is already feeling the English immigration on his
character. He is not as good a man as his father was before him. I dare
say that in his desire to make everything English that is Manx, he
may some day try to abolish the House of Keys, or at least dig up the
Tynwald Hill. In one fit of intermittent mania, he has already attempted
to "restore" the grand ruins of Peel Castle, getting stones from
Whitehaven, filling up loop-holes, and doing other indecencies with
the great works of the dead. All this could be understood if the young
Manxman were likely to be much the richer for the changes he is bringing
about. But he is not; the money that comes from England is largely taken
by English people, and comes back to England.

CONCLUSION

From these ungracious thoughts let me turn again, in a last word, to
the old island itself, the true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman. In
these lectures you have seen it only as in flashes from a dark lantern.
I am conscious that an historian would have told you so much more of
solid fact that you might have carried away tangible ideas. Fact is not
my domain, and I shall have to be content if in default of it I have got
you close to that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land,
shown you our island, helped you to see its blue waters and to scent its
golden gorse, and to know the Manxman from other men. Sometimes I have
been half ashamed to ask you to look at our countrymen, so rude are they
and so primitive--russet-coated, currane-shod men and women, untaught,
superstitious, fishing the sea, tilling their stony land, playing next
to no part in the world, and only gazing out on it as a mystery far
away, whereof the rumour comes over the great waters. No great man among
us, no great event in our history, nothing to make us memorable. But I
have been re-assured when I have remembered that, after all, to look on
a life so simple and natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in the
heart of the mighty world, which the true Manxman knows only by vague
report; millions on millions huddled together, enough to make five
hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen that have lived since
the days of Orry, more than all that now walk on the island, added to
all that rest under it; streets on streets of us, parks on parks, living
a life that has no touch of Nature in the ways of it; save only in our
own breasts, which often rebel against our surroundings, struggling
with weariness und