The national habit of living in the past seems to give us a present without achievement, a future without hope.
The conclusion was long ago forced upon me that whatever may have been true of the past, the chief responsibility for the remoulding of our national life rests now with ourselves, and that in the last analysis the problem of Irish ineffectiveness at home is in the main a problem of character--and of Irish character.
I am quite aware that such a diagnosis of our mind disease--from which Ireland is, in my belief, slowly but surely recovering--will not pass unchallenged, but I would ask any reader who dissents from this view to take a glance at the picture of our national life as it might unfold itself to an unprejudiced but sympathetic outsider who came to Ireland not on a political tour but with a sincere desire to get at the truth of the Irish Question, and to inquire into the conditions about which all the controversy continues to rage.
This hypothetical traveller would discover that our resources are but half developed, and yet hundreds of thousands of our workers have gone, and are still going, to produce wealth where it is less urgently needed.
The remnant of the race who still cling to the old country are not only numerically weak, but in many other ways they show the physical and moral effects of the drain which emigration has made on the youth, strength, and energy of the community.

Our four and a quarter millions of people, mainly agricultural, have, speaking generally, a very low standard of comfort, which they like to attribute to some five or six millions sterling paid as agricultural rent, and three millions of alleged over-taxation.

They face the situation bravely--and, incidentally, swell the over-taxation--with the help of the thirteen or fourteen millions worth of alcoholic stimulants which they annually consume.

The still larger consumption in Great Britain may seem to lend at least a respectability to this apparent over-indulgence, but it looks odd.

The people are endowed with intellectual capacities of a high order.