ter to leave
him alone. If he has an opinion and attaches any importance to it he
will go to the polling booth without being dragged there by a kind of
special constable hired for the purpose. If the money of the party
funds were given to the voters in the form of bribes, the expenditure
would be intelligible. It might even be justified; since an occasional
tip would be most welcome to nearly every elector. But to spend tens
of thousands of pounds on what is called organization seems very
foolish. However I am not a practical politician, and my immediate
object was not to explain the theory of political finance to Conroy,
but to work him up into the frame of mind in which he would sign
cheques.

I cannot flatter myself that I did this or even helped to do it.
Conroy did not give me a chance. He began to talk about the Irish land
question, a thing in which I no longer take any but an academic
interest. He asked me if I still owned a small estate in Co. Galway
which had belonged to my father. I told him that I had long ago sold
it and was uncommonly glad to do so.

"Not a paying proposition?" said Conroy.

"Oh," I said, "it paid very well; but the fact is, what with the
agitation about grazing lands, and the trouble about people in
congested districts--"

"I reckon," said Conroy, "that your ancestors mismanaged the property
some."

I expect they did. But I did not expect to have their misdeeds brought
home to me in a vigorous personal way.

"Your father," said Conroy, "or your grandfather, turned my
grandfather off a patch of land down there in 1850."

My grandfather had, I have heard, a theory that small holdings of land
were uneconomic. He evicted his tenants and made large grass farms.
Nowadays we hold the opposite opinion. We are evicting large tenants
and establishing small holdings. Our grandsons, I dare say, will go
back again to the large farms. I explained to Conroy that he ought not
to blame my grandfather who was acting in accordance with the most
advanced scientific theories of his time.

Conroy was very nice about the matter. He said he had no grudge
against either me or my grandfather. He had, however, so he told me
frankly, a prejudice against everything English; an inherited
prejudice, and not quite so irrational as it looked. It was after all
the English who invented the economic theories on which my grandfather
acted. He talked so much about his dislike of England and everything
English that