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the sight. Many causes have of course | what nearer the centre of English contributed to produce this lamentable finance. It is only when a question of result. Long observation and experience convince me that the chief agent in working the mischief, as well as the most difficult obstacle in the way of remedying it, has been and is the Irish railway system. And this system alone, among our causes of complaint, has no excuse in the traditional legacies of rights and wrongs, of religious hatreds and racial contempts, of class warfare and clan jealousies, which account for so vast and sad a part of Irish history. Almost as grievous an indictment might be brought against the Irish banking system. In other countries the functions of a bank are primarily to gather together the unemployed monetary resources of a community, and thus enable the community as a whole to undertake enterprises and conduct a volume of production and trade to which the scattered efforts of its individual members would be unequal. It follows-always

utilizing a little of this money in Ireland is raised, that a conservative chill benumbs the processes of Irish banking. Then you encounter the most mercilessly vigilant caution, the most rigid insistence upon a surplus of sccurity. In effect, no man can get money from an Irish bank for Irish industrial or commercial purposes, unless he can prove that he does not need it. To grant a loan on prospective profits, to lend upon mercantile security, is unheard of. Equally out of the question is it for a farmer to borrow upon the value of his lease, or upon his improvements. The Irish banker takes no interest in the doings and prospects of the busy men about him. It is no concern of his to watch their progress, to canvas the chances of their success, to form conclusions as to whether they are meu to be backed up or not. These are all affairs quite out of his province. speaking of other His office is almost as alien to the intercountries that the prosperity, activ-ests and fortunes of the country he ity, and virile force of a community are habitually to be measured by the strength and the intelligent and progressive adaptability of its banking management. Familiar to triteness as this truth is, it must be repeated here, because it furnishes the most concise possible statement of what Irish banking is not. So far as playing a helpful part in the employment of Irish resources and the development of Irish production, trade, and commerce concerned, the banks of Ireland might almost as well be in Mexico. In truth, I am not sure that most of them would not be better there. Irish banks, in practice, exist for the purpose of getting together Irish money and sending it away for investment elsewhere. Of furnish the impulse under which the the Bank of Ireland's £12,000,000 of coal and iron are to be brought buoycapital, over £10,000,000 are in the use antly to the surface, the mill-wheels of the government outside of Ireland. started whirring again, and the wretched The bulk of the other banks employ mud-hovels revolutionized into tidy and their hoards even less to the public commodious homes. A strong, vigorbenefit. There is always Irish money ous, and sympathetic national governforthcoming for hare-brained gambling ment in Dublin will find some way to ventures in the Argentine or at the put a regenerated Irish banking system Cape, or for dubious schemes some-in touch with Irish business and trade,

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lives in as is that of the emigration agent at Queenstown. Even the PostOffice Savings Banks — with their aggregate Irish capital of £3,974,968 in 1891-work out the same unfortunate results. If it is good for the people individually to have such a store of savings, it is a good far overbalanced by the general evil of having this money sent out of the country and applied to foreign uses.

But, it will be answered, these are all ills which may be remedied. A miraculously reinvigorated and inspirited new generation of agriculturists can drain the land, plant fresh forests, and make Ireland to blossom like the rose. A restored national pride will

will know how to restore confidence | excess of females over males of 72,010. and energy to commercial life—may Of this excess the twenty-eight Catheven discover a plan by which to turn olic counties have 17,517, and the four the Irish railways into a blessing in- Protestant counties have 54,493. This stead of a curse, without bringing means simply that the able-bodied girl down the wrathful veto of the British in the Catholic parts goes away to shareholder, and his vested-interests America or Australia, because there is spokesmen at Westminster. nothing for her to do at home. The Protestant girl of Belfast or Derry finds employment in the home factories instead. The product of her labor somewhat underpaid, it is said, but very remunerative to the employermore than accounts for the net advantage these few Protestant towns enjoy

I speak as one who is willing to see the experiment tried, and who fain would believe that these halcyon results may follow. But above every form of hope there rises the grim and gloomy shadow of doubt is it not really too late?

twice the income-tax of Londonderry, and Dublin's income-tax is still nearly double that of Belfast. If I do not refer henceforth to these Protestant towns, by way of exception, it is because they are not really important, one way or the other.

