imerick drinks
the Shannon; you can catch trout from the busiest quay in Limerick.
Now, the towns of England don't drink their own rivers. You don't
drink the Rea at Birmingham, I think?"

I was obliged to admit that the pellucid waters of the crystal Rea
were not the favourite table beverage of the citizens of Brum, but
submitted that Mr. Joseph Malins, the Grand Worthy Chief Templar, and
his great and influential following might possibly use this innocent
means of dissipation.

Mr. Thomas Manley continued: "The tenant farmer has cried himself up,
and the Nationalists have cried him up as the finest, most
industrious, most honest, most frugal, most self-sacrificing fellow
in the world. But he isn't. Not a bit of it. The landlords and their
agents have over and over again been shot for rack-renting when the
rents had been forced up by secret competitions among neighbours and
even relations.

"Ask any living Irish farmer if I am right, and he will say, Yes, ten
times yes.

"The Irishman has a land-hunger such as is unknown over the water. And
why? Because the land is his sole means of living. We have no
enterprise, no manufactures to speak of. The Celtic nature is to
hoard. The Englishman invests what the Irishman would bury in his back
garden, or hang up the chimney in an old stocking. So we have no big
works all over the country to employ the people. And as we are very
prolific, the only remedy is emigration. Down at Queenstown the other
day I saw 250 Irish emigrants leaving the country. A Nationalist
friend said, 'If they'd only wait a bit till we get Home Rule, they
needn't go, the crathurs.' What's to hinder it? How will they be
better off? Will the land sustain more with Home Rule than without it?
And when capital is driven away, as it must and will be the moment we
pass the bill, instead of more factories we'll have less, and England
and Scotland will be over-run with thousands of starving Irish folks
whose means of living is taken away.

"As an Irish farmer, and an Irish farmer's son, living on Irish farms
for more than sixty years, having an intimate acquaintance with the
whole of Ireland, and almost every acre of England, I deliberately say
that the Irish farmer is much better off than the English, Scotch, or
Welsh farmer, not only in the matter of law, but in the matter of
soil.

"In many parts of England the soil must be manured after every crop.
Every time you take out you must put in. Not so in Ire