Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/137

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Speech.
131

labourer from the farmer observable in Anglesea and the Vale of Clwyd. Their thrift and industry are evidenced by the way in which they have brought into cultivation the rough land on the mountain sides, adding year by year to the cultivated area a strip out of the waste land of the farm, using for the purpose the spade where the plough could not be worked. As I traverse districts like this, I feel that every cottage built on a Welsh hillside, and every generation reared within it contain new possibilities for Wales. For from such have come the leaders of Welsh thought and movements, the makers of our nation. It was not from a borough or garrison town but from one of the glens of the Dee that Owen Glyndwr rose to wage his fifteen years' memorable struggle for Wales. Huw Morris, Pont y Meibion, and Morgan Llwyd o Wynedd, the two Welsh voices of the seventeenth century, were country folk. So were all the leaders of the religious revival. Thomas Charles and Lewis Edwards came from peasant hearths. Diosg Farm sheltered the three famous brothers of Llanbrynmair,