Chapter XVIII: A little Political Economy

The breakfast-room at Headlands faced the east, and from the large bay-window you could see, over the trees which grew down to the sea, Eversbeg Abbey and Eversbeg House, the mountains where the marble was quarried, and the Twelve Pins far away in the distance.

“Lovely! exquisite!—perfectly enchanting!” exclaimed Mr. Pryor, looking for the twentieth time away from his tea and toast, from his ham and eggs, to the view before him. “It is not reality, Mr. Drewitt; we must be in fairyland!”

“Never saw anything more charming put on the stage,” capped Mr. Gyton; at which remark his host laughed a little scornfully.

“Frank and I do not generally agree in our opinions,” observed Mr. Pryor; “but on the present occasion I confess I think he is right. I never saw anything more charming on the stage nor in a picture, which is about the same thing. On the stage, as in a picture, the best part of a scene is given to us, and all the worst is excluded. What we get is perfect of its kind, without blemish, without spot; and this scene is perfect; we could wish nothing more, we could do with nothing less.”

“An unconscious plagiarism from Moore,” remarked Lady Emmeline from behind the tea-urn, with an engaging titter. She had had a pleasant life of it during the fifteen years of her second experiment in matrimony; but experience had not made her any more sensible.

“Indeed!” said Mr. Pryor; “I was not aware.”

“Of course not—I am sure not,” replied Lady Emmeline, who prided herself on the extent of her reading. “So few people know the little poem to which I refer, It begins”—and Mr. Drewitt’s wife coughed affectedly and tapped with her fingers on the table-cloth, and said, “Oh dear! how does it begin? ‘To kneel—’ no; ‘To keep—’ no—how is this?—‘To weep—’”

“To damn,” suggested her husband, and Mr. Gyton grew quite red in the face with his efforts to keep from laughing.

“‘To sigh, yet feel no pain,’” said Lady Emmeline, with a swan-like movement of her lean neck; “‘to weep, yet scarce know why’—the lines I referred to are towards the end—

“To feel that we adore with such refined excess,
That though the heart would burst with more, it could not live with
less.

“This is love,” and Lady Emmeline shut her eyes and repeated the remainder of the poem to herself.

“Well, it may be,” remarked Mr. Drewitt; “I confess I am no judge; but it sounds to me much more like folly. What is your opinion, Mr. Gyton?”

“Mine?” exclaimed that young gentleman. “I know nothing about it. The fact is, love is not in my way. Ask my uncle; he’s a shocking flirt.”

“Oh, fie!” said Lady Emmeline, looking immensely pleased for all that. “Defend yourself, Mr. Pryor, from such a frightful accusation.”

“Conscious innocence——” murmured Mr. Pryor.

“Needs no advocate,” finished his nephew. “What a compliment to your clients!”

“I have come here, Frank, to forget my clients,” answered the other. “Let me enjoy my holiday; let me imagine I am in Paradise without a serpent near me.”

“If the garden of Eden had been in Ireland,” said Lady Emmeline, “poor Eve would never have been beguiled into eating the apple.”

“My experience of Eves would lead me to a different opinion,” remarked Mr. Pryor. “I do not think the absence of serpents would have secured the safety of the fruit.”

“How terribly ungallant!” observed his hostess.

“How terribly true!” added her husband.

“And besides,” finished Mr. Gyton, “St. Patrick was not born for a few years after Eve’s petty larceny.”

“It is a sad thing,” said Mr. Pryor, addressing his host, “that so fine a country should not be more prosperous. I cannot understand the reason why Ireland is so far behind England at the present day. You have soil, climate, labour, fuel, canals, navigable rivers. It is a perfect puzzle to me.”

“You are wrong in some of your premises,” answered Maxwell Drewitt; “we have not soil, nor climate, nor efficient labour. Of course a soil can be made, and bogs can be drained; but these things require capital, and Ireland has no capital. If we had your climate and your capital we could do anything.”

“But there must be money in Ireland,” Mr. Pryor persisted.

“There is money in the North, I suppose,” answered Maxwell, indifferently; “though even there I should say great capitalists are almost unknown; and there may be a few pound-notes in Dublin; but, as a whole, there is no money in Ireland, for this reason—that all the money made in Ireland is spent out of it; that rents are not returned to the soil, but squandered in England and on the Continent. We never had many resident gentry, and there are fewer resident gentry now than ever. Since the famine, this part of the country, at any rate, has been like the Deserted Village. People have purchased in the Encumbered Estates Court who have never seen their properties, and are never likely to see them.”

