The Principality

[THE LATE MEETING AT PRYNMAWR. TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRINCIPALITY. Siit,-FroTi-i an allusion made by one of the speakers at the late m-eeting at Brynmawr, report has gone abroad that I was present. I beg, however, to state that I was not there, and did not even hear of the assembly till it was over. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, JOHN HUGHES, Curate of Llanelly, Breconshire. March ].

PROPOSED MONUMENT TO THE LATE THOMAS CHARLES. TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRINCIPALITY. SIR,—Having read in the PRINCIPALITY for the 8th inst. a paragraph about erecting a monument to the eloquent, celebrated, and immortal THOMAS CHARLES, of BALA, founder of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and Sun- day Schools in Wales, I beg to inform the public generally that there are gentlemen in this neighbourhood ready to contribute towards the erection thereof, when the estimate may appear in the columns of the PRINCIPALITY. I am, dear sir, yours truly, Llandissyl, Feb. 28,1848. 1 DAVID DAVIES.

THE REPORTS.—EYIDENCE OF THE REV. ROWLAND DANIEL. TO THE INHABITANTS OF THE PARISH OF ST. NICHOLAS, IN THE COUNTY OF PEMBROKE. CHRISTIAN FRIENDS,—You have, Yery likely, either seen or heard how you are characterised by your rev. in- cumbent in the Commissioners' Reports (see Mr. Lingen's, page 398). Your moral character is authoritatively re- quired and your rev. informant has seen fit to expose you in the face of the nation, the two houses of Parliament, and the world, as bearing a character which is not good. You are all, be it understood, involved in the description. and placed in one and the same condition, without the least regard to any distinction which may exist amongst you; whether learned or illiterate, believers or infidels, rich or poor, your wholesale character is, not good, without any difference or mitigation. Whatever is implied in the term good,-whatever virtue, praise, amiableness, benevolence, loyalty, peaceabieness, ehantablenes, or any other quality to which the appellation good may be attached, they are not your property, you are not entitled thereto, you are destitute of them all; the loving term, good, which is seeii affixed to most of your surrounding parishes, you are not worthy of; your character is not good. But. dear friends, you are not only negatively described, there is a positive affirmation in your informant's delinea- tion of your character and that very naturally, for if you are not good, you are bad. There can be no intermediate state between good and evil, light and darkness, honesty and dishonesty, drunkenness and sobriety, truth and false- hood, loyalty and rebellion, chastity and lewdness, life and death; if you are destitute cf the one, you cannot extri- cate yourselves from the charge of the other your moral character must then be the reverse of what may be termed good—it is evil, only evil, evil without exception or, in the very words of the rev. gentleman to whom the cure of your souls is entrusted, your character is-" Bad, bastard v very prevalent'' Your informant, you see, has not thought'proper to particularise the different and various species in the immorality of your character. You are bad. and one branch only of your immoral character is specified, thy rest is left to the wide range of conjecture, and the in- terminable excursion of imagination, to seek after; as to anything the numerous readers of your informant's evi- dence may know to the contrary, you may be thieves, liars, drunkards, rioters, nay, everything that is not good; you are in totuni. If your informant's evidence can be depended upon, who can depend -upofi you ? It-is, daugsrv ous to inhabit your surrounding parishes, no confidence can be placed in you. No honest man would ever wish to have any dealings with you, none can rely on the veracity of your declarations, and good reason why, your character is bad. The individual who is now addressing you has had the advantage of knowing you and associating with most of you, for many years before your rev. informant ever came to reside in your neighbourhood, or even before he went to Cardiganshire, or Maenelochog; and of many of you he has found every reason to form the most favourable opinion —and dlJuld not for a moment hesitate to hold you up as patterns of the most praiseworthy qualifications, as well in morals as in religion. Your informant has most likely formed h:s opinion by, and founded his evidence upon, what he sees in your parish church. Had there been no more religion to be found amongst you than what is to be seen within the walls of that gloomy, empty building, I should at once concur with his evidence, and fall in with his description of your cha- racter. What after all if the informant were on a Lord's day morning to direct his footsteps towards