But for the grown men, it lacked one thing: effort. Pleasant it was; lots of everything, lots of hunting, lots of game on the moors and bogs, lots of fish in lake and river, lots of beef and mutton on the farm, lots of logs and turf, lots of space—above all, lots of time, and always the spirit for a spree that made everyone "prefer good fun to a punctual dinner." There was only one deficiency: that way of life was apt to be short of cash. It was, in short, a life that could not pay its way. The "big Galway welcome" is just as big with a sounder economic system, that rests solidly on men's own work. Anyone who knows Western Ireland can tell you that the quality of work is better on the land where men are their own masters than it was in the old days. Yet even there we are not out of the old vicious circle of under-pay and under-work; and in the industrial life we are fully entangled in it. But here also the revolutionary as schoolmaster has appeared. To my thinking the most momentous apparition in Ireland of our times is that of Mr. Ford, who is paying American wage rates for labour in Cork, and calculating, not to get value for his money at once, but to teach labour to be worth it. According to his gospel, as it was expounded to me, you will not get efficiency by offering to pay the wages of efficiency when labour becomes efficient: you must first provide the conditions of efficiency and then teach, just as in the army your first care is to get a recruit fit and your second to make him thorough in his ground work. That is the practical recognition of what yesterday in Ireland failed to recognise.

Nor does this ideal of strenuous and capable work exclude either the strenuous and capable talk of Martin Ross's Galway household or anything else that was excellent in the old way. Certainly the most laborious and the most prosperous peasant household that I have ever known (and for many months I was part of it) was the most thoroughly and traditionally Irish, except that it was removed by one generation from Gaelic speech. But the whole cast of mind was Gaelic, remote as the poles from that "newer Ireland" which is in revolt against all tradition of authority—and, if they only knew it, against all Irish tradition. Miss Somerville thinks, as a page in her book shows, that the newer Ireland has lost the endearing courtesy which is imposed by the genius of the Gaelic tongue, and is for that matter to be found in every line of Pearse's essays. We can educate back to that without any detriment; we can be as efficient and as courteous as the Japanese. Another thing is gone. Ireland of yesterday, even in its poverty, was a merry country; to-day, even in its prosperity, it is full of bitter, mirthless rancour and hate. It will be a great thing if we can help to preserve for Ireland the exquisite benediction which a beggar woman in Skibbereen laid upon Martin Ross: "Sure, ye're always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the glory of Heaven."

1918.