Welsh Journals

The election of 1868 marked clearly the crisis in the political influence and career of Thomas Price both in the constituency and in the country at large. He never quite recovered his old authority in as comprehensive a way as before; indeed, he seems never to have sought thereafter to do so. If he had been in error in refusing to place himself where his past career proclaimed him to belong, at the head of the political nonconformity of the Liberationist type in the constituency, he never admitted his mistake. But this study of his developing career has shown that his decisions in 1868 were less surprising than at the time they had seemed. For there is a basic consistency in his political views and actions up to the election: his failure lay in his inability to adapt them to the new conditions created by the Reform Act of 1867. This is most apparent in his relations with the working classes. Here, he refused to see that in the contingencies of a protracted general election campaign the loyalties of the newly enfranchised would not of necessity be given to those middle-class leaders by whose efforts their enfranchisement had largely been won. It was apparent, too, in his relations with nonconformity. Here, what is significant is that when the time of decision came it was local loyalties and traditions rather than 'national' obligation which determined his course of action. Not only Dr. Price, in fact, but political nonconformity as a whole, had reached a crisis in its development. To succeed in the future it could no longer assume a necessary congruity between its aims and those of the bulk of its working-class adherents, and, above all, it would need to create a new kind of political organization to replace the old. IEUAN GWYNEDD JONES. Swansea.