his "Patriots" (1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since the Land Purchase Act went into force.
The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed—the story of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because of the danger to Rose's health that cam-
