order to bring boys into touch with social problems, and to give them
some idea that the way of the world is not the way of a prosperous and
sheltered home. It is open to doubt whether it is possible to touch
boys' hearts and sympathies much except by linking a School Mission on
to some institution for the care of boys--an orphan school or a
training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the
sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an
extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and
not thinking much or anxiously about mending them.

In any case the one aim ought to be to give boys a personal interest in
such problems, and put them in personal touch with them. But the Eton
Mission was planted in a district which it was very hard to reach from
Eton, so that few of the boys were ever able to make a personal
acquaintance with the hard and bare conditions of life in the crowded
industrial region which their Mission was doing so much to help and
uplift, or to realise the urgency of the needs of a district which most
of them had never visited.

But if the Mission did not touch the imagination of the boys, yet, on
the other hand, it became a very well-managed parish, with ample
resources to draw upon; and it certainly attracted the services of a
number of old Etonians, who had reached a stage of thought at which the
problem of industrial poverty became an interesting one.

Money was poured out upon the parish; a magnificent church was built, a
clergy-house was established, curates were subsidised, clubs were
established, and excellent work was done there. The vicar at this time
was a friend and contemporary of my own at Eton, St. Clair Donaldson,
now Archbishop of Brisbane. He had lived with us as my father's chaplain