Welsh Journals

by the turn of the century, this agitation was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the great social and economic problems of Wales. (Section vi is an admirably succinct discussion of this point.) He argues in his con- clusion that sheer quantity of political posturing, pamphleteering, and newspaper polemics has misled people into thinking that disestablishment was a crucial issue in Wales for longer than was in fact the case: 'the extent to which it ever had mass support is, indeed, uncertain' (p. 31). There are two small points which should be made. The first is that on two occasions the process of condensation has led to misleading results. On p. 18 it is stated that E233,000 p.a. out of total Church endowments of £ 279,000 p.a. were to be secularized by the Bill of 1894. It is doubtful whether such figures should be put baldly, without indicating that the £ 279,000 was a gross figure, from which Asquith himself estimated that about 25 per cent should be deducted to arrive at the net income, and without mentioning the difficulty of estimating a variable quantity like the value of the endowments of the Church. The general reader is prone to take figures too literally. Again, on p. 30, it is misleading to attribute the formation of a new ecclesiastical province of Wales to the Act of August 1919; this was the decision of the Welsh Church, by a resolution of its Governing Body in June 1919. The second point is that Dr. Morgan's commendable determination to keep down the temperature has occasionally inhibited him too much; for example, he does not draw out the bizarre, even comic, nature of the settlement of 1919. Churchmen had maintained that the property of the Church was sacrosanct; Liberationists had argued that it was wrong for the State to support religious bodies. Yet, in the end the Church lost its property, and the Treasury gave a million pounds towards the cost of compensating a disendowed Church. It was all very strange. P. M. H. BELL. Liverpool. GLAMORGAN HISTORIAN. Vol. III. Edited by Stewart Williams. D. Brown, Cowbridge, 1966. Pp. 254 (with illustrations). 30s. The earlier publications in this series of studies on the local history of Glamorgan have already been accepted as praiseworthy guides to the colourful yet significant facets of community life in Glamorgan. This third volume, which has been attractively produced and enriched with reproductions of paintings and insets of photographs, contains a series of fifteen articles, one poem on the Viking incursions, and brief notes on nineteen plates depicting Cardiff in the late Victorian era. The editor's initiative and enterprise, along with the labours of contributors in different fields of study, are greatly to be admired.