THE PROGRESS OF IRELAND.
THE report of the Registrar-General for Ireland for the year 1912, which has just been issued, con- tains a record of progress which will surprise most Englishmen. On this side of St. George's Channel we have so long been accustomed to hear statements with regard to the decline of Ireland that few of us have yet taken note of the fact that the " most distressful country" has now turned the corner and is on the up-grade. Judged by almost every test that can be applied, Ireland. has now reached a condition of rapidly growing prosperity. The test of vital statistics is as good as any and better than most, for it is based upon facts that seldom have more than one interpretation. The first point to note is that in the year 1912 the population of Ireland increased. The increase, it is true, is small—only 1,102 according to the Registrar-General's calculations ; but still it is an increase, and thus furnishes a striking contrast with the almost steady decline which has been going on since the middle of last century. The increase in popula- tion is due both to a decline in the death-rate and to a decline in emigration. The death-rate last year in Ireland was 16.46 per 1,000, which is the lowest recorded since 1871. Specially satisfactory is the decline in the death-rate from tubercular disease, which fell to 2.15 per 1,000. This decline has been progressive for many years past, and last year's figure is the lowest on record. In the same way infant mortality has been pro- gressively declining.
Equally significant from another point of view is the decline in emigration. The rate of emigration in 1912 was 6.7 per 1,000, as compared with 7 per 1,000 in 1911 and 7.7, which was the average rate from 1902 to 1911. These figures clearly show that the rapidity of emigra- tion from Ireland has been arrested, and the fact can only be attributed to the improved prospects available for Irish men and women who stay at home. Parenthetically, it is worth while to notice that, as in all countries, the larger number of emigrants are young people in the prime of life, and their out-going leaves a larger proportion of old people to the total population, a fact which explains the relatively high death-rate still prevailing in Ireland in spite of recent reductions.
Passing from these vital statistics to other information, we cannot do better than take as a test a speech delivered by Mr. Devlin, M.P., at Leeds in the month of March this year. In this speech Mr. Devlin became almost lyrical in his description of the progress achieved in Ireland during the past ten or fifteen years. Thousands of wretched hovels had disappeared, and thousands of excellent labourers' cottages had taken their places. A quarter of a million of Irish labourers were now comfortably housed in clean, well-lighted, and sanitary dwellings. And, above all, two-thirds of the soil of Ireland had been transferred to the ownership of those who tilled it. As to the economic effect of this transference there is almost universal agree- ment. It has resulted in improving the agriculture of Ireland and the prosperity of the Irish farmer. Luckily, too, for Irish farmers who are on the way to become owners, the progress of land purchase has synchronized with a rise in agricultural prices throughout the world. The result is that tenant purchasers have been able to take advantage of the rise in prices in land, and Irish news- papers are now constantly noting record prices obtained for farms.
To take another test, we have the growth in the deposits in the Post Office Savings Bank, and a similar large increase tin the balances of the joint-stock banks. There is also an extraordinary rise in the figures of Irish imports and exports. Simultaneously, railway receipts have risen, and the amount of income assessable to income-tax has also gone up. Less than a year ago Mr. T. P. Gill, the Secretary of the Irish Department of Agriculture, stated publicly that in his opinion " Ireland to-day is not only a progressive nation, but within her own limits is among the most rapidly and soundly progressive nations in the world." A similar statement was made by Mr. T. W. Russell in November last, to the effect that "Ireland is doing quite as well as any part of the Empire." It is interesting to contrast these statements by Mr. Devlin, Mr. T. P. Gill, and Mr. T. W. Russell, all of them Home Rulers, with a speech made by Mr. John Redmond in Dublin at the end of the year 1909. Mr. Redmond then said, speaking with regard to the prospects of the Homo Rule Bill, " They had before them to-day the best chance that Ireland ever had for the last century of tearing up and trampling underfoot the infamous Act of Union, -which had made Ireland impoverished, depopulated, and unhappy." That, of course, is the kind of stuff with which English- men have been regaled by Irish orators for a couple of generations past, and the persistent promulgation of statements of this character explains the sympathy which the Home Rule agitation commands in England. Mr. Redmond's statement is untrue both historically and as regards contemporary facts. The Act of Union did not depopulate Ireland. On the contrary, within the first fifty years after the passing of the Act of Union the population of Ireland almost doubled. It has since, of course, declined, just as the population of Scotland is at this moment declining for economic causes ; but even now the popu- lation of Ireland is little, if at all, less than it was at the time that the Act of Union was passed. As regards the question of impoverishment, it is interesting to compare Mr. Redmond's rhetoric at the beginning of the twentieth century with Swift's gruesome pleasantry in the earlier years of the eighteenth. If the Act of Union is responsible for Irish poverty, it is curious that seventy or eighty years before that Act was passed Dean Swift should have been so impressed with the horrible and apparently irremediable poverty of the Irish peasantry as to try to arouse English attention by the satirical pro- posal that Irish babies should be fatted for consumption in the English market. As regards unhappiness, it is difficult to bring Mr. Redmond's statement to any precise test, for happiness is not a quality that can be measured statisti- cally ; but all present observers say that life in Ireland has taken a new turn, and that never before in living memory have Irishmen been so full of energy and apparently obtaining so much enjoyment in life. Certainly the con- dition of the masses of people in Ireland to-day compares most favourably from every point of view with the condition of the Irish population before the Act of Union. We are not, of course, so foolish as to attribute all the improvement here noted to the Act of Union or to any legislative measure, or, indeed, to any single cause. A multitude of causes have occurred to make Ireland, in Mr. T. P. Gill's phrase, " one of the most rapidly and soundly progressive nations in the world." Among these causes is the splendid work done by Sir Horace Plunkett in teaching the Irish people to help themselves instead of leaning upon politicians. There is also the very important fact above referred to of the rise in the world's price of agricultural products, which has naturally benefitted a country that lives, and must live, mainly upon agriculture.
The important point to be enforced is that, at a time when this indisputable advance is going on, it is foolish to risk a set-back by altering fundamentally the political condi- tions under which Ireland lives and has of late so vastly improved.
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