in Germany especially, the public utilities are owned and operated by the corporations, and there is an extension of municipal activity amazing to the American. But in Dublin there is little of what the English call "municipal trading," and the Americans municipal ownership when they do not call it Socialism. The tramways are owned by a private corporation, and operate a rather inefficient service at a rate of fare several times larger than that in vogue in Liverpool and Glasgow.

It is, however, an expression of the modern spirit of Dublin that has caused the nervous and energetic Lord Mayor Sherlock, who, as I have said, is modern, democratic, and progressive, to institute efforts to correct some of the abuses charged against the tramways company; and here again Dublin is like most American cities in that she has her problem of transportation and her struggle with her street-railway company. Dr. Sherlock is an advocate of municipal ownership, ownership, though that statement has no such implication in Europe as it has in America, for in Europe all schools of political thought are in favor, quite as a matter of course, of that policy.

batons blancs, they are, as far as I know, the only policemen in Europe to carry clubs, which is natural enough, perhaps, since policemen's clubs are a development from the Irish shillalah.

But municipal ownership of the tramways in Dublin must wait, as all else must wait, on home rule. The city is ruled in reality by the Imperial Government, and the limitation of its powers is shown by the fact that even in local improvements the city is not supreme. The council may order and make an improvement, it is true, but if one citizen objects, -and there is always one citizen, of course, in every city who objects to all public improvements, -a government inspector promptly sits to hear the objection, and though the local authorities are permitted to explain and defend their action, the inspector is absolute and may order the work discontinued or carried on, as it pleases him. Even with her own police force Dublin has nothing to do except to contribute to the payment of their salaries. Those slender, well-set-up young chaps in helmets and blue uniforms, with clubs in their belts, are of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which are a part of castle government, and are to the city what the Royal Irish Constabulary are to rural Ireland. Except the traffic officers in Paris and Brussels, who wield the

But in all cities there are forces more powerful than policemen and more potent than laws, compelling changes against all opposition of prejudice and reaction, and these forces are operating to make over Dublin. There, as everywhere, is the silent and invisible force of public opinion, so that the trim young policeman does not enforce, for instance, the obsolete law which forbids a priest from appearing in public in his clerical garb. And there is the stronger force, the old and irresistible force of necessity. Formerly the sewers of Dublin emptied directly into the Liffey, but the corporation has constructed great intercepting sewers, parallel to the river, and these bear the sewage out of town to disposal plants, where it is purified and its waste reclaimed. In this respect Dublin is far in advance of any American city of which I know; we recklessly flush our sewage into the rivers at our feet, and then stoop and drink of the polluted waters. But Dublin not only purifies her sewage: she refuses to drink of the Liffey, a river once noted for its unpleasant odors, and through her splendid system she has an abundant supply of the best and purest of waters. They call it the Vartray water, and it comes from the city's reservoirs away in the beautiful hills of Wicklow.

DUBLIN'S PROBLEM OF OVERCROWDED

TENEMENTS

BUT for these instances, Dublin is modern only in her problems, and she has dealt in the modern spirit with the questions of sewage disposal and water-supply only because she is under that general compulsion of necessity which has driven most European cities to reform in these two departments. American cities have not even undertaken them as yet, and, as a result, have an average death-rate from typhoid fever alone that is ten per cent. higher than the average in European cities. Necessity, too, has forced Dublin to deal with another problem, happily not yet acute in our cities,-though before long it will be, unless we plan our towns bet

ter, as it is in Europe, and that is the problem of housing. Indeed, no other city in the world presents all the elements of the problem more vividly, more pathetically, and I had almost said more picturesquely, than Dublin.

For this proud old city, with its sad memories, has disowned what trade was not crushed by English laws, and preferred to be poor and genteel. Her sons have preferred to go into the army or the constabulary or the civil service, or to seek their fortunes at the bar or in America, rather than to lower themselves by going in for the industries and trades. They have had before their eyes always the aristocratic walls of a great university, which they will not forget refused Oliver Goldsmith his degree, and there has been upon them the influence of the sham court maintained at the viceregal lodge in Phoenix Park and the ugly castle, and always there is the large garrison of red-coated soldiers. All of which has given to Dublin a distinct atmosphere affecting somehow even those who love Ireland and behold in Dublin the invested capital of a virile nation.

