WELSH HOME RULE.
[To TEC EDITOR OF TRI1 "sPiccp,Tos."1
Sin,—With our national preoccupation about Ireland, Wales is naturally somewhat out of focus. Thus an incident, worthy
of attention, may have escaped notice. The Welsh Liberal Members have agreed to a memorandum embodying certain principles to be adhered to in re-drafting their Welsh "Home Rule" Bill. The Bill itself, as far as we understand it, appears to be another good example of that petty tyranny which we have come to associate with the new "Liberalism." It is unlikely to reach the Statute-book, but even placed there it would be rendered nugatory by the determined hostility of a minority of the Welsh people—a minority powerful enough to enforce its veto. There would be no question here of a "clean cut," since the minority is evenly distributed in Wales and England. The loyalists of Wales alone could bring the bureaucratic machine to a standstill by the judicious application of grit. The people—the Welsh people who cherish the integrity and continuity of Welsh influence in British affairs—who remember Bosworth field and what it stood for, and who resent the recent " discovery " of Wales as "the youngest of the nations" (whereas it is old among the oldest) —these people are not going to allow their liberties to be handed over to a coterie which they dislike and despise. One of the notes of the present day is the self-assertiveness of the smaller nations, but it should be remembered that the phenomenon is symptomatic of a still more important move- ment on the road to human liberty—the political self-assertion of minorities. Every true lover of liberty now realizes that the tyranny of a " democratic " majority may be more un- bearable than that of an individual, and that in modern bureaucracy the "sovereign people" is forging itself fetters which it will be at some pains to shatter when the first crude labourings of demagogues have ceased and the ferment of " unrest " shall have subsided under a wider illumination.—
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