Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

IRISH POLITICS AND POLITICAL HISTORY 23
You are friendless. That is the grand central fact in your
position, seen from the outside and from a quasi-political
point of view, and you are, moreover, hated, envied, and
despised. The outcome, all this the result of vices and
follies innumerable on the part of your order. Plainly,
then, you must multiply the number of your friends and
diminish the number of your enemies, and this end you
must compass by wise and brave conduct, by the straight
road, not by crooked ways and cuts short but not sweet.
Thus landlords of the silly and ignoble type, popularity-
hunters, as they are called, endeavour to secure friends by
a variety of vile devices. Such would placate the National
League by rent reductions and rent remissions—con-
cessions contrary to justice, and which they know to be
so. Like the cowardly pre-Norman Saxons, they would
pay Danegelt to their enemies. In some instances they
even join the National League and contribute to its funds,
an act of baseness incredible but that we know it to be
done. Or they flatter popular and influential priests,
or local popular leaders, or give large and lavish employ-
ment to men who are National Leaguers to the tips of
their fingers, and whom they take no pains and incur
no contumely and misrepresentation in the endeavour
to make less so. Plainly, such landlords are traitors to
their class, foolish and cowardly in an eminent degree.
Instead of multiplying their friends, they diminish them.
Instead of diminishing the number of their foes, they
increase them. To the hatred with which they have been
before regarded and the hunger with which their fatness
has been contemplated, they superadd contempt. Such
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