dimmest conception, his helplessness in the fierce current of industrial life in which he is plunged, the climatic extremes of heat and cold, the early hours and few holidays:  all these experiences act as a rude shock upon the ill-balanced refinement of the Irish immigrant.  Not seldom, he or she loses heart and hope and returns to Ireland mentally and physically a wreck, a sad disillusionment to those who had been comforted in the agony of the leave-taking by the assurance that to emigrate was to succeed.

The peculiar Irish conception of a home has probably a good deal to do with the history of the Irish in the United States.  It is well known that whatever measure of success the Irish emigrant has there achieved is pre-eminently in the American city, and not where, according to all the usual commonplaces about the Irish race, they ought to have succeeded, in American rural life.  There they were afforded, and there they missed, the greatest opportunity which ever fell to the lot of a people agriculturally inclined.  During the days of the great emigrations from Ireland, a veritable Promised Land, rich beyond the dreams of agricultural avarice, was gradually opened up between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains, which the Irish had only to occupy in order to possess.  Making all allowances for the depressing influences which had been brought to bear upon the spirit of enterprise, and for their impoverished condition, I am convinced that a prime cause of the failure of almost every effort to settle them upon the land was the fact that the tenement house, with all its domestic abominations, provided the social order which they brought with them from Ireland, and the lack of which on the western prairie no immediate or prospective physical comfort could make good.

Recently a daughter of a small farmer in County Galway with a family too ‘long’ for the means of subsistence available, was offered a comfortable home on a farm owned by some better-off relatives, only thirty miles away, though probably twenty miles beyond the limits of her utmost peregrinations.  She elected in preference to go to New York, and being asked her reason by a friend of mine, replied in so many words, ’because it is nearer.’  She felt she would be less of a stranger in a New York tenement house, among her relatives and friends who had already emigrated, than in another part of County Galway.  Educational science in Ireland has always ignored the life history of the subject with which it dealt.  In no respect has this neglect been so unconsciously cruel as in its failure to implant in the Irish mind that appreciation of the material aspects of the home which the people so badly need both in Ireland and in America If the Irishman abroad became ’a rootless colonist of alien earth,’ the lot of the Irishman in Ireland has been not less melancholy.  Sadness there is, indeed, in the story of ’the sea-divided Gael,’ but, to me, it is incomparably less pathetic than their homelessness at home.