sands, dipping full goblets out of a sea that has been transmuted into lemonade.  This, the Utopian mood of humanity, is inextinguishable, and it has embroidered the Home Rule idea in common with all others.  Before the complexity of modern economic organisation was as well understood as is now the case, there is no doubt that certain sections of opinion in Ireland did regard self-government as a sort of Aladdin’s Lamp, capable of any miracle.  The necessity of pressing all the energy of the nation into one channel had the effect of imposing on political life a simplicity which does not belong to it.  But all that is over and past.  The Ireland of to-day does not pay herself with words.  She is safe from that reaction and disillusionment which some prophets have discerned as the first harvest of Home Rule, because she is already disillusioned.  Looking into the future we see no hope for rhetoricians; what we do see is a strong, shrewd, indomitable people, at once clear-sighted and idealistic, going about its business “in the light of day in the domain of reality.”  No signs or wonders blaze out a trail for them.  The past sags on their shoulders and in their veins, a grievous burden and a grievous malady.  They make mistakes during their apprenticeship to freedom, for, as Flaubert says, men have got to learn everything from eating to dying.  But a few years farther on we see the recuperative powers of the nation once more triumphant.  The past is at last dead enough to be buried, the virus of oppression has been expelled.  The creative impulse in industry, literature, social habit, working in an atmosphere of freedom, has added to the wealth of humanity not only an old nation renascent, but a new and kindlier civilisation.  In other words, political autonomy is to us not the epilogue but the prologue to our national drama.  It rings the curtain up on that task to which all politics are merely instrumental, namely the vindication of justice and the betterment of human life.

From the first, the economic note will predominate in a Home Rule assembly, not only in the sense in which so much can be said of every country in the world, but in a very special sense.  For the past decade Ireland has been thinking in terms of woollens and linens, turnips and fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and railways.  The conviction that the country is under-developed, and in consequence under-populated, has been growing both in area and in depth.  With it there has been growing the further conviction that poverty, in the midst of untapped resources, is a national crime.  The propagation of these two beliefs by journals of the newer school such as The Leader, Sinn Fein, and The Irish Homestead has leavened the whole mass of Irish life in our time.  The Industrial Development Associations, founded on them as basis, have long ago “bridged the Boyne.”  At their annual Conferences Belfast sits side by side with Cork, Derry with Dublin.  It is not merely