The Cambria Daily Leader

Sun Risss 5.5, Sun Sats 1t.J1. Lighting-up Time, 9.51. High Wator, 16.31 a.m., 16.47 p.m. King's Dock, 47ft. lin. a.m., 36ft. Sin. p.m. To-morrow, 11.1s a.m., 11.34p.m.

HOME RULE TO THE FRONT. Discussing the question "What is the matter with Parliament?" and stating that there'is "some- thing radically wrong," the 'Times' Parliamentary correspondent gives prominence to the solution, pre- ferred by a section growing in num bers and influence every day, of a comprehensive scheme of federal devolution. This plan comes im- mediately into the range of prac- tical polities, for to-day and to morrow the House of Commons will debate a motion on the subject. The resolution, which a Unionist will move and a Liberal will second, affirms the desirability of enabling the Imperial Parliament to devote more attention to the general interest of the United Kins; dom and, in collaboration with tlu other Governments of the Empire, to matters of common Imperial concern. To this end it declares that the time has come for th3 creation of subordinate Legislatures within the United Kingdom, and calls upon the Government, with- out prejudice to any proposals it may have to make with regard to Ireland, to appoint forthwith a Parliamentary body" to consider and report- 1. Upon a measure of federal devolu- tion applicable to England, Scotland, and Ireland, defined in its general outlines by existing differences in law and adminis- tration between the three countries. 2. Upon tlio extent to which these differ- ences are applicable to Welsh conditions and requirements; and 3. Upon the financial aspects and re- qiuremeuts of the measure. The main resolution asks definitely for three subordinate Legislatures. Welsh members at once table an amendment to add a fourth for their country. Another amend- ment presses the creation of a new Heptarchy—that is, tho division of England itself int.) provinces each with its subordinate Legislature. This latter was the solution of the difficulty proposed some years ago by Mr. Churchill. A conference is to be held at Llandrindod in Whit-week to talk over the Welsh attitude. We have- not much faith in "fhese holiday- time conferences, and, when think of the last Llandrindod fiasco, not many hopes of practical results accruing. But we must say that the programme of next week's three day gathering promises better things than the last. Professor Zimmern, who has just been appointed to the Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth, is to give the opening address; and he 's a thinker of such originality and clearness that the conference will a at once have a high standard to live up t.o. Other speakcrs will include Sir Walter P. Nicholas, Aid. D. R. Williams, chairman of the Central Welsh Board, and (of course) Mr. E. T. John. Outside Professor Zimmern, the platform is not tn- spiring, but this will not- be a disad. vantage if the attendance includes men and women really representa- tive 6f he public life of Wales and I t-hey are giveja- opportunities of ex- pressing themsel ves. These conferences, as a. rule, are cut and dried eort of affairs, with s$t resolutions and a long li-s ot pre-arranged speakers. If tbè Llandrindod Conference of next i week is to be useful, thne must be provided for general discussion, and, above all, the speaking rmnr-t be preserved from the people who mouth generalities about Prince Llewelyn, Wales the Land of White Gloves and of' Sunday Sc hools, Wales the Land of the Perfect System of Education- We are living in A.D. 1919, and Wales is not te).dqy a laud of 'Vbit Gloves, its Sunday Schools are gftevously declined, and its feductt- t-onal system it painfully deficient. It thevConference keeps to the plain isaue of Home flule, our prepared ness for it or, otherwise, and the lines of national cleavage, it will be worth while. Not upon any otbier score. Of far more value in our opinion is the announcement of the "Welsh Outlook that groups have been formed in more than one centre for the purpose of carrying out d. tailed and exhaustive inquiries into such questions as Welsh auto- nomy, Welsh education, Welsh land and agriculture, and that it is hoped befote the end of the year that the results of thesa inquiries will hatV<s bèri published- This is the b8&t, and, we are iaclined to think, the only way. Conferences have a. habjt 01 missing the bard facts and wail- ing themsej vés in rhetork-plea8. ing: to the immediate audience, but useless for practical end-s.

