for years provide employment
for the starving people of Connemara, and would afterwards prove of
incalculable benefit to the whole West of Ireland by opening up an
attractive, an immense, an almost inaccessible tourist district,
besides affording facilities of transit for agricultural stock and
general market produce, and powerfully aiding the rapidly-developing
fish trade of the western sea-board. Not a bit of it. The Western
Irish are always standing about waiting for something. They talked
about the line for a generation or two, but they cut no sod of turf.
They harangued meetings convened to hear the prospective blessings of
the line, but they declined to put any money on their opinions. The
starving peasants of Connemara might have turned cannibals and eaten
each other before Irishmen had commenced the railway. The people of
the congested districts were unable to live on the sympathy of their
fellow-countrymen, and nothing else was offered to them. The
Connemarans have an occasional weakness for food. They like a square
feed now and again. Their instincts are somewhat material. They think
that Pity without Relief is like Mustard without Beef. They like
Sentiment--with something substantial at the back of it. Their
patriot-brethren, those warm-hearted, dashing, off-hand,
devil-may-care heroes of whom we read in Charles Lever, sometimes
visited the district, to rouse the people against the brutal Saxon,
but they did no more than this. Sometimes, I say, not often, did the
patriots patrol Connemara. There were two reasons for this. First, the
Irish patriots do not speak their native language; and the Connemarans
are not at home with English. Secondly, and principally, the
Connemarans had nothing to give away. They cannot pay for first-class
patriotism like that of Davitt, Dillon, O'Brien, and Tim Healy, who
latterly have never performed out of London.

And so the Galway folks went on with their railway discussions, and
the poor Connemarans went on with their starving. Suddenly Mr. Balfour
took the thing up, and the turf began to fly. The Midland and Western
Railway Company, in consideration of a grant of L264,000, agreed to
make the line, and to afterwards run it, whether it paid or not. The
contractors were not allowed to import unskilled labour. The
Connemarans were to make the line whether they knew the work or not.
They had never seen navvy labour. They knew nothing outside the
management of small farms. They had