The Iron Puddler | Page 8

fight against a big nation. The idea that David stopped Goliath seemed to reflect their own national glory. The ancient invasions that poured across Britain were stopped in Wales, and they never could push the Welshmen into the sea.
The Welsh pride themselves on hanging on. They are a nation that has never been whipped. Every people has its characteristics. "You can't beat the Irish" is one slogan, "You can't kill a Swede" is another, and "You can't crowd out a Welshman" is a motto among the mill people.
I didn't want to leave Wales when my parents were emigrating. Though I was not quite eight years old I decided I would let them go without me. The last act of my mother was to reach under the bed, take hold of my heels and drag me out of the house feet first. I tried to hang on to the cracks in the floor, and tore off a few splinters to remember the old homestead by. I never was quite satisfied with that leave-taking, and nearly forty years later when I had car fare, I went back to that town. I never like to go out of a place feet first, and I cleared my record this time by walking out of my native village, head up and of my own free will.
On that trip I paid a visit to the home of Lloyd George in Cricuth. Joseph Davies, one of the war secretaries to the prime minister, invited me to dinner and we talked of the American form of government. (Note the spelling of Davies. It is the Welsh spelling. When my father signed his American naturalization papers he made his mark, for he could not read nor write. The official wrote in his name, spelling it Davis and so it has remained.) "You have this advantage," said Mr. Davies. "Your president is secure in office for four years and can put his policies through. Our prime minister has no fixed term and may have to step out at any minute."
"Yes," I replied jokingly, "but your prime minister this time is a Welshman."
Since then four years have passed and our president is out. But Lloyd George is still there (1922). And he'll still be there, for all I know, until he is carried out feet first. The instinct of a Welshman is to hang on.
These things teach us that racial characteristics do not change. In letting immigrants into this country we must remember this. Races that have good traits built up good countries there abroad and they will in the same way build up the country here. Tribes that have swinish traits were destroyers there and will be destroyers here. This has been common knowledge so long that it has become a proverb: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of the ages. Life has taught me that the wisdom of the ages is the truth. The Proverbs and the Ten Commandments answer all our problems. My mother taught them to me when I was a child in Wales. I have gone out and tasted life, and found her words true. Starting at forge and furnace in the roaring mills, facing facts instead of books, I have been schooled in life's hard lessons. And the end of it all is the same as the beginning: the Proverbs,--the Commandments,--and the Golden Rule.

CHAPTER III
NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES
From my father I learned many things. He taught me to be skilful and proud of it. He taught me to expect no gift from life, but that what I got I must win with my hands. He taught me that good men would bring forth good fruits. This was all the education he could give me, and it was enough.
My father was an iron worker, and his father before him. My people had been workers in metal from the time when the age of farming in Wales gave way to the birth of modern industries. They were proud of their skill, and the secrets of the trade were passed from father to son as a legacy of great value, and were never told to persons outside the family. Such skill meant good wages when there was work. But there was not work all the time. Had there been jobs enough for all we would have taught our trade to all. But in self-protection we thought of our own mouths first. All down the generations my family has been face to face with the problem of bread.
My Grandfather Davies, held a skilled job at the blast furnace where iron was made for the rolling mill in which my father was a puddler. Grandfather Davies had been to Russia and had helped the Russians build blast furnaces, in the