…Another thing which the public will not stand is that the miners should
pretend that they are advancing the rule of the people when they are really
claiming privileges for themselves at the heavy expense of others. A good, or
rather a bad, example of this tendency is provided by the Welsh miners, who
are refusing to pay Income Tax. Some miners have been earning as much as £10
and £12 a week. Of course not all earn so much, but an appreciable number of
miners earn more than is earned by clerks who pay their taxes like men. As
Labour Members in the House of Commons recently asked Mr. Chamberlain to
remove all indirect taxation, the contention of a great many working men
seems to be that people who earn less than £250 a year should not pay any
taxes at all, and that a man who earns his living with his hands should not
pay any taxation, however large his income may be! What kind of democratic
government does all this lead to? The aristocracy of former days put forth
many foolish and wicked claims in the interests of a small class, but
probably nothing more unashamedly aristocratic in spirit than this.
This piece comes from the
Monmouthshire Merlin but is there credited to the
Carmarthen Journal.
There was a meeting of the respectable inhabitants of the hundred of Derllys,
held at St. Clears, on
, when resolutions were
passed praying that a rural police be not established, the expense of which
will fall heavily on the farmers and rate-payers of that hundred. Do not those
hardened ruffians in crime, Rebecca and her Daughters, think they have already
done enough of mischief, by destroying the gates and the toll-houses of the
different trusts, as well as burning the plantation of that generous friend to
the poor, Timothy Powell,
Esq., of Penycoed, that they
must inflict upon the innocent farmer punishment of the pocket, which is most
dearly felt, by continuing their wicked acts, and thus compel the magistracy
to form a rural police, which, as a matter of course, cannot be efficiently
kept up without undergoing an immense expenditure. We sincerely hope that
those lawless persons will see the propriety, by their peaceable and honest
conduct, of not compelling the magistrates to introduce a rural police to
protect the property of the people of that part of the county.
Henry Tobit Evans, in his book
Rebecca and Her
Daughters, writes that Timothy Powell was “a magistrate active
against Rebecca” and that four of twenty-two acres of his plantation were
burned on .
