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OPEN LETTERS TO WELSH LEADERS…

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OPEN LETTERS TO WELSH LEADERS OF: OPINION. No. XV MR. T. E. ELLIS, M.P. lUR. DEAR ELLIS,—" Theodore Dodd never had a correspondent to whom it gave him greater pleasure to indict a letter than to the hero of Cymru Fydd—the patriot who has brought the idea of Wales a nation from the study of the antiquarian into the region of practical politics —from the meeting place of the Cymmrcdorion Society to the floor:of the House of Commons. For, Ellis, as truly as the name of Glyndwr is bound up with the Welsh national rising of the fifteenth century, as truly as the name of Grattan is linked to the memories of those Irish volunteers, as truly as the names of ^Wallace and Bruce are blended with the freedom of Scotland, so truly when we are a nation, and when, in the days to come, sire to son shall tell the tales of freedom won," your name will always hold the first place among those who sacrificed all on the altar of Wales a nation. There are in North Wales many long-descended squires, who can truly trace a descent from the ancient princely families of Wales, and some of them, like William Wynne, of Peniarth—whom you (on dit) helped to make the^Lord-lieutenant I of Merioneth—are men of culture and sound judgment, too, when they can get the Church Establishment and the game laws out of their heads. Some of them, I can fancy, in a saner moment might have whispered to them- selves after reading your early speeches, when you JSXSt Stood before Merioneth as the nationalist can- didate. Oh, Oynlas, the landless, the heirless shall win Prouder name by this deed than the chiefs of our kin. For the old chiefs from whom the Wynnes of Peniarth. the Pulestons, and other such gentry are are discended, were the leaders in all national movements that failed. You are a leader in a na- tional movement that will succeed. Your success, too. dear Ellis, has in it many ele- ments of a romance. It seems strange to say. but, nevertheless, it is true, that as a politician you have been infinitely more successful than the G.O.M. or Lord Salisbury, or Mr. Chamberlain. They have made failures, they have suffered defeats, but as yet the star of good fertune has always shone on your banners. And yet, when one looks at the odds against which you have had to fight, one is astounded at the victory that you have won. It is, though, Tom bach, an over true tale. and yet it seems too strange to be true. Think what you were twelve years ago. You were born in a lonely Welsh village, but yet among the mountains of Merioneth, with your Arran and Cader Idris full in view, in the land where, cis the story runs. Arthur of the Round Table appnt his youth, and within a few miles or the home of Owen Glyndwr; .and from your earliest days the name of Charles of Bala (I mean y Bala) mnst have bean familiar to you. So from tliS earliest daya of your life every side of the Welsh nationalism, the mystic, the historic, the religious must have been present to you. You were, they tell me, a bright happy boy, and you had a happy home. Your father was and is a very typical Welsh Methodist farmer, -a "blaenor" in the Methodist Chr.pel, a prominent member of the "Corph," and greatly respected. But it is from your mother men say that you got your vivacitv and humour, and I can well believe H. Few of those who have visited Cynlas will forget Mrs. Ellis. You have several sisters who all worship yon, perhaps more than is good for you, one of whom we know spoke at a meeting at Llandrindod the other day on the pro- posed memorial (which Mr. Owen's patriotism would raise to the immortal memory of our last martyred prince Llewellyn), another of whom is an Aberystwith student. You had no brother. You never, I believe, went to a boarding school at any period of your life, and so your character has been far more moulded by women than that of most of your colleagues. You have gained something by it, Tom. Nay. you have gained a great deal. You have a light, delicate sarcastictouchaboutyou that the women have given you. You cannot lift the battle-axe of abme; but you can point the rapier of sarcasm a small, delicate point it has. but it can pierce the armour of fifty Goliaths. Think of that poor J.P. in Carmarthenshire—I forget his name—who tried to score off you. and got repaid with interest. And yet how beautifully you did it, and how delicately too. How Osborne Morgan would have shrieked, how Sam Evans would have bellowed, if someone had suppressed one of his letters and altered another. And yet you could calmly write to the gentleman in question :—" You altered your letter that was your own affair. You omitted part of mine; that was impertinence. You never published my second letter; that was unqualified meanness. And yet you are a magis- trate. bound by your oath to true and lawful deal ings." Oh. Tom, that letter was exquisite. No young lady ever gave an impertinent suitor a more satisfactory conge, and yet it was rather pretty all the same. And your letter to that poor dear Rector of Brymbo was equally pretty, and equally destructive. I never hear of the old gentleman now. You went to the pariah school, and yon made many friends of whom Wales now knows some- thing. There was Owen Edwards, then, as now. a student and a dreamer there was Puleston Jones, your own near neighbour, the theologian, the first- class history man, the nephew of Sir John Pule- ston, and the supporter of Lloyd George and there was Daniel, the North Wales temperance lecturer, who, in hia way, is a poet; and there were the sons of the other farmers, who, in the days that were to come, were to send you to Parliament, and wregt the government of your fair county from the Anglicised gentry and place it in the hands of those whose hearts beat in sympathy with the hopes and aspirations of the quarrymen and peasants of your native dales. At school you learnt the feelings of your countrymen. At home you saw Welsh Calvinism in its finest form. They thought then that you would be a preacher, and some dreamed that the mantle of John Elias had fallen