Wales

by William Watkin Davies

The Reform Act of 1832, which raised the number of Welsh Members from twenty-seven to thirty-two, seems to have made no alteration in the politics of the country; but soon afterwards the topics which were going to be fought over so passionately before the close of the century, began to emerge and to define themselves—the right of the Welshman to live his own life in his own way, to speak his own language, and to worship in his own chosen mode. It meant the recapturing of the lost dignity of Welsh nationality. In the eighteenth century Welshmen had, almost contentedly, sunk into a position of inferiority, and had never dreamed of asserting their claim to a place of equality in the Empire in which they were now, by law, partners. The cleavage between the newly anglicised gentry, and the middle and lower classes, had become wider; and after the Revival, to the difference of language, was further added the difference of religion. That any Welshman should aspire to occupy a position of trust and distinction would be scouted. Goronwy Owen, a curate in the Church of England, and the greatest Welsh poet, and possibly the greatest prose stylist too, of the eighteenth century, writes in one of his charming letters in 1753: "Do you ever expect to see a Welshman a Bishop? Sooner would I give credence to the Brut which promises the second coming of Owain Lawgoch than expect ever to see a Welshman holding an office of the least distinction in either Church or State."

South Wales was rapidly becoming industrialized; and the Chartist Movement found there, and even more in the small manufacturing towns of the Severn valley, places like Llanidloes, and Newtown, the home of Robert Owen, many followers. All through the centuries, owing to its geographical position, Wales had been influenced by two things, isolation and contact; isolation from all kindred beyond the seas, and contact with its unfriendly neighbours on the land side. In the ancient Hellenic world the sea united; but for the Celtic races it has been a barrier to divide. Between the Celt of Ireland and the Celt of Wales intercourse was always slight and intermittent; while between the Welshman and the Breton there was hardly any intercourse at all. Unlike his Breton kinsman, the Welshman has never taken kindly to the sea; he has looked at it, and then raised his eyes to the mountains. He became a farmer, and not a fisherman or a sailor; and when he did look out at the great world he did so through the English window. This geographical isolation led also to a human isolation, which is a very marked characteristic of the Welsh nation. Fortunately the nation had been fully formed before the close of the eighteenth century, otherwise the combined influence of English political, social, and religious ascendancy might have swept away every vestige of the fine cultural inheritance of the past. In the great fight which began in 1832, and which occupied eighty years, Wales came out victorious in religion, in politics, in education, and in social matters. Even industrialism, the most potent foe of nationality, was kept at bay; and between it and the Welsh spirit the contest still goes on. With the Industrial Revolution itself, enormous as its influence was, we need not concern ourselves here; for in Wales it followed practically the same course as in England. The mineral wealth of Wales had been tapped by the Romans; but a new impetus was given to mining by the invention of the steam engine, of improved machinery, and by the new means of transport which came into being in the first half of the nineteenth century. In many parts of the land agriculture had to yield place to quarrying and mining; for there was slate in Carnarvon and Merioneth, copper in Anglesey, zinc in Denbigh, lead in Flint and Montgomery, gold in Merioneth, silver in Cardigan, and iron and coal in both North and South Wales. At first iron was regarded as the most important, coal being valued only for the part which it played in smelting operations. With the coming of Guest to Dowlais, and of Crashay to Merthyr, towards the close of the eighteenth century, the industry began to expand rapidly in Glamorganshire and Monmouth. It was not until the middle of the following century that the coal industry became important in itself; but once its importance was recognised, it was worked with the utmost energy, and exported to every part of the world. To-day upwards of a quarter of a million men work in the pits, and more than half the total population of Wales is contained in the mining valleys. The majority of these labourers are not Welsh; for to the pits, and to the great ports on the Bristol Channel, immigration has been taking place regularly, and on an enormous scale. Except for the thinly populated counties of Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen, South Wales is no longer Welsh in any sense of the word, and it has ceased to sympathize with the political, the cultural, and the religious ideals of the North. This is the most difficult problem with which Welsh statesmen are to-day confronted.

