What the Agricultural Organization Society is doing for agriculture the Industrial Development Associations, formed only in quite recent years, are doing, in a different way, for the encouragement of Irish industries.  The Associations of Belfast, Cork, and other cities work in harmony, and meet in an annual All-Ireland Industrial Conference.  Their effort is to secure the concentration of Irish brains and capital on Irish industrial questions, to promote the sale of Irish goods, both in Ireland, Great Britain, and foreign countries, and to protect these goods against piracy and illicit competition.[56] Here again co-operation for Irish welfare brings together the creeds and races, and tends to extinguish old bigotries and antipathies.  Here again the truth is recognized that Ireland is a distinct economic entity whose conditions and needs demand special study from her citizens.  In a country of which that basal truth is recognized it would seem inexplicable that Protestants and Catholics who meet in committee-rooms and on platforms to promote, outside Parliament, the common interests of Ireland, should not unite as one man to demand an Irish Legislature in which to focus those interests and make them the subjects of direct legislative enactment, free both from the paternal and the coercive interference of a country differently situated, and absorbed in its own affairs.

I pass from the agricultural and industrial movements to another powerful factor in the reconstruction of Ireland, namely, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, whose success under the Presidency of Dr. Douglas Hyde in reviving the old national language, culture, and amusements, is attracting the attention of the world.  Fortunately the League encountered some ridicule at the outset and prospered proportionately.  Some of its work is not above criticism, but few persons—­and none who have the least knowledge of such intellectual revivals elsewhere—­now care to laugh at it.  The League is non-political and non-sectarian.  Strange, is it not, that such a movement should have to emphasize the fact?  Strange paradox that in a country which is being re-born into a consciousness of its own individuality, which is regaining its own pride and self-respect, recovering its lost literature and culture, and vibrating to that “iron string, Trust thyself,” the conflict for self-government, that elementary symbol of self-trust, should still retain enough intestinal bitterness to compel men to label national movements as non-political and non-sectarian!  It would be idle, of course, to pretend that this national movement, like all others in Ireland, does not strengthen, especially among the younger generation, which grows increasingly Nationalist, the sentiment for Home Rule.  If it did not, we should indeed be in the presence of something miraculously abnormal.