The true basis of the doubts I have

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In the consideration of this question, over their Catholic fellows. Nor is I should like to put aside at the very this advantage so striking in substance outset the so-called problem of Ulster. as it seems to be on the lecturer's. If the electorate of the United King-screen. With an equal population.. doms in its wisdom or unwisdom, as it Waterford ten years ago paid almost may turn out to be, sees fit to devolve back Parliamentary power to Dublin, this phantom problem will soon enough demonstrate its own unreality. The principal figures in the opposed Parliamentary groups of Irish Nationalists and Irish Unionists are well acquainted with one another. They pair together, they travel to and from Kingstown to- mentioned most dismal and depressgether. They laugh among themselves, ing doubts — is to be found in the con-privately, at the remarkable success dition and character of the people of their violent public display of histrion-Ireland to-day. I would not lock my ism has had in setting the slower Saxon mind against the hope that a man, or by the ears all over the world. There a body of men, may be raised up strong is no prominent Irish Unionist who has not picked out, and already begun to furtively cultivate, the constituency he would prefer to represent in the new Irish Legislative Assembly, if one is to be created. There is no leading Irish Nationalist who does not know this perfectly, and who has not a clear idea as to the particular personal group of Unionists with whom he would choose to work, in Irish affairs, in preference to some of his present patriot colleagues.

The chief real difference between Belfast and its half-dozen small imitators in the north, and the rest of the towns of Ireland, lies in the fact that the Ulster communities have a line of industries in which cheap female labor can be profitably employed. There is in all Ireland, by the census of 1891, an

enough, great enough, to do something with them. But it is to be said, in all solemnity and candor, that no statesman has ever before been confronted with a task of such dimensions, and containing so many elements of an apparently hopeless nature.

How much is cause and how much effect, and which of the two is which, are questions I leave to others. I know no standard by which we can judge what another race would have been like, graduated under the conditions which have ruled these hundred years. in Ireland. Happily the experiment has never been tried on quite the same lines anywhere else. There is a Poland, to be sure, and other partial parallels occur to the mind, but there is always in these the vital flaw that the nobility, gentry, and natural leading

classes went with their people, and towns of over ten thousand inhab

itants, which is seventeen per cent. of the whole, as against seventy-one per cent. in England and forty-seven in Scotland. The agricultural class, in round numbers, comprises nine hundred and thirty-five thousand people; the industrial class, six hundred and fifty-five thousand; the domestic class, two hundred and fifty-five thousand; the professional class, two hundred and fifteen thousand; the commercial class, eighty-five thousand. These two last classes deserve especial notice. England the predominance of the commercial over the professional class is as forty-nine to thirty-two; in Scotland, as thirty-three to twenty-four; in Germany, as forty-five to twenty-two; in France, as twenty-one to five. There is no other civilized country which does

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were indeed the ones who most conspicuously suffered in the losing fight. Ireland offers the unique instance of an aristocracy going over almost en bloc to the side of the stranger, and leaving the middle and lower strata to shift for themselves, where indeed they did not become the active and interested agents of the oppression. In the great famine years of 1847-9, for instance, it was the Irish aristocracy and landed classes who exacted rents and carried out wholesale clearances, and it was the charity of England and America which enabled even a remnant of the Irish people to survive the terrible crisis in the land of their birth. Neither Poland nor Austrian Italy, neither Hungary in the forties nor the Slav States under the pashas, had at least that experience. So I say that it must not contain, in some proportion, more remain a matter of speculation of commercial men than professional men partisan debate, if you will-how some - except Ireland, where the ruinous other race would have emerged from ratio the other way is as twenty-one to the same ordeal. eight.

