a different way, for the encouragement of Irish
industries. The Associations of Belfast, Cork, and other cities work in
harmony, and meet in an annual All-Ireland Industrial Conference. Their
effort is to secure the concentration of Irish brains and capital on
Irish industrial questions, to promote the sale of Irish goods, both in
Ireland, Great Britain, and foreign countries, and to protect these
goods against piracy and illicit competition.[56] Here again
co-operation for Irish welfare brings together the creeds and races, and
tends to extinguish old bigotries and antipathies. Here again the truth
is recognized that Ireland is a distinct economic entity whose
conditions and needs demand special study from her citizens. In a
country of which that basal truth is recognized it would seem
inexplicable that Protestants and Catholics who meet in committee-rooms
and on platforms to promote, outside Parliament, the common interests of
Ireland, should not unite as one man to demand an Irish Legislature in
which to focus those interests and make them the subjects of direct
legislative enactment, free both from the paternal and the coercive
interference of a country differently situated, and absorbed in its own
affairs.

I pass from the agricultural and industrial movements to another
powerful factor in the reconstruction of Ireland, namely, the Gaelic
League, founded in 1893, whose success under the Presidency of Dr.
Douglas Hyde in reviving the old national language, culture, and
amusements, is attracting the attention of the world. Fortunately the
League encountered some ridicule at the outset and prospered
proportionately. Some of its work is not above criticism, but few
persons--and none who have the least knowledge of such intellectual
revivals elsewhere--now care to laugh at it. The League is non-political
and non-sectarian. Strange, is it not, that such a movement should have
to emphasize the fact? Strange paradox that in a country which is being
re-born into a consciousness of its own individuality, which is
regaining its own pride and self-respect, recovering its lost literature
and culture, and vibrating to that "iron string, Trust thyself," the
conflict for self-government, that elementary symbol of self-trust,
should still retain enough intestinal bitterness to compel men to label
national movements as non-political and non-sectarian! It would be idle,
of course, to pretend that this national movement, like all oth