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SELECT COMMITTEE OR ROYAL COMMISSION?: WALES AND 'THE LAND QUESTION', 1892* BETWEEN 1886 and 1892-the golden age of the Cymru Fydd movement- Welsh issues were more frequently discussed in Parliament than ever before or indeed since. During this period, the Welsh Liberal MPs were becoming an increasingly articulate group at Westminster; indeed, by 1890 more than three-quarters of them had intervened either in parliamentary debates or at question time. The Welsh issue par excellence to which official Liberals in Wales devoted attention was the disestablishment of the Church. John Morley claimed that disestablishment was as much a national issue for Wales as home rule was for the Irish. Resolutions for Welsh disestablishment were moved in 1886, 1889, 1891 and 1892; the remarkable Welsh Intermediate Education Act was passed in 1889; and repeated attempts were made to tackle the land question and the problem of tithes-an area where religious and agrarian grievances powerfully coalesced-leading to efforts directed towards the passage of a Welsh land act and the securing of a measure of tenant rights. For some fifteen years from the autumn of 1879, the occasion of a disastrous harvest, much of rural Wales was plunged into acute depression and severe impoverishment. Most of the Welsh countryside was made up of small-holdings, generally less than fifty acres, on unrewarding upland terrain. The arable sector was pitifully small; very little wheat was grown. This pattern was disrupted only very occasionally where richer soils permitted more varied farming practices-as in the Vale of Clwyd, the Aeron valley in Cardiganshire, the southern half of Pembrokeshire and the Vale of Glamorgan. The prevalence of land hunger in Wales meant that Welsh farmers often borrowed as much as a third of the purchase price of their holdings or else endured long-term, crippling mortgages. Agricultural techniques remained generally primitive, improvements and innovations were few, and capital input was low. Rural inter-relationships were under- mined by a basic cleavage between landlords and tenants in religion, language and political outlook (a divide which did not feature in England), potently reinforced by memories of the elections of 1868 and of the ensuing political evictions so vividly reflected in the impassioned writings of the veteran Thomas Gee and the frenzied eloquence of the young David Lloyd George. am very grateful to Professor Kenneth O. Morgan for his most helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article. South Wales Daily News, 9 October 1988.