“Surely, however, the Encumbered Estates Court has done good?”

“I ought to say nothing against it, at any rate,” answered Maxwell, with a smile, “for I have bought to great advantage in it.”

“I am sure I thought at one time he was going to buy all Connaught,” said Lady Emmeline, languidly.

“Things will be better now, though,” remarked Mr. Pryor, after acknowledging Lady Emmeline’s observation.

“Will they? What makes you think so?” asked his host.

“The famine must have taught the Irish not to depend on potatoes,” interrupted Mr. Gyton.

“Would a murrain teach the English not to depend on beef and mutton?” demanded Mr. Drewitt.

“Certainly not; but beef and mutton are not potatoes, are they?”

“Potatoes were beef and mutton to the Irish,” answered the owner of the Headlands.

“And, good heavens! how can you expect a country to prosper whose people are satisfied with that cursed root, as Cobbett called the potato?” asked Mr. Gyton.

“The people here are not at all averse to butchers’ meat,” Maxwell replied, coolly; “only it is sometimes true philosophy to be satisfied with what one can get.”

“_Quand on n’a pas_——” began Lady Emmeline, but her husband cut ruthlessly across her little observation.

“There is no man living,” he went on, “can tell what the cause of Ireland’s misery may be, or where the best remedy for that misery is to be found. I thought at one time I had got to the bottom of the matter. After twenty years’ consideration I have arrived at the conclusion that I know nothing about it. Every fact in the country is contradicted by some other fact.”

“But surely the reduction of the superabundant population——” began Mr. Pryor.

“My dear sir, as you came through the country, did you see any traces of there ever having been a superabundant population in Connemara?” broke in Mr. Drewitt. “I hear a great deal of talk about the blessings of the potato blight, and the good done by emigration, but I confess I cannot trace the blessing or see the good.”

“Potatoes could not, however, be a desirable article to form the sole diet of an entire population,” persisted Mr. Pryor.

“They were quite as good as yellow meal,” retorted Maxwell Drewitt, “and a precious sight more palatable. I really should like to have some clear explanation of the benefits this blight has showered down upon us,” he continued; “for, so far as I can see, it has only reduced our population a couple of millions and brought Indian corn to our doors. Is yellow meal beef and mutton? is yellow meal bread and butter? is Indian-meal porridge a richer diet than potatoes and salt?”

“But wages must be higher,” argued Mr. Pryor.

“Possibly they may be a little,” answered the other; “But certainly provisions are higher also. Potatoes are dearer, oaten meal is dearer, all the necessaries of life to the mass of the population are much dearer. It is not the potato blight or emigration that has, in my opinion, caused the slight rise in wages, but simply that money is not of the same value as formerly. No terrible calamity has fallen on the whole of England during the last few centuries, and yet an ox used to be sold for fewer shillings than it now fetches in pounds. I repeat what I said at first: plague, pestilence, and famine have done Ireland no good. What will do Ireland good remains yet to be seen.”

“You have mounted him on his hobby now, Mr. Pryor,” said Lady Emmeline, “and if you do not take him out he will not get down to-day;” which hint being sufficiently intelligible, Mr. Pryor asked his host to show him his improvements, and Mr. Gyton gladly accepted an invitation from Lady Emmeline to accompany her over to Kincorth.

Mr. Gyton thought her Ladyship “awful value,” as he told Harold confidentially, while he considered her husband confoundedly slow.

“A demmed blue-book,” was Mr. Gyton’s irreverent conclusion; “a perfect table of confounded statistics.” And Harold laughed and vowed he would tell his cousin what Mr. Gyton said; while Mr. Gyton was inwardly thinking he had never seen, in all his life, a prettier girl than Geraldine Drewitt.

Meanwhile Mr. Pryor and Maxwell Drewitt walked by the shore, conversing as they loitered along.

“I should like to understand why this country cannot be made to prosper,” repeated Mr. Pryor, pausing at last and looking with thoughtful eyes across the bay. “We in England imagined Ireland’s difficulties were over; but now, when I come back here, I see no change. I see the same dress, the same wretched cabins, the same dunghills, the same weeds. Excepting your place, I see no improvement anywhere. Tell me what your idea is of the matter? as a thinking man you must have formed some opinion on the subject.”

