with the highest artistic embellishment and spiritual fulfilment. Back of the Irish immigration was an immediate past of hunger, oppression, intolerance and passionate, ineffectual revolt, and long vague memories of distant splendors that came to them, partly in legend and partly in the ruins of pillar-towers, castles, abbeys and half-obliterated carvings over graves. Out of these legends and these ruins and graves came to them the true whisperings of the race. The Celtic renaissance in Ireland itself grows because these whisperings are a little better heard. A like cultivation may follow here if the race is true to itself. It is within the memory of many like myself that to be Irish has taken on a substantial social consideration but grudgingly accorded thirty or forty years ago. So many have arrived at fortune, have done great public service, have attained social heights that it becomes a matter of social self-defense with them to see that no child of their race shall lack for the incentive and something of the opportunity to enter and carry on the battle of life under inspiring conditions. In attempting to visualise the Irish share in New York itself, the preceding considerations appear to be as necessary as the mere record of mighty numbers and massed achievement, but enough has, perhaps, been said to show that, by and large, the Irish here have survived their greatest trials, have largely developed the civic virtues and reached a plane of prosperity inferior to no race on the continent. They are one-fourth of New York’s population, and probably hold almost an equally high fraction of its personal wealth, bating, of course, that enormous increment which comes to the metropolis from its commanding position as the continental centre of investment. May the Irish chapter of New York in the next fifty years be more inspiring still. HOW THE CELEBRATION TOOK SHAPE.