notable linen mills and shipyards in the world. Belfast is an industrial miracle and she knows it. If she pays low wages, it is because there is available at her doors a constant supply of labor, reared on the farms. Yet her low wages are the less burdensome because there will be, in the same family, women weaving linen and men rivetting liners. The little brick homes of Belfast have thus two sources of income. Whether this industrialism has yet become a higher civilization, may be doubted. I remember a great machine for combing flax. It was as big as a church organ and there on a seat, far above the ground, sat bare-foot a lad of twelve or thereabouts, facing an infernal clatter, and lifting constantly a heavy weight. That was his start in life. It was a mingled effort and monotony, and obviously the victim should have been still at school.

Was he really better off at his machine than his sister, the colleen of Connemara, also barefoot, yet singing as she tramps the moorland road, with her boots dangling across her shoulders against her red cloak? It is a cloak for which her grandmother spun the wool, thirty years ago, and had it dyed and woven for herself-yes and for her daughterfor her daughter's daughter-that cloak which will never wear out. True, in Connemara, the sidecars and even the automobiles meet one hours late. There is no sense of time, but also there is no sense of hurry. You ask the way, and the answer may be less than lucid, but it is more poetry than prose. These folk may be illiterate, but they can sow and reap, can cut and stack their winter turf, can thatch a roof and build a wall, can sheer their sheep, spin the wool, and knit their clothes. They read little but they tell their own stories and pray their own prayers. Honk your horn and they curtsy and cross themselves.

Jolting up the valley, you see in panorama the whole history of agrarian Ireland. The The green meadows by the river belong to the home farm of the estate. There you must seek the landlord's mansions. It was the belief of the It was the belief of the tenants that those meadows once belonged to them. Anyway, they found themselves on the hillsides, where fields less green than below, are sprinkled with boulders; and the first task of the dispossessed was to gather the boulders into cairns and build them into walls. The fields then became valuable and with the value began the rent. As the rent rose, so did discontent, until one day the Land Leaguers

came-the tenants went on strike-they were evicted by armed police-their cottages, as you can still see, were burned, and moonlighters began to fire at the landlords from behind the walls. Here they tell you-was so-and-so killed; and there, it was someone else. Let a new tenant take an evicted farm and there would begin the boycott. He would be like a Cromwellian blacksmith who lunched with me at Cork some years ago, entering the city with an armed escort of mounted police and suddenly producing from his capacious pockets a pair of huge pistols which he laid solemnly, the one by his knife and the other by his fork ere he bowed his head and recited grace. Happily for the Irish Free State, those rents have been thrice reduced; so reduced, they became the basis for calculating purchase; the landlord has disappeared; the evicted tenant has a holding again, and they who effect improvements in the land enjoy the benefit of them.

MOST

A HATED LANDLORD

OST intractable of all the landlords was the Marquis of Clanricarde. In his treatment of his tenants, he was pitiless. The hatred that he incurred was so deadly that for the most part of his long life he never saw Ireland -never dared to see her-but left his castle unfinished, a gaunt and unwindowed skeleton overlooking a lake that merely reflected "the folly." In absentee landlordism, there you had the final example. Even for the Irish peers at Westminster, Lord Clanricarde proved too much. When his legal interests were threatened, he would struggle down to the House of Lords, a figure that would have exceeded even the imagination of Charles Dickens, in a green and tattered coat, across the bosom of which floated in a tangled mass. his unkempt beard. At neck and wrist was. unwashen linen, frayed as the lace of Ireland itself-which I can testify, for after his death, I held in my hand his incredible collar. Clanricarde died a miser, a money-lender, and a millionaire. For years, he occupied an apartment near Regent Street, which he filled with pictures that had to be taken from their packing-cases after he had gone. Just as he wrangled with his tenants for rent so he would wrangle with his secretaries over the price of a pencil. He was the last of "the garrison."

