‘Well, I really don’t recollect at this particular moment.’
‘Sir, the reason was the jealousy of the Liverpool shipowners. What do you think they did?’
‘I really can’t say.’
‘Well, as soon as the Liverpool shipowners saw the line was going to be a success, they came over to Galway and bribed the pilot to run the ship on the only rock there was in the harbour, and there was the end of the Galway Transatlantic Line.’
‘Of course, Father O’Bourke, I am not going to contradict you,’ replied Wentworth. ‘I am not a Liverpool shipowner, and know little about them; but I was not long ago in Galway, in the very harbour to which you refer, and while I was there a man said to me that Allan’s steamers used to call in there for emigrants, and I asked why they did not then. “Oh,” said he, “the fact was, that while they charged in Londonderry a penny a ton, and in Queenstown a halfpenny, in Galway the charges were sixpence a ton, and so the steamers were driven away.” Thus, you see, it was not the Liverpool shipowners, but the Galway people themselves, that drove the trade away. What do you say to that?’
‘Well,’ said the priest, rather confusedly, ‘the fact is, there are wheels within wheels; we do not want the people to emigrate.’
‘No, you fear you will lose your power over them if they do; but, for the sake of abusing England, you tell me that England ruined the Galway Steam Packet Company. I am inclined to believe it did nothing of the kind.’
‘But the landlords, what do you think of them?’
‘So far as I have seen them, they are a mixed lot, like all the rest of us—some good, some bad. I blame people who bid against each other in their madness to get a bit of land on which it is impossible for anyone to live. I blame the priests and the patriots and the landlords who for ages have winked at this, and allowed the people to sink into a state of degradation such as you see nowhere else. For miles and miles, as you know, Father O’Bourke, in many parts of Galway, you see fields covered with stones, and these fields are let off as farms. If the landlord resides on the estate the stones are cleared off, the soil is drained, and the tenant manages to make a living—not such as he could get in America, or Canada, or Australia, if he had pluck enough to leave the old country and emigrate, but a living of some kind. If he is under a bad landlord—a poor Irish squire, for instance—of course it is different. If the landlord does not reside upon the estate—unless he be a great English landlord, like the Duke of Devonshire—the tenant and the land have alike a bad time of it. But as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so the heavens are unpropitious to the small farmer. If he rises early and sits up late, and eats the bread of carefulness, all is in vain. In Liverpool there are five or six miles of docks filled with American corn and cheese and bacon. How can the small farmer, either in England, or Ireland, or Scotland, compete with that? “It is my belief,” said a Liverpool gentleman to me—who in the famine year went on a mission of mercy, and as a messenger of relief exposed himself to all the horrors of a Connemara winter—“that the small farmer could not get a living even if, instead of paying rent, rent were given him on condition of his taking the farm.”
‘I fear, Mr. Wentworth,’ said the priest, ‘you have looked at Ireland with prejudiced eyes.’