“You don’t mean to say that these people actually live on that fare? that they have nothing else? They at least have meat with their potatoes?”
“God bless you, sir,” and the honest man’s eyes filled with tears, “they never know the taste of meat. There has not been a bit of meat in my house since last Christmas, when we were fortunate enough to get a bit of pig’s head. But up here they don’t even have that.”
A TERRIBLE SEVEN HOURS.
Surely this must have been an exceptional case. It was impossible that even in that country there could be more than one or two instances of such utter and abject woe and misery.
But Mr. Duggan told us to the contrary. He said that the house we had just left was only a fair sample of what was to be seen all over the Galtee Mountains. To be convinced, we trudged painfully through the rain for seven long hours.
We toiled through fields that in America would not be accepted as a gift. Here, if the exorbitant rent charged for them could not be paid, the holders were evicted. We went through roads so wretchedly bad that teams could not travel over them. Yet taxes had to be paid by those who had holdings on either side. We saw fields that had been reclaimed from the original state, had been made productive, and had been the cause of the eviction of the holder because he could not pay the rent which the improvements brought upon him. He had been thrown off the land and it was rapidly going to waste again. Large patches of heather, which is worse than the American farmer’s bane, the Canada thistle, were growing over it, choking all other forms of vegetation. It would only take another season to make the land so worthless that three years of hard work would be required to put it back to the condition it was in when the holder had been compelled to leave it, after having devoted the best years of his life to reclaiming and making it productive.
After seven hours of such sights as these, which cannot be described, we were wet, weary and mad. We had seen enough for one day, and were ready to go back. All during the long drive to Mitchellstown not a word was said. The subject was too terrible to discuss.
CHAPTER XXVI.
BANTRY.
THE village of Bantry, in County Cork, some forty miles from Cork, is owned and controlled by My Lord Bantry, who is, or, at least, ought to be, one of the richest men in Ireland. Whether he is or not depends entirely upon how expensively he lives in Paris, and how much extravagance he commits there and in London. He certainly screws enough money out of the unfortunates born upon the land stolen from them by English Kings and given to him, to make him a richer man than Rothschild, if he has taken care of it. But I don’t suppose he has. Probably the magnificent estate, robbed from the people, is mortgaged to its full value, and he supports himself by keeping his so-called tenants down to a point, in food, shelter, and clothes, that a Camanche Indian would turn up his nose at. Indeed, were the most degraded Piute compelled to accept life on the terms that My Lord Bantry imposes upon the men he robs, he would paint his face, sing his death song, go out and kill somebody, and die with great pleasure.