to My Little Farm 



cunning, fraud, perjury, treachery and cruelty, 

 with several attempts to take my life, and, worse 

 than all the rest, thievery. I set down these 

 words in cold care that each may be the right 

 word, expressing no more than the accurate fact. 

 The words ought to be carefully used, for their 

 significance goes far beyond the personal. The 

 qualities which they indicate are cultivated for 

 social virtues, as a kind of moral ammunition 

 against mental emancipation which is scarcely an 

 encouragement to scientific farming. As directed 

 in the battle against myself, most of these Irish 

 virtues are badly outranged, and only amuse me, 

 but there are several exceptions. A character that 

 has so far outgrown the parish testimonial is not 

 likely to worry about falsehood,- slander, cunning, 

 fraud, perjury, treachery and cruelty ; but murder 

 ends my teaching, and theft deprives me of the 

 means to show the thief how, in a given time, he 

 can produce more than he can steal. " On the 

 whole and up-to-date," it is as I describe, or worse, 

 but no absolute conclusion follows. In the most 

 unexpected corners of the west, I have met men 

 honestly at war with the popular virtues and 

 gloriously guilty of the greatest crime in Con- 

 naught Conscience. They occur here and there 

 like the seeds of a divine survival left behind 

 among the nether weeds to witness the defeated 

 purposes of Providence. 



All communities have their thieves, but in 

 normal communities theft is not a virtue, and the 

 people as a whole co-operate in tracking down 



