nd,
but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to
England--just to work and earn some money, and come back.

"If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find
America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get
out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have.
Naturally, you see," said Father M'Fadden, "they find a certain pleasure
to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the
four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money
jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a
chain--and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an
eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to
Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country," he said. "We hear
of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of
that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again."

"Then you do not encourage emigration?" I, asked, "even although the
people cannot earn their living from the soil?"

Father M'Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, "No, for things
should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the
country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the
condition of the district."

At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He
was most courteously received by Father M'Fadden. To my query why the
Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this
trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land,
Father M'Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to
intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are
subdivided.

"The Courts," he said, "may not be, and I do not think they are, all
that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less
impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an
improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for
themselves."

I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the
olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents--and then did
not pay them--but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant
clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. "Oh!" said
Father M'Fadden, "that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was
coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its
impr