on your shoulders. But there was another side to your life. "I have come," you once told the House of Commons, from a peasant home, and I know how awful a thing it is to hold our political and religious beliefs in a homestead that is at the mercy of an alien and unsympathetic landlord. There were dark deeds done near your home in 1868, and in the years that went before- A threat, it was said, was made to plant Owen Edwards a village of Llanuwchllyn with fir trees if the tenants dared to vote against the house of Wynne. Your own family were evicted after one election, and were threatened at many another. It was among these scenes that you grew up. You saw Wales, whose mountains, whose vales, whose religion you loved so well ground down and trampled under foot by a selfish and alien aristo- cracy you saw all places of offices and honour confined to a small minority of the population you saw the language of the people insulted and derided, and the labourers often living in places unfit for human beings. And then, so the story goes, you read the story of Glyndwr, the hero of your country, you learnt what a grand stand Wales could make for her liberty, even when she was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, and you dreamt that such a thing might again be. And then. as you were to be a preacher, vou went to y Bala and Aberystwyth. The first National Col- lege of the sons and daughters of Wales, as vou once described it, made you what you are. At Aberystwyth you were with your old Bala friends and you met others, of whom Wales was to hear Samuel Evans and Professor J. E. Lloyd. Aber- ystwyth taught you what stuff was in you. With all your exterior of girlish gentleness and refine- ment, you had at the bottom the fierce indomitable spirit of the Celt. You had not been long at the collebe before your fellow-students, and not only they, but the professors, whether English or Welsh. learnt that you were a leader of men. They called you in those days, I have heard, the Bishop. No Papal prelate of the Middle Ages ever spoke with more authority than you did there. Do you remember the rabbits, Tom ? There was a rabbit day dinner. Those rabbits did not suit the students' palates but, like Welshmen of the old school, they each grumbled, but held their tongues in the presence of authority. Tom organ- ised a strike. One day the rabbits were left un- tasted on the table and the students walked away. Rabbit day, as a day in the Aberystywth calendar, came to an end, thanks to you. In the same way] some time you will raise a similar strike against the government of Wales by an 'alien Parliament. The boy is father to the man. If Wellington learnt how to win Waterloo on the playground at Eton, so you, in defying successfully the authorities at Aberystwith, prepared yourself to win a battle against the lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons of England. Alike at Aberystwyth and Bala, as afterwards at Oxford and public in life, you exhibited another quality rarely found in politicians, but to which you owe your present popularity, and to which you will owe your future fame—a charming want of care for yourself. You. are, as we know now, and your friends learnt then. utterly unselfish. You only desire to work for and to serve Wales, for her sake, and not for yours. You would retire to-morrow from public life if you thought Wales would be the gainer. I doubt me. Ellis, if the patriotism of all your colleagues is as pure as yours. Stuart Rendel gives his guineas, but then he hopes to be my Lord Viscount. Sam Evans orates with the best; but Sam Evans' fee book, though he has not been called a year, would, if published, tell the world that to be a nationalist barrister is not only a thing glorious to the soul, but also profitable to the pocket. Bowen Row- lands, of course, is going to be a judge and Bryn Roberts—as good and true a fellow as ever lived— is yet becoming more and more the squire of his domain near Bangor. And Lloyd George, will go to the bar and beat Sam Evans' record. Yes, Ellis— Your mates have found both land and friends, Their heads and hearts to rest; Wales sees their flocks and fields increase, But loves you still the best. As was said of Grattan, he had abilities which would have gained him honour and position in any rank of life, but he preferred to devote them to the cause of his country and the poor, and he had his reward. You are the Grattan, not the Parnell of Wales. But I must return to my story. At Aberystwyth, Principal Edwards, who liked you far better than that more difficult personage Owen Edwards, came to the conclusion that you had a future, and partly at his advice you went to Oxford. You chose New College of all places in the world, not Welsh Jesus, not Liberal Balliol, but the aris- tocratic home of the pick of Winchester and Eton. You were among the aristocrats, and if Welshmen | grieved that they did not see more of you. Win- chester and Eton gained. You were among the Tories of the strictest sort, the men of the Canning Club, Worsley, Pemberton, and they all liked you, and you liked them also—and what is more to the point, you modified their views. One evening, I have heard, you met Viscount Cranborne, and you afterwards told a Welsh friend that he was not nearly so bigoted a Tory as you expected. I wonder what he said of you ? And, Tom, you belonged to the Palmerston, the Whigs' Club that the Earl of Portsmouth and Alfred Milner founded, and even with the Whig undergraduates, always a touchy class, you were popular. I have heard you speak at the Union. The House always listened to you, for you always talked sense; but although you got on the committee you did not make so distinguished a mark as your future career might have led us to expect, You could not speak English as fluently as you can now, and your accent, Tom, was entrc nous, a little against you with the bigoted T)ry "House." You took a second class in history, only just missing a first. But what effect hjid Oxford on your mind ? That is the interesting point. Bala had made you a Nationalist. Aberystwyth had taught you your power, but Oxford shaped your career. At the "Pam" at