Meanwhile decay has succeeded to decay; the old mansions where the aristocracy once dwelt, halls that blazed with light at night and rang with the laughter of sparkling wit, and heard the accents of the most beautiful and perfect English spoken anywhere on the globe, have degenerated into foul tenements. The houses are centuries old, three or four stories in height, without courts or alleys, and about the low, worn steps at their entrances children are swarming and women are "gostering," to use the old Irish word with which the lord mayor deprecates their idle gossiping, and they are all living in single-room tenements. There were 21,133 of them, according to Sir Charles Cameron's report on the health of Dublin for the year 1911. Of these 21,133 single-room tenements, more than 2000 are occupied by more than five persons; in nearly 4500 of them six persons live; in 854, seven persons; in 431, eight persons; and in 146, nine persons.

Figures, of course, are dull, and do not strike the imagination. It is difficult to realize five, six, seven, eight, or nine persons in a single dark room, living there, cooking there, eating there, when they do

eat, washing there, when they do wash, lying down there, sleeping there, getting up there in the morning, and getting up in the morning without hope, without even the dream that the new day will bring forth something interesting or beautiful. No wonder the Irish "Times" says, "Our tenement system is the ultimate cause of most of the city's disease, intemperance, and crime."

It is an advance, I suppose, to discover that a tenement system is the cause of so much evil, and after a while, perhaps, Dublin, and some other cities besides, will go further and find out what causes the tenement system. Meanwhile the corporation has done what other European cities have done, and more and more are doing all the while. It has built cottage dwellings in the suburbs, as, for instance, those at Clontarf, and these it rents to the poor. It has not solved the problem, by any means. No city has done that, and there are many persons in Dublin, and in all the cities of the United Kingdom, who contend that the taxing power of the Government will have to be invoked to do away with the evils.

It has been this very condition, indeed, that brought on the agitation in favor of the land tax, which, under the leadership of the remarkable Welsh radical, Mr. David Lloyd George, introduced the great conflict over the budget. The situation gives force and cogency to the claims of the land-values men, who say that it is the system of taxing property in Great Britain and Ireland that is responsible for all this overcrowding in slum dwellings, and they insist that the remedy is to tax the value of the land, whether used or unused, while lessening and gradually abolishing the taxes on buildings and improvements. There are in Dublin, according to a recent survey, 519 waste spaces, and the land-values men contend that these do not remain vacant because there are no builders or tenants who might like to build on them or live on them, but because the owners demand a price which, added to the rates, would make the erection of houses at reasonable rentals unremunerative. They claim, too, that if these vacant spaces were assessed for rating at the value put on them by the owners, it would no longer be profitable to allow them to remain unused and idle. The

and under this enlightened policy the agriculture, at least about Dublin and in the east and south of the island, is the finest in the world, and down toward the old town of Tarraght there is peace and smiling contentment where forty years ago there were armed uprisings.

But memory persists in recalling with distinctness those narrow, twisted streets of the old quarter where this problem remains unsolved; those cold sidewalks over which patter the bare feet of ragged children, and the dingy doorways through which titled ladies once were shown by link-boys in their braver, finer days, while by them, in the gloom, flit the figures whose poor painted faces show for an instant in the circle of light from the street-lamps. Some of those ancient halls, no doubt, have known the shafts of Swift's wit, or echoed to the singing of Thomas Moore, whose bust in a little niche over a public house will be pointed out to you as marking the house where the Irish poet was born. He was not so much Irish, however, it has always seemed to me, with his career among the great of his time in England, or so much a poet, as that other poorer, sadder man, whose very ghost seems somehow to haunt those tenements, that poet who was so distinctly and implicitly Irish, James Clarence Mangan. One might imagine him, thin and pale and racked by his cough, haunting these nightly ways the nameless one no more,

owners, they say, would be compelled either to put them to some use or to part with them to those who would use them.

