had been profitably cultivated by black Protestants,
and their land was coveted by the priests for their own people. My
friend admitted that, although born a Catholic, his religious opinions
were liberal. I asked him if the Protestant minority would be
comfortable under a Dublin Parliament. He shook his head
negatively--"Under equal laws they are friendly enough, but they do
not associate, they do not intermarry, they have little or nothing to
do with each other. They are like oil and wather in the same bottle,
ye can put them together but they won't mix. And the Protestant
minority has always been the best off, simply because they are hard
workers. A full-blooded Irishman is no worker. He likes to live from
hand to mouth, and that satisfies him. When he has enough to last him
a day through he drops work at once. The Protestants have Scotch
blood, and they go on working with the notion that they'll be better
off than their father, who was better off than their grandfather. And
that's the whole of it."

Mr. J. Gilbert Kennedy, of Donegal, holds similar views of Irish
indolence. He told me that although living in a congested district he
could not obtain men to dig in his gardens, except when thereto driven
by sheer necessity, and that having received a day's pay they would
not return to work so long as their money lasted. "They will put up
with semi-starvation, cold, and nakedness most patiently. Their
endurance is most commendable. They will bear anything, only--don't
ask them to work." Mrs. Kennedy said that with crowds of poor girls
around her, she was compelled to obtain kitchen maids and so forth
from Belfast. "They will not be servants, and when they afford casual
help, they do it as a great favour."

A Scotsman who employs five hundred men in the mechanical work said:
"I have been in Ireland fifteen years, and have gone on fairly
smoothly, but with a world of management. For the sake of peace I have
not five Protestants in the place; and I would have none if I could
help it. It is, however, necessary to have Protestant foremen.
Irishmen are not born mechanics. In Scotland and England men take to
the vice and the lathe like mother's milk, but here it is labour and
pain. Irishmen are not capable of steady, unremitting work. They want
a day on and a day off. They wish to be traders, cattle-drovers,
pig-jobbers, that they may wander from fair to fair. My men have
little to do beyond minding machines; otherwise I must