ale of
population is almost six times greater than that of the United States.
If the Union were peopled as thickly as Ireland even still is, the
population would be nearly five hundred millions. There is still a vast
deal of filling-up to be done in America, mostly in the rural parts.

But the main consideration I wish to emphasise throughout is that the
problem under review is moral and social far more than economic, human
rather than material. This is the natural view of an Irish worker, who
knows that the solution of _his_ problem depends upon the possibility of
endowing country life with such social improvements as will provide an
effective compensation for a necessarily modest standard of comfort. But
the citizens of the United States may be pardoned for being physiocrats.
The statistical proof, annually furnished, of the growing agricultural
wealth, is apt to obscure other essentials of progress. The astronomical
proportions of the figures stagger the imagination, and engender the
kind of pride a man feels when he is first told the number of red
corpuscles luxuriating in his blood. How can there be agricultural
depression in a country whose farm lands Secretary Wilson, in his
notable Annual Report for 1905, declared to have increased in value over
a period of five years at the astounding rate of $3,400,000 per day? Yet
to the deeper insight, the same moral influence through which we in
Ireland are seeking to combat the evils of material poverty may in the
United States be needed as a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing
material prosperity. The patriotic American, who thinks of the life of
the Nation rather than of the individual, will, if he looks beneath the
surface, discern in this God-prospered country symptoms of rural
decadence fraught with danger to National efficiency.

The reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of
the towns is condemned by the verdict of history. We need not now fear
that invading hordes of hardy barbarians will mar the destiny of the
great Western Republic, as they ended the career of the Roman Empire.
There are, however, other clouds upon the horizon. Only a few years ago,
the American people could well treat with contempt the bogy of the
Yellow Peril. With a transformation unprecedented in history, the
situation has been changed. Japan is already devoting to the arts of
peace qualities but yesterday displayed in war, to the amazement of the
Western world.