yesterday in
Ireland is that everybody accepted as natural a state of affairs under
which Irish gentry were taking rents that could not be earned on the
land which was burdened with them. Landlord and tenant alike were really
dependent on what was sent back by the sons and daughters of poor people
from America to prevent the break-up of homes. The whole situation was
false, from top to bottom. At top, a small class, physically and often
mentally superb, full of charm, extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great
uses, but by temperament, habit and education unequipped for its proper
task of equipping and directing the labour out of which ultimately it
had to live or perish. It perished. At bottom, a multitude with
marvellous constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, friendly,
most lovable, most winning, but untrained and unequipped, half-hearted
in its business of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill.
It survived--clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which so
meagrely nourished it. But during that generation of yesterday--and how
many generations before it?--there grew up inevitably, from the
conditions, a traditional toleration of incompetence, a faith as it were
in inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in one vicious circle
of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and
work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the
lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to
mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper
class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual
subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves
at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two
removes from the "gentry houses." While the first line of defence, the
tenants, held good, the world went pleasantly for the Ireland of
yesterday. But when that line broke, and starvation burst in, then the
best men and women in the big houses flung their all into the common
stock, and went under--as did the chief of the Martins in Connemara.

That, however, happened the day before yesterday; yesterday saw nothing
so dire. But the menace of it was always there, and the rest of Ireland
gradually consolidated itself for a struggle to win what had long ago
been acquired for Protestant Ulster--the right of a tenant to what his
own labour created. The Ulster custom has done for