land would discriminate against Protestant Ulster; (2) the fear that agricultural Ireland would over-tax and otherwise unfairly legislate against industrial Ulster; (3) the fear that an Irish Parliament would be packed with members unqualified to handle the problems of a modern industrial community. It has been said that the men of Ulster know that they have had the best end of the bargain to date, that they simply do not want to change from a position of superiority to one of equality with the rest of Ireland, and that their fears are trumped-up fears to lend the look of logic to their intransient attitude. There is little to support this charge. Although many of their fears might prove groundless in the end, the men of Ulster undoubtedly believe that independence would not mean real self-government for them. Were these fears dissipated, tens of thousands of Ulster Unionists would probably go over to the camp of the Nationalists.

IV. WHY ULSTER WINS

But the thing that has bothered American readers has been the difficulty in seeing how such a small minority, whatever their fears and however good their reasons, could absolutely dominate the entire Irish situation. The plain fact that the union with England still stands is the sign of Ulster's successful opposition. There are those who say it is not so much that Ulster is strong as it is that England has never really intended to extend any marked measure of Home Rule, that her movements in that direction have been merely opportunist gestures, that it has been with relieved gladness rather than reluctance that she has made Ulster the excuse for repeated postponements of Home Rule. One big factor that has ministered to the success of the Ulster opposition to Home Rule has been the unwillingness upon the part of many Nationalist leaders to permit the exclusion of any part of Ulster from Home Rule, fearing that the exclusion of such a wealthy, even though small, part of Ireland from an Irish government might mean the failure of the experiment. Thus the old contest between state rights and secession, which

we knew in the Civil War period, operates in Ireland. But Ulster Unionists have succeeded not only because of these factors, but also because Ulster Unionism is a party of unusual strength through the fact that it has united all classes of its people on its program of opposition. The composition of Ulster Unionism is a unique story.

Ulster Unionism has united three classes that are normally at one another's throats, the aristocracy, the trading class, and the laboring class. These three classes are alike in their almost fanatical devotion to the union with England, but each favors the union from a different motive. The Ulster aristocrat favors union with England for imperial reasons. This Irish aristocracy has, by long tradition, a knowledge of large affairs and marked qualities of leadership. These Irish aristocrats in Ulster have an undying pride in the British Empire and are inveterate imperialists. It is not Catholic Ireland or agricultural Ireland or incompetent Ireland that they fear primarily. They fear a Nationalist Ireland that would disrupt the British Empire. The leadership of this group gives marked strength to Ulster Unionism. Yoked with these aristocrats are the business and manufacturing classes of Belfast. These men of trade favor union with England more from economic than imperial reasons. They think profits and prosperity safer under British guidance than under the guidance of an inexperienced Irish Parliament. To these men of aristocracy and industry are joined the Protestant laboring men of Ulster. They favor union with England not from imperial or economic motives, but from a religious motive. Their basic fear is of Catholic domination. Simply as working-men they are independent and radical, but their fear of the pope is so much stronger than their fear of the capitalist that they are unswerving in their coöperation with the aristocrats and the business men.

It will now be of interest to trace the developments that have resulted in the present wide-spread unrest and virulent passion that has of late swept Ireland in the interest of separation from England.

V. HOPE IN PARLIAMENT DIES

There has been a long and steady preparation for the present outburst of fresh Nationalistic ambition in Ireland. One of the things that has prepared the way has been the gradual destruction of the average Irishman's hope that progress toward self-government could be secured through the work of an Irish party in the British Parliament. The Irish party in Parliament has tried in turn three policies, and each has signally failed. Butt, the leader of the first real Nationalist party in Parliament, tried a policy of argument. He found that in Parliament members are more recorders of party policies than individual statesmen to be convinced by sound arguments. He failed. Then Parnell tried a policy of assault. He gathered strength, and then threatened to obstruct legislative business unless he got what he was after. That failed. He tried to threaten party leaders. Straightway political enemies closed ranks and defeated Parnell's tactics. Then Redmond tried a policy of alliance. He bargained with the Liberals and promised to support them if they would support his demands. The Liberals failed to deliver fully on their promises. Redmond failed. The successive failures of these policies of argument, assault, and alliance convinced Irishmen that no hope lay in an Irish party in Parliament. They began to cast about for tactics that would promise greater success, and their casting about has ended in the present vogue of the Sinn Feiners.

VI. SINN FEIN ENTERS

Who are the Sinn Feiners, and how did they rise to power? There is in many minds a vague notion that the Sinn Feiners were, in the beginning, a small band of Irish anarchists or Celtic Bolshevists who started out one evening with torch and gun and inflammatory words and overnight roused all Ireland to a fever-heat of sentiment for their independent policies. The story, of course, is not as dramatic as that. The words "Sinn Fein" means "ourselves" and when joined, as they sometimes are,

with a third word, we have the phrase "Sinn Fein Amhain," which means "ourselves alone." This is the name chosen by the new party which Mr. Arthur Griffith, the editor of "The United Irishman," founded. Defining the aim of the party, Mr. Griffith said: "The basis of the policy is national self-reliance. No laws and no series of laws can make a nation out of a people which distrusts itself." The party was at first only a group of young intellectuals who felt that Ireland's best future demanded her cutting free from all foreign entanglements, notably British, and basing her development upon self-reliance, self-help, and self-sacrifice. Skipping past details, it may be said that the new Sinn Fein party jogged along slowly, as most ready-to-wear manufactured parties do, as our Bull Moose Party did, gathering to itself individual minds that agreed with its policies and point of view; but it did not sweep the country. For ten years after the beginning of the agitation that produced the party it cut only a slight figure in Irish politics.