lthosycaerau on the one hand, or LlanglofTan on the other, and gaze at the hundreds congregating from the different localities in your parish, and from other parishes, to those renowned and ancient Dissenting places of worship, to hear the word of life ? What if he were to attend your numerous Sunday- schools, and crowded prayer-meetings? Or what if lie were informed of the yearly amount of your voluntary contributions towards religious institutions both at home and abroad, whilst at the same time you are compelled to support the Church established by law in your parish, from which you conscientiously dissent ? Would he then have the temerity to pronounce your character as being indis- criminately bad ? If you will only take the trouble to turn one leaf back, and look at page 39?>, you will find your adjoining parish of Granston reported by the same informant, and it is all good. You are astonished! What! Your next neigh- bours, with some of whom you are closely connected, both as civilians and religionist's! How, then, can this be P They all good, you all bctd! How in the world could the rev. gentleman perceive such a difference ? They, being good, are of necessity, honest, true, sober, chaste, loyal, pious you, being bad, must be of a contrary character. The contrariety between bad and good is not greater than that between you and them. But how are the two most distant extremes possible come so nearly allied is the mys- ticism! What can be the invisible moral barrier which separates you, so that their good never enters your parish, nor your evil theirs ? But what necessity to enlarge ? You know how it is the keenest eye can see no difference worth publishing in the moral state of the two parishes; here must, therefore, be something else. You have no esquires residing in your parish to entertain the rev. gen- tleman. Who, therefore, cares what he will say of you, a poor dissenting parish, provided he may so serve his own purpose ? When your informant is asked again if you do subscribe to the maintenance of schools, he hesitates not to reply in the negative whilst at that very time, and for years before, several of you did subscribe, and continue to do so still. Fair play, some one may say, to the gentleman, he was not aware of it. Yes, fair play, and fair play to the parish as well if he was not aware that you did subscribe, how could he affirm that you did not? Will his ignorance in such a case justify the falsification of his evidence? He ought to have known, or to have acknowledged his igno- rance. He is asked again if you can for the most part read and write and his answer is, A-o; when to the same question in relation to your neighbours of Granston parish, his answer is, Yes. Strange They can read and write you can not. In what state of mind, or body, or both, the man must have beed? But to be serious. A man's character should always be dear unto him; the profes-mg Christian should, in an especial manner, be watchful and jealous of his cha- racter things the most important are intimately con- nected with it. Now, Christian friends, your character is in the most public and serious manner defamed and what is the course which you ought to pursue ? It appears to me that there is only one of three ways for you to take either, first, you must remain quiet, passive, and speech- less, under the odium heaped upon yon, to the disgrace of ilic religion which you profess or, secondly, you must re- purchase your character by assembling around the altar of your parish church, at the expense of your principles as Nonconformists—principles dearer than IJÍe-by which means you may undoubtedly exonerate yourselves; and acquire the appellation of gbod when your character may be next required or, thirdly, you must think of some means whereby your character may be as publicly cleared as it is now slandered. You ought to talk the matter over and over, call a public meeting, compel the rev. informant to produce his authority for making such a distinction be tween the two adjoining parishes, and give the most exten- sive publicity to the results of your exertions. This, how- ever, I beg. to leave to your discretion and serious attention. PIIILALETHIS. Fishguard. L W e think our correspondent is not justified in affirming that the term not good," conveys the idea of the worst character. We take this opportunity of stating that the columns of the PjiiKcirAMXT are open to Mr. Daniel, arid all others who might be disposed to defend themselves from any charges which have been brought against them in its pages. Our sole object is to elicit THE TRUTH, and to speed THE H.IGHT.-ED. P.] ERRATUM.—In a former letter for Gospel read Goshen. -<

