234 A LIFE'S WORK IN IRELAND. 



tenants are made peasant proprietors, or given a 

 greater hold on the land by Tenant-right or the Three 

 Fs : they will get deeper in debt in consequence, and 

 be more surely sold up by the creditors the first time 

 bad years come. I believe one cause that my tenants 

 are less in debt than others is, that all money-lenders 

 know that I feel no pity for them ; as my tenants 

 and I are on very friendly terms on the whole, the 

 money-lenders fear we may collogue (as it is called 

 here), and leave them in the lurch. My principle in 

 all such cases is, that though some of my tenants, I 

 am sorry to say, are not so honest as they should be, 

 yet money-lenders are so much worse rogues, that it 

 is no part of my duty to think about them, and if 

 a tenant likes to surrender his land, I decline to ask 

 what money he has borrowed. 



I may be told that the course of gradual amend- 

 ment I suggest is too slow. My answer is, its slow- 

 ness is one of its chief recommendations. Amend- 

 ment of a people's habits cannot be fast, as I have 

 said before. Improvement will need generations to 

 effect ; but every step is a gain. The proximate cause 

 of the present agitation is the distress from failure of 

 crops in Connaught and some other parts. Smith 

 O'Brien's folly in 1848, just after the famine, pro- 

 ceeded from the very same causes. It must be clearly 

 understood that the state of Connaught and other 

 western mountainous and sea-coast districts differs 

 wholly from the rest of Ireland. Here and there an 



