Then and Now 27 



because nearly all the pain has been gratuitous, 

 and deliberately inflicted to prevent success, 

 apparently in fear that the peasant, industrially 

 emancipated, might be a less convenient instru- 

 ment in our foreign monopoly of the native mind. 

 The pain is over now, its consecrated savages 

 all silent, their treachery defied by triumph. 

 The net gain to me is my knowledge of Ireland, 

 which is much. Starting from a filial motive, 

 I continue from a national one ; because so much 

 of Ireland, her character and her destiny depends 

 on the future of her little farms, not merely for 

 her farming, but also for the higher efficiency in 

 every other pursuit of life which is derived 

 from intellectual application to agriculture. I 

 have not forgotten the young chemists and 

 engineers from the little farms of Scotland who sat 

 in the same classes with me at college, and I have 

 yet to meet the first Irishman of the kind from an 

 Irish farm of the same size, though we know how 

 to accumulate funds out of poverty for those 

 forms of " education " which help only to export 

 us as human raw material. 



Let me not make a picture to deter the enter- 

 prising peasant. More than half my complaints 

 would not apply to him at all in the circumstances. 

 To a hundred of the attacks that hurt me, he 

 would be invulnerable, because unaccustomed to 

 the life I had enjoyed before coming to Connaught. 

 I am not a peasant ; I am only trying to be one, and 

 finding the chief hindrance in the moral conflict. 



The means and methods of the contrast above 

 described are discussed in the next chapter. 



