doubt. The Export and
Import figures are little better than volunteer estimates; there is no
compulsion to accuracy. As to the yield of crops, all that can be said
is that our present information is not as bad as it used to be. But
above all we have no comprehensive notion of the condition of the
people. Whenever there has been an inquiry into wages, cost of living,
or any other fundamental fact, Ireland has come in as a mere tail-piece
to a British volume. All this we must change. The first business of an
Irish Parliament will be to take stock; and this will be effected by the
establishment of a Commission of a new kind, representative of science,
industry, agriculture, and finance, acceptable and authoritative in the
eyes of the whole nation, and charged with the duty of ascertaining the
actual state of things in Ireland and the wisest line of economic
development. Such an undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish
life altogether without precedent. It will draw the great personalities
of industry for the first time into the central current of public
affairs. It will furnish them with a platform upon which they will have
to talk in terms of the plough, the loom, and the ledger, and not in
terms of the wolf-dog and the orange-lily, and will render fruitful for
the service of the country innumerable talents, now unknown or estranged
by political superstitions. It will do all that State action can do to
generate a boom in Irish enterprises, and to tempt Irish capital into
them in a more abundant stream. And the proceedings and conclusions of
such a body, circulated broadcast somewhat after the Washington plan,
will provide for all classes in the community a liberal education in
Economics. Will "Ulster" fight against such an attempt to increase its
prosperity? Will the shipbuilders, the spinners, and the weavers close
down their works in order to patronise Sir Edward Carson's performance
on a pop-gun? It is not probable.

Work is the best remedy against such vapours, and an Ireland, occupied
in this fashion-with wealth-producing labour, will have no time for
civil war or "religious" riots.

As for concrete projects, the Irish Parliament will not be able to
begin on a very ambitious scale. But there are two or three matters
which it must at once put in hand. There is, for instance, the drainage
of the Barrow and the Bann. These two rivers are in a remarkable degree
non-political and non-sectarian. Just as the rain