When I walked Offa’s Dyke last year, I reflected on the fact that Welsh American connections are apparent in countless dimensions. We are told that a prince, Owain Gwynedd, reached America in the 12th century and, as a result, historians studying long-extinct native American tribes have discovered Welsh words and customs.

Some say that America was actually named after a Welshman, Richard Amerik, a wealthy Glamorgan customs officer in Bristol in the late 15th century who invested in the second voyage of John Cabot, the first European to land on American soil in 1497.

Not many Americans acknowledge the fact that William Penn wanted to name Pennsylvania ‘New Wales’, but instead named it after the Welsh word for head--pen, as in Penrith, and not after himself, as most Americans believe. Consequently, the Welsh American society of Philadelphia is the oldest ethnic organisation of its kind in America.

In Llanberis, there is a slate memorial to the Welshmen who signed the Declaration of Independence. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, there is a roadside marker commemorating the 125th anniversary of the 1869 Avondale mine disaster.

Compared with Ireland, Scotland and England however, only a tiny number of Welsh people went to America and yet the influence of the Welsh in the new world has been out of proportion to their numbers. Seventeen of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were of Welsh descent. Our chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, who shaped our constitution, was Welsh; Thomas Jefferson’s family came, as you know, from Snowdonia; a Welshman, George Jones, co-founded The New York Times; a Welsh American named Oliver Evans invented the self-propelled automobile with a steam-powered engine and the great civil war author Harriet Beecher Stowe was Welsh.

Brynmawr college has a Welsh name and Yale, Harvard and Brown were founded by Welshmen. Elihu Yale is buried in St Giles’ church in Wrexham. The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the fiery labour leader, John Llewellyn Lewis, the muck-raking satirist Sinclair Lewis and the President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis were all Welsh. More recently, you well know the contributions to arts and entertainment in America of Welshmen such as D. W. Griffith the director, Shirley Bassey, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Jones, Richard Burton, Bob Hope and Howard Stringer. Just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were reminded, when we were with her, of another prominent American’s passionate interest in her Welsh descent--Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In my office back in London, the new deputy chief of mission, my chief operating officer, is now a fellow by the name of Glyn Davies--he is very proud of his Welsh heritage. I am surrounded by you!

But in trying to bring some of the old country to the new world, the Welsh immigrants left their mark all across America--Bangor, Maine; Cardiff, New Jersey, and the list continues. By the 1850s there were regular Welsh music festivals in my country--song and poetry with which you would be familiar. By 1870, more than 100 Welsh books, pamphlets, hymnals, collected sermons and literary magazines were published. A dozen Welsh language newspapers came and went. In the 1890s--around the peak of Welsh immigration to America--there were more than 500 dedicated Welsh congregations of worship.

My own home state of South Carolina is a good example. The South Carolina town of Society Hill in Darlington county was originally called Welsh Neck in colonial days. In fact, its current name, Society Hill, was derived from one of the oldest and most distinguished organizations of its kind in America, the St David’s Society. The civic-minded residents of Welsh Neck, who had come from Cardigan and Pembrokeshire in 1703 by way of William Penn’s colony, also founded St David’s Academy in 1778--a pioneer education institution. Their Welsh Neck Baptist church, built in 1738, is one of the oldest in the South, and their library was a beacon of enlightenment throughout the ante-bellum period.

In a way--and I use my state just as one example--the Welsh have helped to create the American ideology, the republican doctrine of personal independence and civic virtue.

Over the 200 years since our independence, our 50 states have become laboratories of democracy. With this new Assembly, Wales may become another important laboratory of democracy, dealing with Welsh problems, finding Welsh opportunities and fashioning Welsh solutions. I am reminded of what Tom Stoppard said:

‘It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting’.

I might add respectfully, it is not the establishment of the institution, it is the execution which proves democracy.

Yesterday was an extraordinary day for me. Here in Wales, on the same day, I went to the ancient gardens of Aberglasney, the garden lost in time. A few hours later, I visited the Millennium Stadium, the most advanced technology construction, fit for a new century. A garden lost in time, a stadium looking forward to a new century.

