It is not part of my scheme to describe in detail the various movements, agricultural, industrial, economic, literary, political, which in the last twenty years have contributed to this national revival.  Some have a world-wide fame, all have been excellently described at one time or another by writers of talent and insight.[46] My purpose is to note their characteristics and progress, and to estimate their political significance.  In the first place it must be remembered that some of the most important of the modern legislative measures have been initiated and promoted by Home Rulers and Unionists, Roman Catholics and Protestants, acting in friendly co-operation and throwing aside their political and religious antagonisms.  Such was the origin of the great Land Purchase Act of 1903, which Mr. Wyndham drafted on the basis of an agreement reached at a friendly conference of landlords and representatives of tenants.  But a far more interesting and hopeful instance of co-operation had taken place seven years earlier.  One of the very few really constructive measures of the last twenty years, the Act of 1899 for setting up the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, was the direct outcome of the recommendations of the Recess Committee brought together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett; a Committee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the House of Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster captains of industry, the Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, and an eminent Jesuit.[47] In its reunion of men divided by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of Conference that assembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a devastating war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African Union.  That Conference was the natural outcome of the grant of Home Rule to the defeated Boer States.  The Irish Conference, succeeding a land-war far more destructive and demoralizing, was brought together in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,[48] is a measure of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial of self-government.  There lay Ireland, an island with a rich soil and a clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind England, far behind all the progressive nations of Europe in agriculture and industry, her population declining, her land passing out of cultivation,[49] her strongest sons and daughters hurrying away to enrich with their wits and sinews distant lands.  There, in short, lay a country groaning for intelligent development by the concentrated energies of her own people.

“We have in Ireland,” runs the first paragraph of the Report of the Committee, “a poor country practically without manufactures—­except for the linen and shipbuilding of the north, and the brewing and distilling of Dublin—­dependent upon agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled, its area under cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population without industrial habits or technical skill.”