Welsh Journals

EDITORIAL SPEAKING for Wales is not an easy job. There is an approved way of buttering up the Welsh people in a leader. See the B.B.C.'s approach in London Calling. Think of numerous after-dinner speeches on St. David's Day. Cabinet Ministers coming down to the Valleys during the depression just to tell us that all Wales is a Sea of Song." Remember pleas asking us to forget recitals of long-standing grievances. This year a new spirit of realism is abroad the majority of the Survey-of-the-Year articles are conscious of the task ahead. Judging from one or two talks and newspaper columns, however, it is obvious that a dispassionate appraisal of the situation is something still beyond some of our public men. Yet we are not a nation of toads. Evidently some of our present rulers and representatives are out of touch with the feeling of the people generally. Our great man usually is a big bore. Behind a mass of verbiage lurks a timid, bourgeois, and messy mind. He lacks the straightforward fearlessness and humility of the truly great. This is one of our chief troubles. But as Miss Dilys M. Rowe writes in a New Year's Day essay in the South Wales Evening Post There is a Welsh parliamentary party, and there is growing up in Wales a movement one would like to compare to Yeats' in Ireland. This movement's principal organ (Wales) was one of the first victims of the paper shortage, while endless reels of newsprint were allotted to the different nations and odd causes who sought the hospitality of these islands, who did not use all the paper to foster the Allied cause, and, in fact, used a great deal of it to create anything but the atmosphere one associates with the words United Nations. Prophets are not honoured in their own country, but this truism carried to extremes means that with the exodus of prophet after prophet goes drop after drop of that country's life blood." This is where Wales comes in. We, above all, cannot ignore practical politics any longer. So we are printing in this number two political articles, one by a Socialist and the other by a Nationalist, both of which do not theorise and are somewhat more than important indications of trends inside the Principality. In future numbers, in order to preserve balance, other view-points will -also be found in this Political, Planning and Reconstruction forum. Besides the usual literary features, we have