Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

"We are different!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"

He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful, for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....

"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or think!..."

Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Henry remembered how Marsh had generalised about the English. "They live on their instincts," he had said. "They never live on their minds!" and he had quoted from an article in an English newspaper in which the writer had lamented over the decline and fall of intellect among his countrymen. The writer declared that no one would pay to see a play that made a greater demand upon the mind than is made in a musical comedy, and that even this slight demand was proving to be more than many people could bear: the picture palace was destroying even the musical comedy.

"But are we any better than that?" Henry had asked innocently, and Marsh, indignant, had declared that the Irish were immeasurably better than that.

"But are we?" Henry asked himself as the train swiftly moved towards London.

And through his mind there raced a long procession of questions for which he could not find answers. His mind was an active, searching mind, but it was immature, and there were great gaps in it that could only be filled after a long time and much experience. He had not the knowledge which would enable him to combat the opinions of Marsh, but some instinct in him caused him to believe that Marsh's views of England and Ireland were largely prejudiced views. "I don't feel any less friendly to Gilbert and Ninian and Roger than I do to John Marsh or any other Irishman, and I don't feel that John understands me better than they do!" That was the pivot on which all his opinions turned. He could only argue from his experience, and his experience was that this fundamental antagonism between the Irish and the English, on which John Marsh insisted, did not exist. When Marsh declared passionately that he did not wish to see Ireland made into a place like Lancashire, he was only stating something that many Englishmen said with equal passion about the unindustrialised parts of England. Gilbert Farlow denounced mill-owners with greater fury than Mr. Quinn denounced them.... It seemed to Henry that he could name an English equivalent for every Irish friend he had.

"There are differences, of course," he said to himself, remembering the silent company of passengers who shared his compartment, "but they don't matter very much!"

"I wish," he went on, "John Marsh weren't so bitter against the English. Lots of them would like him if he'd only let them!"

He looked out of the window at the wide fields and herds of cattle and comfortable farmhouses, built by men whose lives were more or less secure, and ... "Of course!" he exclaimed in his mind. "That's the secret of the whole thing! When our people have had security for life as long as these people have had it, their houses will be as good as these are, and their farms as rich and clean and comfortable!"