ng to his gospel, as it was expounded to me, you
will not get efficiency by offering to pay the wages of efficiency when
labour becomes efficient: you must first provide the conditions of
efficiency and then teach, just as in the army your first care is to get
a recruit fit and your second to make him thorough in his ground work.
That is the practical recognition of what yesterday in Ireland failed to
recognise.

Nor does this ideal of strenuous and capable work exclude either the
strenuous and capable talk of Martin Ross's Galway household or anything
else that was excellent in the old way. Certainly the most laborious and
the most prosperous peasant household that I have ever known (and for
many months I was part of it) was the most thoroughly and traditionally
Irish, except that it was removed by one generation from Gaelic speech.
But the whole cast of mind was Gaelic, remote as the poles from that
"newer Ireland" which is in revolt against all tradition of
authority--and, if they only knew it, against all Irish tradition. Miss
Somerville thinks, as a page in her book shows, that the newer Ireland
has lost the endearing courtesy which is imposed by the genius of the
Gaelic tongue, and is for that matter to be found in every line of
Pearse's essays. We can educate back to that without any detriment; we
can be as efficient and as courteous as the Japanese. Another thing is
gone. Ireland of yesterday, even in its poverty, was a merry country;
to-day, even in its prosperity, it is full of bitter, mirthless rancour
and hate. It will be a great thing if we can help to preserve for
Ireland the exquisite benediction which a beggar woman in Skibbereen
laid upon Martin Ross: "Sure, ye're always laughing! That ye may laugh
in the sight of the glory of Heaven."

1918.

End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Books and Irish People, by Stephen Gwynn

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