THROUGH A COTTAGE WINDOW. XXII-Citizenship and the Statehood. By GEORGE W. GOUGH. Since I wrote last other casea of bad citizenship have attracted the attention of the whole nation. To begin with, the procession of Discharged Soldiers and Sailors attempted to do what the laws and regulations of the metropolis torbade them to do—namely, to approach the Houses of Parliament. The existence of the rule was well known, its reasons are obvious and natural—yet they wanted to break it. A man cannot be a good citizen and break a ba4 law. I know that looks awful, put down in cold print, but there it is, and I stand by it as the fundamental rule of citizenship. It was different in days when the State provided no legiti- mate means by which organised citizens could *,ert fheir wills and get their way. Then the good eitiaen, on rare occasions even then, was impelled to break the strict law. Those days have gone by for ever, so far as we are concerned. The laws we want are laws that we can have. So I write it down again, for the sake of emphasis. No man can be a good citizen and break a bad law. But now I add that no man can be a good citizen and not do ail he can to get a bad lau abrogated and a good one put in itp place. And that's j that. J The" London police, doing the only do- I a>bl« thing—rtheir duty, tried to stop the prooessiohists from breaking the law. | Whereupon the processionists threw wooden paving blocks and chunks of con. crete at tho police. The state of mind of the processionists who did that indicates a capacity for citizenship that would dis- credit a Zulu kraal and would be con- j sidered indecent in a compound of Aus- tralian black-fellows All this was bad enough, but next day there was a letter of apology. From the processionists to the police? Not by a long way. The letter of apology was from the Secretary of the PliemenJ6 Union, and was addressed to the processionists in par- ticular and labour in general. That letter means one thing and one thing only. The men who wrote it ufieo words which clearly infer, and in faet plainly hint, that he hopes the day will come when the police will not prevent labour from breaking the law. I suppose that Utopia, as imagined by some folks, will come when policorneri keeip the ring while the "proletariate" cracks the skulLs. of the bourgeoisie," The Red Guard of Lenin and Trotsky appears to have done something of the kind, and the sort of Utopia they have provided for the Russian proletariate is now becoming' known to all. Bad economics and bad eitlzcnsjiip always go together. They went together during the Industrial Revolution, and left behind them a pretty mess for us to clear up— slums and sweating, and poor-houses and parasitism. If, in thes* dnys when we do mean to clear the mess up, ty are to go together agnin, the last state of this country will be worse than the first, THE QUEST OF THE STATE. I We are, you will remember, engaged in 9 rery important quest. We want to find the State. We have t-b-e bf*t of all reasons for setting forth en this adven- ture. Th6 State ij to be c-illm upon to do something—namely, set about remov- ing the causes of the prevailing evils of society. We ngf, for example, that COftl. miners need not necessarily be huddled up in filthy mining valleys. We do not expect that work on the face of a seam can be made clean and refreshing to the body and lightsome and agreeable to tbv soul, any more than we expect to drop git on to without ing them. But when a miner has done with the mine, he ought to be ilbl-! to be a gentleman; to have, that it,, leisure for cnltnre. a desire to be cultured, and an opportunity for finding culture. There is no reason at all why he should be housed Iwe sumptuously than the mine-owner's hunter. Of course the hunter can do eothing to house himself, and not much to feed himself, and he has to be a mere recipient of the good things he gets, where- as the miner has got to be the chief maker of them, But both in making them and in fitting the miner to make them, this thing called the State is to take an im- portant share, and that is why we want to find it. Now consider this very simple but light- giving truth. If one of my readers, having timfc and mohev and wal to sv,are, were to feet out from Swansea to find the State. he cou'd not do it. Search high, search low, he would never see it, feci it, or touch it. He could see the King, the Prime Minister, the Government, the Govern- ment ofifcer, the Houses of Parliament— but not the Stat.p. The State, vastly im- portant-as it is. is not something he sets but an inference from all the things he sees. It is the life of the body politic. 'th pilrgwn, operating on the pathological human body, can see both the body and its ofgánsthe braip. the h0@'8.rt. the lungs, and so on. Life he cannot see. Life elud es the most delicate scalpel And the most powerful microscope. Nay in seek- ing for life, he might easily destroy it though he ea.n I never find it. Is it not exactly like this with the State? May we not, quite easily, in seeking ignorantly and blindly for the State of our ideals kill the State that actually exists and ruin the whole enterprise? Whatever the State is, it is clearly something that does not have an independent existence. Life is not an attract thing. It is always found connected with a living body. So the State is no independent existence, but a something-of-the-nature-of-life connected with the co-existence of a number of citiens in a prescribed area of land. The 1State is a function of citizenship. THE STATE AS A FUNCTION. P 10U are, or can easily make yourselves, familiar with the conception of some- thing which changes as and because some- thing else changes. A locomotive is at reel in I-addington station. The driver pulls the lever, and it commences to move. At the. end of five seconds it clears the piat- form, at the end of ten seconds it passes the oJgnal box. The distance travelled is constantly increasing. it is never the same for two eexxmds together, every tenth of a second, it greater, every" thousandth Ott. a second, every millionth. 