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o American observers, accustomed as they are to follow the story of British politics day by day in the telegrams, the sudden eclipse of David Lloyd George as a force in the public life of Great Britain has seemed chiefly interesting in its bearing on British and European politics or as a dramatic turn in a romantic and unprecedented career. But it presents an aspect of wider and more enduring interest, which claims the special attention of students of American public life. It embodies on a vaster scale a tragedy which can constantly be observed in the United States and in all lands of mixed population and heredities-the spectacle of an incompletely assimilated foreigner, more gifted than those among whom his lot is cast, driven to exercise his talents and secure the dominance which he feels is his due not by the natural ascendancy of home-grown genius among his own people, but by the adaptation and artifice, the trickery and legerdemain, which have been the age-long weapons of the slave within the household.

No one can understand the personality and career of David Lloyd George who does not know Wales. The fact that he is a Welshman is the

No. 1

most important fact about him. It is also, in the eyes of most of his critics, the most damning fact. "Wales," said an editorial writer the other day in the leading Welsh review, "never gets much credit from the English press or public for Mr. Lloyd George's success, but the blame and contumely for his errors and failures are merrily thrown in her face." It must be admitted that this complaint is fully justified. Englishmen are fond of attributing the defects of the ex-premier to his un-English extraction, to the fact that he is a Welsh Baptist and not an English gentleman. Even so discriminating a critic as Mr. Algernon Cecil, in the memorable "Quarterly Review" article of last October, which contributed so immediately to his fall, cannot refrain from sounding this note. Englishmen, in fact, are wont to accept the ex-premier's unusual endowments, so unlike their own, as a matter of course, and merely to regret that their possessor has not been completely Anglicized in other respects. For any one who knows Wales the want of understanding displayed in this view is apparent. The real tragedy of David Lloyd George lies not in the incompleteness of his Anglicization, not in

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the fact that he has not been more thoroughly dipped in the melting-pot of the House of Commons and of London "society," but in his undue susceptibility to it and in his loss of touch with his own nationality. Nothing could ever have made him a great Englishman, but he might, under a happier star, have been a great Welshman; and, as a great Welshman, he might have added luster to the annals of the British Commonwealth of nations. Therein lies the disintegration of a personality, the eclipse of a political career, and a moral not for Wales or Great Britain only, but for students of the contacts of nationality and politics the world over.

Wales is the territory in the west of the Island of Great Britain lying between the mouth of the Dee and the Bristol Channel. It is inhabited by a distinct race, the descendants of the ancient Britons who took refuge in the mountains and dales of western Great Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. These "Welshmen" (foreigners), as the English call them, or Cymru, as they call themselves, are not only different from the English in language, customs, religious life, culture, in fact in all that goes to make up national personality, but are actually more widely sundered from their English neighbors than are either the Scots to the north of them or the Irish to the farther west. Between England and Scotland relations of mutual respect and a fair measure of mutual understanding have been established for a century or more. Dr. Johnson and his contemporaries may have felt toward Scotland and her inhabitants much as many Englishmen still feel toward

Wales and Welshmen; but from the days of Sir Walter Scott onward these sentiments were obliterated by a wholesome respect for Scottish achievement. Between England and Ireland there has been a long and unhappy political relationship. Irishmen were until recently considered by Englishmen as incapable of governing themselves, and recent events have served in some quarters to reinforce this complacent verdict. But oppression and condescension in the political field have not prevented the knitting of many links between the two peoples in other spheres of achievement. In the field of letters, in particular, Ireland has made a substantial contribution, if not to English literature, at least to the literature of the English language. For the Welsh, on the other hand, English is emphatically a non-conductor. No one who knows the Welsh people will affirm that it is inferior to any of its neighbors in the British Isles in thought and passion or in the impulse to express thought and passion in the written word. Yet how slender and unsubstantial is the volume of Welsh production in the English tongue! Virtually the only real example of the Welsh genius in English garb is afforded by the religious poetry of Henry Vaughan and George Herbert in the seventeenth century. Those who are familiar with the Welsh hymnwriters can recognize in the quaint blending of philosophic thought and natural imagery in which Vaughan in particular exhibits the quality of mind which Pantacelyn and the religious poets of the Welsh Revival brought to triumphant expression in their own tongue. But Vaughan is only a happy exception who proves the rule; and even in this case the great mass of his

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work has been blunted rather than refined and enriched by the influence of his Oxford training.

