tual needs. We have made some tentative efforts.
The long war over the land, which resulted in the transference of the
land from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part of the way,
but the Land Acts offered no complete solution. We were assured by hot
enthusiasts of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has not tilled
a single acre more since the Land Acts were passed. Our rural exodus
continued without any Moses to lead us to Jerusalems of our own. At
every station boys and girls bade farewell to their friends; and hardly
had the train steamed out when the natural exultation of adventure made
the faces of the emigrants glow because the world lay before them, and
human appetites the country could not satisfy were to be appeased at the
end of the journey.

How can we make the countryside in Ireland a place which nobody would
willingly emigrate from? When we begin to discuss this problem we soon
make the discovery that neither in the new world nor the old has there
been much first-class thinking on the life of the countryman. This will
be apparent if we compare the quality of thought which has been devoted
to the problems of the city State, or the constitution of widespread
dominions, from the days of Solon and Aristotle down to the time of
Alexander Hamilton, and compare it with the quality of thought which has
been brought to bear on the problems of the rural community.

On the labors of the countryman depend the whole strength and health,
nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country,
politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the
countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table.
It seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in
Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only yesterday
to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find the
Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural
population in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins of
diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their
constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national
childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which
classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem
to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy
without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects
disease in old age, but not in youth.