ll 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