We mentioned the other day the interesting impressions of English
life written in the Daily Mail by Mr. Frank Fox, an Australian journalist who is seeing the United Kingdom for the first time. In England he was surprised to find no class animosity and no remnants of feudalism. He has now passed to Ireland, and after travelling a thousand miles up and down the country has to confess that his pessimism about Ireland also has disappeared. "The Ireland I expected to find," be writes, "was a running sore near to the heart of the Empire threatening its well-being. The Ireland I found was a healing Ireland, not yet prosperous, but prospering. The population was not made up chiefly of bailiffs and famine- stricken peasants. The chief article of production was not grievances." We are very glad to learn that this is how it strikes an impartial observer who was probably a Home-ruler before he came to England. To us who live near at hand the gradual improvement is less striking than to the stranger, who compares what he sees with what he has been told of the conditions of a generation ago,—for the story of Irish grievances as published abroad is sadly out of date.
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