My Visitors 153 



ment, on an irregular plane, inclining gently west, 

 my little farm is originally a bit of mixed drift 

 flung accurately across the middle of a river valley ; 

 and on such a site, it is easy to infer a prehistoric 

 abundance of rank and acid vegetation, before the 

 impounded waters had cut their way through in 

 the stream now watering my calves. The brown- 

 gray cavity above me is an emptied lake ; below me, 

 a double slope once kept bare by denudation, still 

 dependent for economic production on a thin and 

 uncertain stratum of organic surface. Here, on 

 the north of the stream, the slope looking south 

 was a waste gathering-ground and social centre 

 for derelict asses. Now it is profitably tilled, 

 admittedly through me. How can any man 

 help Ireland while he cares a rap what the Irish 

 think of him ? " The national impulse," they 

 say, will change all that. If so, the nation must 

 first be created. I can find little to indicate 

 the existence of a nation but a corrupt commerce 

 in diseased sentiment paraded by professional 

 patriotism, and a collective character lacking all 

 the vital inspirations of nationality. Nations are 

 not made out of moral cowardice. I believe that 

 some of the peasants who gain so much by my 

 work would cut my throat to please the profes- 

 sional moralist who makes the altar of God an 

 instrument of murder. 



