rents. In 1849 the Encumbered Estates Act came into operation. It was simply a Parliamentary plan for helping those who had not helped themselves. It provided encumbered land-owners with a cheap and easy way of transferring their property and of releasing themselves from the toils of debts which their extravagance had contracted. From October, 1849, to August, 1850, 1,085 cases of sale came before the Court of Commissioners in Dublin. In those 1,085 cases, the gross rental was £665,470, whilst the encumbrances amounted to £12,400,348. I introduce that fact in passing, merely to illustrate the example of thrift which that race and class of " civic virtues and efficiencies" gave the people. But the Act brought to the Catholic tenants only a change of masters. Some of the old race of landlords were kindly men, better than the spirit they inherited and the circumstances into which they were born; but the land-jobbers who in them had neither family honour to relieve them. vices of speculators and starts. Rack-rents and evictions went on worse than before; pay or quit was the grinding alternative which the Catholics had to face almost down to this day. This should explain to anyone who has the will to learn, why the Catholics of Ireland spent the nineteenth century at politics rather than at economics. Their Catechism taught them that the supernatural virtue of Faith is the foundation of Hope and Love; bitter experience taught them that, for themselves at any rate, only politics could make economics useful or possible. practise economics on chimeras. them not to spend more time or labour on their lands than they did spend. Insecurity discourages industry.

many cases superseded tradition nor personal They came with the the vulgarity of up

A people cannot Common sense told

They had to pay fines for renewal of leases; rents were raised on the improvements made by their time, labour, and money; in other words, they would have to invest

their own capital, and pay rent on it. "Ye are idle, ye are idle," said the Egyptian taskmasters to their Hebrew serfs, when they failed to make bricks without straw.

Aubrey de Vere writes in the work which I have already quoted*:-"Of all the oppressions with which your England had afflicted this country, there was not one which, by means however various, did not tend towards a common end; and whether you proscribed her religion, or warred upon her morals; whether you made it her necessity to despise herself, or her duty to detest you; whether you engulfed her in apathy, or provoked her to rebellion; whether you assailed her with confiscations, or withheld from her rights; whether with plenary authority and the bell, book and candle of the State, you passed an interdict on her for ages, and committed her to darkness and the blank of outlawry; or imparted to her the perfidious and terrible gift of laws, restricting her legally from civil and religious privileges, when these first asserted themselves; from property, when property was enfranchised; from education, when knowledge moved abroad; from commerce, when commerce became a power in the world; the tendency of your versatile policy continued unchanged, and its result has been the reduction of this land to poverty. Poverty, the consummation which you had reached, and if not the chief grievance of Ireland, the joint product of all her wrongs, their concentrated and abiding representative record and result-poverty could not be moved by Catholic Emancipation. On the contrary, by the long denial of that just measure and the long struggle thus rendered necessary, a new evil was added to those already existing, a more rankling discontent, accompanied by a systematic agitation, less degrading than the servile content of the last century, but unfavourable to an advance in the peaceful arts, because inconsistent with staid expecta

English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds, pages 99-100, 101-102.

tions. The struggle for emancipation bred in the heart of this country a sorer, though not a deeper, wound, than fifty years of the penal laws. If this circumstance should surprise you, account for it by the fact that men may sleep in their chains and be unconscious of them, but that they feel those chains when they strain against them. That poverty, sir, still remains, though many of its original causes are abolished; and it looks up at you, demanding food, and inquiring of its parentage. I have detained you thus long on a painful subject, because if I can induce you to pore upon those significant characters graven by the foot of your country upon the breast of Ireland, I may spare you the trouble of reading a feeble commentary from my pen. You will not now ask me so pertinaciously why we are poor. It is because you impoverished us, confiscating property over and over again, incapacitating the great mass of the people from acquiring or bequeathing it, proscribing industry and fomenting mutual animosity and common insecurity. You will not ask me why the people are reproached for sloth; it is because there was no object for their energy; why they procrastinate-it is because there is no difference between to-day and to-morrow when each is a blank; why they bully you-it is because you bullied them, and failed to make them just concessions except on compulsion; why they are deficient in truth--it is because truth is the language of freedom; why they are lawless-it is because for three centuries they knew them too well; why they are reproached with levity-it is because they are not ennobled by the graver happiness that entails responsibility; why they do not love the memory of their masters -it is because they could not love it without hating all they are bound to love."

I conclude with this short dialogue between Luke Delmege, who brought over from England some humanitarian views which he mistook for wisdom, and one of

his parishioners, which Father Sheehan puts into their mouths: :

"But, Conor, apart from the question of sanitation, don't you think that a few flower beds would look better than that dismal swamp?

"Of course, yer reverence, but we'd have to pay dear for them." "Not at all. A few wall-flowers in spring, and a few tufts of primroses there are thousands of them in the spring-time in the hedgrows and a few simple geraniums in the summer, would not cost you one half-crown. Now, Lizzie, don't you agree with

me?"

"I do, Father," Lizzie would say.

"So do I, yer reverence; but it isn't the cost of the flowers I'm thinkin' of, but the risin' of the rint. Every primrose would cost me a shillin'; and

"I thought that was all past and gone for ever?" said Luke. The poor man would shake his head.

"I daren't, yer reverence. Next year, I'm goin' into the Land Court agin; and, begor, the valuators and Commissioners would put it on, hot and heavy, if they saw a sign of improvement about the place.

"Good heavens!" Luke would say. 'Then 'tis to your interest to drag everything back to prairie conditions, instead of improving house, land, and gardens."

You've said it, yer reverence," said Conor.

I believe that there is more practical economics, and a keener insight into the philosophy of modern Irish history in those few sentences of "Conor" than in all Sir Horace's book.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ACTION OF IRISH PRIESTS IN THE TEMPORAL

CONCERNS OF THE PEOPLE.

ANYONE who, after an absence of several years, returned to Ireland within the past decade must have noticed a considerable change for the better in the condition of the people. What is the cause? Industrialism? They have not shown much "character" as to industrial life; although in other respects they have proved themselves to be a people of very pronounced "character," inasmuch as they have survived at all, and have preserved those religious and national principles for which they have made so many sacrifices. That they have not displayed an industrial character is not a sign that they have not been industrious, but that they have not been fools. What, then, is the cause of the change? The action of the Department? No; but because land tenure is no longer precarious, and rent is no longer arbitary; no longer the result of an arrangement which was not an agreement but a forced contract. I have no business to criticise the new Purchase Act, and I do not think that my opinion of it would be worth publishing even though I gave it; but, at any rate, it has fixed a principle of land tenure which will put it in the power of every landowner to reap what he will sow, as to money, labour, and time. A peasant proprietary prevails over all the district of Abbeyfeale, a large parish in the west of Co. Limerick; and the appearance of improvement is already so visible that it promises a great transformation in the near future. That passing