“I have not,” was Maxwell’s reply. “I am as far at sea as ever. If you told me that unless I could give a clear account of the cause of Ireland’s misery, and suggest some means of bettering her condition, I should be hung to-morrow morning—I must either string together a parcel of lies, or go to the gallows. I know no more than an infant where the evil lies, though I know where it does not lie. Ireland has nothing to complain of from England now. The English helped us nobly through the famine, though only about a quarter of that help reached the poor. We are fairly taxed, fairly governed. The unprosperous man never likes the prosperous. If Ireland does not like England, it is only because England is the rich lady, and Ireland the poor. Grievances are all rubbish: very well on the hustings, perhaps, or in a newspaper leader, but absurd when one talks sober, sorrowful earnest. I am sorry to see my country limping along, but I cannot see where the shoe pinches for all that.”

“You are satisfied, then, the population was not excessive?”

“It was not excessive for the country, though it probably is still excessive for the capital in the country. A dozen servants may not be too much for one house; but if there be no money to feed and pay them, what then?”

“That is precisely what political economists say!”

“I beg your pardon, political economists say there were too many people for the soil. You have only to use your eyes to see that view is erroneous, at any rate. The population of London, which is about half that of the whole of Ireland, is not too great for London, because you can employ your population and pay them. Here we could employ our population, but not pay them. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, you want capital; but if capital comes to Ireland, you shoot its bodily representative.”

“I have not been shot.”

“But you are Irish, and you are popular.”

“No,” said Maxwell Drewitt, slowly. “No, I am not popular, but I have been cautious. I loved my life, and I took care of it. I have tried to be just. I have made no distinction between Catholic and Protestant. I have never evicted a tenant. I have given employment. I have assisted the poor. I have fed the starving. And yet,” he added, “I am not popular. Explain it how you will.”

Mr. Pryor thought about what the coachman had said, but wisely held his peace.

“There is my uncle,” proceeded Maxwell, “who has mortgaged and wasted, beggared his tenantry and himself, ruined his tradespeople and encouraged pauperism, been a furious bigot and an intolerant Tory. He is liked better than I am. People would rather run a mile for a word from him than go across the street for a shilling from me. I cannot be blind, Mr. Pryor; these are the facts which puzzle me about Ireland—which I shall go to my grave and never understand.”

“How is your uncle?” asked Mr. Pryor.

“But middling,” was the reply. “Middling in mind, body, and estate. As for the latter, it is going to the dogs. Nothing can save Kincorth. If he lives long enough he will have to leave it, and God help the man who has it after him.”

“Why?” inquired Mr. Pryor.

“Because an angel from heaven would not give satisfaction there now. If you bring a new mistress home to a disorderly household, what is the consequence? That the household hates the new mistress who wishes to put things to rights a little. For the same reason, Kincorth would hate a new master.”

“But tenants are surely not like servants? They stand in a different position to their landlord to what a servant does to his master, and a good landlord must be felt by them to be a blessing.”

“True—but there you come round the screw in the Irish character: they like to be benefited, it is true, but they must be benefited in their own way. They love to have their rents remitted, rents lowered; but they cannot endure a man who wants them to improve their land and take more out of it; who wishes them to help him and themselves at the same time. I have made my money, not by my tenants, but by my labourers. There is not a man who pays me rent that has bettered himself or me to the value of sixpence. If I had to begin again I would not buy an estate that had tenants on it; because if you evict them you are likely to get a bullet through your head, and if you let them stay it is endless worry and trouble. Besides, there is a something very shocking—look at the matter how you will—in sending a whole colony adrift. A man used to a farm of his own will not become a labourer; and over and above that, the Irish attachment for place is strong to a degree inconceivable to an English mind. If you took a small house from an Englishman and gave him a better he would be contented I suppose?”

“He would be a great idiot if he were not,” answered Mr. Pryor.

“Well, an Irishman would not be contented. Where he is planted he grows: he is like a cat; he loves the walls he has been accustomed to. If you take the roof off he will still kindle his fire on the old hearthstone, and sit there with nothing but the sky above him, cursing the men who have, as he calls it, brought him and his ‘to the world.’”

“But what are people to do?”

“Let the tenants stay, as I have done; or, better still, buy the waste land and reclaim it. I would turn no man out in this country, because it is better for him to live poorly off his own labour rather than live poorly by begging. The thing is this—if you turn a man out he will not work, and he will neither let you or anybody else till his land; therefore the land is useless, and he is a burden. That is the state of the country at present; but if capital were introduced into Ireland, if our waste ground were ploughed, if our cattle were properly fattened, if the people were taught to eat beef and mutton, if they could be made to love luxury, if they could be induced to wear shoes and stockings, and to live in any house better than a pig-stye—if, in one word, they could be civilised, I think in another hundred years things might be better. I only think, remember, because Ireland is a hopeless problem to me at present. Had I had English tenants to deal with, had I had to work with any class of human beings that wanted to rise in the world, I could have money in handfuls. I declare to you, Mr. Pryor, I could.”

