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that our sons may worthily maintain the traditions of the past, in promoting the agricultural welfare of our country and the scientific interests of the world, is a prayer to which Irishmen of every religious creed and political faith will fervently say " Amen."

But that consummation can only be achieved by a complete reform of our system of economy. Even the casual observer must see that the weakness of Ireland is its contempt for industry on the one hand, and its distrust of industry on the other, whereby the labourer and the employer fail to effect such a combination as would render the land productive and enterprise successful. Our country is being steadily depleted of its most vigorous toilers, and nought is done to fill up the gap made by the exodus or to check that exodus. On the contrary, the young and ambitious, the industrious and intelligent, have every worldly inducement to abandon the homeland that will not support, employ, or educate them in such a way that they can earn a living therein, and to seek new fields of industry in the far west. Sectarian differences and mutual distrust impede education and economy at every point. The natural result is that the nation is slowly dying; its energies are decaying, its children are departing, its trade is depressed, its labour is degraded and its tillage is declining, while the disabilities of the employer, the farmer, and the labourer, are increasing every year owing to the mismanagement of our material resources, the inefficient control of the work, and the unreliable character of the workman. Labour requires to be reorganised on an ethical basis; education must be made more practical in its aims; capital must become more disinterested in its investments. The

national decay is a proof of the unwisdom of spending one's life in the pursuit of political ideals and of the necessity of facing the facts of actual life. An Act of Parliament is not the panacea for a state of things created by too much eloquence and too little diligence, but a regeneration of the national spirit is. An exchange of landlords will not raise the national credit unless it is followed by a change of character. The work of reform is no longer hampered by the intertribal warfare or oppressive statutes described in the preceding pages. The Irish people have their national destiny in their own hands; they must work out their own salvation themselves without the assistance of Parliament. There are no longer grievances to be redressed, but there is character to be reformed. And if the national life is to be renewed, the principles of economy must be studied and a new spirit of enterprise infused.

Is it sound economy to have a premium on idleness and endeavour at a discount, to banish the employer and to abolish sport; to allow foreign produce and manufactures to compete on equal terms with our own in every market; to fill our baronies with unemployed labourers struggling with starvation on half an acre of ground; and to imagine that all the ills our country has inherited can be removed by the creation of socalled "economic" holdings for men, who have no capital to buy stock or intention to till the soil? The result is as evident, as it is inevitable, namely, that the thrifty, the temperate and well-to-do will gradually acquire the farms of the dilatory, the impecunious and the intemperate.

It does not pay in the long run to allow the land to

become impoverished, to take hay crop after hay crop from the same field, to purchase second-rate farming implements and machines made in America because cheaper, to buy the stuff dumped down by foreign countries in our markets, to use inferior seed and manures, to live on credit, and to trust that Providence will correct our mistakes and pay our debts. Change of ownership can not of itself improve the land-the only security of our national lifeunless the new landlords prove industrious themselves, and capable of employing and controlling labour. Our economic efficiency depending on the co-operation of land, labour and capital, the three agents of production, peasant ownership can lead to no lasting benefit so long as agricultural produce is unprotected, the capitalist discouraged and the labourer dismissed.

On the one hand, we have stately asylums for the insane, all too small for the increasing demand, and spacious unions for the inane, maintained by a ruinous tax on the land for the accommodation of casuals, too lazy to dig but not ashamed to beg, and children who become demoralised by their surroundings-for the really deserving poor prefer "out-door relief," and the aged poor are to receive pensions nominally from the State, in reality from another iniquitous tax on the land-while, on the other hand, we see universal signs of decay and decline.

Over every village a ruined mill, gaunt spectre of a crushed enterprise, throws its dark shadow, and makes its mute appeal to Ireland to protect its industry and to defend its trade against the ruthless invader-not the Saxon this time-and every unjust attempt to undersell and monopolise. One may well ask-Is it sanity to allow foreign

potatoes and bacon to compete on equal terms with our own even in pig-producing and potato-growing districts? Is it sanity to allow the parasites, the drones and the weak-minded to multiply, and to permit the able-bodied and industrious to be diminished if they will not migrate? It seems, indeed, to be the fate of Irish industry to be starved out by its "Cosherers and Fait-neants"-of whom Petty complained in 1691men who demand support, but despise work? Is it sanity to imagine that we can live by the land alone, and that the State must manage everything-railways, factories, and co-operative stores? The improvement effected in the early part of the seventeenth century by Sir Lawrence Parsons, described in this chapter, is a proof that reform of industry is possible if the men be found capable of initiating, capitalizing and controlling it. A social regeneration would follow the resuscitation of some of those industries mentioned in these pages, in which we were once the dreaded rival of England. When those ruined mills, which once gave employment to the country-side, hum once more with the sound of machinery; when those expensive workhouses are converted into homes for workers; when one quarter of the area of the country is tilled; when the raised character of the labourer encourages capitalists to invest in home securities and to combine to develop national industries, and when the national produce receives State protection, then industrial inefficiency and agricultural depression will no longer act as a double brake upon the wheels of progress, and our economic salvation shall be accomplished.

CHAPTER XVIII.

IRISH CUSTOMS AND CURIOSITIES.

IRELAND was ever in an unsettled state.

This was due in a large measure to the number of warlike septs who regarded each other with feelings of mutual hatred and distrust, and had seldom an entente cordiale with one another for any length of time. This is not to be ascribed altogether to the inbred love of fighting in the Irish, but also to the unsettled state of life and property within the borders of the various septs. There were wo customs connected with the inheritance of land which were answerable for this unrest. In the first place, when the chieftain

died it did not follow as a matter of course that his eldest son or the next-of-kin succeeded; but the tanist was often selected who could secure his election by force of arms. And by the law of gavelkind the other tenantries were divided among all his sons, legitimate and illegitimate. Then came in the other custom, often acting contrary to this and causing grievous complications, of the chief claiming to inherit the land of his tenant who died during his office. It is little more than a hundred years since one of the old chieftains of King's County died who used to insist on this right. He was Thomas Coghlan, M.P. Banagher, and the last of the MacCoghlans "of the Fair Castles" of Delvin Ahra, commonly known as "the Maw" who has already been described. He levied the fines of Mortmain when a vassal died,

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