I claim to be a lover of my country. I admire much the social and civic virtues, and the religious enthusiasm of her people; but I am forced to admit that among the Welsh, as such, there is no onward tendency. That is a great and noble ambition of theirs which urges them to retain their language; and they firmly believe in the prophecy, “_Eu hiaith a gadwant_.” But to be equally bent on perpetuating certain peculiarities which unite them with the past as a race opposed to their English neighbours, this desire to surround themselves with a sort of Chinese wall, instead of letting “the dead past bury its dead,” is not the part of true patriotism. For, by blindly adhering to such a stationary policy, they will eventually, as a distinct nation, be submerged by the tide of progress, instead of floating on its surface, and exist about as much in reality as their fabled Lowland Hundred. In everything but political sectarianism, and this only because they are moved to it by political agitators, the Welsh are in fact a most conservative nation. This primitive condition of the Welsh, however, is not singular. It has existed, and exists even now, in various parts of the world. As an instance with which we have lately been made acquainted, it may be mentioned, that Wallace has found, in some of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, several communities which have no intercourse with the world at large, leading an industrious, peaceful, moral life; committing little or no crime; “showing the work of the law written in their hearts;” and a pattern to many of the inhabitants of so called Christian and civilized countries. When we contemplate such beautiful simplicity and purity of life, we must admit that these people “are not far from the kingdom of God;” and one is tempted to doubt whether civilization with its extremes of wealth and destitution, refinement and barbarism, culture and ignorance, integrity and crime, saintliness and profanity, is the blessing that it is commonly held to be. But yet if we compare the endowments of mankind with those of the more intelligent brutes, we find that man has a capacity for being educated into a higher being in proportion as the race stores up knowledge, a power which opens the vast treasury of nature; whereas the most intelligent of the brutes are but slightly educable, and therefore stationary. While man, however, is gifted with this immense superiority, he does not always turn it to the greatest advantage. Some nations are rapidly advancing; some, having advanced in time past up to a certain point, have either long ago halted, or have gone back to barbarism or worse. Of these three tendencies, the one strongly manifested by the Welsh is halting. What forces there are urging them forward are almost entirely from a foreign source; and the fact that such influences are operating upon them is, by many of their number, regarded as a misfortune, by few as a blessing. Painful,