He was an Irishman, and his meager salary in the office had to be helped out with money wrung from Irish peasantry by landlords' agents. Captain O'Shea knew little about his estate, and was beautifully ignorant of its workings; but once he and his wife went over to Ireland, and the woman saw things the man did not and could not.
The Irish agitation was on, and the heart of the English girl went out to her brothers and sisters across the Channel. Marriage had tamed her, sobered her dreams, disillusioned her fancies. In her extremity she turned to humanity, as women turn to religion. In fact, humanity was to her a religion: her one thought was how to relieve and benefit Ireland—Ireland which supplied her that whereby she lived! She felt like a cannibal at the thought of living off the labor of these poor people.
She read and studied the Irish problem, and one day copied this passage from Henry George into her commonplace-book:
Ireland has never yet had a population which the natural resources of the country could not have maintained in ample comfort. At the period of her greatest population (Eighteen Hundred Forty to Eighteen Hundred Forty-five), Ireland contained more than eight millions of people. But a very large proportion of them managed merely to exist—lodging in miserable cabins, clothed in miserable rags, and with potatoes only as their staple food. When the potato-blight came, they died by thousands. But it was not the inability of the soil to support so large a population that compelled so many to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to starvation on the failure of a single root-crop. On the contrary, it was the same remorseless rapacity that robbed the Indian peasant of the fruits of his toil and left him to starve where Nature offered plenty. When her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain, meat, butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled. For these exports of food there was no return. It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute, to pay the rent of absentee landlords—a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to the production.
Captain O'Shea was not at all interested. He had the brain of a blackbird, but not enough mind to oppose his wife. He just accepted life, and occasionally growled because more money did not come from this agent in Galway—that was all.
He still nominally belonged to the army, was a member of "The Canteen," a military club, played billiards in Winter and cricket in Summer, and if at long intervals he got plain drunk, it was a matter of patriotism done by way of celebrating a victory of English arms in the Congo, and therefore in the line of duty. Captain O'Shea never beat his wife, even in his cups, and the marriage was regarded as a happy one by the neighboring curate who occasionally looked in, and at times enjoyed a quiet mug with the Captain.
Mrs. O'Shea knew several of the Irish Members of Parliament; in fact, one of them was a cousin of her husband.
This cousin knew John Dillon and William O'Brien. Dillon and O'Brien knew Parnell, and belonged to his "advisory board."
Mrs. O'Shea was a member of Ruskin's Saint George Society, and had outlined a plan to sell the handicraft products made in the Irish homes, it being the desire of Ruskin to turn Irish peasantry gradually from a dependence on agriculture to the handicrafts. Mrs. O'Shea had a parlor sale in her own house, of laces, rugs and baskets made by the Irish cottagers.
John Dillon told Parnell of this. Parnell knew that such things were only palliative, but he sympathized with the effort, and when in June, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, he accepted an invitation to dine at the O'Shea's with half a dozen other notables, it was quite as a matter of course. How could he anticipate that he was making history!