I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the
practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh. It
may cause a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears
that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is
dead; but, no doubt, Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for
becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country. The
fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous,
English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the
swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation
to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a
necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern
civilisation is a real, legitimate force; the change must come, and
its accomplishment is a mere affair of time. The sooner the Welsh
language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political,
social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better
for Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent service by
pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart of the
principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and
harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much
sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of
living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I
think, a fantastic and mischief-working delusion.

For all serious purposes in modern literature (and trifling purposes
in it who would care to encourage?) the language of a Welshman is and
must be English; if an Eisteddfod author has anything to say about
punctuality or about the march of Havelock, he had much better say it
in English; or rather, perhaps, what he has to say on these subjects
may as well be said in Welsh, but the moment he has anything of real
importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he