58 My Little Farm 



hereditary total, deliberately destroying the farm 

 for evidence to reduce the judicial rent in the land 

 court, though the gain of a penny in this is impos- 

 sible unless by the loss of sixpence to secure it. 

 We are the only people who plunder posterity 

 and call it patriotism. 



I cut the upper angles off my earth fence, and 

 turned the stuff in on top, raising the height and 

 sloping the sides. Then a single wire, with furze 

 seed under it, and in three years I have a hedge as 

 well as a fence, good for at least two generations, 

 or perhaps indefinitely, assuming the necessary 

 attention to hedges. The whole work was only 

 like a last touch to the heavy lifting done in vain 

 before me, and it often sets me reflecting whether 

 the Irish people will ever come to see their 

 opportunities, or die out blind and let their beauti- 

 ful bit of the earth pass into stranger hands, when 

 organised crime, dying of its own diseases, can no 

 longer depend on legislative fraud to disguise 

 industrial inefficiency. We were told, and the 

 fiction is still abroad, that proprietorship would 

 improve on all that ; but the final test is the total 

 of life supported by the soil, and this goes down as 

 proprietorship goes up, the man disappearing all 

 the more where the master has become landlord. 

 The gain of the new annuity, as against the old 

 rent, goes to ease the existing standard of life 

 rather than to raise it, so that the purchasing 

 tenant who had four labourers retains one, leti 

 three go to America, and can live as well as before. 

 Without a tradition to maintain, he is the happy 



