But Land Purchase and County Councils are only part of the great change that has come over Ireland since 1893.

There are other great transformations. There is the redemption of the congested districts. There is the revival of agriculture. There is the Old Age Pensions Act. Finally, there is the reform of the Universities.

THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS BOARD

Take, first, the daring policy of social renovation by which the forlorn peasantry of the West are being saved from the grey wilderness into which they had been thrust by the landlordism of 1830 to 1880.

It is the habit of the Unionist Press to claim the whole of this work as their own. That is rather bold of a party that lifted not a finger while these people said by those who know them to be the best peasantry in Europe were driven from the rich lands of Ireland to till the barren moorland and scratch the very rocks on the shores of the Atlantic. The Tories do not explain why they allowed the House of Lords for a whole half century to seal up the exile of these poor folk by rejecting every measure proposed for their welfare. As a matter of fact, of course, the policy of redeeming the congested districts was not first proposed either by the Tories or by the Liberals, but by the Irish members themselves.

The Tory claim is based, of course, on the fact that the first step towards action by the British Government dates from the famous Western tour of Mr. Arthur Balfour in the early nineties. Perhaps Mr. Balfour was tired of the monotony of five years of coercion. At any rate, he took that journey, and it was the best act of his political life. He travelled along that misty fringe of the Atlantic. He saw as we saw last summer, and I saw in 1891 the utter poverty of that unhappy land, where human life, sustained only by the charity of American exiles, still pays its doleful toll to far-off, indifferent landlords. Who can tell whether some touch of remorse did not enter into the heart of the man who up to that time had been the greatest of Irish coercionists since Castlereagh, when he saw with his own eyes the sorry plight of the poorest people in Europe the people who, in the opinion of General Gordon, were, as a result of a century of British civilisation, more destitute and miserable than the savages of Central Africa?

Mr. Balfour, at any rate, relented from his policy of more oppression. He even entered upon the first small beginnings of a policy of restoration.

It was a very small beginning that first Congested Board and a Commission that reported on its work nearly twenty years after decided that the Board had neither powers nor cash sufficient for its work. The Liberal Government of 1906-10 frankly accepted the opinion of the Commission, and gave the Board both new powers and new funds in the Irish Land Act of 1909. Under that Act the Congested Board is endowed with L250,000 a year, and has authority over half the area and a third of the population of Ireland. Over these great regions this authority now possesses extensive powers of purchase, rehousing, replanting, creation of fisheries, provision of seed and stocks powers, in short, extending to the complete restoration, by compulsion if necessary, of a whole community. The Board is appointed by the Chief Secretary, and already in two short years it has accomplished great work. Estates are being bought and replanted; holders are being migrated from bad land to good; villages are being rebuilt; industries encouraged; health safeguarded; fisheries revived. Those who examine its work as we did last summer will experience the feeling of men looking on at a splendid and gallant effort to salvage a race submerged.

This work, indeed, is still in its infancy. There are many absentee landlords who are still holding out for heavy and extravagant prices as a reward for the poverty and misery which they have often in large part caused by their own neglect. The Board appears to be reaching the limits of voluntary action. Much of the hope for the future of Ireland rests on their courage and skill.

THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE

The passing of landlordism has produced a great revival of energy and life in the rural districts. That revival began in the nineties, and the credit for first realising its importance and significance must be given to Sir Horace Plunkett. But private organisation alone could not meet the needs of the situation. In 1899 the Government were persuaded by the Irish party to pass an Act founding a new Irish Board of Agriculture on broad and generous lines.

This Irish Board of Agriculture is a very remarkable body. It is practically a Home Rule authority for agricultural purposes only. The Irish Minister for Agriculture by no means rules as an autocrat. He has to submit his policy to a large “Advisory Council” of over 100 members elected by all the County Councils of Ireland. Out of this Council a committee is chosen which is practically a Cabinet. This Agricultural Parliament now plays a most important part in the life of Ireland. It speaks for the whole nation more than any other public body. Its discussions are practical and useful. It is a training ground for the rulers of the future, and it is playing a vital part in bringing together the best men of the North and South. The Ulster members are already, in agricultural matters, working in a friendly spirit side by side with the men from the South.

Thus advised and kept in touch with public opinion, the Board of Agriculture is the most popular and effective Department in Dublin Castle. It gives us a foretaste of the new power that will be given to Irish administration by the Home Rule spirit.

For it is just this central guidance that the other great new Irish developments chiefly lack. Take local government. There is not a County Council in Ireland which would not be stronger if it were directed and sometimes, perhaps, even commanded from the centre by a sympathetic national authority. There is not a Board in Ireland, whether it be the Congested Districts Board, or the Estates Commissioners, or the Land Commission, that would not be more wisely directed if there were some central arena in which the great principles of administration could be seriously and responsibly debated and settled. For, in spite of the popular notion that Irishmen are too talkative, there is really too little discussion in Ireland on practical affairs. The great unsolved political problem blocks the way. The block cannot be removed except by settlement. One of the strongest reasons for granting Home Rule is in order to free the mind of the nation for attention to the national housekeeping.

OLD-AGE PENSIONS

One of the most remarkable events of the last few years has been the unexpected side-share of Ireland in the great social legislation of Great Britain. Even the Irish members themselves have scarcely foreseen how immensely Ireland, being the poorest partner in the United Kingdom, would benefit by a policy “tender to the poor.” The most conspicuous example of that effect has been Old-age Pensions. Old-age Pensions have fallen on Ireland as a shower of gold. Her share is already well over L2,000,000. The great new fact in Irish social welfare is that she now draws that great draught from the Imperial Exchequer.