THE EDUCATIONAL REPORTS.—PUBLIC MEETING AT LLANELLY, BRECONSHIRE. On Tuesday, Feb. 22nd, a public meeting was held at Siloam, Independent chapel, Llanelly, in order to expose the calumnies cast upon the Welsh people by the Governmental Reports and more especially to dis- cuss those portions of them which have an immediate reference to the parish of Llanelly. Every corner of the chapel was literally crammed, though the weather was very unfavourable, and many were obliged to return for want of access. E. Parry, Esq., surgeon, son of the late W. Parry, Esq., ofTretower, was unanimously voted to the chair, who said,—Fellow-countrymen, we are about discuss- ing the reports contained in the Blue Books. I should think that the powerful remonstrances occasioned by their infamous contents, ought ere this to have given the "blues" to their unenviable authors. The Govern- ment itself, in selecting such men, exhibited gross care- lessness or incompetency. The sources which the Com- missioners chiefly applied to for information were most barren. A scientific man would have shown more skill and care in the examination of a pebble than these men have done in ascertaining the real character of a nation. One of the Commissioners denied the existence of talent amongst Welshmen, by saying that they never attained to higher situations than those of Gaffers." How is it that Lloyd Jones is one of the first financiers in the kingdom; that Griffith Davies is employed by foreign states, to solve problems which bame all other men? The ill-used immortal Picton was a gaffer one might be proud of. You' have all heard of William Edwards, and the monument erected to his genius by himself in Glamorganshire. Europe was pronouncing the under- taking beyond the power of man to accomplish, and was repeating her assertion when this Welsh gaffer, or modern Archimedes, had executed the task. I might mention many more of such celebrated" gaffers;" but shall not tire the meeting with superfluities. Rev. John Price, of Rhumney, proposed the first re- solution (see our advertising columns), and said,—My friends, these Reports are exceedingly ill-framed—they exhibit the utmost confusion, and in many instances the most glaring contradictions yet the Commissioners were such clever logicians as to be able to draw the most uniform conclusions from the most contradictory premises. To prove that the evidence given is contra- dictory, we need but mention two letters referring to your own neighbourhood:—the one by the Rev. Mr. Howells, of Llangattock, who wrote as a gentleman, a patriot, and a Christian; the other by the Rev. John Hughes, the curate of your parish, where I find such sentiments as these :They (the people) are sus- picious of any attempts to do them good;" "they are but slightly acquainted with the common observances of civilized life;" "they dislike strangers, and conse- quently are narrow-minded. This arises partly from the ignorance of the Dissenting teachers, and partly from the prevalence of the Welsh language." But why are we thus abused for our efforts to benefit our fellow- men ? Why attribute to our endeavours the prevalence of those sins which rooted in our country when the Es- tablished Church had the-sole possession of the land? Why brand our Sunday-schools and our inexhaustible language with that darkness and barbarism which are the remains of those times when Sabbath sports were patronized by the State-paid clergy, ere ever the beams of Dissent had shone over our land? Compare the knowledge and morals of our country now with those of the happy and golden age, when the authority of the successors of the apostles was almost omnipotent, and we need not be apprehensive of the result. Mr. Daniels, of Abergavenny, seconded the resolu- tion, and said,-I am a Welshman, who has a true Welsh heart, but not a very practised Wrelsh tongue. In coming1 to the meeting, I had not the least intention of addressing you but to show by my presence my in- dignation and disgust at the falsehoods cast upon my countrymen by the Educational Reports. Your prayer- meetings and Bible classes are sneered at, and repre- sented as causes of unehastity and sources of degrada- tion. When I think of the pleasure, the hallowed and refreshing enjoyment I have often experienced in these meetings, and when I see,these very meetings sneeringly held up to the world by a triad of barristers as fruitful sources of evil, my heart truly burns with indignation. The clergy of the Established Church have glaringly and impudently attributed almost every evil in the land to the prevalence of Dissent, and the ignorance of the Dissenting teachers. Even our language is cursed,' and its existence bitterly bewailed. These calumniators of our country, though receiving the cream of the land, have done but little to improve it, in either knowledge, morals, or religion. I beg most cordially to second the resolution.' Rev. T. Jones, of Llangattock, moved the second re- solution, and said,—1 feel proud that an opportunity is afforded me to speak publicly of the sincerity and im-