Welsh Journals

to such Welsh institutions as he finds he can support. A tory in Newport or Cardiff might rally round Mr Watson-Cliffe's Welsh Union of Leasehold Reformers. He ought, I believe, if a member of the Welsh landed interest, to join the Farmers' Union of Wales. That rare tory, the tory business man, might take a special interest in the Welsh Economic Development Council. I believe there is a special duty for that quite common sort of tory, the tory who has some knowledge of the profession of arms, to begin a careful study of his subject as it affects Wales. I believe that some Welsh tories should maintain their membership of the Conservative Party. In the event of self-government-an event nowadays considered to be by no means improbable-there may exist for quite a time something like party government, and it might be necessary that there should be the rump of a Conservative Party in Wales-a party which, of course, not only accepts the situation but approves of it. I envisage such a party as occupying a political position no less nationalist than that of the Nationalists but based upon different political doctrines such as I have indicated. I hazard a consideration which tories of an ancient school would rightly have put first. On the old tory banner appeared the words: 'the maintenance of religion'. What this meant is worth an essay in it- self. Coleridge told us that it meant nothing less than 'Lex sacra, mater legum, which in the very first law of state ever promulgated was pre- supposed as the ground of that first law'. We would therefore firmly stand for a religious architectonic philosophy under which the secular departments of life would subsist as princes paying homage. And I be- lieve that we would be forced to labour not just for the rather crude re- establishment of a particular Christian sect but for the restoration of something like a clerisy or a Wales understood to be a Christian society. I am well aware of the general body of objections which would be raised against such a programme. Am I not a tory in the heart of Rhondda; And yet in the last few years something has happened to Rhondda which already begins to change Rhondda. Over the valley there stands once again the Mother and the Child of Pen Rhys. Mary's well is refurbished. An antiquarian side-line; No indeed, for from the springtime until September come ten thousand pilgrims. Where the old Cistercian 'ysbytty' stood, will stand a new chapel. And if this be done in the green, what shall be done in the dry?