[CHAPTER XVIII.]
THE VAMPIRE.
What is the nature of a country-life that it should breed such a vampire,—such a monster of iniquity,—such a “squanderer of national wealth” as the landlord whom your Free-trading friends hold up to public execration? The old classical idea “procul a negotiis” would indicate that it had a contrary influence. How is it then that it produces the unmitigated miscreant whom Bright delights to denounce,—whom Gladstone loves to pursue with ruinous enactments,—and whom Parnell, with his murderous crew, takes pleasure in “boycotting,” maiming, and assassinating? The external appearance of this monster gives no clue to his character. From personal acquaintance with men of this class in England I should have said, that, on the average, they were well-meaning, harmless, good-natured men; not always of the widest of views, or shrewdest intelligence, but with the best intentions, anxious in bad times to help their tenants, and in good times to improve their property. Even your prophet Adam Smith appears to have been deceived by them.[63] Again, appearances are deceptive; for, to my inexperienced eye, there seemed to be a large amount of kindly sympathy between tenant and landlord.
I am unable to speak from personal experience respecting the same classes in Ireland; but all novels and tales of Irish life, which should reflect, with some degree of truth, the general aspect of things, agree in describing scenes, probably founded on facts, from which one would imagine that, before the present agitation and enactments, there appeared to exist much kindly feeling and sympathy between the peasantry and the “Masther,” who, with all his faults, is represented as a generous, rollicking, devil-may-care sort of fellow,[64] quite opposed to the grasping, grinding miscreant whom your friends denounce; of course, there were exceptions.
Mr. A. M. Sullivan seems also to have been mistaken when he says:—
“The conduct of the Irish landlords throughout the famine period has been variously described, and has, I believe, been generally condemned. I consider the censure visited on them too sweeping. I hold it to be in some respects cruelly unjust.... It is impossible to contest authentic cases of brutal heartlessness here and there; but granting all that has to be entered on the dark debtor side, the overwhelming balance is the other way. The bulk of the resident Irish landlords manfully did their best in that dread hour. If they did too little compared with what the landlord class in England would have done in a similar case, it was because little was in their power.... They were heritors of estates heavily overweighted with the debts of a bygone generation.... To these landowners the failure of one year’s rental receipts meant mortgage, foreclosure, and hopeless ruin. Yet cases might be named by the score in which men scorned to avert, by pressure on their suffering tenancy, the fate they saw impending over them. They went down with the ship.
“No adequate tribute has ever been paid to the memory of those Irish landlords, and they were men of every party and creed, who perished martyrs to duty, in that awful time.”[65]
It is wonderful how, at such an awful time, the Irish landlord should have continued to mask his true character.
Still I am rather puzzled.