as a mere tail-piece to a British volume.  All this we must change.  The first business of an Irish Parliament will be to take stock; and this will be effected by the establishment of a Commission of a new kind, representative of science, industry, agriculture, and finance, acceptable and authoritative in the eyes of the whole nation, and charged with the duty of ascertaining the actual state of things in Ireland and the wisest line of economic development.  Such an undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish life altogether without precedent.  It will draw the great personalities of industry for the first time into the central current of public affairs.  It will furnish them with a platform upon which they will have to talk in terms of the plough, the loom, and the ledger, and not in terms of the wolf-dog and the orange-lily, and will render fruitful for the service of the country innumerable talents, now unknown or estranged by political superstitions.  It will do all that State action can do to generate a boom in Irish enterprises, and to tempt Irish capital into them in a more abundant stream.  And the proceedings and conclusions of such a body, circulated broadcast somewhat after the Washington plan, will provide for all classes in the community a liberal education in Economics.  Will “Ulster” fight against such an attempt to increase its prosperity?  Will the shipbuilders, the spinners, and the weavers close down their works in order to patronise Sir Edward Carson’s performance on a pop-gun?  It is not probable.

Work is the best remedy against such vapours, and an Ireland, occupied in this fashion-with wealth-producing labour, will have no time for civil war or “religious” riots.

As for concrete projects, the Irish Parliament will not be able to begin on a very ambitious scale.  But there are two or three matters which it must at once put in hand.  There is, for instance, the drainage of the Barrow and the Bann.  These two rivers are in a remarkable degree non-political and non-sectarian.  Just as the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so do their rain-swollen floods spoil with serene impartiality Nationalist hay and Orange hay, Catholic oats and Presbyterian oats.  Will “Ulster” fight against an effort to check the mischief?  Then there is re-afforestation.  As the result mainly of the waste of war, Ireland, which ought to be a richly wooded country, is very poor in that regard.  In consequence of this, a climate, moister than need be, distributes colds and consumption among the population, without any religious test, and unchecked winds lodge the corn of all denominations.  Re-afforestation, as offering a profit certain but a little remote, and promising a climatic advantage diffused over the whole area of the country, is eminently a matter for public enterprise.  Are we to be denied the hope that fir, and spruce, and Austrian pine may conceivably be lifted out of the plane of Party politics?  Further, to take instances at