N early communities the the family tie was of the strongest, and the family circle

was most exclusively sacred. It was impossible for a stranger to enter into a family that was not his own, save by the fiction of adoption and of pretending that he was descended from the ancestral god of the family. Stranger and enemy were the same. The purity of the family blood was jealously guarded. The family honour was asserted in many a fierce blood feud, the family possessions could not be alienated except through ceremonies so elaborate that alienation was hardly possible at all.

While the desire for isolation was so strong, while the hatred of strangers was so great, while possessions and religion were bound up with the purity of the family blood, why is it that the blood of the inhabitants of the remotest glens of Wales or of the silent reaches of Sweden is a mixture of the blood of many races?

The desire for keeping together is not the only desire that forms a motive power in the history of man. There is also a desire for moving on. In the history of progressive nations, from the mountains of central Asia to the shores of the Western Ocean, there has been a continuous move

[No. 5.

ment westward. This migration of nations was the cause of conquest, of the growth of classes by super-imposing conqueror on conquered, of the mixture of blood by the gradual assimilation of the two.

Before the daring Genoese and Portuguese ventured out into the Western Ocean, Wales lay on the very fringe of the known world. From its mountains men gazed into the mystery of that unknown and limitless ocean, and felt that they had reached the end of the earth. It was only the most adventurous that reached our shores, from them came the Pelagius and the Abelard of history.

In the dimmest distance we see a great race of short men, with dark hair and eyes, and of a swarthy complexion, moving northwards and westwards. They came, perhaps, along the northern coast of the Mediterranean, from Egypt and Arabia, from the home of weird beliefs about death, from the deserts that have given the world so many heroes and so many great creeds. We have given them the name of Iberians. Their language has been lost, unless it lingers in a few place names, and unless it explains some of the peculiarities of the grammar of our own language. But they are probably the most important element, at this very day, in the constitution of the Welsh people.

The

After them there came another people,greater in stature and mightier in war, with colder blood and more virtue. Celts were tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. They came along the mountains which divide the great northern plain of Europe from the peninsulas of the south. They remained mighty hunters and warriors, despising the skill of the Iberian

craftsman, a skill they regarded as magic. The Celts were the aristocratic rulers of old Wales, it is the prowess of Celtic heroes and the fair beauty of Celtic women that are described by the earliest poets of Iberian blood.

After the Celts came a race like them in many things, but uglier and less gifted. This Teutonic wave came along the great northern plain, and it reached our islands. from the point at which the plain reaches the western sea, at the neck of the Jutland peninsula. This great migration did not cease for many centuries. It had begun before the birth of Christ, the Roman tried in vain to stem it, and its force was not spent before one half of Wales was conquered by the Norman knights it had brought into Gaul.

Iberian, Celt, Teuton,-we are not any one of these, we are all of them. Our characteristics might be traced to one or the other of these,-genius and vice to the Iberian, strength and pride to the Celt, honesty and wilfulness to the Teuton. But our conclusions would probably be all wrong, for the elements are changed by intermixture. Besides, the existence of the elements themselves is largely a matter of inference.

But there is one question of supreme importance concerning the difference between them. It is this, had they all reached the marriage stage, or "the patriarchal stage," as it is called. Some say that the story of human development begins with marriage, others say that marriage itself is the crown of a long course of development out of a horde existence. This much is certain, there are nations among whom the marriage tie is so weak that it is impossible to find it, nations whose institutions do not presuppose the existence of the family at all. Whether this is a relic of a stage previous to the family stage, or whether it is a falling away from it, must be left to be discussed by the supporters of Maine and Morgan respectively. But when we find, in the Welsh laws, a community whose privileges are based on marriage existing side by side with a community with no family privileges, we naturally ask,-Do we not find here the Iberian and the Celt not yet assimilated? We shall be tempted to go further and ask,-Did the Celt come as the

apostle of the severe sanctity of marriage and is the sullying of it due in a measure to the presence of the more sensuous Iberian?

The migration did not cease when the forests and the marshes of the north ceased to pour their barbarians into the Roman lands. The first Angles and Saxons hardly entered into modern Wales in the first days of conquest. But they came gradually, and were followed by those who had largely intermingled with Celtic people, the Flemings and Norsemen who have formed so important a part of the inhabitants of our southern coast.

