The Irish Question is, then, in that aspect which must be to Irishmen of paramount importance, the problem of a national existence, chiefly an agricultural existence, in Ireland.  To outside observers it is the question of rural life, a question which is assuming a social and economic importance and interest of the most intense character, not only for Ireland North and South, but for almost the whole civilised world.  It is becoming increasingly difficult in many parts of the world to keep the people on the land, owing to the enormously improved industrial opportunities and enhanced social and intellectual advantages of urban life.  The problem can be better examined in Ireland than elsewhere, for with us it can, to a large extent, be isolated, since we have little highly developed town life.  Our rural exodus takes our people, for the most part, not into Irish or even into British towns, but into those of the United States.  What is migration in other countries is emigration with us, and the mind of the country, brooding over the dreary statistics of this perennial drain, naturally and longingly turns to schemes for the rehabilitation of rural life—­the only life it knows.

We cannot exercise much direct influence upon the desire to emigrate beyond spreading knowledge as to the real conditions of life in America, for which home life in Ireland is often ignorantly bartered.[5] We cannot isolate the phenomenon of emigration and find a cure for it apart from the rest of the Irish Question.  We must recognise that emigration is but the chief symptom of a low national vitality, and that the first result of our efforts to stay the tide may increase the outflow.  We cannot fit the people to stay without fitting them to go.  Before we can keep the people at home we have got to construct a national life with, in the first place, a secure basis of physical comfort and decency.  This life must have a character, a dignity, an outlook of its own.  A comfortable Boeotia will never develop into a real Hibernia Pacata.  The standard of living may in some ways be lower than the English standard:  in some ways it may be higher.  But even if statesmanship and all the forces of philanthropy and patriotism combined can construct a contented rural Ireland for the people, it can only be maintained by the people.  It will have to accord with the national sentiment and be distinctively Irish.  It is this national aspiration, and the remarkable promise of the movements making for its fruition, which give to the work of Irish social and economic reform the fascination which those who do not know the Ireland of to-day cannot understand.  This work of reform must, of course, be primarily economic, but economic remedies cannot be applied to Irish ills without the spiritual aids which are required to move to action the latent forces of Irish reason and emotion.

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