A comfortable Boeotia will never develop into a real Hibernia Pacata.

The standard of living may in some ways be lower than the English standard: in some ways it may be higher.

But even if statesmanship and all the forces of philanthropy and patriotism combined can construct a contented rural Ireland for the people, it can only be maintained by the people.
It will have to accord with the national sentiment and be distinctively Irish.

It is this national aspiration, and the remarkable promise of the movements making for its fruition, which give to the work of Irish social and economic reform the fascination which those who do not know the Ireland of to-day cannot understand.

This work of reform must, of course, be primarily economic, but economic remedies cannot be applied to Irish ills without the spiritual aids which are required to move to action the latent forces of Irish reason and emotion.
* * * * * The task which we have to face is, then, a two-sided one, but its economic and its purely practical aspects first demand consideration.
Many even of the agrarian aspects of the question have, so far, been somewhat neglected in Ireland owing to a cause which is not far to seek.
It has often been asserted that the Irish Question is, at bottom, the Land Question.