"Harvest" is a grim picture of civilization in its especially demoralizing effects upon the people who spring from the soil. The mock culture and shallow education which inspire peasant folk with awe, which lure the children away from home, only to crush the vitality out of them or to turn them into cowards and compromisers. The tragedy of a civilization that dooms the tillers of the soil to a dreary monotony of hard toil with little return, or charms them to destruction with the false glow of city culture and ease! Greater still this tragedy in a country like Ireland, its people taxed to the very marrow and exploited to the verge of starvation, leaving the young generation no opening, no opportunity in life. It is inevitable that the sons and daughters of Ireland, robust in body and spirit, yearning for things better and bigger, should desert her. For as _Mary_ says, "When the sun sets here, it's all so dark and cold and dreary." But the young need light and warmth--and these are not in the valley of ever-present misery and want. "Harvest" is an expressive picture of the social background of the Irish people, a background somber and unpromising but for the streak of dawn that pierces that country's dark horizon in the form of the inherent and irrepressible fighting spirit of the true Irishman, the spirit of the Fenian revolt whose fires often slumber but are never put out, all the ravages of our false civilization notwithstanding. T. G. MURRAY MAURICE HARTE "Maurice Harte" portrays the most sinister force which holds the Irish people in awe--that heaviest of all bondage, priestcraft. _Michael Harte_, his wife _Ellen_, and their son _Owen_ are bent on one purpose; to make a priest of their youngest child _Maurice_. The mother especially has no other ambition in life than to see her son "priested." No higher ideal to most Catholic mothers than to consecrate their favorite son to the glory of God. What it has cost the Hartes to attain their ambition and hope is revealed by _Ellen Harte_ in the conversation with her sister and later with her husband, when he informs her that he cannot borrow any more money to continue the boy in the seminary. _Mrs. Harte._ If Michael and myself have our son nearly a priest this day, 'tis no small price at all we have paid for it.... Isn't it the terrible thing, every time you look through that window, to have the fear in your heart that 'tis the process-server you'll see and he coming up the boreen? _Old Harte_ impoverishes himself to enable his son to finish his studies. He has borrowed right and left, till his resources are now entirety exhausted. But he is compelled to try another loan.