it. But all that is over and past. The Ireland of to-day does
not pay herself with words. She is safe from that reaction and
disillusionment which some prophets have discerned as the first harvest
of Home Rule, because she is already disillusioned. Looking into the
future we see no hope for rhetoricians; what we do see is a strong,
shrewd, indomitable people, at once clear-sighted and idealistic, going
about its business "in the light of day in the domain of reality." No
signs or wonders blaze out a trail for them. The past sags on their
shoulders and in their veins, a grievous burden and a grievous malady.
They make mistakes during their apprenticeship to freedom, for, as
Flaubert says, men have got to learn everything from eating to dying.
But a few years farther on we see the recuperative powers of the nation
once more triumphant. The past is at last dead enough to be buried, the
virus of oppression has been expelled. The creative impulse in industry,
literature, social habit, working in an atmosphere of freedom, has added
to the wealth of humanity not only an old nation renascent, but a new
and kindlier civilisation. In other words, political autonomy is to us
not the epilogue but the prologue to our national drama. It rings the
curtain up on that task to which all politics are merely instrumental,
namely the vindication of justice and the betterment of human life.

From the first, the economic note will predominate in a Home Rule
assembly, not only in the sense in which so much can be said of every
country in the world, but in a very special sense. For the past decade
Ireland has been thinking in terms of woollens and linens, turnips and
fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and railways. The conviction that the
country is under-developed, and in consequence under-populated, has been
growing both in area and in depth. With it there has been growing the
further conviction that poverty, in the midst of untapped resources, is
a national crime. The propagation of these two beliefs by journals of
the newer school such as _The Leader, Sinn Fein,_ and _The Irish
Homestead_ has leavened the whole mass of Irish life in our time. The
Industrial Development Associations, founded on them as basis, have long
ago "bridged the Boyne." At their annual Conferences Belfast sits side
by side with Cork, Derry with Dublin. It is not merely that the
manufacturers and traders have joined hands to advance a movement
beneficial to themselves;