he desire to emigrate
beyond spreading knowledge as to the real conditions of life in America,
for which home life in Ireland is often ignorantly bartered.[5] We
cannot isolate the phenomenon of emigration and find a cure for it apart
from the rest of the Irish Question. We must recognise that emigration
is but the chief symptom of a low national vitality, and that the first
result of our efforts to stay the tide may increase the outflow. We
cannot fit the people to stay without fitting them to go. Before we can
keep the people at home we have got to construct a national life with,
in the first place, a secure basis of physical comfort and decency. This
life must have a character, a dignity, an outlook of its own. A
comfortable Boeotia will never develop into a real Hibernia Pacata. The
standard of living may in some ways be lower than the English standard:
in some ways it may be higher. But even if statesmanship and all the
forces of philanthropy and patriotism combined can construct a contented
rural Ireland for the people, it can only be maintained by the people.
It will have to accord with the national sentiment and be distinctively
Irish. It is this national aspiration, and the remarkable promise of the
movements making for its fruition, which give to the work of Irish
social and economic reform the fascination which those who do not know
the Ireland of to-day cannot understand. This work of reform must, of
course, be primarily economic, but economic remedies cannot be applied
to Irish ills without the spiritual aids which are required to move to
action the latent forces of Irish reason and emotion.

* * * * *

The task which we have to face is, then, a two-sided one, but its
economic and its purely practical aspects first demand consideration.
Many even of the agrarian aspects of the question have, so far, been
somewhat neglected in Ireland owing to a cause which is not far to seek.
It has often been asserted that the Irish Question is, at bottom, the
Land Question. There is a great deal of truth in this view, but almost
all those who hold it have fallen into the grave error of tacitly
identifying the land question with the tenure question--an error which
vitiates a great deal of current theorising about Ireland. It was,
indeed, inevitable that Irish agriculturists, with such an economic
history behind them as I have outlined in the previous chapter, should
have concentrated their a