I would suggest that on no subject related to this Assembly do we Americans have greater interest than in how you balance the mandates of cultural preservation and economic development. Promotion of economic development is part of your remit. As you well know, the Assembly is the only representative body in Europe with a statutory duty to consult business. As a former businessman, I hope you will take seriously this responsibility and opportunity.

Last night, I was privileged with your First Secretary, Rhodri Morgan and others amongst you, to take part in the launch of the new Wales North-American Business Council. My message to them and to you is simply this: we Americans stand ready to assist in the continued economic development of Wales, as I trust we already have. However, we see in this a balance between inward investment, in which the Welsh Development Agency has been rather successful, and new business formation and growth.

You know all the American businesses that have already discovered the advantages of setting up shop in Wales. Since 1983, US capital expenditure in Wales has totalled £4.6 billion. It has created 22,000 new jobs and safeguarded a further 26,000 jobs that were threatened. There are already 143 American companies with significant investments in Wales: GE, Ford, 3M, Dow Corning, Kelloggs, Raytheon, Texaco, Bank One, International Rectifier, among others.

We Americans encourage this Assembly to continue to work with trades unions, local authorities and the City to maintain an environment in which Wales continues to be a primary target for American investment. However, we also take the liberty of encouraging you to look to America as to what we have done right and what we have done wrong in fostering enterprise.

America today, if I can take just a moment to seem even more immodest, has had the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history. We have the lowest unemployment in 41 years, the lowest core inflation rate in three decades, and the highest home ownership rate in our country’s history.

Why? A significant reason is the fact that since 1990, 70 per cent of the net new jobs in the United States have come from new businesses. Since 1993, 18 million new jobs have been created in the United States, 92 per cent of which have been in the private sector. Last year, 2 million new businesses were formed by Americans under the age of 30 and 6 per cent of American adults every day are in some stage of starting their own business. In 1995, the last year for which we have such statistics, 13 per cent of all American workers were employed by companies that did not even exist in 1990. This is not by accident and so I hope that, as you work with the Wales North-American Business Council, the trades unions and the universities, this Assembly will make possible opportunities for internships, public-private financing agencies, university linkages and voluntary sector association with many of our American colleagues.

This enterprise infrastructure consists of a profusion of experienced managers willing to take risks, early-stage venture capital and active angels networks of investors. It includes wellsprings of new technologies and new business ideas, schools and universities. It must have lawyers, bankers, accountants and marketing specialists who are willing to work with entrepreneurs. It should have stock markets that welcome entrepreneurs and, especially important, the regulatory, tax and education framework that fosters new business formation and growth.

You and I may have as much difficulty understanding some of these ‘fast companies’ as I have in understanding your language: pharmacogenomics, asymmetric digital subscriber lines, fluorescent DNA sequencing. But all of that is in Wales today and we must understand that whatever distinctions still remain between left and right, politician and businessman, day-trader and City banker, today they are being blurred by the enterprise spirit.

We Americans need to learn from you: how you have balanced, and how you will continue to balance, heritage and prosperity; how simultaneously you will address cultural aspirations and material needs.

Governing, in the American experience, has been found never to be easy. The former Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, said: ‘We campaign in poetry; we govern in prose.’

There are difficult decisions ahead for you: ensuring equal participation in the benefits of prosperity for both north and south, rural and urban; full access to quality health care; a curriculum that reflects a bilingual and bicultural nation; how to save rural schools; how to promote Welsh development without compromising Welsh culture.

We cannot let politics do the work of economics. That is why I took this occasion to emphasize how we Americans think your role will be essential to forging the cultural, political and, especially, the business ties between our two countries. It is an exciting time to be Welsh. Just ask Cerys Matthews, the Manic Street Preachers or Alun Michael.

However, I learned last year in that walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats the truth of the Spanish proverb:

‘There are no roads: roads are made by walking.’

Know that, however uncertain the path, the Welsh and we Americans walk together. And we can walk in confidence, knowing that we are in the company of trusted friends.