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That the Irish race in Ireland That fifth of the population which has come out badly there can be no two supports itself by agriculture is a shade opinions among candid observers. It better off now than it was a dozen seems to me to be of the utmost impor- years ago. The general effect of land tance for the future that we should legislation since 1881 has been to give realize just what that " badly means. the small farmer and the smaller holder In a question of life and death, a a sense of security, which they lacked kindly diagnosis becomes easily a before. They could whitewash their crime.

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cottages now, put on a new thatch, or So shrewd and cautious a student of lay a floor inside, without its being lands and resources as Arthur Young taken as an evidence of prosperity warthought, a century ago, that Ireland ranting an increase in the rent. As a could maintain a population of one result, the traveller now gets a considhundred million souls. Sir Robert erably less repellent idea of the condiKane, in his "Industrial Resources," tion of the farming classes than used to puts the number to be supported com- be forced upon him. The incessant fortably, under intelligent manage- emigration, too, has measurably augment, at twenty million. We know mented the demand for labor in the that, fifty years ago, the island did contain over eight million, and, as the glimpse afforded above of Mountmelick shows, there was a greater industrial prosperity then than now. At the present time Ireland contains about four million six hundred thousand inhabitants, and is still losing its population yearly at a rate of about ten per cent. Of the existing population, eight hundred and fifty thousand live in

country. The ordinary spade-man — original of the spalpeen · can now carn an average annual wage of £20. This man has long been the least unsatisfactory figure in the woe-begone gallery of Irish-class types. He shows fewer signs of the universal dry-rot, even now, than the others. It is true that the once famous pride in keeping his aged parents off the rates is now pretty well extinct in him, and that his wife

has raised the industry of going about | Canada and Australia, in Glasgow and begging at the farmers' houses to a quite the north of England, outnumber by professional pitch. His old melancholy fivefold their cousins who have reinability to do anything by organization mained to till the soil of Ireland.

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The moment we quit the farm-land proper for the village, the evil and discouraging change begins. Without

is as marked as ever. There is scarcely a vestige of an agricultural laborers' trade union to be found in Ireland, and with a single exception in Carlow-doubt there is all too much sad incathe Irish Hodge shows no conception of any form of benefit society. But in the strictly rural districts he remains industrious, honest, and faithful, and since, in our own time, his condition has admittedly been the worst of any white Christian under the sun, one cannot but be glad, if it be true, as Assistant-Commissioner O'Brien thinks it is, that he is doing better.

pacity, poverty, and wretchedness in what we have turned our backs upon; but in what we are coming to these will be found not only to exist in a greatly increased degree, but to be capped by an clement of personal worthlessness which it is difficult to think or speak of with the scantest patience.

I will not lay any particular stress upon that familiar and heartbreaking The farmers may no longer find a feature in every Irish village — the conprofit in preserving an exaggerated siderable class of miserable and ragged squalor about their homes, but they get old people who are frankly unable to little enough profit out of anything else. get food from day to day without help Here and there a strong farmer, hap- of some sort, official or otherwise. pily situated as regards the problem of They are by no means the worst peogetting cheaply to a good market, does ple you shall find in this simple hama little more than make both ends meet. let or small town. Students of their The rest hold themselves extremely species who have lived long either in fortunate when they have managed to this or any other backward district of subsist through the year without iu- Europe do not need to be told that the creasing the gombeen-man's clutch on generation which grew up, before readtheir holding and next year's crops. ing and writing were the local fashion, This, however, is coming more and possessed certain qualities which somemore to be the case all over the British how their lettered children have manIsles, and it is enough to say that the aged to miss. Mr. William O'Brien Irish farmer, with so many odds against has recently published an affecting him, will not at the best be doing better sketch of one of the last of the itinerant than his English and Scotch fellows." philologues," a curiously indepenHis, too, is a respectable class, harder dent old bag of rags and bones, who of nature and narrower than the agri-tramped from barony to barony, concultural laborer, prejudiced by bitter templating the stars through some abexperience against venturing upon ex-surd pre-Ptolemaic mist of theory, perimental outlay, schooled to meanness in small routine expenditures, and painfully lacking in ideas not connected with farm-work, markets, and the sports of coursing and horse-racing-but still respectable. If the Irish farmer and his laborer made up three-fifths of Ireland's population, instead of one-fifth, there would be no need for despair. But it is upon these two classes that the hand of expatriation has been most heavily laid. The sons and grandsons of Irish husbandmen who are doing well to-day in the United States, in

