“I assure you,” he said, “there are some of them who cannot even pay their dues to their priest, and when I say that, you will know how pinched and driven they must indeed be.” It was in view of these tenants that he seemed to justify the course of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. “They must all stand or fall together.” He had nothing to say to the discredit of Lord Lansdowne; but he spoke with some bitterness of the agent, Mr. Townsend Trench, as having protested against Lord Lansdowne’s mak ing reductions here while he had himself made the same reductions on the neighbouring estate of Mrs. Adair.
“In truth,” he said, “Mr. Trench has made all this trouble worse all along. He is too much of a Napoleon”—and with a humorous twinkle in his eye as he spoke—“too much of a Napoleon the Third.
“I was just reading his father’s book when you came in. Here it is,” and he handed me a copy of Trench’s Realities of Irish Life.
“Did you ever read it? This Mr. Trench, the father, was a kind of Napoleon among agents in his own time, and the son, you see, thinks it ought to be understood that he is quite as great a man as his father. Did you never hear how he found a lot of his father’s manuscripts once, and threw them all in the fire, calling out as he did so, ‘There goes some more of my father’s vanity?’”
About his people, and with his people, Father Maher said he “felt most strongly.” How could he help it? He was himself the son of an evicted father.
“Of course, Father Maher,” I said, “you will understand that I wish to get at both sides of this question and of all questions here. Pray tell me then, where I shall find the story of the Luggacurren property most fully and fairly set forth in print?”
Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, “By far the best and fairest account of the whole matter you will get in the Irish correspondence of the London Times.”
How the conflict would end he could not say. But he was at a loss to see how it could pay Lord Lansdowne to maintain it.
He very civilly pressed me to stay and lunch with him, but when I told him I had already accepted an invitation from Mr. Hutchins, he very kindly bestirred himself to find my jarvey.
I hastened back to the lodge, where I found a very pleasant little company. They were all rather astonished, I thought, by the few words I had to say of Father Maher, and especially by his frank and sensible recommendation of the reports in the London Times as the best account I could find of the Luggacurren difficulty. To this they could not demur, but things have got, or are getting, in Ireland, I fear, to a point at which candour, on one side or the other of the burning questions here debated, is regarded with at least as much suspicion as the most deliberate misrepresentation. As to Mr. Town send Trench, what Father Maher failed to tell me, I was here told: That down to the time of the actual evictions he offered to take six months’ rent from the tenants, give them a clean book, and pay all the costs. To refuse this certainly looks like a “war measure.”