ONE WELSHMAN : A GLANCE AT A GREAT CAREER. INAUGURAL ADDRESS, AUTUMN SESSION, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH, OCTOBER 31st, 1912. BY WHITELAW REID. HARRISON AND SONS, PRINTERS. LONDON: 1912. rignand 10-22-33 ONE WELSHMAN. THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR AT THE UNIVERSITY I must begin by expressing my warm appreciation of this welcome, as well as of the high honour you have conferred in summoning me to this oldest of Welsh universities, to follow the long line of eminent scholars and publicists who have dignified these academic occasions by their service. However unworthy your present speaker may feel himself for a place in that line, he has imagined that at any rate he might be thought to show respect for this large and select audience and for the dignity of the occasion by an effort to estimate a great transatlantic representative of your own blood, and to recall to your minds some details in his career. Comparisons are rarely agreeable and often delusive. The general outlines of the career referred to have been familiar to you and to all the world for a century. Since you are not known to have assigned to this man the rank beside the famous Welshmen who have illuminated your long and brilliant domestic history which we should have thought deserved, it may be because you know your history far better than we do, or because you have not rated his achievements so high as we do. You observe I do not allow for exaggeration in our own estimate,—we rarely do! But I do not think I have been under any temptation to exaggerate his merits, and I certainly am not blind to his faults. He was the founder and life-long leader of a political party I profoundly distrusted, and in my small way have spent my life in opposing. In spite of that, I am about to venture on a rash and I fear ungracious task. I am going to bespeak your friendly attention to a few reasons for thinking that some work of this transatlantic offshoot of the Welsh stock does almost as much honour to the Welsh land and race as that of any of your great sons throughout your history. I am even bold enough to think he has made the world his debtor as much as did Llewelyn, ablest and most successful of all Welsh princes; or as much as that famous ruler and rebel, Owen Glendower, who five hundred years ago held his court near this town. The peaceful laurels of your American Welshman may last even longer than those bestowed by your grateful country on Griffith ap Rhys, for victories over Norman and Flemish troops. We cannot pretend to claim for him the eulogy earned later by the Rev. Griffith Jones, rector of Llanddowror— that nearly one-third of the whole population of his state had been taught to read in his schools. And yet, even in fields akin to that, he did two things that I well know insure Welsh respect. As a young legislator he succeeded (against the ruling and fashionable classes) in making the slave-trade unlawful in his state; and as a weary old man, after having climbed to the very top of the ladder of his nation's greatness, having spent forty years in continuous public service, under harassing responsibilities, having shaken the world, changed its geography, and largely remoulded its government, he gave his declining years to the organization of a state university; and as his dying wish asked that that should be one of the three acts of his life singled out for record on his tombstone! My observations have not led me to think Wales particularly backward, any more than my own country, in appropriating and raising |