Conemara Women.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SOME LITTLE HISTORY.
IT is very difficult to make an American understand the Irish question, for the simple reason we have nothing parallel to it in our own country; for which every American should thank his Heavenly Father, who cast his lines in such pleasant places.
Whenever you speak to an American about the woes and wrongs of Ireland he at once says, “Why does the Irish farmer sign a lease which he knows he cannot live to?” “If he don’t like the country and the laws, why don’t he get out of it?” “Why is it, the country being under one government, that the English farmer and the North of Ireland farmer are prosperous, while the South of Ireland farmer is in a state of discontent?”
The trouble with the man who asks these questions is, he doesn’t know anything about the subject. He measures everybody’s grain in his half-bushel. He supposes that under English government, as in America, there is one law which obtains everywhere, and under which all men are equal.