Welsh Journals

VOLUME XX WELSH OUTLOOK Where there is no vision the people perish .Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes iurns out not to be what they meant and other men have to fight for what they meant under ariuther name. .He who doeth well in fellowship, and because of fellowship, shall not fail though he seem to fail to-day, but in days hereafter shall he and his work yet be alive, and men be holpen by them to strive again and yet again." THE first number of the "Welsh Outlook" appeared in January 1914. The statesmen at the centre anticipated quiet and pros- perous times, and it was not to be expected that the founders of the new journal at the circum- ference should foresee the Great War. Had they done so they would certainly have faltered in their self-imposed task. The year 1913 had been one of maximum production in the coalfields and the industrial barometer indicated fair weather. Trade depressions had been getting shallower and shorter and there were good grounds for com- mercial confidence and therefore for a modest journalistic enterprise. Disestablishment was still a domestic controversy and events in Ulster were causing uneasiness. The outlook changed almost overnight. The twenty years reviewed in this issue have been determined and overshadowed by the Great War, and by its direct consequence, the Great Depression. Every phase of Welsh national life has been invaded, saturated, transformed by these two world-wide forces. The war itself united the vast majority of the people of Wales in its support, because its challenge reached them in the shape of the duty of defending a small nation violated by a big and brutal empire. It was "a Station of the Cross on the road to the emancipation of mankind." We had to pass along the Via Dolorosa from bar- THE NUMBER XII DECEMBER 1933 RETROSPECT William Morris: A Dream of John Ball. barism to civilization, "through terror to triumph." The nation only gradually realized the difficulty of defeating the enemy but it settled down to the job with characteristic doggedness. Sporadic labour difficulties were repressed or compromised. Old customary ways of work were speeded up or scrapped. Women found a hundred ways of helping in the struggle. A deep sense of common effort in a great and unselfish cause filled the people and lifted them to a con- sciousness of unity and devotion unknown in peace time. At length victory came and Versailles and for a short period high hopes of a world re-born, or, at least, re-constructed. But instead of a new world purified and exalted to a higher plane, it was a world debased and disjointed and disillus- ioned. What was really taking place, though we knew it not, was a readjustment at lower levels. In the economic sphere these levels were reached through a series of long-drawn in- dustrial battles culminating in the General Strike of 1926. In this warfare owners and workmen who had fought side by side against the Germans now fought each other as bitter enemies, and dealt their industries and the nation such shattering blows that they have not yet recovered from them. There were thus two wars and the South Wales coalfield has had to bear the devastation of both. Tariffs have shut out coal from foreign ports