Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

IRISH POLITICS AND POLITICAL HISTORY 21$
vers to their work, paying their just rents in due season.
" Barbarians 1 " I wish you had but a tithe of their
barbaric energy and pluck. Of those countless generations
of Irish nobles, not one provoked a servile revolt, or one
that they could not quell. Combination against rent,
indeed ! I can imagine with what a face the Desmond
would have listened to a report of such a resolution, passed
at Thurles or the Abbey of Feal, and the black look of his
household troops, amhus so called, going down to ad-
minister such a harrying to the Land Leaguers as their
children's children would remember. For mind you,
the Desmond did live in Crom, Co. Limerick, and he did
have his household troops, whose brawny limbs and loyal
hearts were fed with Desmond's rents and the warm
sunshine of his presence, and, if necessary, he had his
war-tenants as well, lightly taxed, holding by military
tenure, bound by oath, by custom, by inclination, and by
interest, to gather round his standard, once the warsummons
was sent round. Do you think it was by playing
the fool that for four long centuries he maintained his
sovereignty .? Do you think if he had spent the rents
of Desmond from the Shannon to the Southern Sea on
his own vile body and its belongings, or sold the half of
them to usurers, and spent the rest in London, he would
have held his lands for four hundred years ? Very
quickly, I think, the McCarthy in the West, the O'Brien,
the Butlers, and the Le Poers, would have carved out and
divided his kingdom amongst themselves. For in those
old times punishment followed so close upon the heels
of folly that the fool was never allowed a fair start. The