been little or no emigration, for never was there race that left the
land of its fathers with such bitter and entire reluctance as the
Irish. The English peasant shares the same reluctance, though his
slower nature is incapable of expressing it with the same volubility of
anguish. Give him enough land to live upon; make him a proprietor
instead of a serf; let him have fair railway rates, so that his produce
can fetch its proper price in the markets, and there were no man so
proud and so content as he. But this is just what the feudal laws of
England will not do for him; and so millions of acres fall out of
cultivation and farms go a-begging because the men who could have kept
them prosperous have been forced to sell their thews and muscles to be
prostituted in the dismal drudgeries of cities.

There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by
Money-hunger. Simple ideas of life must needs perish where the nature
of a nation's life makes them difficult or impossible of attainment. A
country-born youth might keep to the soil, if he saw the slightest hope
that the soil would keep him; when he sees that this is impossible he
files to cities, because he believes that there is more gold to be
picked up in the city mire in a month than can be won from the ploughed
fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown
that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when
the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once
Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome
Earth-hunger--old as the primal Eden, where man's life began--is
stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords
being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for
the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the
wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture
of Nature is cast aside for the blotted pages of the betting-book;