These things are signs of a mental and moral condition that goes deeper than the manifestation.  They do not show only want of the sense of beauty—­want of the sense even of cleanliness; they show the absence of all the civilizing influences—­all the humanizing tendencies of modern society.  By this want Ireland is made miserable and kept low in the scale of nations.  Had the race been self-respecting, sturdy, upright, stubbornly industrious, all this savage neglect would have mended itself.  Being what it is—­excitable, imaginative, spasmodic, given over to ideas rather than to facts, and trusting to Hercules in the clouds rather than to its own brawny shoulders—­this squalor continues and is not dependent on poverty.  Time alone will show whether changed agrarian conditions will alter it.  So far as his power goes, the priest does nothing to touch it.  The Church uses up its influence for everything but the practical purposes of work-a-day-life.  It teaches obediences to its ordinances, but not civic virtues.  It encourages boys and girls to marry at an age when they neither understand the responsibilities of life nor can support a family; but in its regard for the Sacrament it forgets the pauperization of the nation.  It enforces chastity, but it winks at murder; it demands money for masses for the souls of the dead, but it leaves on one side the homes and bodies of the living; it breeds a race of paupers to drag the country lower and lower into the depths of poverty, and thinks it has done a meritorious work, and one that calls for praise because of the paucity of numbers in the percentage of illegitimate births.  Thus in Ireland, where everything is set askew, even morality has its drawbacks, and less individual virtue would be a distinct national gain.

The Home Rule enthusiasts say all that is wanted to remedy these ingrained defects is a Parliament; all that is wanted to make Irishmen perfect and Ireland a paradise is a Parliament chosen by the people and sitting in College Green.  Human nature will then be changed, and the lion and the lamb will lie down together.  The Papist will love the Protestant, and the moral of the story about those two Scotch Presbyterian boys, whose presence at the Barrow House National School so seriously disturbed both priest and people, is one that will read quite the other way.  All the bitter hatred poured out against England, against Protestants, against the law and its administrators, will cease so soon as Catholics come to the place of power and the supremacy of England is at an end.  The Church which burned Giordano Bruno and is affronted because his memory has been honoured—­which placed the Quirinale under the ban of the lesser excommunication, and withstood the national impulse towards freedom and unity as represented by Garibaldi—­the Church which has ever been on the side of intolerance and tyranny will suddenly, in Ireland under Home Rule, become beneficent, just, and liberal, and heretics will no