Not that the landlords were the only difficulty. In the west of Ireland, there are what

have been called technically Congested Districts. These are areas in which the holdings have been divided by families and subdivided until the farms are utterly too small to sustain any family in a decent manner. The problem has become somewhat similar to what is reported of the paddy-fields in Japan. One would see a village around which there was an actual patch-work quilt of diminutive fields and paddocks-so much so that there really seemed to be more of walls and stones than of cultivable soil. These farms had long since ceased to be continuous. Families were tilling Families were tilling plots from which there was no access to their dwellings and to which they had to walk perhaps for miles. One spent twenty minutes proceeding from one field on a farm to another and was compelled incidentally to climb half a dozen walls. The whole of the produce of the more distant of the fields had to be carried over those walls and for that distance on the back of the laborer. It was an arrangement at once primitive and impossible. The people simply failed in hope and in health and the children in school bore all the evidences of under-feeding and tuberculosis. These were the evils which Mr. Balfour, when he was Chief Secretary, set himself to remedy and it is to him that Ireland owes the Congested Districts Board. This authority cut the Gordian knot and with sublime indifference to the rights of property re-apportioned the land around such villages until each family had enough for sustenance, with proper access to the village itself. Usually, it was found that there was not enough land to go round, and the surplus of families were transplanted to virgin soil, of which there is still some in Ireland, where one saw them, clearing the forests, building their cottages, and tilling the plots when cleared just as you would see these things in a new country. Instead of the more picturesque but less sanitary thatch, the cottages have tiles for roof. Doubtless, they are small, but as homes they represent a vast improvement on anything known by their occupants hitherto. There must arise in due course the question, How many people can be accommodated in the new Ireland? About one fifth of the area is bog, mountain, and moorland, suitable for cutting turf but for little else. But the rest of the soil is excellent, though at times over-cropped. The main part of Ireland is, however, devoted not to crops but to cattle and livestock, and as long as this continues to be the case, there

must be a limit to the people there resident. While the famine is doubtless responsible in the first instance for the depopulation of Ireland, there have been other causes at work. All over the United Kingdom, the rural workers were drifting to the big towns, and farms were being consolidated into ever enlarging units with the result that labor was saved. Economically, there was thus no distinction to be drawn between the case of many Irish countries and that of my own county of Westmoreland where the old yeomen have one by one dropped out. Sinn Fein is trying to stem the tide of emigration by moral suasion. That is an attempt which, in the nature of things, cannot succeed for long. If a man or a woman thinks that life is to be lived more abundantly in a new world, to the new world will each of them go. No law and no opinion will stop it. The real hope of Irish agriculture lies in the coöperative enterprises instituted by Sir Horace Plunkett: that is, in the creameries. By these arrangements an immense production of food has been organised-from dairies especially. Also, there has been a system of credit and buying which has defeated the wiles of the gombeen man. The Irishman, when thus led, has proved himself to be an excellent agriculturist, and when the interruptions of guerilla warfare are over, there can be but little doubt that in no European country, not even Denmark, will the countryside enjoy better prospects. England with her teeming millions is the very market that Ireland needs.

THE PROBLEMS OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT

HE Irish Free State thus begins its career

TH

marked out. It finds the thorny question of the universities settled. It will have to engage in no fight with the landlords. The state had already built many thousands of cottages for the workers. Taxation is by admission well arranged. The post office is among the best managed in the world. The currency is sound. Something, and indeed a good deal, will have to be done to put the railways into good shape. As somebody remarked, it did not matter when recently the Government stopped the trains, because they seldom run anyway! Whether there will be a serious attempt to revive Irish industries and especially the trade in wool, remains to be seen. For a century, there has been no difficulty placed in the way of any such industries by

Britain, and the matter has been left to economic forces. That Ireland's industries were mistreated by England before the Union is agreed by all historians and these memories may have deterred the Irishmen of a later day from indulging in commercial enterprise. It may be that in the Irish Free State we shall thus see a tendency at first to speculation. Those who believed that British Rule prevented the development of Ireland's coalfields may try their hand on the same and may learn of difficulties that are entirely economic. Those who argue from the famous Tara brooch that there are still gold and other precious metals in the island may also discover by experiment that Ireland's scarcity of minerals is not an invention of the "enemy" but a geological fact. Any coalfield can be worked if you are ready to work it at a loss. Such a loss, however, would mean a subsidy, and subsidies fall on the taxpayer. Where finance is concerned, the judgment of the British Treasury, though cautious and unemotional, has usually been found correct on the merits of the case.

