12 My Little Farm 



that no man can prosper on honesty. In Con- 

 naught at least, it is the invariable view of the 

 average man that any man above him must have 

 got there by fraud, and where fraud is accepted 

 as the essential means to approved distinction, it 

 follows that honesty is folly. Yet all this is quite 

 natural in the circumstances. Up to this, these 

 people have seen few rising among them, except 

 by grinding them down, and the market value of 

 the verities has remained accordingly low. The 

 Irish nation is a native body, perpetually damned 

 by the infliction of a foreign soul, the bastard 

 spirit of the Tiber and the Thames, two of the 

 dirtiest sources corrupting mankind. 



Relieve them of this, and you have a normal 

 people. Continue it, as now, for a medium of 

 government, an official morality, and the curse 

 remains, necessitating its own continuity from 

 age to age. The Irish are not primarily to'blame. 

 The wonder is that they are not worse. They are 

 what they have been made, and the method has 

 never been more triumphant than to-day. How 

 can industry in any form prosper on such a footing ? 

 It is waste of means attempting, unless in so far 

 as the footing can be changed, but the footing 

 becomes more firmly fixed every year, and is much 

 worse now than when I left Ireland thirty years 

 ago. 



Here in the mental and moral waste, at the 

 dead of night, the day's work done, I sometimes 

 sit alone and think what can it be behind the brutal 

 hostility against myself ; and always with the same 



