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tyranny of the most odious character, exercised with effect through their underlings, till at length a farmer could scarce kill a hen or pluck a goose without the cognizance of bailiff or driver. And the people abhorred them all with a far livelier abhorrence than they did the Devil himself.

Where the occupier did not hold under old lease he paid too much for his holding; and, consequently, was very much at the mercy of the Agent. Where his lease dropped, he was still more so.

It is natural for people unacquainted with the circumstances of Ireland to inquire: "Why should a farmer take or retain a farm under rent for which it was not value?" Farming and farm-work being the exclusive dependence of nearly seven-tenths of the people, land in Ireland was, up to the period of the potato-blight, 1845, at an enormous premium. As the population increased-and it was said to have doubled in sixty years, so, and nearly in the same ratio, did the demand for land increase? There were twenty, fifty, one hundred competitors, perhaps, for the farms to be let. have put in abeyance the common sense and prudence of the farming A most pernicious rivalry seemed to and farm-seeking class. They recklessly out-bid one another, offering in many cases rent which they could not pay and live; giving away as often a good part of their capital as a fine to the landlord, or a bribe-in "greasing" or commercial rule A. 1, was that in general application to the letting of glove money" to the Agent or the Agent's lady. The land. It was no part of the duty, or at least it was no part of the practice, of owner or agent in Ireland to consider whether or not the fine given, and rent bid were fair and equitable, such as, under the circumstances, a solvent tenant, meaning to be honest and with a just regard to himself could pay-"The value of a thing is what it brings." The Agent of course felt it incumbent on him to make the best, that is to say, the hardest bargain with the fool of most quality, in mark and means, who offered. People will even tell you of the landlord who made it a custom to calculate before setting a farm how many years it would take to break the in-coming tenant.

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For a time, while the wars of Napoleon continued, the all-hazard desire for ground was not so much to be wondered at. Then, there was excessive demand for home agricultural produce; it was paid for at exorbitant prices; and, as a consequence, land assumed an extravagant value. After Waterloo, however, though the prices fell, the marketable value of the land was not lowered proportionately. For competition still continuing to an extreme, those who held farms if not bound to them, (as were many of those wise folk who looked upon Napoleon as a fixed star and war a fixed state,) still feared to throw their ground into the market; wanting other means whereby to make a livelihood, they held on desperately; though to go on with the assumed rent was to take deliberately the road to ruin. of them like children to a mother. They clung to their holdings, many father and grandfather, and great grandfather were born, and lived, "On this farm," said they, "my and died; and I will live and die on it if I can." They held to it with a desperate longing tenacity, even with beggary staring them in the face. They would live on dry potatoes only to be permitted to live there, to keep the cabin over head. They were for all practical purposes uneducated; they knew how to turn their hands to no other labour of production. And these men of the labour-class of the last generation had little of the world-scouring enterprise of their sons; who, thanks to the new fields over the way, will not stay to starve, though it be at home in Ireland.

Since the union with Great Britain, the first class proprietors generally, as is notorious, have ceased to reside in Ireland. The lesser proprietors and leaseholders, after this removal of the superior caste, finding themselves the leading people of the country, should of course uphold its high-hospitable character. In truth they took and tried to maintain positions the requirements of which were extravagantly beyond their incomes. They did no more than follow the example of their superiors at home and abroad, even, in many cases, but from different reasons, to the extent of becoming absentees. As was to be looked for, the like course led to a like influence and a like end. The influence was two-fold; pauperising the labour-class by rack-rents, and demoralising it by the contagion of improvidence. The end one and the same, whether arrived at through the round-abouts of Chancery or by the short cut of the Incumbered Estates' Court.

Yet should we not pity rather than condemn the men upon whom the destination fell? They were born to a false, a bad inheritance, and it failed them in the day of need. They found themselves in a false position with a fictitious income to support it. Who can pass one of their mansions deserted or turned into an auxiliary workhouse without thinking of those who there lived out their palmy little day; of the gentle virtues that grew up around the hearth in kind hearts now sorrowful-doubly sorrowful, it may be, at the loss of hopes and friends fondly cherished there in happier times? Let us look at the better side of them, try to forget their faults, except in justifying to ourselves the supreme and severe justice which overrules all. If they have sinned much, they have suffered much; and all but their good qualities should be overlooked by us their neighbours. Thrown, many of them, utterly ruined upon the world, yet have they mostly stuff enough in them to mend their fortunes. They are truly our brothers now; and as such-let us think of them and act by them.

There have been rare examples to the contrary of all this; ladies, lords, and gentlemen who lived within their incomes and did not grind their tenantry, but stood nigh with helping hand even when the dark day came. And there have been good agents. They deserve our highest admiration; who proved themselves strong against tempta. tion; who stood forth as saving examples; "who could have sinned and did not: who are they and we shall praise them?"

