One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? Now, when the disturbance was over and security of life had been obtained (after what misery and bitterness and cruel lack of common comprehension!) the Irish would soon set up a level of life that might ultimately be higher than that of the English.
"Of course," said Henry, remembering something that his father had said, "there'll be a Greedy Interval!"
The Greedy Interval, the first period of prosperity in Ireland when the peasants, coming suddenly from insecurity and poverty to safety and well-being, would claw at money like hungry beasts clawing at food, had been the subject of many arguments between Mr. Quinn and John Marsh, Mr. Quinn maintaining that greed was the principal characteristic of a peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it.
"Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By God, they buried their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that, John Marsh? They saw their own countrymen who had been fighting for them, starving, and they let them starve!..."
It was the same everywhere. "I never pass a patch of allotments," he said, "without thinkin' that their mean, ugly, little look is just like a peasant's mind, an' begod I'm glad when I'm past them an' can see wide lands again!" Peasants were greedy, narrow, unimaginative, lacking in public spirit. In France, in Belgium, in Holland and Russia, in all of which countries Mr. Quinn had travelled much, there was a peasant spirit powerfully manifested, and almost invariably that manifestation was shown in a mean manner.
"That's what your wonderful Land Laws are going to do for Ireland!" Mr. Quinn had exclaimed scornfully. "We're to be thrown out of our land, an' louts like Tom McCrum are to be put in our place!..."
Henry had sympathised with his father then, but he felt that the best of the argument was with John Marsh who had replied that the Irish landlords would never have been dispossessed of their land, if they had been worthy of it. "If they'd thought as much about their responsibilities as they thought about their rights, they'd still have their rights!" he said.
"I suppose that's so," Henry said to himself, picking up a paper that he had bought in Liverpool and beginning to read. "I must talk to Gilbert about it!"
4
Ninian and Gilbert met him at Whitcombe station. As he stood on the little platform of the carriage, he could see that Mary was not with them, and he felt disappointed. She might have come, too!...