ISLE OF MY HEART.

I'm longing here my lone self
In a foreign land and fair,
Where the sun is ever gleaming
And I can live at ease;

For it's me that will be dreaming
Of the dear days that were
On that jewel of an island
In the sweet Hebrides.

The little island of my heart,
Oh! cold it is and bare

It's bleak with rain and black with peat,

And hungry in the foam;

But sure it's heartsome and it's sweet,
It's me that would be there-
For they're good folk and warm folk
And kind folk at home.

I'm wondering if my mother
Will be sitting by her door,

With the spinning-wheel at even,

That's humming like a bee;

She'll be bent and gray with grieving
For the dear days of yore,

And her old heart will be hungry
For her sons across the sea.

My father will be growing frail
With delving in the croft,
While a peat-smell, a sweet smell
Is broken from the land-
A blackbird pipes above the well,
And eve is falling soft-
He'll be old and worn with working
Like the spade that's in his hand.

It's a poor land, a dour land,

A hard land and coldThe young grow weary of its yoke And east and west they roam: There's little there for poor folk When they'll be growing old. But they're near to me and dear to me, My own folk at home.

Donald A. Mackenzie.

MORNING.

Along the lining of a soft night-cloud the silver Dawning crept, Hushed as the nightfall on the sea,

where deep the moonlight slept, His nervous way among the stars the Dawn uncertain stept.

the first time since he rose to "the leadership of the Irish race at home and abroad," Mr. Redmond found his authority effectively challenged. He endured but did not enjoy the experience of a whole series of contested seats. He lost eleven of them and lost them under circumstances that threaten a still greater defection at the next appeal to the country. Over a considerable section of Ireland politics suddenly ceased to be froth and faction. They became instead unwontedly linked, linked as they had not been since the Parnell split, with specific and ponderable issues, with the land taxes and the increased whisky and licensing duties of Mr. Lloyd George's Budget, with the policy of the Nationalist Party towards the Wyndham Act, with the whole question of political bossism. Many causes and influences that have for years been slowly sapping the foundations of official Nationalism found in Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Healy spokesmen and champions of a rare fire and pungency. It was their revolt, and the success it met with, that was the one really unforeseen development of the General Election. Its consequences have been very great. But for the fear of Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Redmond would never have pointed his alternative of "No Veto, no Budget" so abruptly at the head of the Government. Indeed, I am not at all sure that an impartial analysis would not discover that the ultimate force behind the embarrassments and stratagems of the Ministry during the past few weeks has been the province of Munster. I am not, however, concerned at this moment with the effects of Mr. O'Brien's

émeute upon the scheme of British politics so much as with its significance as a purely Irish phenomenon. Within the past two decades a change that has all the sweep of a revolution has overtaken Ireland. The Irish mind has taken a new and most hopeful turn towards the concrete and the constructive. There is a far wider realization to-day than there ever was, or could be, before, that the upbuilding of the Irish nation depends less on the passing or the repeal of laws at Westminster, or on external assistance of any kind, than on the efforts of Irishmen in Ireland; and that those efforts, to produce their best results, must be non-political and non-sectarian. Thus, we have seen the agricultural co-operative movement, initiated by Sir Horace Plunkett, the real "Liberator" of latter-day Ireland, spread until it now embraces nearly 100,000 farmers and has organized over nine hundred co-operative creameries, poultry societies, village banks and so on. We have seen the Recess Committee, composed of men of all ranks and religions and politics, formulating a programme of material amelioration. We have seen the fruit of that programme in the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, a Department popularly governed, working with and through committees appointed by the County Councils, and for the first time bringing expert assistance and advice within reach of the peasant proprie tors. We have seen the establishment of the Congested Districts Board for the resettlement of the Western peasantry on an economic basis, and for the revival and encouragement of the Western fishing and cottage industries. We have seen the building of light railways. We have seen the famous

in

and tenants that brought the sevencentury-old struggle for the land within sight of a decisive and more or less harmonious finish. We have seen the strong and auspicious beginnings of a movement of industrial re-creation. We have seen instance after instance in which practicality has triumphed over bigotry and partisanship; which the politicians and the men of business have met and fraternized on a common platform in which an economic object has secured the united support of the two forces that, hitherto, to the immense disadvantage of the country have been kept apartthe force of industrial leadership on the one hand and of political leadership on the other. On all sides new spheres of non-contentious endeavor have been opened up in which all Irishmen may participate. Indeed, it is safe to assert that the past twenty years have witnessed the growth of more interest among Irishmen in the practical problems of life, and more co-operation among them in the solution of those problems, than any previous period of Irish history.

