Welsh Journals

amenable to local control, the world is stead- ily shrinking and even in this respect the old barriers are breaking down, as shown by a na- ional electricity scheme, the formation of a road board, possibly a national housing scheme, cer- tainly by joint water boards, joint sanitary and joint hospital authorities. It may be claimed with some justice that the Welsh National Memorial Association is a not un- worthy prototype of what the future has in store. It has another significance. As an important unit in the tuberculosis movement it has contributed to the educational and humanitarian benefits which that movement has conferred upon the community, the extent of which is not generally appreciated. Sanitarians are apt to state that the fall in the mortality and morbidity of tuberculosis forms simply a part of, and is almost wholly due to, the general improvement in the public health that has occurred, largely through their efforts, during the last fifty years. But it can be maintained that the campaign against tuberculosis has brought just as much to the Public Health Service as it has re- have before, me as I write, the first issue of the "Welsh Outlook" in its Grey Friars robe, pub- lished in January 1914. As I return to fondle it after twenty years, one of its features almost startles me. Can I have noticed at the time its ostentatious, almost impudent, disregard of the political issues and controversies of Wales at that moment? The whole attitude of those who were launching it indicates that they were perfectly conscious that they had been quite definitely en- dowed with the gift of prophecy. Their task was to define with the utmost precision the "beauti- ful ideals of moral excellence" for Wales, and al- though they admitted in passing that the politician had his duty like everybody else to answer the fate- ful questions What sort of Wales are you seek- ing ? What do you wish the country as a whole to be aiming at ?-at any rate by implication they did not seem to be greatly interested in the parti- cular political activities of the moment or to derive much inspiration or hope from them. Apparently they felt in their bones that the comings and goings of the political life of Wales at the begin- ning of that eventful year of 1914 had become in- sulated, and did not react to the great fundamental forces which were to shape the future of the coun- try for the next generation. That was obviously the view of the eclectics. ceived, that, in fact, a great part of the improve- ment that has occurred is due to the recognition of principles that were first established by pioneer workers in this field of medicine. The recognition of the universal applicability of these principles was the next step, i.e., the realis- ation that the conditions essential to the preven- tion of consumption and to the well-being of the consumptive are precisely the conditions that are necessary for the maintenance of the normal in- dividual in a high standard of health. The last step, the establishment of these conditions, dom- estic and industrial, amongst the rest of the com- munity, remains to be undertaken, conditions which have already been tried out experimentally and .with success at Papworth and elsewhere. When that is effected we shall have built a rtew Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. The campaign against tuberculosis is steadily succeed- ing in its primary object, but its greatest triumph is the lead it has given and is giving to the wider cause of social reform. POLITICS by T. Huws Davies On the other hand, a great mass of Welshmen who were by no means politically unconscious or unintelligent regarded the political events of the beginning of that year as of the highest import for the future of the nation. An old controversy of nearly a century's standing-that of the position of the State Church in Wales-was, at any rate as far as legislation was concerned, on the point of being determined once and for all, under what were regarded as the providential provisions of the Parliament Act. It is interesting to remember now, twenty years afterwards, that it came into operation in !September 1914, and is the only Act of Parliament which ever has become effective under the Parliament Act, and has had to be so administered with many consequent disadvantages. For any historian who takes the trouble to ascer- tain the facts it will afford an exemplary instance of the danger to all parties of legislation under duress and by force. But this is beside the point here. Until the early years of the nineteenth century Wales had been in the mass as politically uncon- scious as the rest of the United Kingdom. It had not even had any of the turmoils of Acts of Union. The marriage of Wales and England, politically, was quietly celebrated in a subsidized Tudor Reg- istry conducted on the basis of patronage and