddfellows, of whom some 25000 are said to be visiting the town, that everything else is crowded out.

[56]

I wrote letters to Angel Colenso & Harold Knowling.

Lois had arranged a little dinner party. I was interested in the conversation of a lawyer, who described with knowledge & intelligence the conditions under which the citizens of Winnipeg own motors & grow rich. The whole population appears to be mortgaged & gambling in 'real estate'. I inquired where in the whole process there entered that element of honest work, which alone could give a moral basis for any material prosperity. He answered that honest work entered nowhere into the process! After dinner we got on to the subject of Putumayo; & I found that not only did he know nothing of the Blue–book, but had the vaguest notion of the whole question. Indeed, I noticed a constraint in his manner which seemed to disclose a certain resentment against the very notion of publicly criticizing a director! My brother tells me that he suspects that my rough handling of the Putumayo Directors meets with scant approval in Winnipeg where a rigid application of my doctrine as to the responsibility of Directors would probably work wide–spread havock! The Dean of the little Anglican cathedral dined also – a small mild man with the sleekness & deprecatory aspect of a well–bred guinea–pig – assuredly not the kind of man to represent effectively the Moral Law in a society of dollar worshipping speculators in 'real estate' such as this which boasts & hustles on this prairie.

---

Issues and controversies: welsh disestablishment; Putumayo