Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/233

 Rh of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried at times, gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion, and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors.

The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before any love. A boreen