Volume Ii Part 15 (1/2)

'Of course, Father O'Bourke, I am not going to contradict you,' replied Wentworth. 'I am not a Liverpool s.h.i.+powner, and know little about them; but I was not long ago in Galway, in the very harbour to which you refer, and while I was there a man said to me that Allan's steamers used to call in there for emigrants, and I asked why they did not then. ”Oh,” said he, ”the fact was, that while they charged in Londonderry a penny a ton, and in Queenstown a halfpenny, in Galway the charges were sixpence a ton, and so the steamers were driven away.” Thus, you see, it was not the Liverpool s.h.i.+powners, but the Galway people themselves, that drove the trade away. What do you say to that?'

'Well,' said the priest, rather confusedly, 'the fact is, there are wheels within wheels; we do not want the people to emigrate.'

'No, you fear you will lose your power over them if they do; but, for the sake of abusing England, you tell me that England ruined the Galway Steam Packet Company. I am inclined to believe it did nothing of the kind.'

'But the landlords, what do you think of them?'

'So far as I have seen them, they are a mixed lot, like all the rest of us-some good, some bad. I blame people who bid against each other in their madness to get a bit of land on which it is impossible for anyone to live. I blame the priests and the patriots and the landlords who for ages have winked at this, and allowed the people to sink into a state of degradation such as you see nowhere else. For miles and miles, as you know, Father O'Bourke, in many parts of Galway, you see fields covered with stones, and these fields are let off as farms. If the landlord resides on the estate the stones are cleared off, the soil is drained, and the tenant manages to make a living-not such as he could get in America, or Canada, or Australia, if he had pluck enough to leave the old country and emigrate, but a living of some kind. If he is under a bad landlord-a poor Irish squire, for instance-of course it is different. If the landlord does not reside upon the estate-unless he be a great English landlord, like the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re-the tenant and the land have alike a bad time of it. But as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so the heavens are unpropitious to the small farmer. If he rises early and sits up late, and eats the bread of carefulness, all is in vain. In Liverpool there are five or six miles of docks filled with American corn and cheese and bacon. How can the small farmer, either in England, or Ireland, or Scotland, compete with that? ”It is my belief,”

said a Liverpool gentleman to me-who in the famine year went on a mission of mercy, and as a messenger of relief exposed himself to all the horrors of a Connemara winter-”that the small farmer could not get a living even if, instead of paying rent, rent were given him on condition of his taking the farm.”

'I fear, Mr. Wentworth,' said the priest, 'you have looked at Ireland with prejudiced eyes.'

'Not a bit of it. No one has been more friendly to the Irish than the Liberal Party, of which I am a member, and yet we are called infamous, and bloodthirsty, and base, and brutal. You know yourself here in England you live in perfect peace and security; you are allowed to go in and out amongst the people to make converts if you are so disposed. In Ireland, if I attempted to do anything of the kind, I should stand a good chance of a broken head.'

'Well, sir, we are a warm-hearted, impulsive people, attached very strongly to the old religion-the religion of our forefathers.'

'There is no doubt of that, sir,' continued Wentworth; 'wherever you go in Ireland, in the midst of all its dirt, and starvation, and wretchedness, and poverty, you see one man well dressed and well fed.'

'And who may he be, sir?'

'The parish priest.'

'And why should he not be? Is not he the guide and shepherd of his flock? I suppose you will blame him next,' said Father O'Bourke, reddening.

'Yes, I do.'

'What for?'

'For his desertion of the people.'

'Really, Mr. Wentworth, you are amusing. You make me laugh,' said the reverend father, looking uncommonly angry. 'Should the priest not take the part of the people?'

'Certainly. But he does nothing of the kind. Is he not the partisan of the popular agitator? Does he not place himself by the side of men whose language is utterly false? Who stimulates the pa.s.sions of the people to fever heat? who teach the poor Irish-ignorant as they are, a.s.sa.s.sins as I fear a few of them are, cowards as they are when human life is to be saved-that they have every virtue under heaven?'

'Indeed, Mr. Wentworth,' said the priest indignantly, 'I know nothing of the kind. Ireland has been trampled under foot by the murdering English, and now we are within measurable distance of Home Rule.'

'And what will be the good of that?'

'That the Irish will have their rights at last; that we shall be free of English tyranny and English injustice.'

'Yes, you will change King Stork for King Log. Irishmen are bound to quarrel. I was at Queenstown last summer, and taking up the Cork paper, I read an account of the meeting of the Harbour Commissioners. In the course of the meeting, one member denounced another as a humbug and miscreant of the vilest character, and said, old as he was, he was prepared to fight him with the weapons G.o.d had given him, and thereupon asked him to step into the next room and have it out. When I mentioned the matter to a priest, he said sarcastically, ”Of course there are no rows in the British House of Commons.” I replied that the questions discussed there were more likely to lead to heated debate than the trifling matters a set of Harbour Commissioners would have to deal with.

Furthermore, I added that when we did have a row, it was often begun by Irishmen, and generally connected with Irish affairs.'

'Ireland must be governed by Irish ideas; that is all we want.'

'Let us look at Scotland. England and Scotland were joined together, and the union was as much hated by the Scotch as the Irish union is hated by your people now. Look at England and Scotland now. Are they not one people-equally great, equally flouris.h.i.+ng, equally happy under what was, at one time, a detested union? Why should not England and Ireland get on just as well? Had we given way to Scotch ideas, we should now be at loggerheads.'

'Unfortunately, you see, in Ireland,' said the priest, 'public opinion is the other way.'

'Public opinion! What public opinion have you, where boycotting and the bullet of the midnight a.s.sa.s.sin, who, coward-like, waits for his unsuspecting victim in a ditch or behind a stone wall, have created a reign of terror under which all freedom of thought and action is suppressed? Public opinion does not exist in Ireland. The Irish are down-trodden indeed. No Russian serfs are worse off.'