records and statistics. Emigration has declined to its lowest point; education has spread amongst the people. Irish emigrants, when they do leave their own shores, take higher positions than ever before. A population of some four millions, largely composed of small farmers, has lent forty-seven millions sterling to the Government; and, what is still more significant, the deposits in Post Office Savings Banks have risen from six millions in 1896 to over thirteen millions the year before the war. The new War Loan is reported to have had an extraordinary success in Ireland. On the last day of subscription a single Dublin bank took in one million sterling.[*] With some self-appointed champions of Ireland abuse of the British Empire is a very popular amusement, but the Irish farmer and the Irish trader put their money in it, and with it they stand to win or lose.

Irish agriculture, partly owing to climatic conditions and partly to the fact that Ireland has a monopoly of the export of live cattle to England, has developed hitherto rather in the direction of cattle-raising than of tillage; and cattle have increased since 1851 from three million to over five million head, and sheep from two millions to three million six hundred thousand. Poultry have nearly quadrupled in the same period. The gross railway receipts—another significant symptom —were £2,750,000 in 1886. In 1915 they had risen to £4,831,000. The co-operative agricultural associations, in which Ireland has shown the way to the English-speaking world, now number about 1,000, and do a trade of well over five millions a year. The thousands of labourers' cottages which have sprung up, each with its plot of land, have been to the Irish labourers what the Land Acts have been to the farmer—they have completely transformed his economic status in the country.

Accompanying these symptoms of material progress, we have witnessed in recent years a striking outburst of intellectual activity. Irish literature, in poetry and drama, has attracted the attention of the whole world of culture, and exact and scholarly research in history and archæology have flourished and found audiences as they were never known to do in Ireland till now. This has not been the work of any one section of the people, either in creed or in politics; but the whole movement has been inspired by an Irish patriotism which no sane person regards as conflicting in any degree with allegiance to the Empire under the shelter of which it has grown and prospered.

The circumstances above set forth do not pretend to be the whole story about modern Ireland, nor do they show that the millennium has arrived in that country. Apart from Home Rule, which is outside our present field, much still remains to be done—there is elementary education to be advanced, commercial facilities to be developed, land-purchase to be completed. But it is contended that the real facts about Ireland are wholly and absurdly inconsistent with the picture of that country which the friends of Germany circulate so industriously at the present time. Ireland is not an oppressed and plundered nation, ground under the heel of a foreign Power, and with her individual life deliberately stifled like that of Poland in the German Empire. Only through ignorance or malice could such an illusion gain currency, and it needs only the touch of reality—reality which every one can easily see or verify for himself—to dispel it for ever from the mind of every candid