Welsh Journals

Conservative M.P.s, summoned by the leader of the Party and it was Bonar Law's speech, much more than Baldwin's, which was the deciding factor.) Yet it is one of Dr. Morgan's many merits that he shows how far the years after 1922 were from being fruitless or wasted for Lloyd George. His policies for land and town planning, for coal and power, the Liberal Industrial Enquiry, his early appreciation and adoption of Keynes's new economic ideas, bore fruit not in the disappointing elections of 1929 and 1935 (would that they had!) but in the work of successive governments since 1940. And as a critic of Baldwin and Chamberlain in their policies of appeasement he was not far behind Churchill, and played his part in Chamberlain's fall. In this last phase, when Wales at least did not desert him or the Liberal Party (to the same extent as England and Scotland deserted them), he drew constantly on Wales. He had always done so. Welsh Liberal support was vital in his bid for power in 1916, and Number 10 Downing Street was under him 'a typical Welsh household, simple, frugal, Welsh in speech', just as his 'garden suburb' was partly staffed by Welshmen. This was, indeed, his strength he never succumbed to London society (nor, one might add, to civil service expertise). And what he owed to Wales he repaid in ample measure. Lloyd George the man of action, was the counterpart of Tom Ellis, the man of vision and the one carried to achievement what the other could never, perhaps, have realized. Lloyd George's career was itself a standing example, which restored the Welshman's confidence in himself. Through him, Wales was led away from the vain plea for independence to the claim, largely satisfied, for equality it could join in a wider British patriotism. Yet this has not been to submerge Wales. In a moving conclusion, in which he sees it as a parable of the history of modern Wales, Dr. Morgan argues that Lloyd George's career helped forward 'the growth of provincialism' against 'the domination of the capitalist South and East'. 'Lloyd George's triumphs impressed on contemporaries anew the rich diversity of their country, which consisted not of one national community but of several. A new and deeper appreciation, not merely of Wales but of British cultural life as a whole, has resulted'. An unexpected conclusion, perhaps, but a heartening one, which makes Dr. Morgan's book far more than a piece d'occasion. It gives to Lloyd George an importance for his time and for ours, as a man whose greatness in British life derived from and never conflicted with his essential being as a Welshman. Bangor. C. L. MOWAT.