'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 days when they believed that work would make them
wealthy. Had they stuck to that truth they would not be a ruined people
to-day. Gran