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. According 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