VII. FOUR AIDS TO SINN FEIN

But, independent of specific Sinn Fein agitation, a combination of circumstances was forming that turned the party from a pet project of a group of intellectuals into the dominant factor in Irish politics. The more important elements of this combination of circumstances favorable to Sinn Fein may be listed as four in number.

First, there was going on a genuine non-political awakening of national consciousness throughout Ireland. The men and women behind this movement probably did not dream that they were forging weapons for a Sinn Fein party. This awakening of national consciousness expressed itself in three directions, cultural, industrial, and agricultural. The Gaelic League worked to revive the Irish language, customs, and folk-lore to their pristine purity. The townsfolk labored in the interest of an industrial revival. The Agricultural Coöperative Society preached the gospel of an agricultural renaissance for Ireland. All these forces were making appeals for

Irish self-reliance, and it was but natural that these forces should become friendly toward the Sinn Fein ideals of self-reliance, although full assent to the party's entire program might be withheld.

Second, there was a growing unrest throughout Ireland over the failure of every effort to get Home Rule through constitutional means. The old Nationalists parties had fallen down. By a process of elimination, the Irish mind turned toward Sinn Fein as another hope for achieving Nationalism.

Third, there was the organization of the Volunteers, which originally had no connection with, but which was later to become "the striking arm" of, Sinn Fein. This was an organization that was planned in imitation of the Volunteers of 1778, who were officered by the Irish gentry. The organization was for the purpose of maintaining a drilled force in Ireland. They were Nationalists, but of a strange type.

Mr. Bir

mingham states that they seemed to have no bitter hatred of the Unionist Volunteers of Ulster, that they even cheered Sir Edward Carson at times, on the general principle that he was defying English law, and that any defiance of England was worth applause, that the early Volunteers were a motley band that might have become the protégés of any one of a number of groups, the official Nationalists, the Irish gentry, or even of the Allies in the Great War. But nobody seemed to hanker after the job of shepherding this volatile crew, and so, more by drift than design, they became allied with Sinn Fein.

Fourth, there was a growing class consciousness in the ranks of Irish labor. The story of how Irish labor, when it became class-conscious, turned to the intensely nationalistic Sinn Fein instead of to an anti-national and international program is an interesting study in paradox. It was Jim Larkin, bold and picturesque, who struck the new note in Irish labor. He went past the ancient gilds and the modern trade-unions and welded the lowest labor of the island into a class-conscious unity. But Larkin was not enamoured of Sinn Fein Nationalism. He was not primarily anti-Catholic or anti-British; he was primarily anti

capitalist. Had Larkin held control of the labor situation, there might never have been an alliance between labor and Sinn Fein. But Larkin was succeeded by James Connolly, who, to a marked degree, at any rate, threw labor into the Sinn Fein camp. How the normally international mind of labor could ally itself with a narrow nationalism is a puzzling question, but that is another story for another time.

The point is that these four developments created great reservoirs of power that were tapped by Sinn Fein. The facts that such diverse elements have joined the ranks of Sinn Fein makes any prophecy of the future development of the Sinn Fein program a difficult undertaking. It all depends upon the element that develops strength sufficient to dominate and direct its development.

The purpose of this survey is not to recount the recent political history of Irish politics, but simply to describe the forces at work. We have to-day in existence an "Irish Republic" asking recognition. England is proposing two parliaments for Ireland, one for Ulster and one for the rest of Ireland, with a single council for all Ireland that will have such powers and duties as the two parliaments may see fit to grant it as the situation develops. Carson is reported as advising Ulster to face about and yield to this plan. But the one thing England insists upon is that complete separation from the British Empire is out of the question. Sinn Fein demands complete independence. The outcome is in the lap of the Gods.

VIII. AN IRISH MONROE DOCTRINE

One of the main arguments of England is that Ireland is so strategically located that the security of England demands union. Eammon de Valera answers this argument by proposing a Monroe Doctrine for the British Isles in which he asserts the Sinn Fein Republic would coöperate. He asserts that England can grant independence to Ireland and at the same time guarantee her security by such procedure. He asks why Great Britain cannot do with Ireland as the United States did with Cuba.

THE HEALTH OF THE WICKED CITY

P

OETS and politicians have long idealized the barefoot boy of the open country. The health and happiness and untarnished naturalness of the country that "God made" have been set against the health-destroying and genius-blighting artificialities of the city that "man made." Like so many truisms, this is not true.

