Welsh Journals

upon a belief in the value of individual initiative. He objects to that initiative being curbed and fettered by com- pulsion. But if individualism were beaten in fair fight, on a free field, he of all men is the last who should repine. It must be observed that the four-fold increase in the power of labour, of which economists speak, is an increase on the average. In some spheres the increase is far greater, in others it is less. It is much less in the vitally important matter of the cultivation of the earth. Here the steam-plough can never dominate the spade as the power-loom dominated the hand-loom, because land is strictly limited in quantity. As the pressure of population increases, intensive cultivation must more and more take the place of extensive. That wasteful use of the soil which has taken place in America must give way to a system far more like that which lately prevailed in lands of teeming population like Belgium. As agricultural conditions react on industrial conditions, it follows that that indefinite reduction of the hours of labour which seems possible within the realm of machinery is not really possible. In the last resort agriculture is the governing industry, for it alone produces great quantities of food, and all must eat. But this limitation is not to be deplored. Let it be said bluntly that the reduction of the hours of labour to four or five per day is a thing not to be desired, if all the other hours are to be spent in idleness or frivolity. The con- ception that many-or indeed any-of them will be spent in study by the majority of men is one which shows a IT is strange that at the time when we are talking of making the world safe for Democracy, a rising French poet should have challenged the principles of the French Revolution, and presented to sympathetic audiences at the theatre dramas in which feudalism is idealised and the modern world condemned. France is always the land of new ideas, and if France is turning its back on demo- cracy, then omens for the future are black. But a close study of M. Paul Claudel's two plays,* The Hostage (L'Otage) and The Hard Bread (Le Pain Dur), does not confirm the view that this author seeks to destroy demo- cracy. The pursuit of wealth is held up to scorn, and no syndicalist could have painted the selfish capitalist in more loathsome colours. In any case M. Claudel is a hard critic of the principles of the French Revolution, and indeed of modern Liberalism but I do not think that he can be called an unjust critic. Indeed the tone of his philosophy forcibly recalls much that was said in the symposium published last year in the Welsh Outlook on Labour Unrest. M. Claudel is indeed concerned with the same problems and those who are brought into contact with the unrest of industrial Wales might learn much from his pages. I do The Hostage has been translated into English, and is published by the Yale University Press, and Milford, Oxford University Press. Le Pain Dur (Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 35 & 37, Rue Madame, Paris) has not been translated. singular ignorance of human nature. But, Petavel main- tains, the average man will employ himself in his garden if he gets the opportunity and the sights, at once pathetic and encouraging, which we have witnessed on allotments near our great cities during these years of war support his contention. Here, we may reasonably hope, the average man may find once more that joy in work which Ruskin and William Morris maintained was his birth- right which he can never experience in merely watching a machine or repeating eternally the monotonous acts to which modern industry confines him or in reading books which he does not understand. He will find it, says Petavel, from contact with the soil. Thus, we may at least hope, and apparently only thus can that vanished joy return. Thus only can we justify the reduction of the industrial day not only to Lord Levernhulme's six hours, but to five, or four, or whatever still less fraction mechanical innovation may render possible in the workshop. The conditions due to the division of labour, from which there is no escape, have fostered the conception that work is in itself an evil. It is no new conception. Men have fixed upon labour as the primal curse In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. But it is false all the same. Gissing was right when he declared, on the contrary, that labour is the world's supreme blessing provided, let us add, it be labour in which joy is at least possible. If Petavel scheme can be realised it becomes possible and this is perhaps the greatest of all the boons he promises. A REBEL POET By J. Arthur Price, London. not agree myself with M. Claudel that the economic exploiter is a result of Liberal principles. I feel, however, that he is right in his view that since the French Revolu- tion society has lived in an unstable equilibrium. Demo- cracy as we know it, especially in Wales, fails to satisfy us, and we feel that in it there is something amiss. At the bottom the problem of democracy which conflicts us in Wales is the problem with which M. Claudel deals in his two plays. Let us see how far he helps to set the crooked straight. The Hostage is a tragedy of which the scene is laid in France at the commencement of the last century, when the great Napoleon is undertaking his expedition against Russia. The drama opens in the Abbey of Coiifontaine in the Mame, where Sygne, the heroine of the play, is entertaining her cousin, the Viscount George de Coiifontaine, who spends his time in plotting the over- throw of Napoleon and the restoration of the banished Bourbons. George and Sygne are the soldiers of a defeated cause, and George himself thus expresses it "Only those things which are dead and vanquished and im- possible are mine." The French Revolution has taught him nothing; he is still the impenitent lord of the manor. My fief like a small France, is my kingdom, the earth in me and my line becomes gentle and noble like some rare thing which may not be purchased.