THE IRISH QUESTION ALWAYS A
LAND QUESTION

THE Irish question, indeed, has always been at bottom a land question. "In the rich pastures of Ireland," said the Congress of the United States in the message of sympathy it sent to the Irish people in 1775, "many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for her destruc tion." The "parasites" whom the fathers had in mind were of that landed class which under the system of land tenure brought from the Continent by the Normans, enabling them to tax the produce of Saxons and Angles, had been transferred bodily to Ireland under the Tudors and the first Stuarts. This landed class betrayed the nation in the Act of Union in 1800 for a bribe of six million dollars, maintained the galling burden that had been imposed on Catholics since 1537, and, until the emancipation wrought by O'Connell, by Grattan, and by Parnell, were themselves sustained by a system of taxation under which the tenant was compelled to renew his lease from year to year, and to pay an enhanced rental for all the improvements he himself had made. From the one injustice they were emancipated in 1829 as the result of the great movement led by O'Connell, from the other by that led by Parnell. His agitation, to say nothing of Davitt's Land League, brought about the land acts of 1881 and 1887, which not only have released the Irish tenant from an intolerable serfdom, but by reacting on England have thus begun to overthrow the old system of the Norman, and these times witness the spectacle of the Irish party in Parliament uniting with the Liberal party to carry out the noble reforms begun many years ago by Gladstone.

These reforms already have so changed and improved Ireland that she is no more the "distressful" country of the old song. The land acts and the various subventions have helped immensely, and the pleasant sanitary little cottages scattered all over the loveliest country in the world have replaced the old cabins. Rural housing conditions have become more tolerable, and in some places generally admirable,

amid wreck and sorrow, And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,

He bides in calmness the silent morrow that no ray lights.

THE GROWING HOPE OF HOME RULE

THERE is now a new ray to light the morrow for Ireland, and the figure of Hope on the gilt dome of the customhouse is no longer a mere sardonic mockery. For at last, after all these years, home rule is at hand, and all Ireland is thrilling with expectation. It is a modern Ireland that longs to express itself, a new young Ireland, with its reverence for the old traditions, of course, and with the will and the purpose to build on a civilization older than England's the new civilization of our time. This spirit is everywhere manifest, whether in the boys at

the industrial school at Artane, once waifs in the streets of Dublin, who now weave and sew and carpenter and build, and then dance Irish reels and Highland flings; or the luckier lads in the O'Connell schools, advanced in their studies far beyond the boys of their age in our schools; or in the first citizen of Ireland, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, struggling intelligently with the problems of municipal government. It is apparent in the very poise of the members on the Irish benches in the House of Commons, sitting there with their tall hats tilted, while the "Government of Ireland" bill is debated, laughing at some Unionist member praising the royal constabulary, denouncing the "royal and ancient" order of Hibernians, as he calls them, and speaking in awe of the Ulster gasconade, and wholly missing the humor in the threats of a province that still insists on being ruled, and even threatens armed rebellion if set free!

It manifests itself even in the jarveys, for as we turned into College Green and paused beneath Foley's statue of Goldsmith, my driver drew up the jaunting-car and, pointing proudly with his whip to the columns of the noble façade of the old parliament house, which was loaned to the Bank of Ireland until the hour of Irish freedom, said:

"There 's where the new Irish parliament will sit, your Honor."

"I know," I said, and, recalling a phrase beloved by an old Irish friend at home, I added, "And more power to them."

"Sure, and a great night that will be," he said, his eye sparkling, his lips smiling in anticipation, "and all the Irish in America coming over for it."

"You'll have to enlarge College Green, then, to hold them," I said. "But no doubt you could move the statue of King Billy yonder."

There was little need, since all the Irish know and hate it, to point up Dame Street to that gilded atrocity of British art which represents King William as a Roman hero on a sway-backed, tun-bellied charger.

"Faith, we could be sparing him, your Honor," the jarvey chuckled.

Yes, the whole land is alive and quivering in anticipation of this new birth, and surely no people with such undying faith, such splendid devotion, such inexhaustible national spirit, could have been kept alive in such amazing vitality through so many centuries of injustice and oppression unless some great and noble purpose was behind it all. And this national spirit awaits the hour to make Dublin over, and as it will make old Ireland new.