He found in 1892 the political energies of Wales divided between a number of purely party organisations, precisely after the fashion of England. Parliament Street had carved up the Welsh counties in the same spirit and method as Canterbury had carved up the Welsh dioceses. There were the North Wales Federation and the South Wales Federation, and a number of other similar bodies, with all the various staffs and camp-followers who find their meat and malt in local distinctions and differences. The worst of it was that these local divisions often blazed up into national divergences on points of policy. On the other hand, there were simultaneously growing up among the younger generation of Wales a vast number of common national organisations and societies, literary, social, and political. There was the same ferment that we have of late years seen in Ireland—the ferment of a new national growth, shown in language, literature, and even in costume. There was the Cymru Fydd (“Wales of the Future”), the Cymmrodorion, and, above all, the revived Eisteddfod, that remarkable annual Welsh festival of poetry and song which seems to combine the spirit of classical Greece and of Celtic Britain. Mr. Lloyd George aspired to bring into Welsh politics some of the strength and hope of this new national rebirth. His definite aim, in the long series of great orations which he delivered on this subject between 1889 and 1896, was to bring patriotism to the help of Welsh politics in place of party— “The spirit of patriotism has been like the genie of Arabian fable. It has burst asunder the prison doors and given freedom to them that were oppressed. It has transformed the wilderness into a garden and the hovel into a home.”[38] It was his aim that the same spirit should transform Wales. A simple aim, it would seem. But no sooner did he set finger on the various political Arks that had been set up for worship in the different competing capitals of Wales than he found himself faced with the fiercest hostility. Among his bitterest opponents was one of his own followers in the House, Mr. D. A. Thomas (afterwards Lord Rhondda). Mr. Thomas set himself up as the champion of the South Wales Federation; and he succeeded in maintaining the cause of local independence. So tense and prolonged was the struggle that Mr. Lloyd George was content in the end to achieve his purposes in another way, by way of a Welsh National Council. “A rose by any other name will smell as sweet”—that is an important thing to remember in politics. Mr. Lloyd George has never forgotten it.