Different Impressions.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 37, 11 September 1902, Page 4

Different Impressions.

Some time ago we were informed by cable that Mr J D. Orimmins, New York, had paid a visit to Ireland, and that he did not find there any of the poverty of which so much is heard, He was convinced that Ireland was prosperous as railway companies, banks, and similar institutions were in a flourishing condition. Mr Crimmins went to Ireland for pleasure, and consequently he did not ccc the misery and poverty to be found at a little distance frcm the beaten track of the tourist. If a person were to go to London and live in the West End he would see but little of the squalor of the low quarters of the metropolis. A correspondent of the Boston Pilot aeka ' Who is Mr Crimminß ? ' and the editor answers him in this wise :—: — Mr Crimmms is a very successful business man of New York, the president of the American-Irish Historical Sooiety, a leading member of the Catholic Club and a generous contributor to it and many other good institutions. His ' discovery of Ireland ' only ahovva how easily a well-meaning 1 visitor, skilfully piloted, may go through a land of misery and find it the reverse, even as a well-fed 1 trustee' may be taken through a gaol notorious for its horrors, and see not a sign of the instruments of torture or the starvation system. Mr Crimmins in his hurried tour of Ireland saw only the show places. He did not visit the mnd cabinß of the west coast. He did not see the happy peasantry who sometimes depend on Beaweed for their sustenance, when the landlord has not amsted them for gathering that nutritious edible on the shores of " his " land. He could have seen more hunger and suffer ins: in one day on the estates of some of his aristocratic entertainers than he would find in a mouth in the lowest slums of New York similarly a man who went to "do" New York >n a flying trip oouM live a mouth at the Wuldorf- Astoria or on Fifth Avenue, and see never a sign of the seething poverty of the Eait

Side. Ifall depends on the point of view and the quality of the •ntertaiflers. We believe Mr Crimmins tells what he saw and saw what he was told to see. We are sorry that he did not fall into different hands. As it is, his judgment is valueless. There are some well-to-do men of the same race and oreed in Ireland who, suffering nothing in themselves, feel no sympathy with otherß less fortunate. Good people of the same tolerant nature were numerous here in slavery times, and they condemned the Abolitionist agitators in highly respectable terms of censure. In faot, the " better classes" have always deprecated anything tending to disturb the existing conditions of society. Saoh a spirit is explicable in one born in the purple. But the eon of an Irish immigrant, as Mr Crimmins is, might be expected to feel differently.' Another visitor to Ireland about the same time that Mr Orimmins was there was Mr J. Cathcart Wason,the Unionist Member for the Orkney and Shetland Islands Mr Wason is well known in New Zealand, having been Member of the House of Representatives for a time. Mr Wason did not visii the show places, but went straight to the West, the scene of the most acute troubles between landlord and tenant. He called on the tenants on the De Freyne estate and heard what they had to say, and then heard Lord De Freyne's ■ide of the story. What he had discovered he told the House of Commons a few weeks ago. The tenant, be said, had done everything, had reolaimed the land, ereoted his own oabin, and paid rent for a farm of bis own creation I During the summer he had to leave home in order to earn that rent by his labor elsewhere, and oa his return might probably find that he was turned adrift from the property his toil had created, without a shilling in his pocket. He claimed that the Government should come forward to help these oppressed tenants, as it had helped the tenants on the Dillon estate, and put an end to the eternal land troubles which made peace in Ireland impossible. 'It was Baid,' he exclaimed, ' that the ulterior object of the United Irish League was separation. If that were ao, those who shut their eyes to what was going om in Ireland were the best friends of the League.' This, the independent ooular testimony of one who is not a Home Ruler, should count for much in oonvinoing thoughtful men on this side of the world that there is a grievance in Ireland which they very inadequately comprehend.

Soon after Mr Wason's return to London, he announced his intention of joining the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, as he felt that the Government were not sincere in their desire to settle the agrarian trouble in Ireland.