Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/272

266 false glow of city culture and ease! Greater still this tragedy in a country like Ireland, its people taxed to the very marrow and exploited to the verge of starvation, leaving the young generation no opening, no opportunity in life.

It is inevitable that the sons and daughters of Ireland, robust in body and spirit, yearning for things better and bigger, should desert her. For as Mary says, "When the sun sets here, it's all so dark and cold and dreary." But the young need light and warmth—and these are not in the valley of ever-present misery and want.

"Harvest" is an expressive picture of the social background of the Irish people, a background somber and unpromising but for the streak of dawn that pierces that country's dark horizon in the form of the inherent and irrepressible fighting spirit of the true Irishman, the spirit of the Fenian revolt whose fires often slumber but are never put out, all the ravages of our false civilization notwithstanding.