Welsh Journals

There are irritating mistakes in the text. The Fabian Society was not founded in 1883, nor did Sidney and Beatrice Webb (who first met in 1890) provide its leadership (p. 229). Morley died in 1923 as correctly stated on p. 272, and not as given on p. 259. The date of Gladstone's Swansea speech in which he proclaimed support for Welsh nationality is given as 1889 (p. 143) rather than 1887 as Kenneth O. Morgan wrote in the article (ante, I (1960), 82) from which Dr. Bradley is quoting. Lubbock was created baron, not earl (p. 272), while Robert Reid was an earl, not a baron (p. 273). Mill, who died in 1873, did not back Gladstone's Bulgarian campaign which started in 1876 (p. 142). The themes in which Dr. Bradley believes the kernel of Liberalism lay are examined lucidly. It is doubtful however, whether he has tracked down the elusive 'British Liberal mind' which he and others have attempted to discover and analyse. MICHAEL HART Merton College, Oxford. HEALTH, WEALTH AND Politics IN VICTORIAN WALES. By Ieuan Gwynedd Jones. University College of Swansea, 1979. Pp. 39. 60p. In the two E. Ernest Hughes Memorial Lectures delivered at the University College of Swansea in October 1978, Professor I. G. Jones fruitfully resumes and develops themes broached in his earlier studies of the politics of Merioneth and Merthyr Tydfil. Sanitary legislation, affecting both lives and pockets, created matter for urgent local decisions; and at the same time, by restructuring local government, it provided a representative forum for groups and interests whose conflict stimulated the growth of political consciousness. Local social and economic con- ditions, above all the qualities of the local people, determined the effectiveness of the administrative reaction and the vigour of the political thought which it provoked. Hence the paradox of Merthyr and Bala. At Merthyr, that raw settlement on the expanding frontier of the iron indus- try, the immigrant workers imported with them the deferential attitudes of the countryside, exhibiting-as the author suggests in a striking passage -the psychology of peasants not an industrial proletariat, and finding in the ironmaster and the works the analogues of the squire and the proprietorial estate. So 'in no place in Wales was oligarchy safer and less under challenge' than here, 'the home of working class radicalism', and when a Local Board of Health was established it was the creature of the ironmasters and moved at the pace and in the direction they dictated. The challenge to oligarchy was first successfully raised in Bala, a poor country community of shopkeepers and craftsmen, but led by an out- standing group of scholars and divines and inspired by proud memories of ancient chartered liberties. Here a petition to bring in the Local Govern- ment Act of 1858 was the first declaration of independance from gentry authority which, as Professor Jones has fully described in his fine article on Merioneth politics, was to lead ten years later to the Liberal conquest of the county seat. This illuminating contrast is part of a wide-ranging