The task which we have to face is, then, a two-sided one, but its economic and its purely practical aspects first demand consideration.  Many even of the agrarian aspects of the question have, so far, been somewhat neglected in Ireland owing to a cause which is not far to seek.  It has often been asserted that the Irish Question is, at bottom, the Land Question.  There is a great deal of truth in this view, but almost all those who hold it have fallen into the grave error of tacitly identifying the land question with the tenure question—­an error which vitiates a great deal of current theorising about Ireland.  It was, indeed, inevitable that Irish agriculturists, with such an economic history behind them as I have outlined in the previous chapter, should have concentrated their attention during the latter half of the nineteenth century upon obtaining a legislative cure for the ills produced by legislation, to the comparative neglect of those equally difficult, if less obvious economic questions, which have been brought into special prominence by the agricultural depression of the last quarter of a century.  Now, however, that the Land Act of 1903 has been passed and the solution of the tenure question is in sight, we in Ireland are more free to direct our attention to what is at present the most important aspect of the agrarian situation—­the necessity for determining the social and economic conditions essential to the well-being of the peasant proprietary, which, though it is to be started with as bright an outlook as the law can give, must stand or fall by its own inherent merits or defects.  Not only are we now free to give adequate consideration to this question, but it is also imperative that we should do so, for whilst I am hopeful that the Land Act will settle the question of tenure, it will obviously not merely leave the other problems of agricultural existence—­problems some of which are not unknown in other parts of the United Kingdom—­still unsolved, but will also increase the necessity for their solution, and will, moreover, bring in its train complex difficulties of its own.

The main features of the depressing outlook of rural life in the United Kingdom are well known.  The land steadily passes from under the plough and is given over to stock raising.  As the kine increase the men decay.  In Ireland the rural exodus takes, as I have already said, the shape, mainly, not of migration to Irish urban centres, but rather the uglier form of an emigration which not only depletes our population but drains it of the very elements which can least be spared.