Nor do the movements I have touched on stand alone. They are reinforced, and their influence in inculcating self-dependence and a new sense of conscious and constructive nationality is made vastly more intensive and extensive by the Gaelic League and the fervor of the Celtic renascence. The Gaelic League is an organized and enthusiastic propaganda for the revival of the old Irish tongue, the old Irish dances, folk-lore, songs and sports, for popularizing the sale of Irish goods and products, for promoting temperance, for brightening village life, raising the standard of rural economy, and implanting among the peasantry a higher conception of the comforts and embellishments of the home. It aims at an all-embracing

Irish Ireland, at the education of the people in the broadest spirit of nationality, at the building up of an Irish character and an Irish individuality in a purely Irish atmosphere. "We shall never be satisfied," said its founder, Dr. Douglas Hyde, “until, throughout the whole of Ireland, man grasps man in peace and unity." No such ideal has ever yet been put forward by any League in Ireland. All other Irish Leagues have been political, sectarian or agrarian, have made for strife and not for peace, have appealed not to the individual, but to the mob, have destroyed character instead of forming it. It is in the labors and aims of the Gaelic League that those who believe that Ireland is in the throes of some such revivification of her national spirit and character as Hungary underwent sixty odd years ago find the justification for their faith.

The resultant of these various forces -the co-operative movement, the Gaelic League, the new concerted attention to the ways and means of practical prosperity, and so on-is, first and foremost, that a new sense of interdependence is being propagated among Irishmen who hitherto have barely conceived the possibility of having anything in common. Almost for the first time in her history Ireland is working round to some realization of what nationality is. She is beginning to see that it is something beyond politics and immeasurably above the factitious partitions of social and sectarian strife. Secondly, it is perceived to-day more clearly than ever before that the salvation of Ireland depends primarily upon the efforts of the Irish people themselves working on Irish soil. The best Irish thought is turning inwards, is moving away from Westminster and concentrating upon Ireland herself, is understanding at last that it is. not in the House of

Commons but in Ireland that the true current of national life flows. Thirdly, there is an increasing recognition that the deepest and most permanent questions involved in the Irish problem are questions not of constitutional change or adaptation, not primarily of material development or even of mental emancipation, but of character and spirit-questions not so much of Ireland as of Irish men and women. Great as is the economic value of the new movements of agricultural and industrial betterment, it is pre-eminently for their influence on character, for their efficacy in conquering selfdistrust and encouraging virility and self-reliance, that they are most to be prized. What it comes to is that the Irish people within the past two decades have begun to throw off the disastrous belief that the cure for all their ills is to be sought in legislation, in some external agency and not in themselves; that they are gradually breaking down sectarian, social, and party barriers and coming to recognize that they are all members of one nation; that slowly they are emancipating themselves from the tyranny of leagues and committees and are beginning to think, speak and act for themselves in a quite novel spirit of individualism.

To all this must be added the immense pacification of the country induced by the Wyndham Act. Ireland, as a whole, has definitely emerged from the more acute stages of agrarian unrest. The land question, or rather the Land Tenure question, is on its way to settlement, has lost already most of its old class bitterness, and above all is ceasing to provide the motive-power for political agitation. This last is a fact of vital moment to both parties. Irish Nationalism has always posed before the world as a struggle for self-government. I am not at all sure that it

would not be better described as a Irovement to beat rents down. Irish Unionism, again, has always put forward Protestantism, the Crown and the Constitution as the basis of its appeal. But I am not at all sure that in reality it has not been, as much as anything else, an agitation to keep rents up. What is certain, at any rate, is that the main strength of Irish Unionism has been the landlords and of Irish Nationalism the tenants. What is not less certain is that the Home Rule movement has derived most of its impetus from the landhunger of the peasantry. The genius of Michael Davitt, by linking the agrarian question with the national question, the desire for more land with the desire for self-government, incalculably reinforced the intensity of both demands. No one can as yet say positively whether the Irish agitation for autonomy is or is not a self-sufficing movement, or what vitality it will possess when deprived of the agrarian tumult and unrest which for thirty years and more has been its backbone. But the peace which has already followed the operations of the Wyndham Act suggests that the Irish peasant, once placed in absolute possession of his holding, will scarcely be the same man, susceptible to the same influences, as in the days when proprietorship seemed an incredible dream. Like all peasants he is more of a Tory than an agitator and more of a materialist than either, and I can easily conceive him in the near future, when he has got from political agitation all it is capable of yielding, as a steadying force in the national equilibrium, mounting sentinel for law and order, ruling the laborers with a rod of iron, an authority on manures, selling his produce through co-operative societies, borrowing from land-banks of his own establishment, gradually effecting his escape from the gombeenman, a Na