"Ireland is the Mother'

President William Thomas Cosgrave of the Irish Free State sped hurriedly last week on his brief U. S. tour (TIME Jan. 16 and 23). Cheered and harkened to by Irish folk in Manhattan and Chicago, he was afterwards received at Washington by President Coolidge. Throughout the week he popped sayings, some humorous, some sage. "The liquor situation in Ireland is fine. We produce the best whiskey in the world. None other can compare with it. . . ."

Asked whether the Irish Free State would ever become a Republic,* he parried : "That is a question to be put to the people of Ireland rather than to me. They now have political freedom; it is up to them to decide what their government shall be."

Irish Chicagoans were titillated thus: "No city in the history of the world has been so libeled. The citizens seem to me to be more Irish than we are in Ireland and at the same time first class, tiptop American citizens. . . . Ireland is the mother, America the wife."

Such blarney seemed innocuous but Commonwealth Official Cosgrave showed poor taste when he went on to praise one who notoriously slings verbal garbage at the commonwealth. Said Mr. Cosgrave: "I also want to say a word about that great and grossly libeled man, the Mayor of Chicago. If I were not a man of the world and experienced in politics I would have expected to meet a tough and a roughneck. Instead I was received and honored by a great big, kindly, genial, American, so bubbling over with plans for the betterment of his city that he talked about hardly anything but the plan to connect Chicago with the sea and make her America's greatest city."

*The Irish Free State has "dominion status" within the British Commonwealth.