This hypothetical traveller would discover that our resources are but half developed, and yet hundreds of thousands of our workers have gone, and are still going, to produce wealth where it is less urgently needed.  The remnant of the race who still cling to the old country are not only numerically weak, but in many other ways they show the physical and moral effects of the drain which emigration has made on the youth, strength, and energy of the community.  Our four and a quarter millions of people, mainly agricultural, have, speaking generally, a very low standard of comfort, which they like to attribute to some five or six millions sterling paid as agricultural rent, and three millions of alleged over-taxation.  They face the situation bravely—­and, incidentally, swell the over-taxation—­with the help of the thirteen or fourteen millions worth of alcoholic stimulants which they annually consume.  The still larger consumption in Great Britain may seem to lend at least a respectability to this apparent over-indulgence, but it looks odd.  The people are endowed with intellectual capacities of a high order.  They have literary gifts and an artistic sense.  Yet, with a few brilliant exceptions, they contribute nothing to invention and create nothing in literature or in art.  One would say that there must be something wrong with the education of the country; and most people declare that it is too literary, though the Census returns show that there are still large numbers who escape the tyranny of books.  The people have an extraordinary belief in political remedies for economic ills; and their political leaders, who are not as a rule themselves actively engaged in business life, tell the people, pointing to ruined mills and unused water power, that the country once had diversified industries, and that if they were allowed to apply their panacea, Ireland would quickly rebuild her industrial life.  If our hypothetical traveller were to ask whether there are no other leaders in the country besides the eloquent gentlemen who proclaim her helplessness, he would be told that among the professional classes, the landlords, and the captains of industry, are to be found as competent popular advisers as are possessed by any other country of similar economic standing.  But these men take only a dilettante part in politics, and no value is set on industrial, commercial or professional success in the choice of public men.  Can it be that to the Irish mind politics are, what Bulwer Lytton declared love to be, “the business of the idle, and the idleness of the busy”?

These, though only a few of the strange ironies of Irish life, are so paradoxical and so anomalous that they are not unnaturally attributed to the intrusion of an alien and unfriendly power; and this furnishes the reason why everything which goes wrong is used to nourish the anti-English sentiment.  At the same time they give emphasis to the growing doubt as to the wisdom of those to whom the Irish Question presents itself only as a single and simple issue—­namely, whether the laws which are to put all these things right shall be made at St. Stephen’s by the collective wisdom of the United Kingdom, aided by the voice of Ireland—­which is adequately represented—­or whether these laws shall be made by Irishmen alone in a Parliament in College Green.