In such matters, the Irish Free State must buy its experience. In that country, as in In that country, as in others, it may be taken for granted that the bankers will keep the politicians in order. Happily, I am able to add, after many years of personal observation, that the Irish politician in his own country and as a representative of his country at Westminster, has been found financially incorruptible. To honors, titles, and offices, he has turned an unseeing eye and a deaf ear. He has left politics as poor as he entered politics and he has lived in Spartan simplicity. Where others have accepted knighthoods, secretaryships, and positions on the bench of judges, the members from Ireland have refrained from these rewards more strictly than did Socialists and Labor men. No hint of scandal over contracts has ever, so far as I remember, emanated from the quarter of the House of Commons where Nationalists used to sit. These men have been entrusted, over and over again, with state secrets which might have been sold for large sums to the press and especially to the American press, but never have they broken confidence. Seldom has there been a political combination better able to keep a secret. On the small Committees which determine the fate of private bills-railways, water-power, gas, electricity, and so on, not only for Ireland but for Britain as well, Irish members always have had a seat and have al

ways discharged their responsibilities with a high sense of what is due to a quasi-judicial position. In controversy, they are, perhaps, difficult. But their removal from Westminster is a loss of which England already is beginning to be conscious. It will be, of course, the deservedly high reputation of the mother of Parliaments that Ireland will, as it were, transfer to Dublin, as an asset of no mean value.

Where will the Parliament of the Irish Free State meet? At present, the Dail Eireann, like the Paris Commune, is the guest of the Hôtel de Ville-the City Hall. The old Parliament House on College Green is not available, yet it still stands-a dignified edifice -used as the head office of the Bank of Ireland. No one who visits that historic landmark in Dublin, will ever forget the experience. Grattan's parliament had two chambers, a House of Lords and a House of Commons. With an ingenuity which must still arouse feeling, the destroyers of that Parliament insisted that the room where the Commons had met, must be obliterated and in the bank no trace of it remains as a memorial of lost liberty. But the House of Lords was considered to involve less perilous emotions and it still survives, substantially unaltered, as "the parlor" where the directors of the bank hold their conferences. There you may see, displayed on the walls, the old panelled tapestries of the Siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne which seemed to the Irish nobility of that day the most characteristic events in the long annals of the country that they so completely misunderstood. Ten years ago, I was present as an English Liberal delegate at what was nothing less than the first reopening of the Irish Parlia- . ment House since the Act of Union. courtesy of the bank, that high authority on the traditions of Parliament, Professor Swift MacNeill, of the family of the immortal Dean Swift, author of "Gulliver's Travels," delivered a discourse on the scenes which had been acted within those long silent halls; and he claimed the Irish Parliament House from the Bank as the only suitable home for the restored Irish Parliament. The Dail Eireann will be fully empowered, if it so wishes, to make good the demand. One doubts whether the authorities of the bank would wish to resist it, and with Irish members again meeting on College Green, one may surely say that Ireland will have come back to her own again.

By

O

merce.

NE of the most important things that Mr. Hoover has done in the Department of Commerce he has done in its Bureau of Foreign and Domestic ComInto that Bureau, for years, has poured the trade information gathered by our force of more than 600 trade and consular representatives, scattered over the world, wherever trade is to be had. But this invaluable information was not made accessible to American business men. It should have been digested by experts and quickly distributed to the business men who could profit by it. But the Director was supplied with only a few executive assistants; these few could not possibly understand all export and other business problems in relation to trade opportunities abroad. They could not possibly direct, adequately, our agents abroad, especially those of the Consular Service, since our consuls are responsible to the State Department and from time immemorial the cooperation between the State and Commerce Departments in trade matters has been un

satisfactory. They could not adequately interpret the trade information cabled from abroad, and they had no adequate personnel or physical means of distributing this information, or their interpretations of it, when they got it. Nine-tenths of it landed in departmental files and stayed there. To get it from abroad, to interpret it, and to clear it at once by long-distance telephone, telegraph, confidential letter, through trade and departmental periodicals, and through trade associations, necessitated the innovation of a quite new method of gathering and of handling this information.

