the Irish labourers what the Land Acts have
been to the farmer--they have completely transformed his economic status
in the country.

Accompanying these symptoms of material progress, we have witnessed in
recent years a striking outburst of intellectual activity. Irish
literature, in poetry and drama, has attracted the attention of the
whole world of culture, and exact and scholarly research in history and
archaeology have flourished and found audiences as they were never known
to do in Ireland till now. This has not been the work of any one section
of the people, either in creed or in politics; but the whole movement
has been inspired by an Irish patriotism which no sane person regards as
conflicting in any degree with allegiance to the Empire under the
shelter of which it has grown and prospered.

The circumstances above set forth do not pretend to be the whole story
about modern Ireland, nor do they show that the millennium has arrived
in that country. Apart from Home Rule, which is outside our present
field, much still remains to be done--there is elementary education to
be advanced, commercial facilities to be developed, land-purchase to be
completed. But it is contended that the real facts about Ireland are
wholly and absurdly inconsistent with the picture of that country which
the friends of Germany circulate so industriously at the present time.
Ireland is not an oppressed and plundered nation, ground under the heel
of a foreign Power, and with her individual life deliberately stifled
like that of Poland in the German Empire. Only through ignorance or
malice could such an illusion gain currency, and it needs only the touch
of reality--reality which every one can easily see or verify for
himself--to dispel it for ever from the mind of every candid inquirer.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ireland and Poland, by Thomas William Rolleston

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