Later on, the towns of Wales were practically garrisons of Englishmen,— centres of civilization and of oppression,selling their wares under the shadow of the king's castles and by charters granted by the king. It is this that explains, for example, why Owen Glendower could not carry his golden dragon into Carnarvon, and why so much English is spoken at Carmarthen to-day.

In our own day, the migration from east to west is going on as rapidly as ever, though not attended with slaughter as before. The discovery of the coal and iron of Monmouth and Glamorgan has brought into Wales thousands of men who are by this time an integral part of the Welsh people.

The continuity of the Welsh people is not that of Snowdon, it is that of the Severn. Not only do people come, they go. They look upon our mountains as their home, they go and are lost among other nations. It is thus that we were able to give French literature a Renan and English art a Burne Jones. To the great towns of England Welsh emigration has been unbroken for centuries, Welshmen now flock to Liverpool and Manchester as they once flocked to Worcester and Chester. In America they are among the most esteemed citizens, and the history of the United States can not be told without giving prominence to many of the sons of the mountains of Wales.

The last comers are, for a while, the most prominent element in the history of the people. Then they die off and gradually lose their prominence and power. To take an instance where there can be no

mistake, it is wonderful how soon most of the families of those who signed Magna Carta became extinct. The first comer is the most acclimatized, and has the best chance of surviving. The key to the history of modern times is the gradual and peaceful upheaval of the lower classes. Governing classes are gradually disappearing. The old fashioned justice, combining hunting with dispensing justice to those who dared hunt on their own account, no longer reigns supreme. The priest, who could once curse the world and lock the gates of heaven, has no longer a monopoly of the explanation of truth and superstition. The conqueror is being gradually divested of the last power and of the last show of power he has so long held.

The answer to the question Who are the Welsh people" is no idle or useless answer. It explains the growth of representation which has been the characteristic

of the last four centuries; it explains the cry for local government that will be, possibly, the characteristic of four centuries to come.

Old Wales was feudal. It was under an aristocracy of princes. The reason is that the various classes were not assimilated; the religion of the time said that men must keep their stations, and exercise patience; there was no means of taking the castles or of piercing the steel which gave one class the power of ruling over another.

New Wales is becoming democratic. The perfection of gunpowder will probably make war so horrible before long that men will put an end to it. The spread of education will make every man his own priest. The people will become self-governing, and the last vestige of a difference between castes will disappear. The Iberian is inevitably conquering his conquerors in the end.

THE HE Cambrian Leather Works, Wrexham, now employing about three hundred men, women, and boys, and having a large trade, not merely in Great Britain, but also in Russia, India, and America, have developed, during the last 120 years, out of a small country tannery into a manufactory of light leather of all sorts, and especially of what is called "roller leather," the production of which at Wrexham largely exceeds the total output of all other makers of roller leather in the United Kingdom.

Mr. A. Seymour-Jones, one of the partners in the firm of Messrs. J. MeredithJones and Sons; the present proprietors of the Cambrian Leather Works, published in the autumn of 1893 an interesting little work on "Roller Leather," in which the development of the manufacture of that product and the leading part taken in connection with it by the author's own firm, and by the predecessors of that firm, are clearly traced. Roller leather is believed to have had its birth in the tannery on the site of which the Cambrian Leather

Works now stand, and it is this specialty that has made Wrexham known to cotton spinners throughout the world. One of the necessities of the cotton spinner is to obtain a perfect covering for his steel rollers, which, being of varying sizes, and having varying rates of revolution, effect the attenuation of the thread before it is twisted. A first covering is provided by what is called "roller cloth," a special product of Lancashire. But outside this inner covering, which serves as a cushion, an outer covering is required, which must possess the several properties of elasticity, toughness, thinness, and extreme smoothness of surface. The only material which has been found in practice to fulfil this function with entire satisfaction is a special sort of leather. The skins of mountainbred sheep are the best adapted for the production of this leather, but the methods of treating them, so as to secure the results required, are so complex as to require great experience and unceasing attention, and to make it intelligible why the manufacture of roller leather is not merely a specialty,