Note 16 — Chapter III

After writing this I came across the following passage in a speech of Mr. Lloyd George’s made in the House of Commons: “Two thousand years ago the great Empire of Rome came with its battalions and conquered that part of Carnarvonshire in which my constituency is situated. They built walls and fortifications as the tokens of their conquest, and they proscribed the use of the Cymric tongue. The other day I was glancing at the ruins of those walls. Underneath I noted the children at play, and I could hear them speaking, with undiminished force and vigour, the proscribed language of the conquered nation. Close by, there was a school where the language of the Roman conquerors was being taught, but taught as a dead language.”