“Never; at least, never one that satisfied me.”
“Nor ever will you,” said Billy, sententiously.
“And why so?”
“Because,” said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a discourse,—“because there's no man capable of going into the whole subject; for it's not merely an economical question or a social one, but it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and historical,—ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that they were infarior to them they ruled over!”
“By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of.”
“I'd like to get a goold medal for arguin' it out with you,” said Billy.
“And, after all, I don't see how it would resolve the original doubt,” said Harcourt. “I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don't want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk.”
“There it is, you'd like to narrow down a great question of race, language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye're in the heart of every Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n't; but quite the reverse,—a very confident sense of being far better than the poor Irish; and I'll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word to reply, you 'll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed you, you'll remember that I'm in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes to ate and water to drink, and you 'll say, at all events, 'I 'm better off than he is;' and there's your superiority, neither more or less,—there it is! And all the while, I'm saying the same thing to myself,—'Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen, and his very best roast beef that he's atin',—I 'm his master! In all that dignifies the spacies in them grand qualities that makes us poets, rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the poet says,—
“In all our pursuits
Lifts us high above brutes,'”
—in these, I say again, I 'm his master!'”