Ireland -- Fiction; Land League (Ireland) -- Fiction; Land tenure -- Fiction; Political fiction
This novel was to have contained sixty chapters. My father had
written as much as is now published before his last illness. It will
be seen that he had not finished the forty-ninth chapter; and the
fragmentary portion of that chapter stands now just as he left it.
He left no materials from which the tale could be completed, and no
attempt at completion will be made. At the end of the third volume I
have stated what were his intentions with regard to certain people in
the story; but beyond what is there said I know nothing.
HENRY M. TROLLOPE.
THE LANDLEAGUERS.
CHAPTER I.
MR. JONES OF CASTLE MORONY.
In the year 1850 the two estates of Ballintubber and Morony were sold
to Mr. Philip Jones, under the Estates Court, which had then been
established. They had been the property of two different owners, but
lay conveniently so as to make one possession for one proprietor.
They were in the County Galway, and lay to the right and left of
the road which runs down from the little town of Headford to Lough
Corrib. At the time when the purchase was made there was no quieter
spot in all Ireland, or one in which the lawful requirements of
a landlord were more readily performed by a poor and obedient
tenantry. The people were all Roman Catholics, were for the most part
uneducated, and it may be said of them that not only were their souls
not their own, but that they were not ambitious even of possessing
their own bodies. Circumstances have changed much with them since
that date. Not only have they in part repudiated the power of the
priest as to their souls, but, in compliance with teaching which has
come to them from America, they claim to be masters also of their
bodies. Never were a people less fitted to exercise such dominion
without control. Generous, kindly, impulsive, and docile, they have
been willing to follow any recognised leader. When Philip Jones
bought the property that had belonged to the widow O'Dwyer--for
Ballintubber had for the last hundred years been the property of the
O'Dwyers--and Morony, which, had been an outlying town-land belonging
to the Hacketts for the last two centuries, he had at first been
looked down upon as a new comer. But all that had passed by, and Mr.
Jones was as much respected as though he had been an O'Jones from the
time of Queen Elizabeth. But now the American teaching had come up,
and things were different.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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