e told
that the brutal Saxon keeps them poor. All this is done by the
priests. They actually admit that the English laws are excellent, but
then they fall back on the allegation that their administration is
corrupt. In vain you point to the Roman Catholic judges. In vain you
go over England's successive attempts to pacify Ireland by
conciliatory measures. The priest ruins all, for while your friend
seems to agree with you--they are so easily led--yet the priest will
secure his vote to a certainty. So long as a heretic power is at the
head, so long Ireland will be discontented. If the country were under
the rule of a Roman Catholic power, the people of Ireland would be
satisfied with any laws whatever. They would not grumble at anything.
The only alternative is the spread of education, and that goes on very
slowly in Ireland. We are very, very backward in Donegal, but not
nearly so bad as in the south and west. We have a bad name for poverty
and ignorance, but we do not deserve it in the same degree as the
Munster and Connaught folks. We dislike the Connaught people just as
much as you do in England. We hate dirt, and lawlessness and disorder,
and therefore we claim to be superior to the rest of the poor
counties. This is, of course, the civilised part of Donegal. But
wherever you go, you see nothing like the dirt of counties Galway and
Mayo.

"We want railways to open up the country. Balfour was building them
for us, and his institution of the Congested Districts Board did
wonderful things for us. Why, if he had done nothing but improve the
breed of fowls he would still have been worthy of remembrance as a
benefactor of this country. Before the Congested Board Committee
introduced superior breeds of fowls, the chickens were like
blackbirds. You could sit down and eat half-a-dozen of them. They were
no bigger than your thumb. But now we can get fowls equal to anything
you have in England. The same may be said of the horses, the pigs, the
cows, and all kinds of domestic animals and poultry. The fishing
industry has saved whole districts from starvation, and has done good
all round. When we get an Irish Parliament the grants for all these
purposes will be discontinued, and the tide of progress will be
checked. The poor folks are quite unable to see that by sticking to
England we have a wealthy neighbour to borrow from, and that this is
an inestimable advantage to a poor country like Ireland. Not long ago
I mentioned this