of which he told
me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called
'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised
in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a
sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran
to waste in destructive criticism.

I naturally turned the conversation on to my own line of thought, and
discussed the practical conclusions to which his studies had led him. I
tried to elicit from him exactly what he had in his mind when, in one of
the articles to which I have referred, he advocated 'a reconstruction of
Ireland on distinctive national lines.' I hoped to find that his
psychological study of my countrymen would enable him to throw some
light upon the means by which play could be given at home to the latent
capacities of the race. I found that he was in entire accord with my
view, that the chief difficulty in the way of constructive statesmanship
was the defect in the Irish character about which I have said so much. I
was prepared for that conclusion, for I had already seen the lack of
initiative admirably appreciated in the following illuminating sentence
of his:--'The Celt will help someone else to do the thing that other has
in mind, and will help him with great zeal and devotion; but he will not
start to do the thing he himself has thought of.'[32] But I was
disappointed when he bade me his first and last good-bye that I had not
convinced him that there was any way out of the Irish difficulty other
than political changes, for which, at the same time, he appeared to
think the people singularly unfitted.

The fact is we had arrived at the point where the student of Irish life
usually finds himself in a _cul de sac_. If he has accurately observed
the conditions, he is face to face with a problem which appears to be in
its nature insoluble. For at every turn he finds things being done wrong
which might so easily be done right, only that nobody is concerned that
they should be done right. And what is worse, when he has learned, in
the course of his investigations, to discount the picturesque
explanation of our unsuccess in practical life which in Ireland veils
the unpleasant truth, he will find that the people are quite aware of
their defects, although they attribute them to causes beyond their power
to remove. Then, too, the sympathetic inquirer is shocked by the lack of
seriousness in it all. With all