Welsh Journals

CARDIGANSHIRE POLITICS IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY A STUDY OF THE ELECTIONS OF 1865 AND 18681 I TRUST that I shall not be considered immodest if I devote the time you have placed at my disposal to a further discussion of some of the more puzzling features of the two elections which I have already described, in part, in a recent Cymmrodorion lecture.2 I refer to the elections of 1865 and 1868, elections which, though separated by three years, exhibit so many features in common that they deserve to be regarded by the student of politics as twin manifestations of the same general changes in the political life of the county, and of Wales as a whole. They require to be studied within such a wider context not merely because they would, in themselves, be unintelligible except in such a relation, but also because the emergence of what can be called a (. national' view of Welsh politics, with a consequent breakdown of the ancient particularism of the counties, is the feature of politics in the 1860's which most insistently demands our concentrated attention. If one asked what, from the point of view of Welsh politicians of the time, was the feature most to be deplored or commended (depending on the point of view held) in the nature of politics at that time, the answer would surely be this, the intrusion into the counties of political ideologies and techniques which claimed a kind of national validity and scope, and which perforce challenged the traditional values and parochial arrangements of the old political classes in those ancient societies. It was the conflict between two differing cultural views- between the politics of deference, the remote exercise of the preroga- tives of leadership based in a society expressive of degree and station, on the one hand, and the politics of numbers, of vox populi, vox Dei, on the other, which gave to the reform movement of the middle sixties its peculiar tensions and, often, bitterness. These tensions are present almost wherever we look in Welsh politics at that time. But not everywhere equally, for there was nothing cataclysmic in the changes we have to observe, and everywhere they were determined and shaped by the balance or interaction of social forces. Looking at the elections of those years over the country as a whole, we can readily see that, with the possible exception of Merthyr Tydfil, the victories of the new over the old were partial only, the outcome determined by the extent of the changes in the basic social configurations of the localities. Only where the growth of industry, and its concomitants, the creation of new types of communities and new leadership patterns, had changed the funda- mental social relationships was the victory complete. Such were