“As it is you have not done amiss, I think,” said the other.

“I have done nothing to what I might have done,” was the reply; “nothing. I might have owned the whole tract of country that lies between here and Bennebeola. Land was to be had in this neighbourhood at one time almost for the asking; and if I could have got hands to farm it, and a market for my produce, I should have been as rich as Rothschild. With me it was not the want of capital so much as the want of immediate return for capital and the perfect impossibility of obtaining labour. Even starvation could not induce men who had owned little patches of land to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. They tired of it; tired of having my bailiffs after them, of being compelled to turn up the ground in earnest. My ways were contrary to their ways, my determination to their prejudices. They could not bear improvement: they saw in it just what the North American Indians saw in civilisation, the downfall of their dynasty of dirt, laziness, and letting things alone.”

“And so you had to give up.”

“So I had to draw in my hand. I had stretched my arm out further almost than I could draw it back; and I do not mind telling you that there was a time when, what with poor’s rates and beggars, and capital bringing back no return, I was almost ruined. Look here, Mr. Pryor,” he added; “at that very time I could have found work for every able-bodied man in this part of the country. I could not get labourers enough. It was then I tried Ireland: then all my old ideas were overset: then I _began_ to understand that the English were right about us—‘that the fault was in ourselves.’”

“And you think so still?”

“I do. I cannot tell you where the fault lies, or what the fault is, but it is in us. I have heard Englishmen talking about friends of theirs—capital fellows, honest, clever, and so forth, who yet could not get on, and wondering what the reason might be. Well, Ireland is as great an enigma; she cannot get on. If her sons and daughters go to England or America they can push their way up, but they will not push here. We are alike in all ranks. There is my uncle at Kincorth, and there is his poorest tenant: they cling together, and love one another, because their ways are the same, their ideas are identical. They are both thoroughly Irish: they do not see the use of ‘taking so much trouble,’ of ‘being so particular.’ What their ancestors did is surely good enough for them; and so where the rushes grew a hundred years ago, they are growing still: where the dungheap was piled in their grandfather’s time, it stands fouling the air to this present day.”

“But you have done so much! I cannot understand _your_ talking in this manner.”

“I have done much; but mark you, if I were dead to-morrow, and an Irish gentleman took this place, in twelve month’s time the lawn would be turned into grazing, and the weeds would be growing beside the drive. I go to England and I see velvet lawns, and clean, well-rolled walks. I come back here and I pay a visit to any house in the neighbourhood—to Lord Marsden’s, or your cousin’s, or any gentleman’s residence—and up to their very hall-doors the grass is half-a-foot long, and the gravel cuts my boots, and the weeds grow lank and luxuriant. If the gentry kept their places in the same order as the English, our labourers would find employment about our gardens and pleasure-grounds alone. But we are all alike,” finished Maxwell, bitterly; “all—all alike.”

“You are all alike in one thing, at any rate,” answered Mr. Pryor; “in your detestation of trade: you do not consider buying and selling cattle and farm produce trading; but you hate mills, factories, shopkeepers, and merchants.”

“Till they are rich enough,” replied Maxwell; “wherein I think we only follow your English lead. You do not recognize traders as equals till they are millionaires.”

“Fairly hit,” laughed his guest.

“And as the Irish think more of caste than of comfort, they would rather, as a rule, live on a little, and be gentlemen, than earn much, and sink in the social scale.”

“But as money goes on depreciating in value; as small incomes, I mean, buy less and less each year; as birth becomes of less importance, and money, and what money can buy—education—of more, that prejudice will vanish.”

“It may—but it will take a long time first,” was the answer.

“To me,” went on Mr. Pryor, “love of pleasure and indifference to luxuries seem the curse of the country. To do as little work, to live on as little money as possible, appears to be the aim and object of every man, woman, and child I meet. It makes it a pleasant country to travel in; but I should not care to live in it all the year round.”

“Do you remember,” asked Maxwell, with a cold smile, “how you were going to right all Ireland’s wrongs when you stood for Duranmore? Do you think, if you had got in, you could have done any good for us?”

“No,” answered Mr. Pryor, “I do not; and I know it was a capital thing for me, being beaten. I lost nearly all my money after I got back to London; and what I should have done, had I been returned, I really cannot imagine. As it was, I turned to my profession with a will; and I have made nearly as good a thing of law as you have of farming.”

