the play, even if it could overcome the
inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since
the Land Purchase Act went into force.

The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice
personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The
Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain.
To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there
is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the
politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so
universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an
universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the story
of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple
because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in
his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her
husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for
political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because
of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would
entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really
significant part of the play,--and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed
to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a
leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his
life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be told
stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a
wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of
the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is
his cry:--

I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up
for eighteen years--God knows what good came of it
all--but--Peter--I meant--I tried ... I know I meant right--and in
prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me
who had given everything for Ireland--they wouldn't have come to
me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here
now--I see them all around me--there is Wolfe Tone, and there is
... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried--tried as you tried--and
been broken....

With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish
life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will
dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson sho