tence, a suspension so long that it is mistaken for a permanent reprieve. During all these centuries of crowding and intermittent famine half the world was unknown and virtually unoccupied. Suddenly this empty world was discovered and appropriated by the more favorably situated of the old world peoples. They were slow to realize the advantage, and but a part availed themselves of it.

But to that limited part these discoveries brought an opportunity so vast that it changed for a time the fundamental laws of their being. As the barriers to occupancy were slowly broken down and the inertia of the situation overcome, all the pent up energies of the race were released and expansion proceeded unchecked. If the potato crop failed in Ireland, half Ireland moved overseas. If there was revolution in Germany, the defeated party came to America. If Russia persecuted her dissenters from the Orthodox faith, they found asylum in the new lands. Each year the movement became easier and the swelling tide increased. The new lands not only received the immigrants but sent back food to those who remained. Thus, while Europe was peopling a new world, she doubled her population at home. And still famine remained afar; the ban upon increase seemed lifted. Nature seemed even to have put a premium upon it. Coinciding, as the movement did, with a vast series of scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions, and favored of necessity for a time by the law of increasing returns, increase of population has for a century connoted an increase in well-being. Superficial thinking has been quick to throw the time-honored philosophy into the discard and grasp the proffered optimism. Nature is not niggardly but bountiful; famine is not necessary and therefore it is disgraceful, a concomi

tant of savagery and sloth. Thus a contributor to the Boston Transcript makes the confident assertion that, when our population reaches the figure of two billions, there will be more food per capita than now and we shall just be beginning to be comfortable.

This comfortable optimism leads to many agreeable conclusions. The notion that there is pressure of population in Europe is a myth. If Belgium imports four fifths of her food why can't the rest of them do it? Why can they not house as many as they have standing-room for? The sufficient safeguard against famine is enterprise, thrift, civilization. The numerous population of Europe is not a source of hardship or danger. It is an advantage

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a source of strength. This may sound a little extreme, as is wont to be the case when we formulate into definite propositions those vague assumptions to which we commit ourselves under the lead of interest and predilection. But left in their usual hazy and subconscious form they form one of the major premises of our modern psychology. Their significant corollary is that we inflict no hardship by restricting immigration. We may admit aliens if we please, as we may admit strangers to our homes; but we are equally free to exclude them and may do so without injury and without compunction.

Meanwhile the old world, in its turn, has developed a psychology equally abnormal, born of the situation. The peoples of Europe have been accustomed for centuries to find in emigration a refuge from famine, persecution, and misgovernment. If you cannot get a job or a piece of land in Europe, go and settle in America. If you are too old to go, send you son and let him send back his earnings for you to live on. If you are unreconciled to your government, go where there is a better one or one more pliable to your will. If

you are persecuted or ostracized for your religious opinions, go where religion is a matter of private choice. Precept and practice have united in enforcing this philosophy — a philosophy endorsed by none more completely than by ourselves. Under this philosophy, the very antithesis of the stolid fatalism of static societies, the world has become fluid and dynamic. This enormous privilege of expansion, abnormal and temporary though it certainly is, has been of such scope and duration as to be mistaken for a permanent condition. This privilege of migration, almost unrestricted for three hundred years, has inevitably acquired in the popular mind the character of a natural and inalienable right.

To further complicate our problem, these empty lands, while as yet they were but beginning to be filled, have passed largely under the control of a single people, themselves largely supplanters of rivals earlier in possession. The Spaniard still has a feeble mestizo hold on a large part of his original possession; but the most and best of the American continent, with nearly all of its mineral resources, as well as the whole of New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, are in Anglo-Saxon possession. This is more than half the white man's land of the world and more than two thirds of the territory available for further settlement. To much of this the French and Spanish had an equal or prior claim. They lost it chiefly because of restriction or discrimination in connection with immigration. The Spanish favored Spaniards; the French would have none but Catholics. But the Anglo-Saxon, despite local intolerance in some of his settlements, has welcomed everybody. The AngloSaxon policy has been an open-door policy. His achievements in the way of assimilation have been simply colossal. From every part of Europe have come

throngs with their babel of tongues, their diversities of practice and belief, all to become in due season fairly standardized Americans, speaking a more or less intelligible American dialect and measurably devoted to the country and the flag.