“For which reason—and because you are too rich, too prosperous, too happy—you want to come to Ireland to be shot?”

“I hope not! If I buy Durrow Park, I shall take your advice and not evict a solitary tenant. I will regard the parents as so many encumbrances, but endeavour to teach the children better ways.”

“You had better not present them with shoes and stockings,” counselled Maxwell.

“Why? would that be interfering with the liberty of the subject?” asked Mr. Pryor.

“And there is a Holy Well in Durrow Park, to which, whenever there is a ‘station’ appointed, about ten thousand people will flock: you had best not meddle with that.”

“Anything else?” inquired Mr. Pryor.

“Well, yes; there are a number of fishermen living under Durrow Cliff who claim the sea-weed as theirs: it would not be wise for you to have any dispute with them.”

“What more?”

“There is a right of way across what is called the ten-acre field, and the inhabitants of Durrow village take their donkeys through the grounds at all hours of the day and night.”

“Any other advantages?”

“Durrow Cliff is full of caves: you must never explore them; and should you hear suspicious sounds round the coast in the calmest night, you must conclude it is the Atlantic breaking on the rocks. If you are wise, you will be kept in brandy free. Many a keg is left outside the dining-room window at the Headlands; and as for potheen, I know a place up among the hills where some of the natives gather mountain dew in such quantities that I could almost set up a public-house with the presents that find their way to me. The constabulary officer sometimes says my whiskey tastes wonderfully like potheen; but I always assure them it is sent to me by a friend in the North.

“‘Bushmills?’ suggests Captain Ford, mixing himself another tumbler.

“‘Somewhere thereabouts,’ I answer; and between us we empty the decanter. There is a still on the Durrow property, and if you see any smoke rising without apparent reason, you had better attribute it to a volcano.”

“Have you exhausted your catalogue of drawbacks?”

“No,” replied Maxwell; “there was a fellow ejected by the late proprietor, who has vowed to burn the house down over the head of the first man who gets his lot.”

“What do you mean by a lot?” interrupted Mr. Pryor.

“A lot,” answered Maxwell, “is so much land let by the piece instead of by the acre; perhaps a tract of waste ground containing one hundred acres of morass, rock, granite and brambles, will let for, say five pounds a year. Molloy’s case was a hard one, if his story is to be believed. Three years running he reared three pigs to pay his rent, and three years running his pigs died; only one out of the nine lived to be killed, and the price of that one he offered to Mr. Carford, who refused to take it.

“‘All or none,’ he said, and Molloy was ejected. Now, if you buy Durrow, take my advice and give Molloy back his house. He is living there on the hearthstone, like hundreds of others in Ireland. Roof his house for him, and give him a potato-garden, and an acre or two of common land for his pigs to run over.”

“But would not that look as if I were afraid?”

“If you had turned him out it would; as you did not turn him out, it will only make things pleasant for your agent.”

“On the whole, I think I shall not care about buying Durrow. I tell you a place I should like, if it were in the market—Kincorth.”

Maxwell’s face changed.

“Kincorth will not be for sale, I fancy,” he remarked.

“I thought you said Mr. Drewitt would have to leave it?”

“So he will; but the mortgagees are likely to take possession.”

“Then he is mortgaged?”

“Mortgaged?” repeated Maxwell. “Swamped would be a better word, Mr. Pryor. He has never paid a shilling of interest these four years, and there were arrears then.”

“The place could not have been mortgaged for anything like its value,” remarked the other.

“I believe it was not, in the first instance,” answered Maxwell; and Mr. Pryor looked him straight in the face.

“I suppose I must not guess who will ultimately take possession of Kincorth,” said Mr. Pryor, a little significantly.

“You can if you like,” answered Maxwell. “Most probably I shall. I bought up the mortgages long ago.

“It is a pity!” exclaimed the other, “for your uncle was a thorough gentleman, and his wife a charming creature.”

“Of course, if I am obliged to foreclose, I shall not require them to leave Kincorth,” said Maxwell, loftily.

“You will do the same by them as you have done by your other tenants, I suppose,” remarked Mr. Pryor.

“If they allow me,” was the reply; and the two walked on for a minute or two in silence, while Mr. Pryor thought that perhaps none of the tenants had found Mr. Maxwell Drewitt very pleasant to deal with, spite of his worldly wisdom.

“You will, I am sure, consider our conversation as confidential,” said Maxwell, after a pause.

“Most assuredly. I have no right to speak about your business at all.”

“Not that it matters much,” thought Maxwell, “for the pear is nearly ripe.”