Jeffers also tends to apostrophize his countrymen as they blunder toward a comfortable destruction. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, Jeffers insists in "Shine, Republic" that prosperity is the enemy of freedom. He begins by invoking the timeless qualities of tree, sky, water, and rock, which he associates with Western civilization's "love of freedom." Like Yeats's Romantic Ireland, Jeffers's ideal America needs marrow, not money: "Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel." Jeffers does not believe that America can supply such blood for the torch of freedom indefinitely. Wealth and power will corrupt America, as they have corrupted every other society, but at least we can "keep the tradition [and] conserve the forms" for a time. Always a master at providing cold comfort, Jeffers ends the poem by suggesting that our decline may provide a useful negative example for the future: "The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt for luxury."