By present standards a day would come when the last coin would depart and the favoured spot would be as independent of money as many of the poorer people were of clothing.
It came as a shock to Nathaniel Kingsnorth.

For the first time it began to dawn on him that, after all, the agitators might really have some cause to agitate: that their attitude was not one of merely fighting for the sake of the fight.

Yet a lingering suspicion, borne of his early training, and his father's doctrines about Ireland, that Pat was really a scheming, dishonest fellow, obtruded itself on his mind, even as he became more than half convinced of the little village's desperate plight.
Nathaniel loathed injustice.

As the magistrate of his county he punished dishonesty.

Was the condition he saw due to English injustice or Irish dishonesty?
That was the problem that he was endeavouring to solve.
"There doesn't seem to be a sixpence circulating through the whole place," he remarked to the agent when that gentleman had concluded his statement of the position of matters.
"And there never will be, until some one puts money into the village instead of taking it out of it," said the agent.
"You refer to the land-owners ?" "I do.