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Republican Government and to confer with the Republican provisional Government at Nanking regarding the procedure for effecting a union." The Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Turkis, and Tibetans will constitute "the great Republic of China." "Thus I and the Emperor shall retire and witness the accomplishment of a perfect Government."

The Coal
Strike

As we go to press the country is living under the shadow of a calamity so appalling that, although it has been advancing during many weeks, the public have refused to look it in the face. The overwhelming majority of coalminers in these islands have voted in favour of a general strike for a minimum wage, and have handed in notices to take effect on March 1. At the moment of writing the outlook is dark, as both sides seem obdurate, and although the Government has been induced by the Daily Mail to attempt a tardy intervention, Ministerial effort so far has been abortive and pessimism predominates. All that is left to us is to hope against hope that even at the twelfth hour reason may prevail, and that a community which has many burdens to bear, may be spared a convulsion only second in its ruinous consequences to an unsuccessful war. Why is Great Britain above all nations afflicted by this continuous epidemic of unparalleled strikes? Are these among the blessed fruits of Free Trade, which used to be represented as a bulwark against Socialism and industrial anarchy, and yet nowadays we never seem to be out of the wood. The railway strike was largely a protest against low wages, but the miners have had an uncommonly prosperous time, and many of them, if not a majority of them, receive substantially more than any suggested minimum wage. The employers, we understand, are prepared to pay a fair wage for a fair day's work. Many collieries cannot afford to pay a minimum wage unless guaranteed a minimum of work, and herein lies the crux of the controversy, which will be settled one way or the other before these pages are in the readers' hands. The position is gravely complicated by the determination of the Socialists, who are rapidly capturing the Labour organisation, to force the Government to Nationalise the mines. They prefer any strike to any settlement.

WELSH DISESTABLISHMENT AND

DISENDOWMENT

WITHIN a year of his Majesty's solemn Coronation Oath, the King has read a speech from the throne commending to the blessing of Almighty God the labours of Parliament on a Bill "to terminate the Establishment of the Church of England in Wales and to make provision for its temporalities." It would have been more accurate to describe Disendowment as king provision "of" its temporalities, but on the whole the Government are to be congratulated on substituting the phrase "terminate the Establishment" for the utterly misleading word "Disestablish." The Church of England in Wales and in England has never been Established by Act of Parliament or by Act of the secular authority of the State, it Las not even made any contract with the State. The Establishment consists in the mutual recognition of the Church and the State, the State recognising the Church as a national institution for universal ministration to the people, and the Church recognising the State as a Christian and not as a Secular State, the Church accepting the duties of a National Church and adapting er organisation to fulfil that object.

The only difference between the position of the Church of England as an established Church and the so-called free Churches is that, whereas the latter are bound as regards doctrine by trust deeds and their property is protected by the special Act of Parliament of 1844, the Church, being a National institution, bearing the National Standard of Christian belief, cannot alter her fundamental profession of faith or her constitution without the National Consent expressed by the King in Parliament. With regard to the official position of the Church of England as the State

Church, the absolute privilege of the Church of England has largely disappeared; and Acts of State are frequently carried out under conditions which may be described as Concurrent Establishment. In Wales this is particularly noticeable. The Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Carnarvon last year was a Parliamentary and religious ceremony, the latter being performed not by the bishops of the State Church alone but by Nonconformist ministers as well. The civic ceremonies throughout Wales to-day usually involve an official visit of the Mayor and Corporation to one or more Nonconformist chapels as well as to the parish church.

Those of us who defend the Establishment defend it upon purely religious grounds, upon the religious character of the State and the National character of the Church, the Church and the State being united not by any shackles but by a common purpose of a common ideal and a common tradition. To our mind the only justification of the dissolution of this union would be the abandonment by the State of its Christian ideal, and the acceptance of a secular or non-religious ideal, or the refusal or failure of the Church to accept its National responsibilities.

