Another Welshman who made his mark in London was the Rev. Dr. Thomas, a Congregational minister at Stockwell, a fine-looking young man when I first knew him as a minister at Chesham. He developed the faculty of his countrymen for lofty ideas and aims to an extent that ended in disastrous failure. It was he who originated the idea of _The Dial_—which was to be a daily to advocate righteousness, and to beat down and to supplant _The Times_. The motto was to be “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” He got a great many people to take shares, and commenced the publication of _The Dial_ in the first place as a weekly. But the paper was a failure from the first. Another idea of his was to raise a million to build workmen’s institutes and recreation halls all over the kingdom, but as the late Earl of Derby, when appealed to on the subject, replied, it carried its own condemnation in the face of it. A society, however, was started, but it never came to much. The real fact is that institutions established for working men, not by them, are rarely a success. Dr. Thomas also claimed to have started the idea of the University for Wales, and was very angry with me when I, after some inquiry, failed to support his claim. His great success was the publication of a magazine for preachers, under the title of _The Homilist_. The writer was a great man, not so much so, perhaps, as he thought, and had his full share of Welsh enthusiasm and fire. But he made a terrible blunder over his _Dial_ scheme. He had done better had he kept to the pulpit. Parsons are not always practical, and the management of successful daily newspapers is not exactly in their line. The shoemaker should stick to his last; but in spite of Welsh poetic geniuses, the great fact which always strikes men in London is the commercial successes of the Welshmen who venture to try their fortune on the metropolitan stage. This especially strikes me with regard to the drapery trade. Many of the largest establishments in that way are owned at this present time by Welshmen—such as Jones, of Holloway; Evans, of Oxford Street, and many more. Few of them had capital or friends to help them, yet few men have done better in the pleasant art of money-making—an art rare, alas! to the class to which I have the honour to belong. CHAPTER X. A GREAT NATIONAL MOVEMENT.