were genuinely interested in religion, and that religion, for the most part, revolved around the local chapel.
"The Welsh language," they said, "is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to overestimate its evil effects."
In other words, the Commissioners gave it as their deliberate opinion that the Welsh people would never make progress in moral or economic affairs so long as they spoke Welsh; the Welsh language was the root of all the ills from which Wales suffered at this time, the source of its ignorance, its immorality, its Nonconformity. The remedy, of course, was obvious: the provision of more schools in which English would be taught efficiently and Welsh eventually killed.
"They are desired by the people," they reported, "and no reasonable doubt is entertained that a sound secular and religious education would raise their physical condition, and eventually remove their moral debasement."
Such, in brief, were the main conclusions of the Commission of Inquiry. The Commissioners had misunderstood and libelled a whole nation, and the result was fierce indignation. Welshmen of all creeds and parties, Whigs and Tories, Churchmen and Dissenters, joined in the fight to clear the good name of their native land. Though these Blue Books did nothing to improve relations between England and Wales, they served to unite Welshmen from one end of the country to the other.
The controversy has almost completely died down by now, but memories of it still linger. Without a fuller knowledge of most, if not all, of the schools of Wales in the "forties" of the last century, it is very difficult to determine how far the Commissioners were right in their condemnation of Welsh education. Probably, and allowing for some exceptions here and there, the majority of the schools deserved the adverse things said about them, though it is interesting to note that similar criticisms were made of schools in England by Kay Shuttleworth himself. The buildings there, as in Wales, were usually far from satisfactory. The schools in Wales were conducted in chapels, shops, cottages, cellars, kitchens, bedrooms and even stables; books and equipment were pitifully inadequate; and many of the teachers were untrained, underpaid, and only a little ahead of the pupils they tried to teach. "The incompetency of the masters," said Symons, "is avowedly great," but he was fair enough to add: "the position of the majority of school-masters is one midway between a pauper and an able-bodied labourer." It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that many of them had begun to teach "because they were either too old or too young for hard work," while others "had been induced to undertake their calling by the loss of a limb, by blindness, deafness or some calamity." As for the curriculum this amounted in the main to reading, with here and there a little writing and arithmetic; geography, history, grammar, drawing and singing were usually ignored. In short, looking at