The vast majority of Churchmen are even more opposed to Disestablishment than to Disendowment, not because they desire privileges but because their conception of the Church is thatof a corporate body, Catholic and National, rather than that of a sect. Let us admit, too, that we cry save us from our friends," to wit, the Liberationist Churchman, who is almost invariably an extreme partisan within the Church, and who wishes the Church disestablished and weakened by disendowment in order that his particular school of thought may prevail within the Church. As one who desires to see the Church of England delivered from the dominance of either the extreme High or extreme Low Church school, I should regret to see the peace and progress of the Church and the furtherance of Christian unity rudely interrupted by the probable disruption that would follow the Disestablishment of the National Church.

Nevertheless, these general considerations do not apply to Welsh Disestablishment. Whatever argument there may be for disestablishing the whole Church of England there is certainly none for disestablishing part of it, assuming, of course, that

Disestablishment is a religious and not a purely political question. The Government propose to terminate the establishment, not in the four Welsh Dioceses but in Wales and Monmouthshire. If this proposal is carried out part of the Diocese of St. Asaph will be Established and part Disestablished; part of the Diocese of Hereford will be Established and part Disestablished. The Church in Wales being part of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canterbury, and remaining after Disestablishment part of that province, will be "bound" in the liberationist sense of the word as long as the rest of the province is bound. True, according to all the Bills, we are to have a "representative body" of our own, either in substitution of or in addition to our representation in the Houses of Convocation and of Laymen. But even in regard to this representative body we are not to be free. Before this new body can hold any property or fulfil any of the functions for which it is designed it must be "approved by the King in Council." So far from being freed from State Control the Church in Wales, inevitably bound in practice if not in actual constitution to the rest of the Church of England, she would be bound in addition to a State-made, State-controlled representative Council. Some of the Welsh political advocates of Disestablishment desire to see the enforced separation of the Church in Wales from the Church in England. In their mania for Welsh Separatism-it does not deserve the name of Nationalism—they Fould like to see the Church in Wales cut off for ever from English connections, and established by the State as a separate entity. This proposal could not and would not be carried out even if it were placed within the penal clauses of the Act. The whole Church in England and in Wales is determined to remain one and will Lever submit to enforced separation. The Church in Wales as been one with the Church of England since long before the nification of the State. The Welsh Clergy sent their proctors the Convocation of Canterbury two hundred and fifty years before Wales sent representatives to Parliament.

But this unity is acknowledged, in principle at any rate, by Mr. McKenna. He hinted, in his recent speech at the Queen's Hall, that after Disestablishment the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in England would be allowed to continue their grants from English Ecclesiastical property in England, in support of the

poorer part of the Church which lies in Wales. Such a permission admits not only the Established unity of the Church but the claim of the Church in Wales on what has now become under the Ecclesiastical Commission, the corporate property of the Church of England as a whole. This concession annihilates the consistency of the Separatists, and if rumour be true, the Welsh Radical patriots are exceedingly angry with Mr. McKenna for proposing such a vital concession.

To sum up the opposition to Welsh Disestablishment as apart from general Disestablishment and as apart from Disendowment, it is founded upon the determination of Welsh Churchmen to preserve the unity and integrity of their Church, just as the Ulster men are determined to preserve the unity of the United Kingdom. All the talk of freeing the Church in Wales we can but regard as mere window-dressing, for the freedom we are to be given is a sham and a fraud, which we could not utilise for any useful purpose. We should only be free to become a constituent of the Free Church Council, but as there is no Free Church Council for Wales but only a Free Church Council of England and Wales, we should be swamped by English Nonconformists, in spite of the fact that we are by far the largest denomination in Wales.

In this connection it is interesting to note that the Nonconformist denominations in Wales are bound very severely by a "dead hand" in the shape of Trust Deeds. Also that they are bound to their respective denominations over the Welsh border. The charge, so often made, that the Church in Wales is an alien Church because it is part of the Church of England and because it is called the Church of England, can be made against every Nonconformist denomination in Wales for precisely the same reasons. The Congregational Churches in Wales are part of the Congregational Union of England and Wales-the Baptists are part of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The Wesleyan Methodist Church whose name is no more Welsh than the Church of England, and the Calvinistic Methodists who are called after Calvin—who was not a Welshman—are all part of and organised with their respective denomination, which has churches. in England as well as in Wales.

The true text of Nationality is not the mere name but the

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