Welsh Journals

Prof. Morris Jones's work shows its peculiar import- ance. Beyond the mere philology, which may be the debating ground of pundits and pedants, this work professes to give the very life of the language. It is not merely a dissection, it is a picture,-an artistic representation of the inner soul of the Welsh language. And surely, this must be the highest praise that can be given to a grammarian,-that no Welshman who can read through this work will be satisfied until he is thoroughly conversant with the literature whose phenomena it describes. Thus, on one side, it faces the past, and on the other, a yet more glorious future. It is the spirit of the medieval Virgil, leading the poet and the artist through the other-world of the past, inspiring the epic of the future. The hour and the man have come together. "THE WORLD OF LABOUR." Everybody seems to be reading Mr. Cole's book- everybody, that is, who is interested in the problems of wage labour, except the victims them- selves, who cannot afford five shillings and they are reading the red penny pamphlets on The Greater Unionism which Mr. Cole advertises in his preface. Everybody finds Mr. Cole's book interesting for a variety of reasons. There is a certain piquancy at this moment, when the potentialities of Universities as strike-breaking agencies have just been discovered, in the reflection that Mr. Cole, who is nothing if not a revolutionary, is enjoying the endowments of a Prize Fellowship, to which he was elected by examin- ation, at the highly respectable College at which The Prince of Wales is being educated. There is also refreshment in finding that after having absorbed, like the rest of the world, the teaching and writings of the Webbs, a young writer has had the courage to shake himself loose from the toils of "Sidney Webbi- calism." Others may turn to it-and they will not be disappointed-for the best account in English of the progress and tendencies of the Labour Move- ment on the Continent and in the United States, or for the closely reasoned discussions on what the author terms Labour's Red Herrings — Co- partnership, Co-operation, Scientific Management and the like. "The World of Labour." By G. D. H. Cole. With frontis- piece by Will Dyson. G. Bell & Sons, 1913. Pp. 443. 5/- W. J. Gruffydd. But there are other and deeper reasons which will make the book notable for many years to come. It is symptomatic of the absorption of the best minds of our generation upon the problem of wage-labour, which is the problem of the civilisation of the industrialised portions of our planet, and it marks a confluence of ideas and influences from many diverse directions of the intellectual globe, which may be the beginning of a permanent and fruitful collaboration in the humanisation of modern life. What are these ideas and influences ? If we attempt briefly to enumerate them, we shall be travelling somewhat outside the red covers of the book, but not beyond what is stirring in the mind of Mr. Cole and his fellow-workers. The first may be summed up in the name Bergson. We in Britain have little means of knowing what the social ideas and sympathies of Mr. Bergson, the philosopher, may be. We cannot tell whether it is a direct or an underground connexion which attached Bergson to Sorel, Intuitionism to Syndicalism, the Gospel of the vital urge to the myth of the General Strike. It is enough for us that the Bergsonian philosophy has awakened us all, even officials and schoolmasters and Trade Union leaders, out of an unwholesome lethargy. It has taught us to look on knowledge, not as a possession, but as an activity on work, not as a routine, but as a daily act of creation on life, not as a vale of tears and boredom, but as a spiritual adventure. Great ideas find unexpected resting places. Mr. Bergson has turned many an artisan into an artist, and penetrating into the recesses of Oxford, he has made Mr. Cole a revolutionary. The second influence is what may be described as the Psychology of the Group-an idea borrowed by Mr. Cole and others from the experience of ancient Greece. Why was ancient Democracy a success, whereas modern Democracy is so often a delusion? Because the modern state is too large, and what was, in Athens, a homogeneous group, bound by the closest ties of sentiment and interest, has become in modern Europe a mob, incapable of self-expression. Ballot-Box Democracy mixes the classes," and by confusing their interests sends the Demagogue his opportunity. How can a mob govern? says a shrewd old Greek historian, it tumbles headlong into business like a winter torrent, upsetting everything as it goes along. It is stupid and violent and there is no use to be made of it I" Psychology, which is after all only a long word for common sense, has known this from time immemorial and has been teaching it to teachers and others responsible for school organisation, for many years