The fact is we had arrived at the point where the student of Irish life usually finds himself in a cul de sac.  If he has accurately observed the conditions, he is face to face with a problem which appears to be in its nature insoluble.  For at every turn he finds things being done wrong which might so easily be done right, only that nobody is concerned that they should be done right.  And what is worse, when he has learned, in the course of his investigations, to discount the picturesque explanation of our unsuccess in practical life which in Ireland veils the unpleasant truth, he will find that the people are quite aware of their defects, although they attribute them to causes beyond their power to remove.  Then, too, the sympathetic inquirer is shocked by the lack of seriousness in it all.  With all their past griefs and their high aspirations, the Irish people seem to be play-acting before the world.  The inquirer does not, perhaps, reflect that, if play-acting be inconsistent with the deepest emotions, and with the pursuit of high ideals, then he condemns a little over one half of the human race.[33] He probably comes to the main conclusion adopted in these pages, and realises that the Irish Question is a problem of character.  And as Irish character is the product of Irish history, which cannot be re-enacted, he leaves the problem there.  Harold Frederic left it there, and there it has been taken up by those whose endeavour forms the story which I have to tell.

I now come to the principles which, it appears to me, must underlie the solution of this problem.  The narrative contained in the second part of this book is a record of the efforts made during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two years of the twentieth century by a small, but now rapidly augmenting group of Irishmen, to pluck the brand of Irish intellect from the burning of the Irish Question.  The problem before us was, my readers will now understand, how to make headway in view of the weakness of character to which I have had to attribute the paralysis of our activities in the past.  We were quite aware that our progress would at first be slow.  But as we were satisfied that the defects of character which stood in the way of economic advancement were due to causes which need no longer be operative, and that the intellect of the people was unimpaired, we faced the problem with confidence.

The practical form which our work took was the launching upon Irish life of a movement of organised self-help, and the subsequent grafting upon this movement of a system of State-aid to the agriculture and industries of the country.  I need not here further elaborate this programme, for the steps by which it has been and is being adopted will be presently described in detail.  But there is one aspect of the new movement in Ireland which must be understood by those who would grasp the true significance and the human interest of an evolution in our national life, the only recent parallel for which, as far as I am aware, is to be found in Japan:  though to my mind the conscious attempt of the Irish people to develop a civilisation of their own is far more interesting than the recent efforts of the Japanese to westernise their institutions.