land, and I know the
difference in the people. They have more self-reliance, and they are
keen after improvements. They are not satisfied to have just enough,
to live from hand to mouth. They must have comfort, and they like to
be independent. Now, Paddy is content to just scrape along. If he can
barely exist he's quite satisfied. He's always on the edge of the
nest, but he feels sure that when the worst comes to the worst,
somebody or something will step in and save him from starvation.

"Nearly every man in this county has been in England, many of them
twenty times or more, working for months and months in the best farmed
districts. Have they got any wrinkles? Divil a one. They have not
planted a gooseberry or currant tree, they have no pot-herbs, no
carrots or parsnips--nothing at all but potatoes and turnips. The
farmers have no system of winter feeding, and they won't learn one.
There is a great and growing demand in England for Irish butter,
which, properly put up in a tasty way, would fetch fine figures, but
the lack of system in winter feeding and winter calving prevents the
supply from being kept up. The farmers will make no change in their
habits, and they don't work as if they meant it. They lounge about all
day, waiting for the crops to grow and the cattle to get fat, and then
they wonder they are so poor. The only hope of the Irish people is
their absorption in America. They work well enough when surrounded by
new influences. Once get them away from the priests, and away they go;
you can't stop them. They have great natural abilities, but somehow
they won't bloom in Ireland. If they put forth the same energy in
Ireland as in America they would do well. But they never will. Their
religion keeps them down, and they can't get out of their old habits."

I observed that the Earl of Sligo had obtained eighty-two decrees of
possession against tenants for non-payment of rent, and that the _Mayo
News_, while censuring his action, admitted that most of the tenants
owed two years' rent at least. My Black Protestant friend might tell
me whether the heading "Another Batch of Death Sentences" was a fair
description of this legal action, and whether the tenants were, in his
opinion, totally unable to pay the rent.

"To call them sentences of death is absurd, The people are not evicted
and left homeless, but merely deprived of their rights as tenants. In
England, if a man does not pay his rent, he is thrown out, and nobo