The creative impulse in industry, literature, social habit, working in an atmosphere of freedom, has added to the wealth of humanity not only an old nation renascent, but a new and kindlier civilisation.

In other words, political autonomy is to us not the epilogue but the prologue to our national drama.

It rings the curtain up on that task to which all politics are merely instrumental, namely the vindication of justice and the betterment of human life.
From the first, the economic note will predominate in a Home Rule assembly, not only in the sense in which so much can be said of every country in the world, but in a very special sense.

For the past decade Ireland has been thinking in terms of woollens and linens, turnips and fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and railways.

The conviction that the country is under-developed, and in consequence under-populated, has been growing both in area and in depth.