Mr. Hoover undertook to achieve this innovation. He saw that (as the result of recent years of enormous growth and of consolidations) American business had come to operate in the main on commodity lines and that its trade organizations were built up on commodity lines. (During the war, in fact, the Government repeatedly urged business men to organize or to join trade associations, since without them it was at a loss for a means to deal with the tens of thousands of scattered

business men.) Accordingly, Secretary Hoover reorganized the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce on commodity lines; that is, he set up a score of commodity divisions a rubber division, automotive division, foodstuff division, textile division, agricultural division, etc.—with a score more to come as soon as appropriations are available. Each division, moreover, he caused to be headed by an expert nominated-in some cases actually voted on by the trade he knows and represents. And each of these is charged with travelling a goodly part of the time, to keep in touch with trade conventions and personnel and trade problems.

The significance of all this Secretary Hoover, in one of his innumerable conferences with business groups, suggested:

"The bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce is a reporting agency. It is bringing in a vast deal of material or information that is important to the business man. There never was any general staff in Washington to sift that material out, to prepare it and make it accessible to the business public. We have organized a staff on a commodity basis, and the staff men take such part of that material as bears on the trades they represent and interpret it back to the trades. The matter in hand might involve legislation in a European country. The arrangements set up in that country might, say, vitally affect the automobile industry in the United States. At first glance they might look all right to our representatives abroad and to the State Department here, but examination by a trade expert, an experienced automobile staff officer, might reveal the fact that the arrangements actually constitute a violation of a favored nation clause in a treaty. It is up to our staff officer representing the automobile trade to carry the matter back to the trade and find out how it is affected. To facilitate such matters and to assist all the commodity divisions to serve the business public, we have added two new divisions—one on commercial law abroad and one on tariffs in relation to American trade."

By this plan, the little man in American business now has virtually the same opportunities abroad that heretofore have been enjoyed only by the big man with his own organization abroad. Now the little man, like the big man, is a unit in a national manufacturing, exporting, and selling scheme, and

the Department of Commerce is his sales organization, in a sense. organization, in a sense. If, for instance, he is a tire manufacturer, eager to exploit our flat-side tire as against the European clincher, he can count on the Department to find out in short order the exact conditions in this or that foreign market, and find official coöperation there when he sets out to advertise. American business men, big and little, are awakening to this new opportunity, for the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce is now receiving inquiries (mainly from prospective exporters) at the unprecedented rate of a half million a year.

But this isn't all.

"There are," as the Secretary observed, as chairman of a conference, " several things which the Department of Commerce can do."

He mentioned some:

"In the first instance, there is its service to the commercial public in the crises that arise. We have at the present moment a crisis in foreign trade. The work of the Department needs to be organized in such a way that this situation can be interpreted to the American manufacturer, exporter, or other business men in just how it affects him. It has to be an actual interpretation, with all the factors considered. Many American firms, to take a case in point, are now withdrawing their foreign representatives because they are afraid that they cannot compete with Germany. Dealing in facts, not opinions, we can make clear to them in terms of German indemnities, budgetary conditions, etc., that their chance will come again.

"That involves a tremendous amount of study of business, commercial, and other problems in Germany. Such economic interpretation is a part of the task of the Department of Commerce. To do it, you must have an organization that functions all the time. You can't grab such information out of the air overnight. You must have an organization operating almost automatically." He went on:

"Then there is the interpretation of economic phenomena in the United States. You might call this business interpretation.

"The Government should have been able, for instance, to show, in terms of fact, that we did not need to import $30,000,000 worth of Chilean nitrate. But how was an importer to know?

"Again, the American farmer has been mar