MALIGNANT SOCIAL GERM ?

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 October 1948, Page 4

MALIGNANT SOCIAL GERM ?

Surely there must be some malignant social germ widely diffused like a pestilence throughout the contemporary world. Heres Wales now! Land of singers, bards, footballers and war leaders like Lloyd George and “Billy” Hughes—here’s Wales or rather the Welsh Nationalist Party, writing to the Dominion Prime Ministers, now meeting m London and asking them “to consider the restoration of self-government to Wales,” and charging the British Parliament, amongst other misdeeds, with “repeated attempts to ignore the existence of Welsh nationality. Truly a mad world, my masters. Why, it is only a few days ago that Mr Churchill, the greatest living representative of this wicked Parliament, received in Wales the most wildly enthusiastic reception in his career. If this is not the malign germ at work, or some hidden human agency with political motives pulling the strings “to make the idol frown,” it m'ay be just a resurgence of the old Welsh spirit, so demonstrative in religious revivals, at football matches, and long before in an extraordinary outburst of song and poesy. This Was in the twelfth century. Readers of history will remember how Wales suddenly awoke out of its semi-barbaric torpor and stood forth as the land of romantic and patriotic poetry, ahead of all the mediaeval literatures of Eurone. It is related that jn the struggles against England a Welsh chieftain said to the King, “I deem that no other race or other tongue will answer for this corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day. save this people and tongue of Wales.” Can it be this old prophecy is still potent?— “Civis” in the Otago Daily Times.