While the Chartist Movement was in full swing, the Rebecca Riots broke out. The new roads which had just been constructed were maintained by tolls, which were levied at turnpike gates placed at short intervals along them. As there were no railways, and as the small farmers of Cardigan and Carmarthen had often to carry great quantities of lime, for the fertilization of their land, over thirty or forty miles, the tax became an extremely burdensome one. Finding that protests availed nothing, some of the younger men, in 1843, disguised as women, broke the obnoxious gates in pieces. Their unruly conduct had two beneficial effects—it drew attention to a real grievance, and it taught the Welsh people to look to Parliament to redress their wrongs.

About this time newspapers began to be founded; and their effect upon the political life of the country was immediate and immense. Without exception they were democratic, and nationalist in the wider sense. The history of the Welsh Press is a heroic record. These little papers hardly ever secured a sufficiently big circulation to make them self-supporting. Their owners, themselves far from rich, were true patriots, and were content to suffer financial loss year after year. Seren Gomer was first started in 1814, and revived in 1818. In 1835 appeared Yr Haul, and Y Diwygiwr. But it was not until Yr Amserau began to appear in 1843, under the editorship of the great poet-preacher Gwilym Hiraethog, that Welsh journalism quite realized what it was capable of doing. At last the Welsh people had found an adequate mouthpiece. Soon the "Letters of the Old Farmer" began to appear in Yr Amserau; and throughout the troubled, but inspiring, period of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth, this paper continued to give Wales a democratic and strong liberal lead. It fought energetically for the repeal of the Corn Laws; and it was the first paper to tell the people clearly—"The enemy is the landlord." From that day, down to the outbreak of the Great War, the political history of Wales consists of an unceasing struggle for the freedom of the tenant, and for the freedom of Nonconformity. Meanwhile other papers and journals were being established. Dr. Lewis Edwards founded Y Traetliodydd; and the articles contributed by him to it, when collected and published in a volume, became the Welsh counterpart of Macaulay's Essays. An able journalist, signing himself "S.R.", vigorously championed the cause of the poor and the oppressed in his Cronicl. He was a Free Trader, he condemned war, he opposed landlordism, and he advocated a penny postage before anybody else had done so. But perhaps the greatest of all the journalists was Thomas Gee of Denbigh. In 1854 he issued a Welsh Encyclopedia, a mammoth work first issued in parts, and afterwards bound in many volumes, which brought the most up-to-date knowledge into the homes of the people, in their own language, and at a price which they could afford to pay. Three years later he started a weekly paper called Baner Cymru, with which Yr Amserau was amalgamated in 1859. The paper won instant popularity; and when the weekly letter of its political correspondent—"Y Gohebydd"—began to appear, its success was assured. No paper did more for the political emancipation, and education, of the people, and to direct their thoughts towards the House of Commons. It would not be long before they claimed to send Welsh speaking democrats to represent them. The supremacy of the squire and the parson was approaching its end.

The closing years of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth, saw a wonderful literary efflorescence in Wales. The Cymru and the Geninen set and maintained a high standard of accuracy, learning, and art. Owen M. Edwards edited cheap reprints of all the Welsh classics; and himself wrote travel books, whose graceful style, delightful humour, and frequent passages of moving eloquence, entitle them to rank with the Reisebilder of Heinrich Heine. The beautiful, but not always idiomatic, prose of the Welsh Bible, had become much more ornate, stiff, and difficult in the hands of Ellis Wynne, whose Bardd Cwsc is, nevertheless, the finest work of creative genius in the Welsh language. Goronwy Owen, and Dr. Lewis Edwards, employed a much more flexible style; but it was not until the rise of Owen Edwards that the full possibilities of Welsh prose, as a vehicle for expressing modern ideas, became manifest. Welsh poetry there had always been an abundance of; starting with the obscure bards of the sixth century, and the Arthurian legends, passing through the warlike minstrels of the Middle Ages, to the sweet, but shallow, love poems of Davydd ap Gwilym. Then came a long period of monotonous and mediocre versifying; until real poetry again began to be produced by Goronwy Owen. A touch of sublimity in an occasional poem of Ishryn, and the true lyric flavour of much of Ceiriog, place these two men in the front rank of Welsh poets. The older poetry is couched in intricate and artificial metres, the twenty-four varieties of which every bard was expected to show an acquaintance with. But of late there has been a tendency to discard these, and to write more freely and naturally. There are some genuine poets in Wales to-day; but their home seems to be the college lecture-room and not the old home of the bards, the Eisteddfod.

