And  before  they  would  undertake  the  purchase  at  all  they
required  the  Archbishop  of  Tuam  and  myself  to  enter  into  a
bond  to  guarantee  the  amount  of  the  new  proprietors'  instal-
ments of  purchase  money  for  the  first  seven  years. But  the
guarantee,  to  the  islanders'  immortal  credit,  never  cost  the
Archbishop  or  myself  a  farthing,  and  one  never  looked  from
the  hill  behind  Mallow  Cottage  at  Clare  Island  grandly
guarding  the  mouth  of  the  bay  in  its  purple  uniform  without
a  heart  brimful  of  gratitude  for  the  regeneration  that  has
brought  gladness  into  every  island  cabin  since  the  last  day
they  saw  a  bailiff,  or  a  policeman,  or  a  gunboat  within  a
cannon-shot  of  their  shores. But  if  it  took  six  years  of
benevolent  fiddling  to  purchase  out  3949  acres  and   make


V  REBUILDING  OUT  OF  RUINS  89

ninety-five  families  happy,  in  how  many  centuries  would  the
turn  of  the  remaining  3,600,000  acres  and  549,000  souls  in
Connaught  come,  if  no  rougher  artillery  than  petitions  to  a
Dublin  Board  and  a  guarantee  of  State  debts  by  private  indi-
viduals were  brought  into  play  ?  No  political  object  entered
into  the  first  conceptions  of  our  movement  in  the  West. All-
sufficient  seemed  to  be  the  local  programme  of  transplanting
the  people  from  their  starvation  plots  to  the  abundant  green
patrimony  around  them. But  a  great  accumulation  of
national  strength  could  alone  effect  this  ;  and  not  only  had
the  official  directors  of  the  Congested  Districts  Board  taken
it  into  their  heads  that  any  great  replantation  of  Connaught
was  hateful  to  the  congested  population  themselves  as  well  as
impracticable,  but  the  conditions  and  the  very  meaning  of  the
movement  were  unintelligible  to  the  people  of  the  three  other
provinces. On  the  other  hand,  the  approach  of  the  centenary
of  the  insurrection  of  1798,  with  its  inspiring  memories  of  the
United  Irishmen,  furnished  not  only  the  idea  but  the  happy
title  for  a  new  organization  which,  drawing  an  irresistible
strength  and  reality  from  the  conditions  in  the  west,  would
also  throw  open  to  the  free  air  of  a  new  national  spirit  those
caverns  and  tabernacles  of  faction  in  which  good  men  of  all
political  persuasions  had  been  suffocating  for  the  previous
eight  years. 