material aspects of the home which the people so badly need both in
Ireland and in America If the Irishman abroad became 'a rootless
colonist of alien earth,' the lot of the Irishman in Ireland has been
not less melancholy. Sadness there is, indeed, in the story of 'the
sea-divided Gael,' but, to me, it is incomparably less pathetic than
their homelessness at home.

There are, as I have said, historic reasons for the Celtic view of home
to which my personal observation and experience has induced me to devote
so much space. The Irish people have never had the opportunity of
developing that strong and salutary individualism which, amongst other
things, imperiously demands, as a condition of its growth, a home that
shall be a man's castle as well as his abiding place. In this, as in so
much else, a healthy evolution was constantly thwarted by the clash of
two peoples and two civilisations. The Irish had hardly emerged from the
nomad pastoral stage, when the first of that series of invasions, which
had all the ferocity, without the finality of conquest, made settled
life impossible over the greater part of the island. An old chronicle
throws some vivid light upon the way in which the idea of home life
presented itself to the mind of the clan chiefs as late as the days of
the Tudors. "Con O'Neal," we are told, "was so right Irish that he
cursed all his posterity in case they either learnt English, sowed wheat
or built them houses; lest the first should breed conversation, the
second commerce, and with the last they should speed as the crow that
buildeth her nest to be beaten out by the hawk."[10] The penal laws,
again, acted as a disintegrant of the home and the family; and,
finally, the paralysing effect of the abuses of a system of land tenure,
under which evidences of thrift and comfort might at any time become
determining factors in the calculation of rent, completed a series of
causes which, in unison or isolation, were calculated to destroy at its
source the growth of a wholesome domesticity. These causes happily, no
longer exist, and powerful forces are arising to overcome the defects
and disadvantages which they have bequeathed to us; and I have little
doubt that it will be possible to deal successfully with this obstacle
which adds so peculiar a feature to the problem of rural life in
Ireland.

If I have dwelt at what may appear to be a disproportionate length upon
the Irishman's peculiar conception of a home, it i