1'he distance travelled changes with the time of travelling. Distance is a funotion of time. At first it moved just perceptibly. The rate of travelling is in question now, not th4) distance travelled, i'he rate of speed increases, and it increases as the steam pressure increases. Rate is a function of pressure. All these things, time, distance, speed, steam-pressure, adimt ot exact measure- ment. If you are not familiar with these things, you may have a boy at school do- ing graphs. It so, get him to show you how he measures time along one line on squared paper and distance along another, and draws a curve representing the func- tion. To get a firmer grip of this notion of a fiinction-a thing changing as and be- cause something else chanutJs-let us see how w can apply it to things more in our line as tellow students of tile social ques- tion. The relation between the supply otf strawberries and their price is of the same nature. I saw my first strawberries the other day—-fitteen <5i them in a little pinnet in a West-end shop-window, price eight shillings. Few strawberries—many pence per pound. You will see something like it in Swansea. Now watch what hap- pens. Thanks to the warm June sun, the supply, of strawberries will increase, gradually at first and then rapidly, and the price will decrease, gradually at first and then rapidly. Price is a function ol supply. sal 1 hve said that the State is a function of citizenship, and if you have grasped the notion ot a function from the above familiar illustrations, you will, I hope, be- gin to see the outlines of the great super- structure of social truth that rests upon this subtle, but sure foundation. It ex- plains why in seeking to learn what the Estate is, we have laid &o much stress upon the citizenship of the citizen. The English State clearly enough is in- timately connected with Fiigiand-the stretch of territory occupied by the Eng- lish people. A given folk and a given land ar.e essential Ingredients in the mak- ing of a State. I was only in pre-war Germany one-e-for a month in the year lIO. When I got there 1 found much with which I was familiar, a.nd of course much that was either quite new or only known to me from books. I was in the German liiid among the German folk, and no intelligent and inquisitive English- man (and I am the one oven if I escape being the other) could be there a month without feeling that the German State was a very different thing from his own Knglish State. Fufther inquiry and re- flection would eoon have convinced him that this difference between the two States was rooted and grounded in differences between the two peoples. The quality of citizenship affects and determines the quality of Statehood. Talk to any man who lipts lived for some time among a savage people—the Bush- men or the Australian blacks." The word "savage" is here used with the colourless sense of v* belonging to a lower grade of civilisation," and is not mellnt to pass a depreciatory judgment either in morals or religion. He might not be, abic., to give you a clear notion of what the State is, but he would tell you that, what- ever it is, the Bushmen and the Austral- ion blacks have not got it. They are a people, a folk with a hirtory and a tra- dition. They have long inhabited certain definite portions of land. But the State, that elusive unknown thing, is 'not there with them. In fact, it is the educative influence of life among such people, or the capacity to realise it from printed accounts without having to live it, that makes one begin to realise the real mean- ing of the State. Now reflect on the general lesson to be drawn from any first-rate history (say Green's or Gardiner's, both being in one volume and excellent reading) of our own country. Surely it is that, RtnrtinT from to-day, which you know by experience, you can work backward until you come to a time when ti e State differed considerably, in origin and conception, from what it is to-day with us. And from the1 State, of that day, say the year 1100, you can work farther hack ward to a State that was alto- gether different, say in the year BOO, and back and back until there is no discover- able State at all but only groups of people. And where history stops, pre-history, written in the rocks of our mother-land, takeg up the tale, and finally lands you in vague imaginings about the man to whom the famous Piltdown skull once belonged. And what has been changing, during all t'hoso thousands and tens of thousands of years, to make the State change? Th* man, ofcour.s.e-the citizen. And if we want the State to change again, what must change first? The man, of course- the eitisen.