Never has Welsh so flourished as a literary language as at present. At least nineteen weekly Welsh papers are published in Wales, eighteen monthlies, and six quarterlies; in addition to which Liverpool has its own Welsh weekly, the United States one, and Patagonia one. The output of Welsh books is not very large, but it cannot be computed at much less than a hundred in the course of every year. And Welsh is not only widely read, it is also widely spoken. In North Wales, and in at least two counties in the South it is still the language of the home, of the playground, and of public worship. And wherever the Welshman goes he carries his language with him. In America, in Patagonia, in Africa, and in Australia, there are Welsh colonies, with Welsh societies and Welsh chapels. In the United States alone the number of Welsh chapels is close upon four hundred. In Great Britain, outside Wales, the tale is the same. The numerous Welshmen who have left their own quiet homes in order to push their fortunes in the great cities have never forgotten the traditions of their youth. London has over thirty Welsh places of worship, Liverpool about the same number, Manchester nine, Birmingham four, and Bristol three, while many other English, Scottish, and Irish towns have at least one each.

The political calm of Wales was broken in 1859, the year of the last but one of the great Revivals. There was a General Election, and the tenant farmers of Merioneth decided, for the first time, that they would refuse to vote for the landlord's nominee, and would run a candidate of their own. Ruthless evictions followed; and ere long it had become the settled policy of most of the great estate holders to examine into the political, and even the religious, views of their tenants, and to expel all Radicals and Nonconformists. Persecution, however, only stiffened the determination of the people; and the contest went on. The Reform Act of 1867 helped the democratic movement; and in the following year Henry Richard was returned at the head of the poll at Merthyr Tydvil. Richard was one of the most able, and most interesting men of the day, and would have been an ornament to any representative assembly. As an advocate of peace he became known all over Europe; and was the first Welshman, in modern times, to occupy an international position. At the same Election seven Liberals were returned for Wales. Fresh evictions followed, and Welsh farmers emigrated in scores to the United States. But a measure of relief was at hand: in 1872 the Ballot Act was passed. From that day Liberalism swept onwards from victory to victory. In 1886 Tom Ellis, the noblest and most far-sighted of the men sent by Wales to Parliament, was elected for Merionethshire. Four years later David Lloyd George became Member for Carnarvonshire, and in the same year Samuel Evans (afterwards to become a famous President of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Court) was elected for Glamorgan.

Wales had now won full political recognition, and its members were in a position to bargain with the Liberal leaders for the inclusion of such measures as Welsh Disestablishment and Disendowment in the party programme. After long waiting, and much acrimonious discussion, that measure became law in 1914. It was a great act of justice, and its benefits have been felt by the formerly Established Church no less than by the Free Churches. Indeed, one of the most wonderful and hopeful things in the recent history of Wales is the way in which the new Welsh Church has organized itself, and adapted itself to the new situation. It is now a truly national body, with its own Archbishop and a thoroughly democratic constitution, in which the lay element counts for at least as much as the clerical.

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Thus from being the last refuge of hunted tribesmen, a land swept time after time by the tide of invasion, Wales has come to be actively and amicably associated with England in her high destinies. Everywhere Welshmen are participating to the uttermost in the wider life of the Empire. In all the professions, in literature, in the arts, in trade, in the Civil Service, in the Army, in the Navy, and in the Diplomatic Corps they are winning distinction for themselves.