xxv RALAHINE AND ITS TEACHINGS 475 



and women almost wholly removed from the temptation 

 to theft. For each one of these cases that comes before 

 the public there must be scores and hundreds of persons 

 in whom the impulse exists in a less pronounced degree, 

 but who gratify it in various harmless ways becoming 

 collectors, picking up bargains, &c., or by exerting all 

 their energy in the practice of those various devices, 

 concealments, or adulterations, which in manufacture or 

 trade soon lead to honourable fortune. Had all the 

 people with these dispositions been born and brought up 

 in the slums, they would certainly have gone to swell the 

 ranks of thieves or burglars, their " human nature " being 

 exactly the same as that which, under more favourable 

 conditions, caused them to remain respected members of 

 society. Again, look at the most suggestive history of 

 the Pitcairn Islanders, the descendants of the mutineers 

 of the Bounty, men brutalized by subjection to the cruelty 

 of superiors perhaps no better than themselves, but given 

 absolute power over them. After years of riot and fighting 

 which made a very pandemonium of this tropic isle, all 

 were killed but one, John Adams, whose influence then 

 brought peace and contentment among the population of 

 half-breeds, the descendants of the original mutineers, and 

 for many years they remained a model community. We 

 cannot suppose there was any great change of character, 

 always for the better, in the descendants of these rough 

 men and savage women, but the better conditions brought 

 about by the influence of the one survivor, appeared to 

 effect a radical change in their nature 



And this view is strikingly supported by the case of 

 Ralahine. The people there were considered to be among 

 the worst of the Irish peasantry. They mostly belonged to 

 the White Boys, Moonlighters, and other organizations for 

 intimidating landlords and agents and carrying on the 

 agrarian war then at its height. They were universally 

 declared by their employers to be idle, wasteful, quarrel- 

 some and vindictive. They had just connived at, perhaps 

 helped in, the murder of the agent of the estate, and were 

 universally considered to be about as bad a lot as could be 

 found. They were, moreover, among the lowest and most 



