facts of Irish life.  The cause and cure of Irish ills are not chiefly political, broaden or narrow our conception of politics as we will; they are not chiefly religious, whatever be the effect of Roman Catholic influence upon the practical side of the people’s life; they are not chiefly economic, be the actual poverty of the people and the potential wealth of the country what they may.  The Irish Question is a broad and deeply interesting human problem which has baffled generation after generation of a great and virile race, who complacently attribute their incapacity to master it to Irish perversity, and pass on, leaving it unsolved by Anglo-Saxons, and therefore insoluble!

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] My own experience confirms Mr. Lecky’s view of the chief cause of this extraordinary feeling.  “It is probable,” he writes, “that the true source of the savage hatred of England that animates great bodies of Irishmen on either side of the Atlantic has very little real connection with the penal laws, or the rebellion, or the Union.  It is far more due to the great clearances and the vast unaided emigrations that followed the famine.”—­Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, Vol.  II., p, 177.

[2] Spectator, 6th September, 1902.

[3] The title to the greater part of Irish land is based on confiscation.  This is true of many other countries, but what was exceptional in the Irish confiscations was that the grantees for the most part did not settle on the lands themselves, drive away the dispossessed, or come to any rational working agreement with them.

CHAPTER II.

THE IRISH QUESTION IN IRELAND.

Whilst attributing the long continued failure of English rule in Ireland largely to a misunderstanding of the Irish mind, I have given England—­at least modern England—­credit for good intentions towards us.  I now come to the case of the misunderstood, and shall from henceforth be concerned with the immeasurably greater responsibility of the Irish people themselves for their own welfare.  The most characteristic, and by far the most hopeful feature of the change in the Anglo-Irish situation which took place in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and upon the meaning of which I dwelt in the preceding chapter, is the growing sense amongst us that the English misunderstanding of Ireland is of far less importance, and perhaps less inexcusable, than our own misunderstanding of ourselves.

When I first came into practical touch with the extraordinarily complex problems of Irish life, nothing impressed me so much as the universal belief among my countrymen that Providence had endowed them with capacities of a high order, and their country with resources of unbounded richness, but that both the capacities and the resources remained undeveloped owing to the stupidity—­or worse—­of British rule.  It was asserted,