"I had a very frank statement on this point," said Mr. Seigne, "not long ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and avoidance. 'My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,' he said, 'because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have, and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of living as I wish to live; and if I can't have it, I'll sell out and go away; but I'll be--if I don't fight before I do that same!'"
"Oh," I said, "'that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree about something.'"
"The truth is," said Mr. Seigne, "that there is a pressure upward now from below. The labourers don't want to live any longer as the farmers have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves, push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the improvement shall come out of him."
He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another room, where he saw the farmer's family making their meal of stirabout and milk and potatoes.
"I asked you in here," said the farmer, "because we keep in here to ourselves. I don't want those fellows to see that we can't afford to give ourselves what we have to give them,"--this with strong language indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!
This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head of the family of which the authoress of "Psyche" was an ornament.
It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the Weissnichtwo professor of _Sartor Resartus_, but are regarded with some awe by the good people of Inistiogue.