To-day you'll meet with a land-owning aristocrat who is interested in what the league is doing, and to-morrow you'll meet a jarvey who is learning Gaelic, and the next day a young lady of gentle birth who is teaching the poor children of the neighborhood how to weave rugs, and then you'll meet an artist who was formerly a land owner and a Protestant, and who was one of the first to sell his property to his tenants under the Wyndham act—and being an artist and not a business man he got ruinous prices for it—and has been forced ever since to rely on his brush for his support. He, too, is heart and soul in the movement.
Now when the yeast permeates the lump to such an extent there is bound to be a rising—but of the peaceful kind.
"Pat," in his "Economics for Irishmen," says, "Were I a priest, I should, I think, regard it as a sin on my soul every time a young person emigrated from my parish while I might have shown him how he could have made an excellent living at home."
It must strike every American, no matter whether he is a Protestant, an atheist, an agnostic, or a Roman Catholic, so long as he is open minded, that the size and evident costliness of the churches in the country districts is out of all proportion to the costliness of the houses of the peasants.
In a poor community money that is put into costly bricks and stone that might have been put into books and bread is money inadequately expended, even if Ruskin rise from his grave to contradict me. A better temple to God than a granite church is a granite constitution, and the light of health and sanity and cheerful industry in the eye of an Irish lad is better than the light of a thousand candles.
This is not a question of religion, but of common sense. If all the money that has been spent upon the extra embellishment of churches of all denominations in Ireland had been spent on the physical and educational and moral betterment of Irishmen, they would have ceased to emigrate long since.
But this is thin ice, and as I can't swim I'll give up the skating on it until the weather is colder.
But the priests are also interested in this Gaelic revival of which Americans have already heard so much, and which is non-sectarian and non-political. And the nuns are doing a blessed work all over Ireland.
Let me close this somewhat serious chapter—one can't help being serious in Ireland when he sees that her regeneration is at hand—with a parable that I made all by my lonesome:
Once there was a man who had a sugar maple, and there being a demand for maple sugar he allowed the sap to run early and late, and disposed of the sugar thus obtained. But there came by a man who said: