at it is neither one nor the other, but economic. In
Irish history, no doubt, we may find, under any of these heads, cause
enough for much of our present wrong-goings. But I am profoundly
convinced that each of the simple explanations to which I have just
alluded--the racial, the political, the religious, the economic--is
based upon reasoning from imperfect knowledge of the facts of Irish
life. The cause and cure of Irish ills are not chiefly political,
broaden or narrow our conception of politics as we will; they are not
chiefly religious, whatever be the effect of Roman Catholic influence
upon the practical side of the people's life; they are not chiefly
economic, be the actual poverty of the people and the potential wealth
of the country what they may. The Irish Question is a broad and deeply
interesting human problem which has baffled generation after generation
of a great and virile race, who complacently attribute their incapacity
to master it to Irish perversity, and pass on, leaving it unsolved by
Anglo-Saxons, and therefore insoluble!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] My own experience confirms Mr. Lecky's view of the chief cause of
this extraordinary feeling. "It is probable," he writes, "that the true
source of the savage hatred of England that animates great bodies of
Irishmen on either side of the Atlantic has very little real connection
with the penal laws, or the rebellion, or the Union. It is far more due
to the great clearances and the vast unaided emigrations that followed
the famine."--_Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland_, Vol. II., p, 177.

[2] _Spectator_, 6th September, 1902.

[3] The title to the greater part of Irish land is based on
confiscation. This is true of many other countries, but what was
exceptional in the Irish confiscations was that the grantees for the
most part did not settle on the lands themselves, drive away the
dispossessed, or come to any rational working agreement with them.

CHAPTER II.

THE IRISH QUESTION IN IRELAND.

Whilst attributing the long continued failure of English rule in Ireland
largely to a misunderstanding of the Irish mind, I have given
England--at least modern England--credit for good intentions towards us.
I now come to the case of the misunderstood, and shall from henceforth
be concerned with the immeasurably greater responsibility of the Irish
people themselves for their own welfare. The most characteristic, and by
far the most hopeful feature of the chang