III

THE LEAVEN OF DEMOCRACY

VERYBODY recalls "Il Bacio,"

EVE

a famous waltz song composed by Arditi in the middle of the last century. He tells us that this wistful melody came to him during a vacation among the hills and valleys of western Ireland.

He jotted it down on an envelope and later finished it at the request of a great soprano whose engagement he was managing in England and who wished a new song. The song was an Arditi did not grow

instant success.

rich out of it, but it made him famous. The music publishers reaped the harvest. Flaxman, who bought the French rights, made one hundred thousand dollars out of the winsome song, and he pointed to a fine building in Paris as a monument to his profits.

How many other melodies have sounded and sobbed through the Eolian harp of the Irish hills and valleys, to be caught up and made world-possessions, but without credit! How many fine fancies, how many germinal ideas, how many moving thoughts have come to mankind in like manner from the life and lore of the same people!

Henry George got the germ of his "Progress and Poverty" from the writings of the Irish recluse, J. Fintan Lalor. Karl Marx came to London in

the mid-60's to write his bible of Socialism from texts found in the works of the Irishman, William Thomson,so says Dr. Anton Menger, professor of jurisprudence in the University of Vienna. Neal Dow, the father of prohibition, is quoted as saying that he got his inspiration from Father Mathew.

And so we may conjecture with more or less plausibility "adown the ages": Copernicus may have studied that old ecclesiastical controversy of the eighth century, wherein the Irish bishop, Virgilius, argued the sphericity of the earth; Columbus may have been inspired by the "Voyages of St. Brendan," of which there were many translations in his time; and Dante, as a widely read man, may have been familiar with the legend of St. Patrick's

Purgatory, which might well have suggested the "Inferno."

A brilliant Irish-American, Ignatius Donnelly, has complained that the greater part of history is simply "recorded legends," while the rest represents merely "the passions of factions, the hates of sects, or the servility and venality of historians." In our age we are rewriting history in a more instructive vein.

Some very practical economic topics are illustrated by the experience of Ireland. The question of protection and free trade has two epochs of Irish history related to it-that of 1782, when the Volunteers inscribed on their cannon, "Free Trade or-!" and that of 1846, when the Irish famine compelled