social mischief of Trades' Unions, an organised conspiracy of employed
against employers, fatal to both, I have often exposed that evil in
newspapers, though anonymously. It is an outrage on the honest working
man with a family, that even in starving times he is obliged by paid
demagogues to refuse work and wages unless he will give the least labour
for the most pay, as the worst of his mates are glad to be forced to do:
while the wicked absurdity of strikes, smashing factory windows and
destroying machinery in order to coerce unfortunate masters to pay
higher wages than they can afford, is climaxed by those brigand
processions of idle roughs who go about bawling, "We've no work to do,
and wouldn't do it if we had." The British workman (of course with many
exceptions) has become a byword for everything unpleasant, which both
large contractors and small employers avoid if they can: drink, bank
holidays, radical spouters, the conceit of being better than their
betters, and above all that suicidal iniquity of strikes, seem in these
latter days to have generally demoralised a race of citizens of whose
virtues our commonwealth once was proud. No wonder that John Bull had to
go to Germany to finish his Law Courts.

CHAPTER XLIII.

A CURE FOR IRELAND.

In connection with the above, I will here print for the first time a
paper written long ago on the now rife subject of a cure for Irish
misery; at all events partially. Ireland has been with me a theme for
many kinds of literature; from that usual sort of authorship, letters in
the _Times_, to journalising on occasion, balladising in or out of
season, and now and then a political squib or graver article. I have
known that hapless land well in old days from Giant's Causeway to Cape
Clear; have been a guest in several noted homes, as with geological
Enniskillen and astronomical Crampton; know the natives well, and how
they have been taught by priests and demagogues to hate the Sassenach,
and, like most well-meaning men, who, after every kind effort, find
themselves utterly misunderstood, am (as a merely private and quite
unprejudiced politician) entirely at a loss to know how to please that
impracticable people, or to mend their miserable condition. However,
that in my authorial fashion I _have_ tried, let the following paper
prove; written and published nearly thirty years ago.

* * * * *

"Nations think and feel and act much as indivi