Welsh Journals

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Llywelyn Williams described the survival of even a single Welsh word as a miracle, and a miracle it is. Why, and wherefore, has this miracle happened ? We are small in numbers, we are poor, as races go, in the possession of wealth; our lang- uage is not an easy one to learn; we have little to offer, at first sight, to others; we are not an ambitious people; we suffer from a fatal tend- ency to internal division and from pettiness in many of our thoughts; we have no force or power behind us, save a love of our land. On the other hand are mighty literatures, political strength, force of arms, every temporal advantage that man can think of or wish for. Yet we and our language live on, while others that are mightier die. Why? It is in no spirit of gratulation or of vain glory that the facts are noted, and the question asked. Other nations have far more reason to be vain- glorious than we have; but it is in finding an answer, if we can, to explain the miracle, that we can discover the justification for the passion- ate desire of Wales to live on. That passion is there. English people some- times say that that passion is based on an obstin- acy inherent in the Welsh people, who are igor- ant of their own best interests. Be it so; but it is a poor explanation, even if it explained. But it doesn't even do that. It merely gives an offensive form of expression to a fact. Why should we be obstinate? We gain nothing by it. To some, there is sufficient justification for the desire to live on in the mere instinct of self- preservation. That justification would be mean- ingless and valueless to others than ourselves, and we must find a justification, which can appeal not merely to ourselves, but to others. Without such we have, in the eyes of many, many even of our own flesh and blood, no claim to survive as a race, and unless we can find it, our efforts to find a constructive policy for the future will be in vain. Unless we find it, too, the riddle of the miracle will remain unsolved. What is the answer which accounts for the miracle? Let me put it briefly to start with. I shall expand it later on. There is only one explanation and that is that the Welsh people and the Welsh language have survived and continue to survive because, in the mysterious shaping of the destinies of man- kind, there has been a purpose, and there still is a purpose, for them to perform. Nothing, it seems to me, can survive without a purpose, though we may be unable to discover what that purpose may be. Such an explanation can mako no appeal to those who look upon the story of human-kind as capricious and purposeless, or to those who think that sufficient unto the day ;s the evil (or good) thereof. For such I do not write. I do not understand them; nor would they understand me. The explanation is offered only to those who think that there is some purpose in creation, to the realisation of which all human effort is grop- ing, falteringly and slowly. Reject that, and there is no meaning in life, no meaning in history, no meaning in Wales or in anything else, save the gratification of a tem- porary indulgence, which can end only in ashes. What then, is the purpose which Wales and the Welsh people and the Welsh language have to perform in the evolution of the mysterious destiny of mankind ? I believe in evolution not in evolution in the sense of the survival of the fittest whose fitness is calculated on physical force only, but in evolution in the sense of a gradual realisation of an ultimate purpose, the end of which we know not, to which weakness, as much as strength, can contribute and must contribute. It is essential to realise our own part in that ultimate purpose, if we can, before we can con- sider how we can further it. To find what it is, we must turn back again to our own history. The answer is there, staring us in the face, if we will take the trouble to look. §4. What is it then that we find staring us in the face, indicating to us the purpose of our continued national existence, when we look into our past history ? It is simply this, that, in some periods of stress in the history of the western world, when that world seems to be on the verge, not of extinction, for it can hardly suffer that, but of desolation, reformative ideas spring from the Welsh mind. For those ideas, born of its own history and temperament, the race fights, physically and morally, and ultimately they are accepted by other races, expanded and put into operation by them, with the result of cleansing and reinvigorating the western world. I have spoken of these ideas as reformative," for lack of a better word; but it must not be supposed that they are essentially new ideas in every case. They are frequently of an intensely conservative character; and no student of Welsh history can fail to be struck by what seems to be a paradox in the Welsh instinct, namely that it is at the same time most conservative and yet most progressive. No doubt many English readers will smile at the assertion made as to what the purpose of Wales is in the scheme of things. I shall pro- ceed next month to give chapter and verse in sup- port of the assertion, and if there be any other explanation for the striking series of events than that they are, one and all, manifestations of the purpose of the continued existence of the Welsh people, it would be well for it to be given. There is a philosophy of history; and the study of history is of little importance, if we fail