cizes, to set himself right. People sneeringly whisper he thinks he's a great fellow. All he has seen, and been, and suffered, is locked from their eyes. The story of his life beyond is ignored, while yesterday's weather is discussed, and the bad year for hay. Three thousand miles of sea lie between himself and the men who say "hello." They feel he is proud of the contrast that his thick goid chain announces. He's "too good for them." The words that should be spoken are left unspoken, and both take refuge in idle, rasping talk. When he goes back to the Chicago car-barns, he feels a strange relief. He is, in a sad sense, going home. But if the people in Ireland have utterly failed to appreciate the romance of the Returned American, the romance of his lonely and heroic struggle in a hard and unfriendly life, they, in turn, are acutely sensitive to the contrast he has taken pains to draw. He is no longer the modest, submissive boy they knew. He is purse-proud and vulgar. He has overlooked the improvements that meant labor and invention and pride. He has conveyed all too scornfully his desire to introduce changes, renovate, reform. They shudder at his impious hands. Things reverent from age and association have lost their value in his sharpened eyes. His religion is no longer the influence it was at home. New values, values in money and worldliness and will, have supplanted the previous truths of old. He has looked down on them as old-fashioned and behind the times. He has tried to force on him crazy ideas of class and power. The clash between generations has been accentuated by the clash between the New World and the Old. In the parish he is remembered as a Yank; and conservatism is ironic about this latest disciple of Mammon, who has splashed his money about with such immoral recklessness, and so boldly invited the anger of the gods. For my own part, I feel sympathy with the Old World in Ireland. I dread nothing for Ireland so much as machine-slavery, the homogeneity of vulgar living that is now the rule in the world and the economic rule in small Irish towns. But bitter as it is to risk Ireland's accent, I do not think that passionate provincialism either in regard to England or America, can save her without confirming a worse decay. Ireland must season its character in the world as it is, not shrink away from foreignness, or it is destined to succumb to the world. PART IV REMEDIES "We are less children of this clime A. E. HOLY POVERTY ECONOMIC FITNESS THE problem before Ireland today is, in short, the problem of survival; and the terms of survival are, first of all, economic fitness. Are the Irish economically fit to survive? Without economic fitness, the Irish will just as certainly perish off the face of Ireland as the Red Indian has perished off the face of Manhattan. Morally, this may seem unspeakable and indefensible. But many morally indefensible results have occurred upon this planet, the first law of which, neither moral nor immoral, is survival. He who neglects to survive may have a sound case against the planet; but the planet is deaf and dumb. "To perish may also be a solution." But if the Irish prefer survival to victimization, they must strive for economic fitness. In that strife they must search out those "institutional elements" of which Thorstein Veblen has spoken that are "at variance with the continued life-interests of the community." By the "force of their instinctive insight " they must prevent "the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture," whether those institutions are selfmade, or church-made, or government-made. They must decline to work under institutions that are at variance with their proper interests. They must |