I saw Mr. Ellis Griffiths--an impassioned and brilliant Welsh
orator who ought to be in the House; my friend, whom I used to know as
Howell Williams, and I now have to call Mr. "Idris," as if he were an
embodied mineral water, and many others. The secret was that the night
was devoted to the Suspensory Bill for the Established Church in Wales,
and anybody who knows Welshmen, will know that this is a question on
which Welsh blood incontinently boils over. Terse, emphatic,
business-like Mr. Asquith put the case for Disestablishment on the plain
and simple ground that the Established Church was the church of the rich
minority, and that the overwhelming majority of the Welsh representation
had been returned over and over again to demand Disestablishment.
[Sidenote: The cynical Gorst.]
Sir John Gorst has an icy manner and generally the air of a man who has
not found the world especially pleasant, and delights to take rather a
pessimistic view of things. His great argument was that if this Bill
were carried, young men would not find enough of coin to tempt them into
the Church, and that accordingly it would languish and fade away. To
such a prosaic view of the highest spiritual vocation, the unhappy
Tories listened with ill-concealed vexation, and Gorst once more
increased that distrust of his sincerity in Toryism which perhaps
accounts for the small progress he has made in the ranks of his party.
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