"All the year round?"
"There's no work in winter, so how can one be payin' wages then?"
"But how can they live on that?"
"They can't live on it," she said fiercely; "many of them ones couldn't live at all, if it wasn't for the money that's sent them from America. But what can the farmers do? If they pay higher wages, they ruin themselves. Most of them have give up in disgust and turned their land into grass."
"What do the labourers do then?" I asked.
"They move away some'rs else—to America if they can."
"Perhaps Home Rule will make things better," I suggested.
"How, I'd like to know? By raisin' taxes? That same is the first thing will happen! No, no; the solid men hereabouts don't want Home Rule—they're afraid of it; but they know well enough they must keep their tongues in their mouths, except with each other. The world's goin' crazy—that's what I think."
Now I look back on it, that conversation seems to me to sum up pretty well the situation in rural Ireland—the small farmer, handicapped by poverty and primitive methods, ground down in the markets of the world, and in turn grinding down the labourers beneath him, or turning his farm into grass, so that there is no work at all except for a few shepherds. And I believe it is true that, as a whole, only the upper class and the lower class of Irishmen really want Home Rule—the upper class from motives of patriotism, the lower class from hope of betterment; while the middle class is either lukewarm or opposed to it at heart. The middle class is, of course, always and everywhere, the conservative class, the class which fears change most and is the last to consent to it; in Ireland, it is composed largely of small farmers, who have dragged themselves a step above the peasantry and who are just finding their feet under the land purchase act, and I think their liveliest fear is that a Home Rule Parliament will somehow compel them to pay living wages to their labourers. I can only say that I hope it will!
Outside, meanwhile, rural Ireland was unfolding itself under our eyes, varied, beautiful—and sad. The first part of it we had already traversed on our excursion to Clondalkin; beyond that village, the road emerged from the hills encircling Dublin, and soon we could see their beautiful rounded masses far to the left, forming a charming background to meadows whose greenness no words can describe. Every foot of the ground is historic; for first the train passes Celbridge where Swift's "Vanessa" dwelt, and just beyond is Lyons Hill, where Daniel O'Connell shot and killed a Dublin merchant named D'Esterre in a duel a hundred years ago—an affair, it should be added, in which D'Esterre was the aggressor; and presently the line crosses a broad and beautiful undulating down, the Curragh of Kildare, where St. Brigid pastured her flocks, and it was made in this wise: