There are, as I have said, historic reasons for the Celtic view of home to which my personal observation and experience has induced me to devote so much space.  The Irish people have never had the opportunity of developing that strong and salutary individualism which, amongst other things, imperiously demands, as a condition of its growth, a home that shall be a man’s castle as well as his abiding place.  In this, as in so much else, a healthy evolution was constantly thwarted by the clash of two peoples and two civilisations.  The Irish had hardly emerged from the nomad pastoral stage, when the first of that series of invasions, which had all the ferocity, without the finality of conquest, made settled life impossible over the greater part of the island.  An old chronicle throws some vivid light upon the way in which the idea of home life presented itself to the mind of the clan chiefs as late as the days of the Tudors.  “Con O’Neal,” we are told, “was so right Irish that he cursed all his posterity in case they either learnt English, sowed wheat or built them houses; lest the first should breed conversation, the second commerce, and with the last they should speed as the crow that buildeth her nest to be beaten out by the hawk."[10] The penal laws, again, acted as a disintegrant of the home and the family; and, finally, the paralysing effect of the abuses of a system of land tenure, under which evidences of thrift and comfort might at any time become determining factors in the calculation of rent, completed a series of causes which, in unison or isolation, were calculated to destroy at its source the growth of a wholesome domesticity.  These causes happily, no longer exist, and powerful forces are arising to overcome the defects and disadvantages which they have bequeathed to us; and I have little doubt that it will be possible to deal successfully with this obstacle which adds so peculiar a feature to the problem of rural life in Ireland.

If I have dwelt at what may appear to be a disproportionate length upon the Irishman’s peculiar conception of a home, it is because this difficulty, which Irish social and economic reformers still encounter, and with which they must deal sympathetically if they are to succeed in the work of national regeneration, strikingly illustrates the two-sided character of the Irish Question and the never-to-be-forgotten inter-dependence of the sentimental and the practical in Ireland.  I admit that this condition which adds to the interest of the problem, and perhaps makes it more amenable to rapid solution, is an indication of a weakness of moral fibre to which must be largely attributed our failure to be master of our circumstances.  Indeed, as I come into closer touch with the efforts which are now being made to raise the material condition of the people, the more convinced I become, much as my practical training has made me resist the conviction, that the Irish Question is, in its most difficult and most important aspects, the problem of the Irish mind, and that the solution of this problem is to be found in the strengthening of Irish character.