And here again this open-door policy has become to the popular mind a part of the constitution of nature, a natural right. What else does it mean when European and Japanese denounce our exclusion policy as unjust? They are as confident of their right to enter as we are of our right to keep them out, and all for the very good reason that they have so long enjoyed the privilege. Let the public make a thoroughfare through your premises for a sufficient number of years and you cannot close it. You have created a public highway. Europe has enjoyed this privilege since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, and privilege has hardened into right.

I am not defending this view. I am merely noting its existence. We have a head-on collision between two instinctive assertions of natural right. We are colliding, too, at a moment when the opposing forces are at their maximum of energy. The static mood has well nigh disappeared. The world is on the move. Never was the desire to migrate so general or the need so urgent as now. It is at such a time that we decide to close our gates, against Asiatics wholly, and against Europeans in major part. Thousands are waiting at the border, ready for the midnight rush when the ban is briefly lifted, and steamers are counting seconds in their race across the line. Foreign governments are clamoring for consideration for their nationals and threatening reprisals. But we sit complacently deaf.

There are reasons and good ones for what we are doing. The best reason of all is the desire that the Anglo-Saxon in

his true character, undiluted and unperverted, shall inherit these lands and give his incomparable guidance to our developing world. It is an ideal to be boldly avowed. The best chance to make this an orderly world, a prosperous and peaceable world, is to make it an Anglo-Saxon world. Let those of other view act according to their conviction, but let us act according to our own. Every foot of soil that we control we hold in trust for that world of the future whose very flesh and blood is to be determined by our holding. It is a great trust and the end in view is worth any hazard.

But let us not be blind to the hazard. It is a fighting proposition that confronts us. The world will not tamely relinquish the prize that we withhold. The Anglo-Saxon still has room, enormous room, which others need and covet. Australia has a population of one and a half to the square mile, Canada two and a half, the United States 32, Europe (as a whole) 110, Italy 326, Japan 376, and England 649. Will these peoples acquiesce unresistingly in so unequal a division of the good things of the earth? Yes, if they must; not otherwise. There will be lip service to our doctrine that immigration is a purely domestic question, but it will be in recognition of our power, not of our right. The country is ours, we say. Well, we got here first. If we can hold it against later comers it will be ours; but our right will be the right of the strong. Against any ethical claim that we may assert, they can oppose another quite as good and one to them far more apparent.

I do not wish to imply that other nations will declare war upon us on this issue. Europe will not force open our

gates as she did the gates of China, or as we did the gates of Japan. The conditions at present are unfavorable to such a course and grant us a deceptive immunity. immunity. Moreover the excluded peoples have other weapons in their armory, of which they have more than once made effective use. But the issue is a fighting issue and it engenders the fighting mood, a mood which may conceivably make the peaceable settlement of other issues impossible. The reaction of Japan to our decision is significant. An exceptionally friendly attitude has been suddenly followed by an attitude of bitter hostility. Whatever the possibilities of the new policy, it does not make for peace or fellowship. Our reputation as a refuge for the oppressed and a home of the free, though somewhat a matter of jest, was still an asset and an asset which we have now sacrificed. We enter upon a more difficult period of international relations, a period of increased contacts and lessened sympathies.

To summarize briefly. Restriction of immigration with total exclusion of Asiatics has become necessary if American development is to continue along our chosen lines. But exclusion is not a purely domestic problem nor does it rest upon an obvious natural right. Interests and instincts are sharply opposed and we shall not make away with the prize unchallenged. It is the most difficult thing we have ever tried to do, a thing fraught with great danger. We have no sufficient consciousness of these difficulties and these dangers. We are prodigal of the world's good-will and reckless of its hostility. We must be wise as well as strong if we are to escape 'grave consequences.'

