Illuminations: An Anthology of Welsh Short Prose

This policy is a danger to the peace of Europe and exceedingly damaging to at least one small country in Britain, namely Wales. The Welsh Nationalist Party² can be expected to resist all the tendencies of this policy. But the point now is that England, too, has been injured and mistreated by the tradition of her government. By means of her one-sided, unbalanced development, and by neglecting and violating her geographical position, England for a while in the last century accumulated exceptional wealth and power. But her life has been the poorer for it. Sir William Morris declares it is high time that 'business ruled in politics'. England's disaster is that business has ruled her for three centuries. It was business — that is to say, the capitalists — which made the empire, and it is a few capitalists who are now the sole beneficiaries of that empire — the same capitalists who are arguing for the empire's economic union. That policy at least is bound to fail. Economic union cannot be created where there is neither natural unity nor geographical connection. Having failed in that, perhaps England will then be prepared to lend an ear to an alternative policy, and will attempt economic and political union within the continent to which she rightly belongs.

Y Ddraig Goch ( Hydref, 1930),
Canlyn Arthur ( Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1938)

Robert Beynon

He is an ordinary man and his wife is ordinary too. There was nothing exceptional about his father, nor his father-in-law either. The book of days has very little to say about his birth and will not mention his death unless there is an inquest upon it.

It is not to insult him, nor to set him below all others, to call him ordinary. There are ordinary men in plenty who are not in the street, and it's only fair to recognize that not every prominent or wellknown man is greater. It is not impossible for the man who lives in the street to be greater than he who owns the street. More prominence is given to many men, not because they are greater but because

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