“Your letter filled me with a desire to talk to you for about 24 hours, concerning Ireland. Why snakes?... what demoralisation is going to come to your nice country-side because they send —— or another, to sit in Dublin and vote on Irish affairs, which he understands less or more, instead of hanging round at St. Stephens?
“We have too much abstract politics in Ireland, we want them real and concrete. Take Old Age Pensions, for instance. I don’t for an instant believe that the pension will ever be cut down, but I do think that an Irish Assembly ought to decide whether farmers should qualify for it by giving their farms to their sons. I do think that we ought to be able to pass a law enabling us to put a ferry across Corrib with local money; it is now impossible because of one Englishman’s opposition. I think we ought to be able to tackle the whole transit question, including the liberation of canals from railway control, and including also the Train Ferry and All Red Route possibilities. In 1871 Lord Hartington said it was a strong argument for Home Rule that a Royal Commission had reported in 1867 for the State control of Irish railways, forty years ago, and nothing has been done but to appoint another Commission. Poor Law, the whole Education system—all these things want an assembly of competent men, with leisure and local knowledge. You think we can’t get them? That is the trouble with people like you. You know the peasantry very well; you don’t know the middle class.... There are plenty of men in Ireland—men of the Nationalist party—brilliant young men, like Kettle,[15] who has also courage and enterprise. He once gave us all a lead in a very ugly corner with a crowd.
“Devlin is to my thinking as good a man as Lloyd George, and that is a big word. Redmond and Dillon seem to me more like statesmen than anyone on either front bench. Of course, in many cases here you feel the want of an educated tradition behind. No one can count the harm that was done by keeping Catholics out of Trinity Coll., Dublin. But beside the Nationalists there will be no disinclination to employ other educated men, witness Kavanagh. Some of our fiercer people wanted to stop his election, right or wrong, but we reasoned them over, and once he got into the party no man was better listened to, even when, as sometimes happened, he differed with the majority.... He would be in an Irish Parliament, in one house or the other, and a better public man could not be found.... To my mind the present System breeds what you have called ‘snakes.’ In Clare, among the finest people I ever met in Ireland, you have the beastly and abominable shooting, and no man will bring another to justice. They are out of their bearings to the law, and will be, till they are made to feel it is their own law. And the scandal of bribery in ‘Local Elections’ will never be put down till you have a central assembly where things will be thrashed out without any fear of seeming to back ‘Dublin Castle’ against a ‘good Nationalist.’
“For Gentlefolk (to use the old word) who want to live in the country, Ireland is going to be a better place to live in than it has been these thirty years—yes, or than before, for it is bad for people to be a caste. They will get their place in public business, easily and welcome, those who care to take it, but on terms of equality, with the rest. Don’t tell me that Ireland isn’t a pleasanter place for men like Kavanagh or Walter Nugent, than for the ordinary landlord person who talks about ‘we’ and ‘they.’
“Caste is at the bottom of nine-tenths of our trouble. A Catholic bishop said to me, drink did a lot of harm in Ireland, but not half as much as gentility. Everybody wanting to be a clerk. Catholic clerks anxious to be in Protestant tennis clubs, Protestant tennis clubs anxious to keep out Catholic clerks, and so on, and so on. My friend, a guest for anybody’s house in London, in half of Dublin socially impossible.
“I am prophesying, no doubt, but I know, and you, with all your knowledge and your insight don’t know—what is best worth knowing in Ireland, better even than the lovely ways of the peasant folk. I’ve seen and rubbed shoulders with men in the making.
“You don’t, for instance, know D. E., who used to drive a van in —— and was a Fenian in arms, and the starved orphan of a —— labourer first of all,—and is now the very close personal friend of a high official personage. Now, if ever I met Don Quixote I met him in the shoes of D. E.; if you like a little want of training to digest the education that he acquired, largely in gaol, but with a real love of fine thoughts. If Sterne could have heard D. E. and another old warrior, E. P. O’Kelly—and a very charming, shrewd old person—quoting ‘Tristram Shandy’ which they got by heart in Kilmainham, Sterne would have got more than perhaps he deserved in the way of satisfaction.
“This inordinate epistle is my very embarrassing tribute. You know so much. You and yours stand for so much that is the very choice essence of Ireland, that it fills me with distress to see you all standing off there in your own paddock, distrustful and not even curious about the life you don’t necessarily touch.
“You and I will both live, probably, to see a new order growing up. I daresay it may not attract you, and may disappoint me, only, for heaven’s sake, don’t think it is going to be all ‘snakes.’
“And do forgive me for having inflicted all this on you. After all, you needn’t read it—and very likely you can’t!...”