It is, of course, unnecessary for me to dwell upon the part played by the home in the standard of living, especially amongst a rural community. But it may not be irrelevant to note that M. Desmolins, who, in his remarkable book, A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-saxons? hands over the future of civilisation to the Anglo-Saxons, ascribes to the English rural home much of the success of the race.
Speed's Chronicle, quoted in Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1611-14, p. xix.
CHAPTER III.
THE INFLUENCE OF POLITICS UPON THE IRISH MIND.
Among the humours of the Home Rule struggle, the story was current in England that a peasant in Connemara ceased planting his potatoes when the news of the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1886 seemed to bring the millenium into the region of practical politics. Those who used the story were not slow to suggest that, had the Bill become law, the failure of spontaneous generation in the Connemara potato patch might have been typical of much analogous disillusionment elsewhere. Even to those who are familiar with our history, the faith of the Irish people in the potentialities of government, which this little tale illustrates by caricature, will give cause for reflection of another and more serious kind. The moral to be drawn by Irish politicians is that we in Ireland have yet to free ourselves from one of the worst legacies of past misgovernment, the belief that any legislation or any legislature can provide an escape from the physical and mental toil imposed through our first parents upon all nations for all time.