t
is best in it. Sinn Fein has largely replaced a movement which, in its
later phases, dwelt perhaps too much on the material advantages which it
offered as the reward of support. Sinn Fein's strength has lain not in
what it has offered, but in what it has asked; it has asked for
devotion, and Pearse certainly both gave that and received it. Such was
his teaching, and I do not know a better saying for the Irish gentry to
ponder over than the last sentence in these essays of his: "The highest
thing anyone can do is to serve."

That temper was perhaps lacking in the Ireland of yesterday which Miss
Somerville so lovingly describes. To command loyalty as a right, to
reward it by generosity, by indulgence--this made part of the ideal of
leadership; but scarcely to be laborious either in rendering or exacting
capable work.

The old way of life was good for children, as Martin Ross describes it
in her sketch of her brother's upbringing.

Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall
trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with,
strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of
furnaces of turf and logs, long drives and the big Galway welcome
at the end of them.

But for the grown men, it lacked one thing: effort. Pleasant it was;
lots of everything, lots of hunting, lots of game on the moors and bogs,
lots of fish in lake and river, lots of beef and mutton on the farm,
lots of logs and turf, lots of space--above all, lots of time, and
always the spirit for a spree that made everyone "prefer good fun to a
punctual dinner." There was only one deficiency: that way of life was
apt to be short of cash. It was, in short, a life that could not pay its
way. The "big Galway welcome" is just as big with a sounder economic
system, that rests solidly on men's own work. Anyone who knows Western
Ireland can tell you that the quality of work is better on the land
where men are their own masters than it was in the old days. Yet even
there we are not out of the old vicious circle of under-pay and
under-work; and in the industrial life we are fully entangled in it. But
here also the revolutionary as schoolmaster has appeared. To my thinking
the most momentous apparition in Ireland of our times is that of Mr.
Ford, who is paying American wage rates for labour in Cork, and
calculating, not to get value for his money at once, but to teach labour
to be worth it. Accordi