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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.

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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. ment. 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. placent 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 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

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