Travelling along the Atlantic coast last summer, I inquired in many local post-offices as to the amount of pensions given weekly in those little grey villages. I found that often the old-age pensioners would number between 100 and 200 in small villages of less than 2,000 people. The emigration of the youth has left a disproportionate number of the old, and it is not necessary to bring any railing accusation against the honesty of the Irish race in order to understand why it is that Old-age Pensions have done so much for Ireland. But the fact remains, and it carries with it a great and unexpected relief to the Irish ratepayer.

THE NEW UNIVERSITY ACT

Last, but not least, we have the great stimulus given to higher education by the passage of Mr. Birrell’s Irish University Act. For a whole generation the progress of higher education in Ireland has been held up by a barren and wearisome religious quarrel. Now that quarrel has vanished, and Ireland is organising a great system of University education for her Catholic as well as her Protestant youth. Not the least stimulating experience of the Eighty Club in Ireland was the day which we spent, under the guidance of the distinguished Principal, at Cork University College, where we saw Catholics and Protestants, men and women, young and old, working together in friendly harmony in the splendid buildings which have sprung up to house the undergraduates of the south-west. The same process is going on at Dublin, Galway, and Belfast. The machinery is being rapidly prepared for training up in the best possible atmosphere of mutual tolerance the new rulers of Home Rule Ireland.

Such have been the great Acts of Parliament which have created a changed situation in Ireland. But the crown is still wanting to the work. Those who travel in Ireland and make any close inquiry into the work of these Acts must feel that there is a great gap unfilled. It is a gap at the top. All these new roads of reform are well and truly laid but they all lead nowhere.

Take one startling fact. Two Commissions of late years have considered the great and glaring need of Ireland in the want of swift, cheap, and convenient transport both for persons and goods. One of these Commissions was on Canals, and the other on Railways. Both decided in favour of national control. But as there is no national authority which anyone trusts, both reports have been stillborn.

It was probably some such facts that led, as far back as August, 1903, to the uprising among the more moderate Unionist Irishmen of a remarkable movement which is still affecting Ireland. This movement took shape in a body; called the Irish Reform Association, presided over, like the Land Conference, by that remarkable Irish peer Lord Dunraven. That Conference put forward a set of proposals which are now historical, and which have since, in varying forms, inspired the movement for what is popularly known as “Devolution."

Mild as are the proposals of this new party, they do not differ in principle from the proposals of the Home Rulers.

These proposals obtained the backing of a large section of the Unionist Party. They undoubtedly had the sympathy of Sir Anthony MacDonnell. It is difficult to say, at the present moment, what precise part was played by Mr. George Wyndham, then still the Irish Chief Secretary. But the eloquent fact remains that the ultimate triumph of the Ulster Unionists over the Devolution Party of 1903 was marked by his resignation. There would seem to be no substantial doubt that in 1903 there arose in the Unionist Party the same division in regard to Home Rule as arose in 1885, when Lord Carnarvon, the Tory Viceroy, met Mr. Parnell. For the moment the better spirits seriously contemplated removing once and for all the bitterness of the Irish grievance. There was a return of that feeling in the autumn of 1910, when, for the moment, at a period still known politically as the “age of reason,” most of the Unionist Press admitted how much good reason and common-sense there was on the side of Home Rule. On each of these occasions the same result has occurred. At the critical moment the extreme faction of the Ulster Unionists has intervened and driven back the Tory Party to its fatal enslavement.

But the great fact which produced these movements still remains as valid and potent as ever. It is that, whatever improvements you introduce into the Irish machine, it can never work properly until the central motive power is a self-governing authority.

So deeply have the better Unionists been committed to that view in the past, in 1885, 1903, and 1910, that they are now shaping a new argument to face the situation of 1912. This argument is simple. It is that the new prosperity of Ireland is not a help, but a bar to Home Rule.

“If Ireland can prosper so well without Home Rule,” so runs this line of reasoning, “why give her Home Rule at all?”

This is indeed a strange and cruel argument. We all know the people who used to say Home Rule was impossible because Ireland was disturbed. They are now occupied in saying that she must be denied Home Rule because she is so peaceful.

But now it appears that this ingenious dilemma is to be applied to her material condition also. As with order, so with finance. In the old days Ireland was refused Home Rule because she was too poor. How could she get on without England? She would be bankrupt. But now that she is better off she is to be refused it because she is too prosperous!

Is it not quite obvious that these are arguments after judgment? That the people who use them are merely seeking excuses for refusing Home Rule altogether and at all seasons?

The British people, essentially a just and serious people, will not listen to these last desperate pleas, the coward fugitives of a routed case.

They will rather believe that all these material improvements in the condition of Ireland only make the need for Home Rule stronger and more urgent. They will realise that Ireland requires not a material, but a moral cure to give her the full value of the new reforms. Her need is to be removed once and for all from the class of dependent communities. She wants the great tonic cure of self-reliance and self-responsibility.

For it is as true to-day as it was when Mr. Gladstone spoke these wise and searching words in April, 1886:

“The fault of the administration of Ireland is simply this: that its spring and source of action, and what is called its motor muscle, is English and not Irish. Without providing a domestic Legislature for Ireland, without having an Irish Parliament, I want to know how you will bring about this wonderful, superhuman, and, I believe, in this condition, impossible result, that your administrative system shall be Irish and not English?”

The greatest need is still this to make the “motor-muscle” Irish.