Welsh Journals

"either know or have a shrewd suspicion of the identity of the persons who submitted work (as if that should matter !). The judge, apparently, should have been from beyond the border. And so on,-all very unpleasant- Nobody, it seems, had a word of admiration for the courage of the men who acted up to their convictions and with- held the prize. Personally we would rather walk in and out of a cage of hungry Bengal tigers with a leg of mutton in our hands than wave a ten pound note in the faces of forty poets and put it back in our pocket. And anyway, as Huw Menai meekly explained to his critics, his adjudi- cation was not delivered at the Eisteddfod-the literary pavilion was empty when he got there so he is being condemned unheard. We print his comments on the competition elsewhere in this number, and leave it to our readers to estimate his competence as a critic for themselves. IT is difficult to believe that only fifty-two years ago local government in this country was a chaos of overlapping areas and conflicting authorities. Then came the Local Government Act of 1888, a revolutionary measure which recog- nised the county as the all-important unit for locaL government and established the right of the ratepayers to appoint their own County Councils. Since then the whole tendency of legislation has been to Increase the powers and duties of those Councils. In 1894 district and parish councils were created, but the principle previously laid down was re-affirmed and widely extended in 1929. This process of devolution is bound to continue. It has long been obvious that a policy of over-centralisation in London is undesirable. Westminster seems, up to the present, to have set its face against national or provincial parlia- ments except in the case of the experiment in the north-east corner of Ireland, and the only alter- native is to develop the County Councils. They will become, and indeed should become, local par- liaments, and yet the pity of it is that, speaking generally, public interest in the proceedings of these bodies is very lukewarm, and in some coun- ties scarcely exists at all. On every hand there are complaints that the number and quality of men who seek election leave much to be desired. It cannot be otherwise unless every effort is made to stimulate public interest and attract the best men both as members and officers. The recent decision of the Montgomery Council Council is therefore most regrettable. In that county the offices are divided between the two principal towns, and the meetings are held alternatively in the Newtown Police Court and the Welshpool Town Hall. An offer to provide a new County Hall on condition that the offices were consoli- dated was turned down and the dual system is to continue. Whatever may have been the influ- ences which resulted in this short-sighted de- cision, the only reason given was that the system had worked satisfactorily in the past "-a reason, if it is a reason, which will ever be popular with opponents of any reform. SILYN Roberts was associated with the "Welsh Outlook" from its commencement, sixteen years ago. For a time he edited it. In recent years he was a regular reviewer of the Welsh literature, and particularly of the poetry, noticed on our review page. His death while still in his prime involves us and our readers in a deep personal loss; but that loss, great as it is, is overshadowed by a greater-the loss to the cause of adult education in our country. There he had found his niche, and was doing great work. He was a man of varied experience and wide attainments. Beginning in the Welsh Calvinistic ministry, he turned to a University appointment, thence to the Ministry of Labour, and finally be- came North Wales organizer for the Workers' Educational Association and held an external lectureship under the University College of North Wales. Under his hands the adult education movement in North Wales grew at a pace which threatened to out-distance the financial resources available. The development was amazing, and few except his most intimate friends realised the unending strain to which Silyn Roberts subjected himself, or how much the cause owed to his con- stant care. Without doubt he will be remembered by his generation as writer, scholar and poet, and his place will be hard to fill in many a national movement from the Eisteddfod to the Welsh Folk Song Society. But his enduring monument is to be found elsewhere. The men and women of the Welsh countryside, to whom education is still a lodestar, and in whose hands, we believe, lies our country's destiny, well knew his value. They mourn a leader lost. And their children's children will give thanks to Silyn for the great movement which lives after him and which bears the imprint of his pioneer labour. AT its annual meeting held in Llanwrtyd, the Welsh Nationalist Party resolved by a majority to discard, for the present at least, the policy of abstention from Westminster. We are very glad. It takes courage for a young party to admit a mistake, especially when it con- cerns what has been publicly advertised as a fundamental plank in the party platform. The admission of error was perhaps a little grudging, cloaked in a good deal of what the Oriental calls "face-saving talk," (we are told, for instance, that this change of policy is "less dangerous to- day owing to the deterioration in the prestige of the House of Commons"), and accompanied by