Note 39 — Chapter IV

No more significant contradiction between practice and conviction can be found in Shaw's career than lies inherent in the fact that he began life by collecting Irish rents! “These hands have grasped the hard-earned shillings of the sweated husbandman, and handed them over, not to the landlord—he, poor devil! had nothing to do with it—but to the mortgagee, with a suitable deduction for my principal who taught me these arts.” Not without its spice of humour, also, is the fact that Shaw is to-day an absentee landlord, having derived from his mother an estate on which her family lived for generations by mortgaging. No wonder that Mr. Shaw contemplates with mingled feelings that process, which he has condemned from a thousand platforms, being carried on in his name between his agents and his mortgagees!