The Henson Journals

[39]

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Thursday, October 30th, 1913. Cardiff.

A beautiful morning, but treacherous & ending in rain. Eileen took me to see the town. The new municipal buildings & law courts are very fine. I understand that the architect was Lanchester. Caröe's University building is good, but might be better. We went to St John's Church, where I was shown the Font in the floor for adult baptisms by immersion. It is practically unused. I left a card on the old antiquarian chemist Drane, & then returned to the house to write letters & read the Times. Henderson took me to lunch with the members of the Diocesan Mission Conference.

At 3 p.m. the public meeting took place. There was a considerable assembly of parsons & women. The speakers were Adams, Bishop Tugwell, & myself. The first was Secretary of the 'Archbishops' Western Canada Fund'. He made a very extravagant speech, in the whole course of which he made no allusion to any other Christian Church than the Anglican, for which he claimed the spiritual care of the whole population. It was with difficulty that I restrained myself from correcting his misstatements. Tugwell, on the whole, spoke well. He is a pugnacious looking person, and probably is rather fanatical in his teetotalism, but mainly, I should think, right in his [40] denunciation of the liquor trade as fatal to the native races. I spoke for about a quarter of an hour, & was very dull.

The rain began to fall early in the afternoon, and as the night drew on it came down with tropical violence. The consequence was that the congregation at the special service was diminished by two thirds. Instead of a crowded church, there was a church scarcely more than one third full. However the service was hearty, and my discourse was listened to with admirable attention. I preached form the words "Freely ye received: freely give".

I sate up till midnight talking with mine host. He has recently come upon extraordinary evidences of wide–spread immorality among the children attending the elementary schools in Cardiff: & inclines to take the gloomiest view of public morals. The root of the mischief here as everywhere else is the execrable housing. Most of the girls in the poorest class are defiled by their own brothers at home: & these corrupted children create the conditions of school. He alleged that he had proofs that in a large Church School, the elder boys regularly defiled the girls, whom they reached by climbing the dividing wall between the playgrounds: & that the elder girls held the neophyte during the process, which they seemed to regard as a kind of initiation to the full membership of the school.

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