s money on himself rather than on the
home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary
son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has
changed both his name and his religion.

All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the
schoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense of
those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old
Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be,
as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for
so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings
for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of
the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder
insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man
with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern
Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn
caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his
prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of
his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character
distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely
is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman.

The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The
Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his
point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with
which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that
their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London,
and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is
but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has
brought upon the modern English stage.

It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots"
(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political
leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with
almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it
is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson
satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political
prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to
arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was
ever possible, is a corollary to