The Henson Journals

[382]

Thursday, September 14th, 1916.

773rd day

I went to the Cathedral, and received the Holy Communion in S. Gregory's Chapel. Dennett celebrated. I wrote cheques for the month's accounts. Also I wrote "Collinses" to the Master of the Household, & Miss Pearce. Ralph & I walked to the station, Ella & Kitty following with the baggage in a cab. On the platform we parted from our guests. They went to visit friends in Westmoreland: we went to visit the Renshaws at Barochan. We arrived in good time for dinner. I had some interesting and informing conversation with mine host. He says that there is a very bad spirit in a section, probably a small section, of the Clyde Workmen, and gave me an extreme illustration of this viz: the electric wires of a battleship were all deliberately cut! But the main cause of the labour troubles was the excessive prosperity of the men. They were receiving unprecedented wages, and they wanted to leave work and enjoy their money! A brutal lack of imagination rather than a conscious disloyalty was the root of the mischief. It was the fact that, whereas before the war the consumption of meat in Glasgow averaged a daily consumption of 5oz of meat per diem for every individual, it had now risen to 15oz! The railway men had undoubtedly broken faith in making a demand for a 10/– weekly increase on all wages: but their conduct was explicable. They observed the large increases of pay which other workmen received, and they contrasted their own situation, unable to leave the service of the Railway Companies without the Companies' permission, and receiving a payment which was comparatively petty. To concede their whole demands, however, would involve an annual expenditure of £21,000,000. This mattered nothing during the War since the Government paid, but after the War the Railway Companies might well be bankrupt!

[380]

The Bishop of London has an explanatory letter in the "Times". He did not say, or, at least, he did not mean; that there were 150 bad women in every London music–hall, but only that there were certainly some! He announces his intention of dealing with the moral question at St James's, Piccadilly, in a few days. Meanwhile he proclaims himself as the final disproof of the wicked contention that chastity is unwholesome or even impossible to man! "Here am I at the age of 58, one of the healthiest men in London!" Ralph repeated to me an observation of Bishop Gore on his brother of London: "Ingram was a delightful boy: he will be a charming old man: he ought to be locked up in the interval". Assuredly his perpetual talking on the most difficult and delicate subjects is becoming a grave scandal. He does not perceive that the wide publicity given to his speeches is due, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the piquant discrepancy between their shallow flippancy and the august position of the orator. Meanwhile ex pede Herculum [from the foot of Hercules]: we may learn the quality of the "National Mission" from these beginnings! The malcontents of London are taking the Bishop's measure, and flocking to his preachments in order to provoke him by question and interruption to ever grosser indiscretions: and all the while the volume of alienation and contempt is waxing in men's minds. The government of the Church of England has now passed into the hands of a coalition of fanaticks who beset the Archbishop, and hustle him where they will. Suffragettes, total abstainers, Christian Socialists, "Catholicks" – everyone with a shibboleth and a following, and all placated into mutual toleration by a 'free hand' in the "National Mission"! Was ever such topsy–turveydom seen at Lambeth and Fullham?

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Issues and controversies: female suffrage