Life is healthy and happy and conducive to the best development of mind and body in the country, the same as in the city, only when life is intelligently ordered. Poverty and ignorance and indifference leave as black trails of broken bodies and stunted minds in Possum Hollow as in Paris. A pointed illustration of this occurred in a recent address on "Better Health for Rural Communities" by Dr. George E. Vincent, President of the Rockefeller Foundation. this address Dr. Vincent contrasted the results of recent investigations of city high-school pupils and of the pupils in a typical rural school. The comparative statistics are illuminating.

In

It was found that fifty-two per cent. of the rural pupils give evidence of malnutrition, while only two and one half per cent. of the city pupils so suffer. Fifty-eight per cent. of the rural pupils suffer from eye defects, while only five per cent. of the city pupils show similar defects. Fifty-one per cent. of the rural pupils are subject to anemia, while only twenty per cent. of the city pupils show a like weakness. Only ten per cent. of the rural pupils use tooth-brushes, as against eighty-nine per cent. of the city pupils using this instrument of civilization. The illness rate is higher among rural pupils than among city pupils. The rural population seems more subject to crippling diseases.

Is it any wonder that there is a drift from the country to the city? The drift will continue until rural life is organized at least as intelligently as city life. Pamphlets on "Back to the Farm" and panegyrics on country air, green hillsides, and lowing kine will not stop the

drift. The total life of rural America must become the serious concern of statesmanship.

The centralized rural school must be lifted to the plane of the city school. The pay of rural teachers must be made high enough to attract the best minds. The rural theater must be organized. Rural play must be given thought, and the country-side be given a real recreational life. The principles of scientific agriculture must be made the possession of every American farmer. A vast and comprehensive rural health service must be organized. The library must turn itinerant, and minister to every rural household. The route between farmer and ultimate consumer must be straightened, and many of the toll-gates that have been erected along its course must be demolished. Inventive genius and distributive economy must place modern light and water systems within the reach of every American farm home. And so on ad infinitum.

To-day many rural communities and small villages and towns throughout the nation represent nothing so much as "fished out ponds, inhabited only by bull-heads and suckers." This is not because the country boy is blind to the beauties of nature and turns with a sort of moth-madness to the flame of city life; it is because there is behind him the push of bad rural conditions and before him the pull of better city conditions. All this can be changed not by damning city life, but by redeeming rural life.

asks why the Allies are taking it upon themselves to discuss the future of Constantinople, "which belongs to Russia under a promise made by the Allies in 1915 as recompense for the Russian effort." The pamphlet is reported as expressing the determination of the Bolshevists to secure Constantinople even at the cost of conflict, if necessary. All of which is interesting in the light of former repudiations of Constantinople, and all other imperialistic claims by the Bolshevists.

The report of this pamphlet may be only another piece of manufactured news about Russia, designed to make the Bolshevists out as czarist imperialists in masquerade. That is neither here nor there. The fact is that, as long as the old international order exists, Russia, whether Bolshevist or Bourbon, must concern itself with the Baltic and Black seas and aspire to control them. Before the Revolution, the reactionaries of Russia used the legitimate desire of the Russian people for a warm-water exit to the ocean through the Black Sea

as an

excuse for furthering a crassly materialistic Panslavism. This old imperial concern with Constantinople, the Turkish straits, and the Black Sea was a constant threat to the peace of Europe.

Constantinople has all along been a sincere concern of the Russian people as well as a sinister design of a few Russian imperialists. Two facts in support of this have been brought out in recent despatches.

First, it is pointed out that the czar announced to the Russian Duma the secret treaty of 1915, in which France and England agreed that Constantinople and the Turkish straits should go to Russia, because the czar's position was daily growing weaker, and his advisers thought that if the Russian people knew they were to get Constantinople, with all that meant to the economic and defense interests of Russia, they would more willingly continue in the war. This does not mean that the Russian masses were interested in the imperialism that had grown up about the Constantinople issue; it means simply that they did not want to be in dangerous dependence upon Turkey or any other power that might close the straits against them and shut them off from the sea.

Second, it is pointed out that during the peace conference many representatives of Russia, not men of the old régime, but men of liberal, democratic, and socialistic leanings, while reversing the old Russian attitude on the question of a free Poland and showing utter fairness on the problem of nationalities, stood like flint on the necessity for a settlement of the question of Constantinople and the Turkish straits favorable to Russia.

As the Russian domestic situation be

comes

composed, and the hour draws nearer when Russia will be readmitted to the family of nations and her relations with the rest of the world reconstructed, we may expect Russian revolutionists, however sincerely anti-imperialistic they may be, to reassert claims to every port and territory that, in a competitive world, is essential to the economic life and the defense of the

Russian nation.

In the absence of a

Workable new international order, who can arise justly to blame them?

The fact is that Russian interest in

There is no sane man who does not

which it would be unnecessary for individual nations to covet, fight for, and jealously guard strategic frontiers and economic rights of way; but as things stand, Russia's inevitable attitude on the matter of Constantinople and the straits is a good example of what we may expect in the world politics of the future. What are the facts in the case as a patriotic Russian sees them?

First, Russia is interested in Constantinople and the Turkish straits as an economic right of way. Prior to 1914, over half of Russia's maritime export trade reached the ocean through the Black Sea. It was through the