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I Public Opinion -and Strikes

I The Strike Settlement. !

Our City Fathers To Be.-I

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Our City Fathers To Be. I DAI DAVIES. I Two of us this week have found devices we in- vented to help us turning into devices for our destruction. My Comrade Jowett has had to drop his Political Notes heading that he might write on the strike and its meaning, and here am I writing about our City Fathers to be "-and find ing a city father pre.sent tense on my hands in the person of Councillor Dai Da vies of Pant. Of course, I know that he is going to continue to be," but in thinking even of Dai Davie* a*, anything else but a Oity father, in- deed as anything other than a sort of father of city fathers, the ludicrulty of the thought breaks down the seriousness, and I smile. Dai so accurately fits the place that it is the height of absurdity to imagine a seat in the Council Cham her without a. little white card in a little brass frame reading D. Da vies." Of course, Merthyr voters have done equally absurd things in the past, and in the not very far back past too, as last November witnessed, and they may lose their senses again, but it will hardly be in the comfortable, .sedate suburb of Pant that the rot wiM start. Mr. Dai Da-vies—somehow that Mr. seems a.s difficult to bring in before the name as swallow- ing a pill whilst in bed, and so I am restarting— Dai is part of the town—his recollections go back vividly to those days when policemen wore top hats to the eternal temptation of good little boys, and lamp lighters trotted around with short ladders and long tapers, to the eterna l glee of bad little boys. And right through from that day to this he has been intimate and ac- tive in its affairs. I am not going to say that it is because of Mr. Davies that automatic clock- work attachments light our lamps to-day. or policemen wear neat clothes and headgear that does not allow of one mistaking them from our old nobility, but I am going to say this with conviction and emphasis—if Dai Davies didn't invent the sartorial and mechanical improve- ments that local governments to-day possess, he did at least, and does, too, see that those im- provements are not bought at the price of de- pressed conditions of the labourers of the muni- cipality. There are hundreds to-day who may well thank the sanity of the franchise holders who had sense enough to send to the Council Chamber a man of such enthusiasm, such out- spoken frankness and such unmistakable cham- pionship of the workers and their cause as Dai Davies. OUR YOUNGEST MEMBER. I Dai Davies is a live-wire of virulent enthu- siasm. That is why, despite his advantage in age over his colleagues and comrades of the La- bour benches, he is the youngest member of our group. He is too virile, too much a part of the scheme of things to ever grow to middle age, even though his years come to surpass the biblically alloted span of man's life. It was that wonderful energy of youth that led him, with his Council colleague, Llewellyn Francis, and a mere handful of others, to defy the whole Con- servative spirit of the Merthyr Labour Move- ment in those exciting days when Hardie was first brought to fight the seat; it was the same tremendous enthusiasm that won the seat. And to-day undiminished it is the same enthusiasm that bursts forth in explosive resentment of in- justice, of anything mean or tricky burst forth in a torrent that is absolutely startling and un- conventional, but which is a mighty force for the health and well being of the borough. THE RED FLACCER. I Dai Davies has grown grey, but never sour in the service of the municipality and the movement. Dai Davies has been, is, and is still to be a councillor of Labour and a Labour councillor—one of the City Fathers to whom is entrusted the task of making the town, if not fit for heroes to live in, at least a little fitter for workers to dwell within. The Red Banner is his flag, and next November as so often before, he will carry it to victory—a vic- tory earned by personal serried by mutual good- wi,]T. by unimpeachable devotion to the cause of the people, and by the great awakening of De- mocracy that to-day is seeing that in Labour alone lies the hope of the future. A.P.Y. I

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