Enter an Irishman

Having heard there was a fight raging in the U. S., a bearded, 6-ft, broad-shouldered, patriarchal Irishman last week crossed the Atlantic to get into it. He needed not ask if it was a free fight. That was obvious. It was the international fight over the Farm Problem (see p. 17, 20). The big Irishman wanted to move the ground of the fight from the statistical, fiscal, political arenas where it was being fought. For he was a poetical Irishman, with strong ideas on the sociological and spiritual aspects of the Farm Problem. He was famed, distinguished George William ("AE/-) Russell and in Manhattan famed, distinguished Nicholas Murray Butler, Alfred Emanuel Smith, Arthur

Brisbane, many another Personage, made him welcome.

AE used to bicycle through the Irish countryside as a representative of the Irish Agricultural Cooperative Society, establishing banks, forming creamery and poultry groups. His now defunct magazine, the Irish Statesman (TIME, May 12), preached rural teamplay. He says his efforts at home, successful, are at an end. In the U. S. he plans to preach from lecture-platforms during a six-months tour.

Last week he delivered, partly by radio, partly by sound-cinema, bits of his message:

"I was alarmed to learn recently that in your country since 1920, 4,000,000 per sons have left the land, 19,000,000 acres have gone out of cultivation, 89,000 farms have ceased production. ... In a generation you will have 90% of your population in urban centres and only 10% on the land. That is a danger to life. After the fourth generation the energy of the country man is worn out in the city .... [and the unemployed] gather in dark slums and in one room ... so that life will fester into rottenness. . . . How is the city going to perpetuate itself . . .? Keep a larger population on the land. Rural industries must be interspersed with agriculture. There must be created what I call a rural society with an enlarged civic spirit like that in the Greek city states. ... I should like to supplicate aid from the poets and literary men, those who are or should be concerned for the spiritual side of your civilization."

/-He signed his first literary composition '-'Aeon." The printer could not read his handwriting, set up only the initial diphthong. The error pleased the author, who signed his subsequent work thus.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.