HOW TO SAVE IRELAND.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 11 May 1912, Page 9

HOW TO SAVE IRELAND.

In an article in the Independant, John Butler Yeats, the father of W. B. Yeats, the poet, says: "Ireland is to be rescued' neither by Belfast nor by Ireland, neither by priests nor by parsons, but by its artists." The Irish Lome, Mr Yeats insists, is infinitely superior to the English home, because the Trish are a healthy people. They have "not brought up generations of children in the awful conditions of the manufacturing towns of prosperous England—the weak hair, the bandy legs, the physical droop, that stamp so many poor Englishmen of to-day, we have escaped. We are, of course, out at the elbows, and little regarded in the woi'ld's esteem, but our eyes are bright, our limbs clean and straight, and our voices musical.

"If the Englishman's idea is ostentation, and the Scotsman's idea is to win some sort of social pre-eminence, the Irishman, the true Irishman, does not want to get on and does not value wellbeing : he desires to save his soul, for he is an Adam who has not quite forgotten his Eden. In the past he has not been allowed to 'get on,' and so perforce he has learned to suck out of life its inner sweetness. There is no man who lives in closer intimacy with nature and life. "My proposal, therefore, is this, that in Ireland we change nothing, only, whereas now men go about in rags,l would clothe them in purple and fine linen, and in place of smoky cabins I would give them palaces; these garments and these palaces to be made out of the cheapest material, to wit: the finest thoughts of the understanding and the finest feelings of the heart. i prosperous and famous England I would alter everything—alter ideals, denounce hopes, and show Englishmen that they are worshiping evil where they think they are worshiping; good. I would shut the factories and I would shut also the churches, the chapels, and the schools. In short, I would pull down the whole edifice.

"In Ireland I would change nothing, or almost nothing. These men and women in their stony fields, these people in rags, with their beautiful dreamy eyes and their hands without purpose, as I myself "havp seen them in Galway and elsewhere; the villages spreading in the sunshine beside streams which commerce hos not yet polluted. This nation indeed lies asleep and awaits the 7iiagician."