THE LIMERICK

THE limerick's is indeed a happy fate or at least it has been so up to the present. Serious-minded critics have been so afraid of lowering their dignity that they have never thoroughly discussed it. But alas, poor limerick!

it shall no longer be allowed to rest in peace. Its pedigree, growing steadily larger every moment, cries out to be chronicled, and, pitiless of the limerick's personal feelings, I shall emblazon its history—not so dark by half as many believe upon these pages.

Limerick is the name of a city, of a county, and of a diocese in Ireland. You will probably object to being told such a universally known fact, but there is ample reason for mentioning it here, as it has given rise to much dispute among those rare scholars who have dedicated a few moments to the verse form of the same name. J. H. Murray states that there has long been a song in Ireland, whose elaborate refrain is built on the question, 'Will you come up to Limerick?' And he further says that the stanza form of this song is identical with that of Lear's limerick.

Well and good. But the Encyclopædia Britannica upsets that apple-cart by impertinently contradicting Mr. Murray, saying that his Irish song does not resemble Lear's limerick in the least.

You may say, 'Why don't you read the song yourself, and settle the matter?' but that question, unfortunately, is as easily answered as asked. The song must forever be consigned to the limbo of the unpublished, for Mr. Murray says it is endless, and of extremely

in the Mother Goose limericks the usual triple-beat metre of "There was an old man of Tobago,' but also many variations, of which there is room to give only the most unusual:

Pitty Patty Polt,

Shoe the wild colt!

Here a nail,
There a nail,

Pitty Patty Polt.

The Mother Goose rhymes, however, cannot be assigned any definite date. And heretofore the serious-minded critics mentioned above have, by their indifference to the limerick, overlooked the first one ever published. It has been printed twice before: once in Michael East's Second Set of Madrigals to 3 4 and 5 parts: apt for Viols and Voices, 1606; and again in Fellowes's English Madrigal Verse, Oxford, 1920; but never previous to now has it been recognized as the first dated limerick. O metaphysical tobacco,

Fetched as far as from Morocco,
Thy searching fume
Exhales the rheum,

O metaphysical tobacco!

The honor of writing the first signed poem in limerick form must be added to the already overladen Robert Herrick. Of this poem, the 'Night-piece: To Julia,' the last stanza is peculiarly beautiful.

Then, Julia, let me woo thee,
Thus, thus to come unto me;
And when I shall meet

Thy silv'ry feet,

My soul I'll pour into thee.

The record of the limerick lies buried in shade as deep as that of Hades for two hundred and more years after Herrick wrote his 'Night-piece: To Julia.' Who can tell to what great heights it rose, or to what vast depths it fell, during that gaping void of years? History keeps quieter than the tomb. At all events, the limerick reappears about 1810 with the Irish Melodies of

Thomas Moore. In the well-known songs, 'The Young May Moon,' 'The Time I've Lost in Wooing,' and 'I Can No Longer Stifle,' each stanza is formed of two limericks.

We find the limerick next in the verse of Leigh Hunt, who uses the form in a 'Song to Ceres,' given in Emerson's Parnassus, though not to be found elsewhere under covers, even in the bibliography of Hunt's work given in the Oxford edition. This perhaps accounts for its not having been mentioned in other essays on the limerick. Hunt also wrote in 1830 a series of humorous limericks on the poet Galt, but they are not nearly so worthy of quotation as the 'Song to Ceres,' one of whose stanzas is as excellent poetry as any of Hunt's I know.

Laugh out in the loose green jerkin
That's fit for a goddess to work in,
With shoulders brown,

And the wheaten crown
About thy temples perking.

And with thee come Stout Heart in, And Toil that sleeps his cart in,

Brown Exercise,

The ruddy and wise,

His bathed forelocks parting.

The next limerick really begins the history of the form as we generally know it. That is the well-known "There was a young man of St. Kitts,' which had a wide circulation in the English university circles about 1834.

Beyond this point, there is a steady, consecutive growth, from Lear to the present day. Who, again I ask, can tell to what vast depths the limerick may fall, or to what great heights it may rise, not far in the future? But no! as I live in a practical age, I must be practical in this history, by limiting it to the past.

Returning to Lear: as everyone knows, he was the limerick's earliest champion. His first Book of Nonsense, issued in 1846, marks the transition in