[TOWN TALK. He is telling- a lie. a Gospel lie," re- marked a withess at the Police Court on Monday. No wonder it turned off cold yesterday afternoon. The Swansea police, appeared on the Areets in their summer hats! A conspicuous figure in the Swansea Battalion procession was the inevitable Navv man. Nothing is complete without Jack! 0, There has been a circular distribution at Neath on How to rear pigs," with a footnote, If you don't need it pass it on to a friend. Be careful, boysl o: Seaman David George Evans, Pontar- dulais, has a tine record as a comedian. He has figured in over 1,000 charity per- formances since the outbreak of the great war. -:0;- An Abercreggan defendant, who said that the man who ueed the bad language had not be?n summoned, told the con- stable from the box at Aberavon, That's straight ta'.king for you." 0; An income-tax prosecution at Aberavon on Monday a collier's earnings were given as kl 1.0 per quarter' The writer was also s-hown the pay slip of a 22 year-old col- lier showing a week's wages as E9 Is. Id. 0: To Mr. John Davies, Tyncoed Farm, Pontardulais, belongs the honouT of hav- ing bred the highest graded beast yet at Pontardulais Mart. which is so successful an institution. The animal was classed Al plus 3s. -:0:- The lure of a shilling held up in the hand of a milk inspector ought to be suf- ficient to stop not only one milk vendor but a regiment of milk vendors."—Mr. Henry Thompson at the Police Court on Monday. -:0:- Apropos that paragraph in this column about children devouring ices before 9 a.m., a local father sadly tells us that they are also eating them after 9 p.m.— when they should be in bed. Oh, those light evening! -:0:- The prospect of an increase in the food prices is reviving the question of X ntionalK;ken@, Should they be es- tablished again thwe are a good many Swansea people who are hoping that one may be established in the town. —< O- — H My experience is that Welshmen who understand EngVsh often say that they do not, especially when they are being cross-examined."—Judge Avory, at a North Wales Assize Court. Who will say that the Welsh are not -:0:- Don't forget that the 6th Weleh Colours have not come nome from Ger- many yet," said an old lady in Wind- street yesterday. We can assure her that Swansea has not forgotten its famous Territorial regiment. The 6th Welsh day is to come. -:0:- Ever heard of a horse committing suicide? At Neath th4 other day a horse was rescued from drowning in a ditch, and a few hours later it bolted out of the paddock, cantered down the treet. and hurled itself against a stone wall. No flowers by request! -0:- A fit. Thomas man who hAe looked everywhere for a dwelling, a.nd flays his wife has looked evekrywhero else, with, of course, no success, gave Iiir, frimdr, in the car this morning a modern finWon of a house. A hoii,,e he .tH. is some- thing someone else ltree in." o" A Swansea man who recently wittiemed tho return of the Colours of the London Scottish observed after yesterdays pro- cession that the one great difference in the two events was that while the Londoners all bared their heads as the Colours passe d by, he did not see one hat raise d to the Swansea Battalion Colours. -'0:- The improvement ca.rried out by the s wanaea Corporation in the widening of the path from Limeslade to Langland is much appreciated by the large number of pleasure seekers who enjov this walk around the cliffs. If the City FA(hers" heArd the ooinpliments paid them on Saturday they would blush with pride. -:oc- The popularity of Swansea as a noL'. day rasort seems to be increasing from year to year. During the present season, liowever, if early promises are fulfilled, all eecords are likely to be broken, for it was apparent to anyone walking about the parks and sands over the week-end that a good many holiday-makers have already arrived in tha town. An allotment holder not five miles from the centrp of the town-and a teetotaler. too-says he for one is glad that all extra half-hour was recently tacked on to the oppniiix hours of public-houses. Formerly he had an audience giving him copious advice as to how the job should be done. Now he just manage* t<. finish his work before the critical crowd comes along. -:0:- Tliera is a very angry amateur gardens in fche west end of the town. He had spent a little money and a good deal of time and trouble over his patch, and the stuff was coming up in a manner that promised a bountiful harvest, when his neighbour's fowls went on a foragtng ex- pedition and played havoc with the pro- due?. Next year, he says, he is going to hlln.:1 the ;F".dot over to the fowtI. Tt will save him and tzhf ni .1 !load deal of trouble. The cricket reports remind a soldier correspondent of amusing incident which occurred in the Balkarts. HQ wsis stationed near the Struma Valley, and attached to his unit was an interpreter who usually carried with him a huge home-orinted English-Greek dictionary. One day our correspondent had an (ft- portunity of glancing through this booTc and discovered spreral errors in the spelling. One of theni concerned word cricketer, which was spelt without the "k." But it was quite another matter to convince the interpreter that the word was mis-soelt. It was in .h. book and that was bound to be right. -;0:- There have been nvjnv threats made bv bodies of workmen that they would go on strike if the Government did not that a larger barrelage of beer was forth- coming. A most novel way of getting a regular supply has been initiated in the Rhondda. Led by the Labour and non- political clubs in the Rhondda Valley, tbf Union of South Wales Clubs is embark- ing upon a scheme for the purchase of a brewery as a going concern, the purchase price being something like 820,000. The first aim of the scheme is to secure a more regu lar supply of beer, first to the affili- ated clube of the Union, and subsequently to South Wales generally. —<— It will be interesting to our boys wlio .av.bMn ?em<?MliMd after 46* thfj# bit in Bel?imn to know th?t the ?J? IM<? ? tw had to, ccmtM? wm aJ# being tumtd to useful purposes. Thi Belgian farmer who àaa returned to his BheH-shattewd fields h" eolved his own particular housing problem by converting an undamaged pill-box" into a tJeqn. porarv honie for himself and faiaaily. Som* of the«e old forts, which contain lour or wore large rooms, are alfeady being turned into eafee, in anticipation of the tourist parties which will throng the battlefields as soon as passnort ovd travel restrictions are relaxed. ■