[16] Recent events have demonstrated that this spirit is still far from extinct. [Back]
The drift of the native tongue, too, since Tudor times has been curious. Its gradual abandonment by the landed gentry from that period onwards, with the tenacity with which their tenants for the most part clung to it, is a subject in itself. The resistance it still offers in spots that may be fairly described as in the very centre of the world’s civilisation is probably the most striking lingual anomaly in Europe. Its disappearance, on the other hand, in regions intensely Welsh is worthy of note. Radnorshire, for instance, penetrating the very heart of the Principality, populated almost wholly by Cymry, forgot its Welsh before anyone now living can remember. Bits of Monmouth, on the other hand, long reckoned an English county, still use it regularly. It is the household tongue of villagers in Flint, who can see Liverpool from their windows, while there are large communities of pure Celts in Brecon and Carmarthen who cannot even understand it.
The great coal developments in South Wales have wholly transformed large regions and brought great wealth into the country, and replaced the abundant rural life of Glamorgan and its ancient families, Welsh and Norman, with a black country that has developed a new social life of its own. Slate quarrying has proved a vast and profitable industry among the northern mountains, while thousands of tourists carry no inconsiderable stream of wealth across the Marches with every recurring summer. But neither coal-pits, nor quarries, nor tourists make much impression on the Welsh character such as it has become in the North, more particularly under the influence of Calvinism, and very little upon the language which fifty years ago men were accustomed to regard as doomed.
The history of Welsh land since the time of the Tudor settlement is but that of many parts of England. Wales till this century was distinguished for small properties and small tenancies. There were but few large proprietors and few large farmers. In the matter of the former particularly, things have greatly altered. The small squires who lived somewhat rudely in diminutive manor-houses have been swallowed up wholesale by their thriftier or bigger neighbours, but the general and now regretted tendency to consolidate farms scarcely touched Wales, fortunately for that country. Save in a few exceptional districts it is a land of small working farmers, and in most parts the resident agricultural labourer as a detached class scarcely exists.
Few countries in the world contain within the same area more elements of prosperity and happiness than modern Wales, and fewer still are so fortunately situated for making the most of them. Coal, iron, slate, and other minerals in great abundance are vigorously exported and give work and good wages to a large portion of the population. In the rural districts a thrifty peasantry are more widely distributed over the soil, to which they are peculiarly attached, than in almost any part of Britain, and occupied for the most part in the more hopeful and less toilsome of the two branches of agriculture, namely, that of stock-breeding. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, there are ready facilities for the trader, the sailor, or the fisherman. The romantic scenery of the country is another valuable asset to its people and brings an annual and certain income that only one small corner of England can show any parallel to. Education is in an advanced state, while the humbler classes of society have resources due to their taste for music and their sentiment for their native language, which have no equivalent in English village life.
Even those strangely constituted minds that like to dig up racial grievances from the turmoil of the Middle Ages, when right and might were synonymous words the world over, and profess to judge the fourteenth century by the ethics of the nineteenth, must confess that the forced partnership with England has had its compensations. The reasonable Welshman will look back rather with much complaisance on the heroic and prolonged struggle of his ancestors against manifest destiny, remembering always that the policy of the Norman kings was an obvious duty to themselves and to their realm.
Had the Ireland of that day, with its larger fighting strength and sea-girt territory, possessed the national spirit and tenacious courage of Wales, who knows but that she might have vindicated her right to a separate nationality by the only test admissible in mediæval ethics, that of arms? Geography at any rate in her case was no barrier to an independent existence, and there would have been nothing illogical or unnatural in the situation. But geography irrevocably settled the destiny of Wales, as it eventually did that of Scotland. If the conditions under which Wales came into partnership were different and the date earlier, that, again, was partly due to its propinquity to the heart of England. Yet with all these centuries of close affinity to England, the Welsh in many respects—I had almost said in most—have preserved their nationality more successfully than the Celts of either Ireland or the North, and in so doing have lost nothing of such benefits as modern civilisation brings.
