Welsh Journals

1860s and 1870s,89 diluted and estranged the offspring from their ethnic roots. The language seems rarely to have survived into the second generation. The fissiparous nature of nonconformity, with its self-government and stress on individual conscience, did not bind the Welsh community together in the way that the monolithic and hierarchical Catholic Church did for the Irish. Denom- inational schooling, the bete noire of E. T. John, also helped preserve a distinct identity for the Catholic Irish community long after substantial immi- gration to the area ceased. In addition, the Welsh were not subjected to the isolating processes of discrimination that afflicted the Irish in Britain. The ulti- mate irony was that their reputation for civic and moral virtue, cultivated so assiduously by key members of the community on Teesside, made the Welsh eminently assimilable. Teesside 89 Ward, op.cit., p.21. RICHARD LEWIS DAVID WARD