‘I believe I can guess,’ mumbled out the other; ‘but I’m not quite sure I ought to tell.’
‘I see,’ said Kearney, with a knowing leer; ‘he’s afraid I’ll roast him about that unlucky despatch he wrote. He thinks I’ll give him no peace about that bit of stupidity; for you see, major, it was stupid, and nothing less. Of all the things we despise in Ireland, take my word for it, there is nothing we think so little of as a weak Government. We can stand up strong and bold against hard usage, and we gain self-respect by resistance; but when you come down to conciliations and what you call healing measures, we feel as if you were going to humbug us, and there is not a devilment comes into our heads we would not do, just to see how you’ll bear it; and it’s then your London newspapers cry out: “What’s the use of doing anything for Ireland? We pulled down the Church, and we robbed the landlords, and we’re now going to back Cardinal Cullen for them, and there they are murthering away as bad as ever.”’
‘Is it not true?’ asked the major.
‘And whose fault if it is true? Who has broke down the laws in Ireland but yourselves? We Irish never said that many things you called crimes were bad in morals, and when it occurs to you now to doubt if they are crimes, I’d like to ask you, why wouldn’t we do them? You won’t give us our independence, and so we’ll fight for it; and though, maybe, we can’t lick you, we’ll make your life so uncomfortable to you, keeping us down, that you’ll beg a compromise—a healing measure, you’ll call it—just as when I won’t give Tim Sullivan a lease, he takes a shot at me; and as I reckon the holes in my hat, I think better of it, and take a pound or two off his rent.’
‘So that, in fact, you court the policy of conciliation?’
‘Only because I’m weak, major—because I’m weak, and that I must live in the neighbourhood. If I could pass my days out of the range of Tim’s carbine, I wouldn’t reduce him a shilling.’
‘I can make nothing of Ireland or Irishmen either.’
‘Why would you? God help us! we are poor enough and wretched enough; but we’re not come down to that yet that a major of dragoons can read us like big print.’
‘So far as I see you wish for a strong despotism.’
‘In one way it would suit us well. Do you see, major, what a weak administration and uncertain laws do? They set every man in Ireland about righting himself by his own hand. If I know I shall be starved when I am turned out of my holding, I’m not at all so sure I’ll be hanged if I shoot my landlord. Make me as certain of the one as the other, and I’ll not shoot him.’