For indeed it is not the Welsh gentry, who have for centuries been in touch with Oxford and the Church of England, who are the true repositories of the Welsh national tradition. The Welsh, like some of the smaller peoples of central and eastern Europe, are a truncated nation. Their aristocracy has been Anglicized and denationalized, so that great gentlemen and landowners, like the earls of Powys or the Pryses of Gogerddan, are no more representative of Wales than the Germanized aristocracy of Bohemia is of Czechoslovakia. The real Wales is the Wales of the common people, of the bourgeoisie, the small farmers, and the artisans, laborers, and shepherds. It is among these, and especially among the humbler members of the community and in the remoter country districts, that the genuine national tradition lives on and the national genius is still aflame. It was a humble farm-house in the Vale of Festiniog that was the home of Morgan Llwyd, that solitary Welsh ally of the seventeenth-century English Puritans, whose strange and powerful prophesyings entitle him to a place, with Tauler, Eckhart, and the rest, in the roll of European mystics. And two and a half centuries later it was from the wet and windy village of Trawsfynnedd, aloft on its rain-swept perch across the ridge (Trawsfynnedd-trans montes) from the Festiniog valley, that there went forth to the Great War a shepherd boy named Hedd Wynn for whom the prize-winner's chair was draped in black at the national Eisteddfod national Eisteddfod in 1917.

For Welshmen who are true to this

tradition modern Welsh history begins much at the same period as the history of the newly liberated peoples of southeastern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. But the power that stirred the Welsh soul to self-consciousness was not political, but religious; not the call of the French Revolution, but the preaching of the English dissenters. It was the influence of Wesley and Whitefield and their Welsh followers that precipitated the "Great Revival" that is reckoned the dawn of modern Wales. It is this extraordinary outburst of religious fervor, releasing, as it did, elements of national personality that had been repressed for centuries under the Anglican and aristocratic régime, which has given to Welsh life, social and political, cultural and religious, the peculiar imprint that still distinguishes it today. From that revival sprang the missionary labors of the four great sects,-non-territorial tribes, as a witty Welsh student of Athenian constitutional history has called them,-the Baptists, the Wesleyans, the Congregationalists, and the Calvinistic Methodists, whose unpretentious chapels may be observed in fierce or friendly competition in every Welsh township or village. It was the Great Revival which, in its hymn-writers, restored the dignity of the ancient language and gave Welshmen the beginnings of a modern popular literature. And it was through the chapels and their multifarious ramifying influences that a freemasonry grew up among classes hitherto disdained and kept under which paved the way, first, for political organization and, later, for an ascendancy, in local government, in parliamentary representation, and in patronage to appointments in the principal

ity, which has lately become endangered through the influence of labor.

"Now that you have come to live amongst us," said an academic colleague to the present writer a few months after his arrival in the country, "you had better choose your chapel and stick to it. You will never get on in Wales unless you do." And when the recipient of this kindly advice protested mildly that none of the four sects satisfied his conscience as to their tenets, "To tell you the truth," was the reply, "I am not a strict believer either; so you need not trouble yourself about that." The fact is that the chapel has been and still is far more than a mere religious organization. It is the main, and still in many parts of Wales the only, outlet for the inner life of the Welsh people. It serves as a channel, alas! too tenuous and constricted, but capable at times of surprising expansion, for the outflow of the exuberance of thought and passion, the pent and fermenting energy, of an unusually gifted and expressive people. It was an accident of history that turned Wales Puritan. Protestantism, in its sober, chilling north European form, is no more natural to Welshmen than it is to Italians or Spaniards or Russians. Wales accepted non-conformity as the first available means of release from Anglicanism; but it made of it something that the English dissenter would not easily recognize as his own mode of worship. The sermon has been transformed from a flat pedestrian discourse into an acutely reasoned philosophical discussion, culminating in an impassioned recitative reminiscent of Italian opera or Oriental prophecy. The prayer, so often on English lips merely a lame and halting allocution to a God indulgent to the

embarrassment of His ministers, becomes a call, a challenge, a rallyingcry, knitting the congregation together in a fervor of devotional expectation; while the hymn, sounding out from every throat in the matchless euphony of the Welsh language, transports the rapt worshipers in the homely chapel for a few moments to the City Everlasting-moments that are lived over again in memory during the week until the Sabbath comes round once more.