We find a true and kindly relationship in general subsisting between those owners or agents and the occupying tenantry. We find scarcely an instance of a man of the labor-class holding under those, who, if he had not notedly been of bad character, has been driven

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* It is of this latter class of absentees it may indeed truly be said :They found that in other countries the scanty residue of their rental procured for them more of the luxuries to which they had been accustomed, than they could obtain at home. They were anxious to be relieved from the burden of supporting a high social position upon inadequate means. They were disgusted at seeing their estates placed under the management of a receiver appointed by the Court of Chancery. They were annoyed by the importunities of their tenantry, and pained by the sight of misery which they could not relieve; and influenced by one or more of these causes, they sought in another land the consideration and enjoyment which they no longer met with in their own." Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland, in 1846 and 1847. Introduction p. 12.

into the poorhouse or forced to emigrate. It is probable that not even a single case will be discovered where, with an incumbered estate and an honest resident landlord no middleman-interest interveningthe tenantry have not been enabled to resist famine and all the following pauperising influences so long at work towards the general destruction.

V.

A great part of the trading class,-farmers' sons born and reared in the country, as we Irish call the rural districts, with all their affections the growth of country-life, had all their joys deep-rooted in the soil. Their desires tended back to this condition of life. The goal of their earthly ambition seemed to be the making of enough to enable them to return to the country in a way of independence, and so to enjoy in it their prime, or at least renew their first childhood in their age. These divided themselves, as all men do practically, into two sets; the patient and the impatient. The latter having once begun to prosper would have immediate gratification of their desire, would farm, as well as work the shop or mill. At first it was for health's sake, to employ or to amuse their leisure hours. Next, having got into the spirit of it, each would farm for profit. If his farm was far from his business-place, then, unless he kept a steward for the farm or a partner-other than a wife-in the business, which perhaps not one in fifty of the set now spoken of did, he must obviously neglect one or both, and eventually lose one way or the other; "the business that is near is devoured by the master; the business afar off devours him." If his farm was near he almost invariably paid a ruinous rent for it. Moreover, he usually expended in “improvement," and in fancy tillage, far more than he purposed on setting out to farm. But the money went so gradually as scarcely to be missed whilst going. The till was ever at hand. From week to week what was spent on one thing or another was unfelt, but at the close of the account a large sum was found to have been expended without adequate return. Men of this set seldom succeeded in either business. But they had much influence in keeping up competition in suburban districts-in town-lots which gave a sort of lead to land rents generally. The other and wiser set, waiting until they had amassed money, gave up shop and took land, usually upon advantageous terms; and though rarely succeeding equally well in farming and in trade, they managed to live comfortably and respectably. The prudent well-to-do trader had but to change his coat to become the gentleman farmer. Having learned from the influence of town and business life the value of education,-for if he had not experienced the worth he had felt the want of it in himself,-he invariably gave his children the best, and genteelest too, of which he knew. The daughters were made accomplished in the ornamental ac. quirements. The sons were made "gentlemen," or brought up to prɔfessions. There was, and there still is, though to a far less extent, a semi-feudality in Irish society, out of certain of the northern counties: and shop keeping was a stench in the nostrils of the half educated semipauper, under-bred aristocrats. The effect of this was to make daughters and sons ashamed of their parents, and even people themselves ashamed of their trade. As a consequence, they got rid of it as soon as they could conveniently. The sons of these people were formed to fill up a large portion of the list of Counsellors, Attorneys, and Doctors, who for some cause or another "didn't practise."

Those gentlemen with or without professions could not live on air. Indeed they commonly were quick-witted; and they exercised their wits

for their livelihood, non-professionally. A little money they usually had from their fathers and perhaps by their wives. On this they trafficked, and in land. Those were mostly good-fellows with sporting tastes. They endeavored to keep hand-and-glove with owners and agents, and thus to command a preference of the farms that from time to time dropped in to be let. Their ready money was often a persuasive-a conclusive argument with needy landlord or greedy agent. They took land to sub. divide it, to cottier it out; and in the letting of it encouraged competi

tion to the uttermost.

