Welsh Journals

a reliable account of the incidence of mental defect as well as a sure guide to the Committee in their endeavours to find a practical way of dealing with mental defectives. The Committee also pay Dr. Lewis the highest tribute. They express the view that his report "is in every respect a document of the first THE WELSH UNIVERSITY IN PARLIAMENT by J. Arthur Price IN one way Wales is typical of the modern world of which it forms a part. There is a fact, very simple and very obvious, and yet generally forgotten, and it is this. The modern world, the creation of the French Revolution and the Capitalist reconstruction of society has really come of age. There is another fact equally simple, equally obvious and very seldom remembered, that modern Wales, the creation of Welsh Non-Conformity and the Welsh educa- tional system has likewise attained its majority. The modern world wastes much of its time in criticising the abuses of the past. Its politicians and professors are still inflaming it against the evils of feudalism and priestcraft, which, to put it plainily, are in anv case evils which in no way affect the majority of the citizens of to-day. But few of these have the honesty of Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb, who in a recent book have frankly admitted that unemployment "is a special evil unknown to the days either of slavery or serfdom, and to be found in greater or less degree in all States that have adopted the modern organisation of industry, while it does not occur in those States in which any form of peasant culture remains dominant or undulv prevalent. In other words, the capitalist organisation of modern society, and neither priestcraft nor feudalism is, in the opinion of Socialistic writers, directly responsible for the greatest practical evil of our own age. And yet the majority of the M.P.'s and professors, while they are never wearied of attacking the mediaeval abuses, which have no practical bearing on modern troubles, never spare a moment for an investigation of the evils of the organisation of the Society under which they live, a; d even the minority which accepts the guidance of Socialistic philo- sophers is just as averse as is the majority from criticising the things in modern industrial Sidney and Beatrice Webb. English Poor Law, Vol. II, p. 631. importance. The data on which it is based were secured with great thoroughness in the face of great difficulties they have been tabulated with extreme accuracy; and the general results of the inquiry have been described with a delightful lucidity." society which must sharply differentiate our own times from past ages, and indeed propose to maintain their most characteristic features in the Socialist Commonwealth. The case is precisely the same with the official guides of modern Wales, only more so. The Welsh Members of Parliamment who represent the new Wales of the modern educational system, talk as if they lived in the days of Osborne Morgan's Burial Bill, or the landlord oppression of 1868, or the temperance movement of the days of Sir Wilfrid Lawson. But it cannot be said that they are even as nationalist as were the members who repre- sented Wales in the last decade of the nine- teenth century. It would, of course, be a mis- take to exaggerate even the nationalism of those members of the olden times. One day in the early nineties, before Tom Ellis had taken office and when Mr. Lloyd George was already in the House, one of the ablest and most critical jour- nalists of the day, Mr. Hutton, of the Specta- tor,' went to the House of Commons to hear a debate on Welsh Disestablishment. He watched the Welsh members with care and listened to the speeches, and the conclusion to which he came was that the Welsh M.P.'s did not really desire to effect Welsh Disestablishment, but that they did honestly seek to compass the Disestab- lishment of the Church of England. In other words, Mr. Hutton refused to recognise that the Welsh M.P.'s were in any sense representatives of a nation, and saw in this only a wing of Eng- lish Nonconformity. The view was no doubt an exaggeration, but practically it has ever since been held by the English Press, Tory and Liberal alike. Even the agitation for Welsh Disestab- lishment and the eventual ratification of that de- mand by legislation never altered the opinion of the English Press. Welsh Disestablishment seemed to it to be merely a sectional move in the long crusade that English Nonconformity, ever since the thirties of the nineteenth century, had waged against the privileged position of the