New College and at the Union you saw the future politicians, and took stock of them. You learnt at once that the Welsh Sunday School and the Welsh Eisteddfod was as good a training ground for an Imperial statesman, and a far tetter one for a Welsh representative, than the ancient and aristocratic schools of England. You saw that you were much more cut out for an M.P. than the gentry born in the purple, and you acted on that knowledge. You learnt this lesson yourself, and you have taught it to the Welsh people, and our Rationalist representatives are the result. At Oxford you also carefully studied the science of politics and economics. You sat, I know, many a weary day over Seebohm's "Village Com- munities," and you carefully mastered all that the new economists can tell us of the development of the present system of agriculture and industry. But your favourite authors were Mazzini and Thomas Davies. Mazzi:ii flight you the poetry of democratic nationalism. It purified your politics of the narrow selfishness of the Manchester school. It made you associate religion and nationalism. But Thomas Davies appealed to you even more nearly. A Welshman by descent, and yet the hero of the purest Irish movements was seemingly almost an im- possible mixture. The old Welsh Methodists had hated the Irish as a lazy idolatrous race of knaves. England had seen this, and had made the Welsh people their tools to do their fullest deeds of oppression in Ireland, and yet you found Davies equally proud of his Welsh descent and his Irish birth, claiming for both nations the right to a free national existence. When you read Davies the Liberals were coercing Ireland, but that weakened not your sympathies, you felt that blood is thicker than water, and you saw as Thomas Davies had seen before you that :the secret of Welsh and Irish discontent was the same, the refusal of England to allow the two nations a natural development. You read the long tragic story of Irish history, and your heart beat in sympathy with the long agony of a sister Celtic race. You despised the miserable argument of Protestant history, of some few Welshman that would keep alive this wronir, because the victims belonged to a different Church than theirs, and Davies also gave you hope for Wales. If he could hope and labour for Ireland against all hope; was not Wales equally worthy of freedom ? equally worthy of sacrifice ? The light of hope dawned in your breast, and made you what you are. It showed the Welsh National Party ere it existed, an^l it helped to create it, and, to quote Davies' own lines— And from that day, through wildest woe, That hope has shone a far light; Nor could life's brightest summer glow Outshine that solemn starlight. It seemed to watch above your head In forum, field, and fane Its angel voice sang round your bed, A nation once again." You decided to be a politician, and gave up the pulpit. You got a private secretaryship, distin- guished yourself in supporting the Liberal candi- date for Merioneth in 1885, when that candidate whom your efforts had made M.P. turned traitor. and the 1886 election came on, you were proposed as a candidate for your own fair land. You were not accepted, I know, without a struggle. That poor marque of a politician, Morgan Lloyd, ran you very close at the Liberal Association. For a moment—a moment big with possibilities in the history of our nation—the scale wavered then you were selected. You fought a hard fight against a Tory squire, and were returned. A new chapter in Welsh history forthwith commenced. The banner that had been laid to rest in Glyndwr's grave, men thought for ever, was again waved free in the mountain air, and Wales a nation was again a living force, for the first time since the fifteenth century, in the politics of Europe. And you, the farmer's son, the stripling of five-and- twenty, had done this deed. Ellis, had your pure soul passed away that moment you wouldyct have had a right to an immortal place in Welsh history. You went into Parliament, and a new era dawned for Wales. How you did make Osborne Morgan, and Dillwyn, and the old fogies shake in their shoes. How you did badger the Tory Ministers How you did bring it home to every cottage in Wales that there was at least one Welsh representative who was not an aristo- crat at heart, one Welsh representative to whom every oppressed Welsh peasant or toiler might turn for protection and relief. Your name spread over Wales. In every valley men blessed you, and many a vow was registered that every new Welsh M.P. who was sent to the House should go pledged to act on the lines of Tom Ellis of Cynlas. And then came the most glorious scene in all your life. Dogged by Balfour's detectives you visited Mitchelstown, you witnessed the massacre, and a day of two later you carried to the suffering victims the sympathies of Wales. By that act you closed the feud of centuries, and made an alliance between the two Celtic nationalities that neither ten thousand Presbyterian delegates, nor yet twenty thousand Brummagem orations can weaken or impair. You stood before Wales a hero. Into the slight reaction that ensued against you, I do not wish to enter now. It is of little importance, but I must take the opportunity to give you a few hints, and, Tom, you will need them. You have many enemies, aud the worst of these are so-called Liberals, and in Wales also there were some who complain that your nationalism is not sufficiently hearty, forgetting that but for you there would be no nationalism in ourpolitics at all. In the first place Osborne Morgan Dillwyn, Stuart Rendall. and the old gang generally do not love you. Bryn Roberts and Lloyd Morgan mistrust you, and even of the Nationalists some are jealous of you, and there are those who would trip you over, for when were there apostles without a Judas in the set. But you have Wales on your side, and as long as you are true to yourself and her the Cymry will be true to you. With my best wishes, I remain, dear Tom, your candid friend, THEODORE DODD. Next week Theodore Dodd will address an Open Letter to Mr. D. LLOYD GEORGE.

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