This little incident will explain how the opportunity of shirking responsibility is seized upon by many. To begin with, the advantage is with the assailant, for the custom of any one farmer or agent is a small matter compared with that of the country side. It is therefore manifestly to the interest of the little shopkeeper to curry favour with the populace rather than with those set in authority over them. Again, the petty trader would fain, after the example laid down by Panurge, pray to God for the success of the peasant in order that he might "de terre d'aultruy remplir son fossé"—that the till might be filled if the agent's book remained empty. As I have previously explained, everybody owes to somebody, or is owed by somebody, in this island of weeping skies and smiling faces. The peasant owes his landlord, who owes the mortgagee or the agent. And the peasant has another creditor—the little trader who works on the credit extended to him from Dublin or Belfast. Beyond a certain limit the little shopkeeper cannot go. So he likes to be threatened, to be made "taboo," to be a martyr, and then presses the tenants who have paid no rent to the landlord to pay him "as they can afford to, begorra, if they hould the harvest." This advice of Mr. Parnell's is keenly relished by many, and has gained him, from a poet, whose Hibernian extraction speaks in his every line, the incomprehensible title of "Young Lion of the Fold."
Young Lion of the Fold,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Young Lion of the Fold,
Says the Shan Van Vocht;
Young Lion of the Fold,
Bade us the harvest hold—
We'll do as he has told,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
Says the Shan Van Vocht;
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
To upstart shoneen gents,
Whose hearts are hard as flints,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
Then glory to Parnell,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Then glory to Parnell,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Oh, all glory to Parnell,
Whom the people love so well,
And his foes may go to ——,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
There is an American humourist who once said that "if the lion ever did lie down with the lamb it would be with the lamb inside of him." Mayhap this is what the indigenous "pôte" dimly shadows forth from the mistland of verse. Or has he mixed up the lion with the eagle in a dovecot?