Cottiering of the land had for a first effect a rapid increase of population. The youth of the labor-class did not in all instances wait before marrying until they had occupation of the soil. The rational instinct, which in other countries and in other communities operates to the prevention of marriage until those about to contract it shall be satisfied of the proba bility of having enough for the unborn, was not indeed less active in the Irish peasantry; but they felt and judged from their own condition only. They had few wants: a cabin, a bed, a pot, fuel, and a potato-garden; and these easy, almost certain, as it seemed, of supply. They thought that what had been good enough for themselves,-that upon what they had grown up and thriven, would be good enough for their children. So surely as the mother should have health and enough of her usual food, so surely would she have sufficiency of nature's food for her child until he should be old enough to "eat the big one with the little one." There was no starving in those days. They left all to God, and did his bidding to "increase and multiply." Nevertheless there were sensible girls not a few who, if they could please themselves, preferred the "boy," with ground of his own; who could offer something better, in hope at least, than "poor hire ;" some stronger security for livelihood than the will of a "close-fisted" farmer. And some laboring boys" chose the life of a farm-servant rather than that more mingled one of joys and cares with wife and children. But whoever had a holding had a wife. No matter how small the plot was, he needed some one to help him; to weed while he trenched, to bind while he reaped, to toss the hay after his mowing, to pick the potatoes after his digging; he wanted some one to sweep the floor, to cook the dinner, to keep the hearth and the heart warm: andto say nothing further-there was no help-mate so cheap as a wife.

The more the land was cottiered, the more rapidly the population increased; the poorer in all but men became the neighbourhood. The more middlemen, the more misery !*

"I would now expostulate a little with our country landlords, who, by unmeasureable screwing and racking their tenants all over the kingdom, have already reduced the miserable people to a worse condition than the peasantry in France, or the vassals in Germany or Poland; so that the whole species of what we call substantial farmers will, in a very few years, be utterly at an end. It was pleasant to observe these gentlemen laboring, with all their might, for preventing the bishops from letting their revenues at a moderate half-price, (whereby the whole order would in an age have been reduced to manifest beggary,) at the very instant when they were everywhere canting their own land upon short leases, and sacrificing their oldest tenants for a penny an acre advance. I know not how it comes to pass (and yet perhaps I know well enough,) that slaves have a natural disposition to be tyrants, and that, when my betters give me a kick, I am apt to revenge it with six upon my footman, although, perhaps, he may be an honest and diligent fellow. I have heard great divines affirm that nothing is so likely to

VI

Moreover, while this cottiering was going on, sub-division of their holdings by the farmers themselves, for love not money, was in many parts taking place.

At Shrove" you might hear of a marrying young man and his friends going about the country, within a circle of twenty or thirty miles, matchmaking at the house of nearly every farmer who had a "colleen," and "means;" "differing," upon the point of means, till happily at length, somewhere, a bargain was closed. Then it only remained for the friends of the young woman to return the visit." It lay upon them," by personal inspection, "to see into" the ways and means of the suitor, "to certify" that "the girl and her fortune" were not thrown away, "her little means" to go straight into the landlord's pocket or the usurer's chest. Leases, rent-receipts, &c., were therefore to be examined. Sometimes a knowing or suspicious old farmer would take occasion to slip into the haggard and, by drawing a sheaf here and there out of the stacks, to assure himself that his proposing son-in-law was not a man of straw merely.

It was, usually, the part of the parents at either side to make the match; some kind friend or neighbour interposing to clinch the bargain, persuading one party or both to give way, supposing that they differed upon the boy's settlement or the girl's fortune.

Now, though much importance was given to money and means, still more was in many instances attached to "blood"-hereditary disposition; since it was remarked, and remarkable, that the men of any family you could name made affectionate husbands and fathers generally, or the reverse was the rule. So with the women of a family, generation after generation they proved devoted wives and saintlymothers; while those of another turned out vixens or worse, drunkards-born with a "bad taste in their mouths," verily perhaps, imbibing "the drop" even with their mother's milk. It need scarcely be said that these last formed an exceedingly small minority.

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Once that the match was made by the old people, short work was made of the wooing. The ceremony of previous acquaintanceship was not deemed indispensable. While the details were de termining, if not before, the young couple were brought together and left "to make up to one another." Certainly, for a warm hearted and impulsive race, this matrimonial custom of theirs was a something most singular. It would seem as if wilfully opposed to their natural disposition. They simply gave their hearts, with a will, to those whom God gave them to love. Marriages are made in Heaven," they said. The grace of the Sacrament makes you love whether you like it or no." It may be, however,-for such things would sometimes be, that the young man had set his heart upon having one in particular, and not the eldest unmarried, of a flock of girls, or none of them; and the father of the maids would not give away his Rachel first, "would not cull his daughters for any man!" So if the young Jacob would not take Lia he might go elsewhere for a wife. Any one of those good girls would make a true and loving wife: there was no doubt of that. Thus they married and lived happily, bringing up their children in the fear and love of

call down a universal judgment from Heaven upon a nation as universal oppression; and whether this be not already verified in part, their worships the landlords are are now at full leisure to consider." Swift, 1720. Works, vol. vi. p.p. 281-2. Scott's (2nd) Edition.