Page:The Irish problem (Hibernicus).djvu/8

4 my journeyings through this island, of every effort being made by resident landlords and their families, to improve the condition of the people committed to their charge; and many a tale have I heard of heart-breaking disappointment—of the most persistent efforts to civilize the small farming community being met not only by a want of inclination, but also by what appears to be a downright inaptitude to improve.

"Make some of them dykes to drain their meadows, and they will not be at the trouble to clear out the weeds periodically unless absolutely goaded to it. Drain their fields and they will let the outfall get stopped up, till by-and-by the wet boils up worse than ever. Rag-weeds and thistles are suffered to infest their pastures. Nothing will induce them to make straight rigs, nor to keep their fences in anything like decent repair. The pig is always in the kitchen, and a noxious pool in front of the door occupies the spot which amongst the English cottagers a trim flower bed would adorn. They stick perversely to antiquated modes of cropping; and exhaust your land thereby to the uttermost; and then turn round good-humouredly—for they are always good-humoured—and tell you that 'it's no odds, so long as it makes them enough to live on after they have paid the rent.' To such men, Ulster Tenant Right is the Right to carry on a half civilized existence, no man hindering them."

This is the sort of sketch which the Intelligent Foreigner would make of our country and our countrymen; admitting of course that he had only picked out the salient points of backwardness and neglect, on the principle that good landlords and well-to-do tenants and trim farms, however plentiful they might be throughout the country, were nothing more than one had a right to expect to find in any civilized land at the end of the 19th century, so that only the negligent landlords or tenants were deserving of special attention as causing blots on the face of the landscape which had no business to be there.

What cure, then, would be devised for the evil by the impartial observer? Again, and again the words are being reiterated, until they will soon become a bye-word:—"Compel the bad landlord by law to do that which the good landlord would do from a sense of duty!" Well and good—but is that sufficient? Is there no counterpart to such an obligation? If the good landlord's efforts to advance his tenants to their proper place in the march of progress are often unavailing, what can you expect of the bad landlord, even if he is put under legal pressure? You must go still further, and you must compel not only the bad landlord, but also the bad tenant, by law, to do that which the good tenant would do voluntarily and as a matter of course! And this is our "