Will the tiller, now the owner
and no longer only the leaseholder, go back from his evil ways of
thriftlessness and neglect, and instead of being content to live just
above the line of starvation, will he educate himself up to those
artificial wants which only industry can supply? Will the women learn
to love cleanliness, to regard their men's rags and their children's
dirt as their own dishonour, and to understand that womanhood has its
share of duties in social and domestic life? Will the sense of beauty
grow with the sense of proprietorship, and the filth of the present
surroundings be replaced by a flower garden before the cottage--a
creeper against the wall--a few pots of more delicate blooms in the
window? Will the taste for variety in garden produce be enlarged, and
plots of peas, beans, carrots, artichokes, pot-herbs, and the like, be
added to the one monotonous potato-patch, with a few cabbages and
roots for the baste, and a strip of oats as the sole cereal attempted?
Who knows? At present there is not a flower to be seen in the whole of
the West, save those which a luxuriant Nature herself has sown and
planted; and the immediate surroundings of the substantial farm-house,
like those of the mud cabin, are filth unmentionable, savage squalor,
and bestial neglect.

These things are signs of a mental and moral condition that goes
deeper than the manifestation. They do not show only want of the sense
of beauty--want of the sense even of cleanliness; they show the
absence of all the civilizing influences--all the humanizing
tendencies of modern society. By this want Ireland is made miserable
and kept low in the scale of nations. Had the race been
self-respecting, sturdy, upright, stubbornly industrious, all this
savage neglect would have mended itself. Being what it is--excitable,
imaginative, spasmodic, given over to ideas rather than to facts, and
trusting to Hercules in the clouds rather than to its own brawny
shoulders--this squalor continues and is not dependent on poverty.
Time alone will show whether changed agrarian conditions will alter
it. So far as his power goes, the priest does nothing to touch it. The
Church uses up its influence for everything but the practical purposes
of work-a-day-life. It teaches obediences to its ordinances, but not
civic virtues. It encourages boys and girls to marry at an age when
they neither understand the responsibilities of life nor can support a
family; but in its regard