Finally, most important of all the activities carried on in the chapel, there is the Sunday school. The services proper are in the morning and evening; the afternoon is devoted to school. In other countries the Sunday school is for children; in Wales it is for adults, and has been, and still is in parts of Wales, the main intellectual stimulus and discipline of the population. The congregation divides itself into small manageable groups, occupying some two or more pews, each under a leader of its own. The usual procedure is to read through a chapter of the Bible and then to discuss it verse by verse; and very remarkable is the knowledge and acumen displayed in this work of exegesis, so congenial to the critical Welsh mind, by men who during the week-time are behind the counter of the village shop or tending the cattle out on the hills. Most books of Welsh autobiography, and Welshmen are very fond, perhaps a little morbidly fond, of this form of literature, deal at length with the Sunday-school reminiscences of their subject. Sir Owen Edwards, historian and late chief-inspector of schools in the principality, and Sir Henry Jones, who, expelled from the national university, for years held the chair of philosophy at Glasgow, may be cited as

conspicuous instances of village boys grown into intellectuals of real stature who have acknowledged their debt to the Sunday school. And both these writers in their reminiscences lay stress on the fact that at a time when Welsh boys and girls were being exposed to punishment and insult by monoglot English-speaking teachers imported to staff the newly established primary schools, it was the Sunday school, in intimate alliance with the home, which kept alive the attachment to the ancient tongue. Conversation with Welshmen of the older generation reveals over and over again how deep the tyranny of "Saxon" linguistic ascendancy, thus exercised during the most susceptible years, has bitten into the mind and spirit of a sensitive people.

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Such was the world in which David Lloyd George spent his youth at Llanystymdwy in north Wales, on the edge of Snowdonia. In the house of his maternal grandfather, the village cobbler, he became familiar with all the traditional lore of the Welsh countryside, with the lives and oratorical achievements of the great preachers, whose faces adorned the walls, as they may still be found in similar dwellings to-day, and with the glories of Eisteddfodau, both national and local. For to the youth of that generation the preachers and the poets were national heroes, and the greatness dreamed of for them by their nearest was in the pulpit, among the saints, or in the select society of the bards. I recall a conversation only three summers ago with a young and promising Eisteddfod winner, by calling a railway porter attached to a small station in the Festiniog valley. He had come round He had come round

on a Sunday afternoon to give a musical recitation, and announced that he had just had the offer of a promotion to a less picturesque station across the English border. "Won't you miss Moelwyn?" we asked him, referring to the noble mountain mass which faced him across the valley at his daily work. "Of course I shall," he replied; "but they will give me a free pass on the line, and I shall still see Moelwyn on Sundays."

It is the tragedy of the generation of young Welshmen, for whom David Lloyd George has opened the road to England and English "careers," that they have begun by reserving Moelwyn, and all that it means, for Sundays only, and have ended by losing touch with it altogether except as a piece of sham stage scenery.

For David Lloyd George was the first young Welshman to win real eminence in British political life. There were predecessors from the Welsh country-side-for example, the two names already mentioned-who had won high academic distinction and the recognition attaching thereto; and in Tom Ellis, who died young, the Liberal party had a much-beloved whip and ardent Welsh patriot and student who was marked out for higher promotion at Westminster. But Lloyd George was the first Welshman, as Disraeli, his favorite among British statesmen, was the first Jew, actually to "arrive." His arrival proved his undoing.

When Scotsmen discovered what Dr. Johnson called the "noble prospect" of the highroad to London, they were morally equipped for the ordeal in the contact of cultures and societies to which they were exposing themselves. Scotland is and always has been a