Welsh Journals

spheres, no matter how radical, all-out, thorough or revolutionary necessity demands and necessitates that they be. The men who will effect this salvation will be men, young men with a realistic grasp of economic reality and national reality, realistically fused in a concrete, sensible programme of national resurrection. Upon whom it DEPENDS. The civilisation that we, the younger generation of Wales and the World, have inherited, is a civilisation ravaged through all its spheres by strife and war; and a painful and inhuman role in this strife and war has been the lot of most of us thus far. The code of this civilisation bids that, amongst other things, we have respect for our fathers, for those who endured and struggled before us, presumably for us. We are bidden to pay deference to their opinions and advice. But our minds are sceptical: hard experience too undeniable a master. We realise that a whole generation willed in egocentric unconcern Let us live, for tomorrow we die." And today they are dead. And their ruins the civilisation that we are obliged to inherit. Yet surprise and consternation is still expressed that this evidently farcical inheritance should have engendered a certain wildness in our blood, in our belief, and in our resolve. Is it not remembered that we were either born in the first world-engulfing war, or were reared through the course of that carnage ? that we grew to manhood in homes either in the grip of unemployment and ensuing unhappiness or in the grip of a fearful family struggle to make both ends meet ? that we come of age carrying the burden of twentieth century war in an effort to retrieve a justice and a humanity imperilled by past cowardice and craven fatuity ? Remarkably reasonable and sane considering the record of our immediate ancestry we did not anticipate as our inheritance either a heavenly peace-perfect City of God, or a faultless classless frictionless State Everlasting. We did expect, however, that the state of the world whose duties and responsibilities we were destined to assume would bear witness to the fact that our fathers had earnestly endeavoured not only to fulfil their responsibility to their own generation but also to discharge effectively their very great duty to the generation upon whose creation they were then bent. Yet historical fact indicts them as a generation too ignorant and self-centred to learn and apply the lessons of their own heroic suffering in the first world war. Our duty cannot be to the advice, of those with such a record our duty is, rather, to the young, red, riven world that only we can recreate. It is vital that we, the