Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/128

 who migrate from Wales to England are women. This latter fact points of course to the large and increasing number of young Welsh girls who become domestic servants in English homes, and to a not inconsiderable number of Welsh peasants who leave the hills to occupy farms in English counties on the border. Altogether 228,616 men and women born in Wales were on Census Sunday settled in England. The drain from the Welsh rural districts into industrial Wales and into England has been so great that during the last decade the decline in the population in the nine preponderatingly agricultural counties has been quite marked and in some counties even alarming. The migration from the country to the towns is not peculiar to Wales or to this Kingdom. It is a world-wide tendency.

This tendency has been accentuated by the industrial development and prosperity of South-eastern and North-eastern Wales. It is, however, more from necessity than from choice that Welshmen leave the fields and villages for the pits, the furnaces, and the