On the reforms which have been thus briefly sketched, one or two general
remarks may be in place.
It has sometimes been contended that except by violence, or the menace
of violence, Ireland has never obtained anything from the English
Legislature. It would be truer to say that she has never obtained
anything at all. England is not a sovereign Power, and does not
administer Irish affairs, nor even her own. What has been gained has
been gained from the Legislature of the United Kingdom, in which
Irishmen, like every other race inhabiting that kingdom, have had their
full share of representation and of influence. And if in Ireland, as in
other countries, the necessity of reform has sometimes been made evident
by disorder, it is wholly untrue to say that this has been always or
even usually the case. Land-reform in its earliest stages, like trade
unionism in England, was accompanied by disorder. But the greatest
measure of Irish land-reform--the Wyndham Act of 1903--was worked out on
Irish soil by peaceable discussion among the parties concerned, and
Parliament acted at once upon their joint demand. It was in precisely
the same way that the Department of Agriculture came into being; nor did
the great measures of Local Government, of University education for
Catholics, of the Labourers' Acts, or the recognition extended to the
Gaelic movement, owe their origin to any other cause than the wholesome
influences of reason and goodwill.
The internal condition of Ireland already shows a marked response to the
altered state of things. It is visible, as many travellers have noticed,
in the face of the country; it is proved by official records and
statistics. Emigration has declined to its lowest point; education has
spread amongst the people. Irish emigrants, when they do leave their own
shores, take higher positions than ever before. A population of some
four millions, largely composed of small farmers, has lent forty-seven
millions sterling to the Government; and, what is still more
significant, the deposits in Post Office Savings Banks have risen from
six millions in 1896 to over thirteen millions the year before the war.
The new War Loan is reported to have had an extraordinary success in
Ireland. On the last day of subscription a single Dublin bank took in
one million sterling.[*] With some self-appointed champions of Ireland
abuse of the British Empire is a very popular amusement, but the Irish
farmer and the Irish trader put their money in it, and with it they
stand to win or lose.
[Footnote *: The Times, Feb. 17, 1917.]
Irish agriculture, partly owing to climatic conditions and partly to the
fact that Ireland has a monopoly of the export of live cattle to
England, has developed hitherto rather in the direction of
cattle-raising than of tillage; and cattle have increased since 1851
from three million to over five million head, and sheep from two
millions to three million six hundred thousand. Poultry have nearly
quadrupled in the same period. The gross railway receipts--another
significant symptom--were 2,750,000 pounds in 1886. In 1915 they had
risen to 4,831,000 pounds. The co-operative agricultural associations,
in which Ireland has shown the way to the English-speaking world, now
number about 1,000, and do a trade of well over five millions a year.
The thousands of labourers' cottages which have sprung up, each with its
plot of land, have been to the Irish labourers what the Land Acts have
been to the farmer--they have completely transformed his economic status
in the country.
Accompanying these symptoms of material progress, we have witnessed in
recent years a striking outburst of intellectual activity. Irish
literature, in poetry and drama, has attracted the attention of the
whole world of culture, and exact and scholarly research in history and
archaeology have flourished and found audiences as they were never known
to do in Ireland till now. This has not been the work of any one section
of the people, either in creed or in politics; but the whole movement
has been inspired by an Irish patriotism which no sane person regards as
conflicting in any degree with allegiance to the Empire under the
shelter of which it has grown and prospered.
The circumstances above set forth do not pretend to be the whole story
about modern Ireland, nor do they show that the millennium has arrived
in that country. Apart from Home Rule, which is outside our present
field, much still remains to be done--there is elementary education to
be advanced, commercial facilities to be developed, land-purchase to be
completed. But it is contended that the real facts about Ireland are
wholly and absurdly inconsistent with the picture of that country which
the friends of Germany circulate so industriously at the present time.
Ireland is not an oppressed and plundered nation, ground under the heel
of a foreign Power, and with her individual life deliberately stifled
like that of Poland in the German Empire. Only through ignorance or
malice could such an illusion gain currency, and it needs only the touch
of reality--reality which every one can easily see or verify for
himself--to dispel it for ever from the mind of every candid inquirer.