your enjoyment. And the modest bulk of his book shows that he has trusted to the force and cogency and not the exhausting length of his argument. Read it and discover it all.

The author's theme will awaken many grave minds to some wrestling with the olden question of the human aspect of God's providence. How many have avoided seeking a conclusion thereon, and have left it among the unsolvable mysteries! Even those who, in the raptures of piety, adore the Creator as the divine, all embracing principle of love and question not His duress to His creatures, seek no solution this side of the grave of the hard fate meted out so often to His deserving children. Our author does not refer the question to the next world so far as the Irish are con

cerned, and he has perspicacity enough to see that by a parallel road the Jews, so long-suffering through the ages, are marching along with the Celts of Ireland to new and greater victories than marked their story of old. The process modernises the equation.

A learned Japanese chemist has been lately proclaiming that the subtle flavors of all our staple foods are simply slight variants of a single definite substance whose presence is to be accounted for as Dame Nature's sly recommendation to the human palate of all things truly edible. No doubt at all the ingredients of the Irish soul include a similar essence, and its richness is to my mind one of the proofs of what our author so powerfully and merrily contends forthe love of God for the Irish.

One of the great defenses of the Irish even in Ireland's darkest century was their sense of humor. And what an asset is an indestructible cheerfulness! He who laughs at fate will outlive it. He surely has something beside, some superior fibre of being that will tell in time. But God's love of the Irish, despite their material plight and their long cheerless outlook to other eyes, was shown when He imbedded in their nature courage, devotion to ideals, and a love of learning that never was crushed out and failed not even when access to the founts of knowledge was denied. them for a couple of hundred years. Here, then, was a stored soul energy, a latent brilliancy of intellect, both awaiting a providential lifting of the weight of oppression. It came, as it had to

come.

The Irish who left Ireland soon proved that the Celt had conquering elements and winning qualities to make rosy his way. What figure of power and intellect Irishmen have made in the world, and particularly in our great Republic of America, must answer, in the light of fame, for such rude conquest as the peoples, luckier materially, have made in masses with the sword. The American Irish have a record to be proud of. How aptly our author quotes Chesterton: "Rome has conquered nations, but Ireland has conquered races."

One joins heartily in the author's glorying in the risen fortunes of the Gael and his pervasive and cheery presence in posts of honor and emolument all round the globe-posts won by brain

power and sustained by physical power that is and has been his trade-markthe invariable accompaniment of the stalwart reproductiveness of his race. Nothing that I know of has touched this off more happily than the lines in T. C. Irwin's wonderful "Potato-Digger's Song":

As the great sun sets in glory furled,

Faith, it's grand to think as I watch his face, If he never sets on the English world, He never, lad, sets on the Irish race.