Note 25 — Chapter XV · 25

Footnote 25:

(return)

Explanatory Note attached to First Edition.—After this chapter had actually gone to press, I received a letter from the friend who had put me into communication with the labourers referred to in it, begging me to strike out all direct indications of their whereabouts, on the ground that these might lead to grave annoyance and trouble for these poor men from the local tyrants.

I do not know that I ought to regret the annoyance thus caused to my publisher and to me, as no words of mine could emphasise so clearly the nature and the scope of the odious, illegal, or anti-legal “coercion” established in certain parts of Ireland as the asterisks which mark my compliance with my friend’s request. What can be said for the freedom of a country in which a man of character and position honestly believes it to be “dangerous” for poor men to say the things recorded in the text of this chapter about their own feelings, wishes, opinions, and interests?