LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [Correspondents are requested to keep their
letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week" Paragraphs. Signed letters are given a"inference over those bearing a pseudonym, and the latter must be accompanied by the name and address of thS author, which will be treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR.].
WELSH NATIONALISM
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sul,—Dr. J. D. Jones quotes the Archbishop of Wales as saying that we do not want to see Wales adopting the methods " of the Fenian incendiary or of the Chicago gunman for the furtherance of political projects." With that view members of the Welsh Nationalist Party will agree, and none more warmly than Mr. Saunders Lewis, who in the speech for his defence at Caernarvon said : " I have repeatedly and publicly declared that the Welsh nation must gain its political freedom without resort to violence' dr tb physical force. . . . And I submit to you that our action in burning the Penrhos aero- drome proves the sincerity of this affirmation. Had we wished to follow the methods of violence with which national minority movements are sometimes taunted . . . nothing could have been easier than for us to ask some . . . of the Welsh Nationalist Party to set fire to the aerodrome and get away undiscovered. It would be the beginning of methods of sabotage and guerilla turmoil. Mr. Valentine, Mr. D. J. Williams and I determined to prevent any such development. When all democratic and peaceful methods of persuasion had failed to obtain even a hearing for our case against the bombing range . . . we determined that even then we would invoke only the process of law, and that a jury from the Welsh people should pronounce on the right and wrong of our behaviour."
But it is more difficult to accept Dr. Jones's argument when he goes on to " deplore the distortion of moral values ..which can make some of our countrymen salute as ' heroes' men whose only title to that epithet is that they have com- mitted arson " ; for he has earlier in the same article refused to discuss the motives from which that arson was committed. The only ground on which these two facts can be reconciled is that Dr. Jones regards the commission of a crime as neces- sarily immoral ; and that is a ground which the history of Nonconformity should prevent any dissenting minister from adopting. The truer attitude is surely that of the Lord Chief Justice of England at the hearing of the application to move the trial of the three Welsh Nationalists to London ; it seemed to Lord Hewart that two things had been confused—" I seem to remember an eighteenth-century philosopher who said that a rebel might think it a moral duty to rebel, but the State might think it a duty to hang him for it." We are, I think, entitled to ask Dr. Jones what action he would have had the Welsh Nationalist leaders take against a government which, while it had given every opportunity for the expression of opposition to bombing schools in England, and had indeed consented to the removal of three from the sites chosen for them and to satisfactory restrictions upon the use of a fourth, contemptuously refused even to receive a deputation to put the case against the Welsh site Mention of the opposition to the Lleyn bombing-school leads me to the essence of the Welsh Nationalist Party, its defence of the Welsh nation as a living thing against the oppression which Imperialism and bureaucracy necessarily, though I suppose unwittingly, involve. Mr. R. Francis Jones asks why the members of the Welsh Nationalist Party do not become supporters of Lord Davies ; I am tempted to tell him to ask that question of the employees of the Ocean Coal Company, but I myself may suggest that no " New Commonwealth " can be hoped for at Geneva or elsewhere until exploitation, whether of individuals or nations, is ended. The fight for Dominion Status for- Wales, like the fight for Dominion Status for India, is fundamentally a fight against exploitation ; and it is the fact that economic nationalism is the only possible weapon for the fight against exploitation in a country where one industry has been developed at the expense of all others which justifies its use in Wales.
Dr. J. D. Jones was warm in defence of cultural nationalism ; Mr. R. Francis Jones is willing to jettison even the language which is the basis of that culture, in the interests of a universal- ism which is to find its expression in English. It is not perhaps surprising that a correspondent who thinks that
the internationalism of finance imposes a restraint- on its fostering of war should forget to consider whether the -greatest hope of a true internationalism does not lie in imitation of the Scandinavian peoples, than whom none more-actively maintains its own language and culture.—Yours faithfully,
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