thinking of himself as a grammarian, and received everywhere sweetly as a unique survival of something, no one knew just what, but which at any rate was undoubtedly Irish - an antique figure as lovable as it was preposterous. I find myself thinking of the swarm of tattered, red-eyed, foul-smelling, wholly illiterate ancient paupers of the Irish village with something of this same instinctive tenderness. As our phrase goes, "they mean no harm, poor souls." They never learned to read, very likely they never wanted to work, but they

are almost the only remaining custo-means of idling comfortably in the dians of the memories of a once bril-neighboring bars.

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enjoy a good name. But the conditions grow increasingly unfavorable to the production of that kind of priest. The commoner type nowadays is of a man who is zealous enough but lacking in breadth and intelligent sympathy. He does not hit it off with the doctor, and that means a sweeping neutralization of his power for improving matters. If he gets into antagonism with the publicans as well, his influence may be written down at zero.

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liant, imaginative, swift-witted people. There will be a priest who in any In their dirty and bemuddled keeping case works hard, and who in addition, are the oral traditions, legends, songs, if he happens to be a man of brains and national folk-lore of an otherwise and zeal, may exert a considerable departed race, the glamour of whose moral and social influence for good. In strange qualities and tragic fate still this latter case, and especially if the fascinates the fancy of civilization. It principal physician is of a sort to labor is, of course, not as true of them now cordially with him, people all over that as it was even ten years ago and in-poor-law district will know Father Sofinitely less than it was in the awful and-so by repute, and his village will year of 1849, when Thomas Carlyle looked them over, and saw nothing but "the old abominable aspect of human swinery." But a touch, a suggestion of the ancient light seems always visible to me in these hapless old wretches. My word for it, the village will be even less bearable than it is now when they are gone. What else will you find in this community be it a village of five hundred inhabitants, or an ancient decayed town of ten thousand? A handful of shops Every "if" in Ireland may indeed on a main street, one or two of which be said to turn now upon these same perhaps perpetuate the flickering re- publicans. It must be an exceptional mains of a local industry-the rest Irish village or town-one worth a what are called general stores, for the long day's journey to see - that they sale of tinned meats, dried fish, and cannot control. The state of things breadstuffs from America, cheap shoddy which makes Guinness the best-known cloths from English or German mills, trading name in Ireland, and probably cheap hats from East London's Jewish John Jamieson the next most familiar, sweating establishments, cheap Ger- and which in whole districts of Ireland man boots, and a ruck of gaudy and has left the distillery or malt-house grossly inferior wares gathered from busy while every other industry has half-a-dozen other homes of pinchbeck vanished, reflects itself by multiplied manufacture. Occasionally the district, facets in the municipal aud social existas about Galway or Gweedore, affords ence of the large towns and cities. some speciality of local fabrication it were not for the saving fact that in which it is worth while to offer for sale. many of the smaller places these pubAs a rule, the last thing these mer-licans are amiable men, amenable to chants dream of getting in stock is something of Irish origin. A few of these traders will be strong men, astute in the bestowal of credit, and utilizing their widespread hold upon their debt- As it is, every Irish community big ors to pecuniary advantage, quite after enough to have a tied public-house the manner of the gombeen-man. The contains an element of its male popurest will lead a hand-to-mouth exist-lation which may be put as a minimum ence, unable to make competition with at one-fifth, and is far more often a their rivals an exciting or even inter- third or even a half of the whole, esting affair, and satisfied if their which is body and soul at the service women-folk take in enough over the of the publican. The larger the popucounter to provide them with the lation, the truer this becomes. It is

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the persuasion of the priest and the handful of serious good citizens, the condition of all urban Ireland would be too terrible to think of.

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