The poor boy whose death you caused was between twelve and thirteen years of age. His mother at one time held a little dwelling from which she was expelled. His father was dead. His mother had left him, and he was alone and unprotected. He found refuge with his grandmother, who held a farm, from which she was removed in consequence of her harbouring this poor boy, as the agent on the property had given public notice to the tenantry that expulsion from their farms would be the penalty inflicted on them if they harboured any persons having no residence on the estate. This poor boy was then left without a house to shelter him or a friend to assist him. He was an unhappy outcast. He went to the house of a man named Coffey, whose wife humanely gave him a little food, but she was afraid to shelter him in her house, as the agent had given orders that distress for twelvemonths' rent would be made on any tenant who should harbour persons not resident on the estate, and that they would also be expelled from their farms. He is turned adrift to the world, friendless and unprotected. He came to Casey's house, where you, his uncle and aunt, resided. He applied for relief, as he was in a state of destitution. Casey, with whom you lodged, desired you to turn him from the house, as he was afraid the orders of the agent would be enforced against him. You committed the offence, not with a desire to inflict death, but influenced by fear that Casey would be expelled from his holding. The poor child is turned out of doors; and the next proof was, that you, Judith, took a pike-handle and beat him violently with it while lying on the ground.

He implored of you to spare him, and he promised to leave the place. He raised himself from the ground, and bound, as he was, went tottering along from house to house, but there was no refuge for the wretched outcast. As a last resource he turned his steps to Coffey's house, but some of the neighbours threatened to tell the agent if Coffey harboured him. Coffey had, however, the humanity to take him to Casey's house, where you resided. He fell twice from weakness and the result of the injuries you inflicted on him. He is supported to the house, and a scene ensued which I find difficult to describe. The door was opened by you, Judith, and a struggle ensues. Coffey and another man endeavoured to force the boy in--you keeping him out. He bleeds profusely. The threshold is smeared with blood. You succeed in keeping him out; and he, unable to walk, rolls himself along the ground, till he gets to the wall, where he remains. Night passes over him, and on the following morning he is found by the neighbours, cold, stiff, and dead. . . . I do not think, however, that you inflicted the injuries with an intention to cause death; it was through fear that the threat would be carried out against Casey. Casey acted under the influence of the threats of those in authority, but such is no justification for the offence. It forms no defence, that such an order was given as that which appeared in evidence on the trial. For an order from the execution of which death ensues is not only not sanctioned by law, but is directly at variance with it.

Mr. Steuart Trench appears to have thought the Chief Baron a very presumptuous person. The rules of the estate survived the sentence of the Donoghues. Their trial took place eleven years before the conversation at Baureigh in which Thomas Trench complained to Mr. Senior that one of his father's great difficulties at Kenmare was his determination that if a younger son or daughter marry, the new couple shall quit the parent cabin. "He knows," said Mr. T. Trench, "that if they remain, the consequences will be the subdivision of the farm, the almost invariable quarrelling of the family, and the misery of its occupants. This they will not at the time admit, and they accuse him-and above all the priests accuse him-of forbidding marriage and of encouraging profligacy." And obviously profligacy is encouraged by such a system as Mr. Trench pursues. If it is not a common result of it, that is due to the innate morality of the Irish peasantry. We know, even from the trial of the Donoghues, that it is a system destructive of the tenderest ties of flesh and blood, fatal to Christian charity, and that it has directly caused one most barbarous and unnatural murder. In all the "Realities of Irish Life" which Mr. Trench has witnessed, there is no ghastlier tragedy than the death of that poor boy whom he outlawed, and who died a cruel death, because he was an outlaw, on Lord Lansdowne's estate. It is a fine example of Mr. Trench's extraordinary effrontery of character that he never even alludes to this case, or to the existence of the rules of which it was one of the results. The argument for the rules is that they are necessary in order to prevent the subdivision of farms. A landlord is within his right when he forbids the subdivision of his farms: but he has no right to do so by a series of rules which are repugnant to the spirit of English law and of the Christian religion, and to the very instincts of human nature. It is possible to introduce such stringent covenants into agricultural leases as will make it the tenant's absolute interest not to sublet. But the rules of the Lansdowne estate are a code for tenants at will. They represent the lowest and basest form of tenure now existing on the face of the civilized globe; and it is evident that the tenants who live under such conditions can call neither their souls nor their bodies their own. The Russian serf, the Virginia slave were not obliged by rule to turn their children out of doors on the day of their marriage, or to refuse food and shelter to their kith and kin. The application of such rules to great properties and large masses of tenantry has another effect, that it encourages the smaller landlords and agents to acts of almost inconceivable arbitrariness. When the Marquis of

Lansdowne, the rising hope of the great Liberal party, who has just done Mr. Gladstone the honour of taking a seat on the Treasury Bench without salary, governs his Irish tenantry in such a fashion, what is to be expected from Mr. William Scully? When Lord Lansdowne makes it a cause of eviction for a tenant to shelter, even for a night, any one, however near by blood, or infirm, or forlorn, and ruthlessly exterminates even the grandmother who harbours for a while her orphan grandson, against whom the excommunication of the estate has gone forth, need we wonder that there are properties in the south of Ireland on which the very keeping of a dog, even where there are sheep to be watched, is a cause for eviction? And this brings us to the main argument of Mr. Senior's book which is that there are two laws in Ireland. "Ireland is still governed," he says, "by two codes, dissimilar and often opposed-one deriving its validity from Acts of Parliament, and maintained by the magistrate, the other laid down by the tenants and enforced by assassination." This is, like so many other sweeping generalisations about Ireland, which English writers have made from imperfect data hastily scraped together and impatiently digested, only a blunder with a smart air about it. There are extensive districts of Ireland, and in all its provinces, where a landlord or agent has not been murdered within the memory of man, or indeed within record; nor has landlord power been less abused in those districts than in others where there has been an almost continuous calendar of crime. If Mr. Trench were to endeavour to enforce the same rules in Monaghan that he has succeeded in establishing in Kerry, his life would not be worth a month's purchase. The tendency to agrarian conspiracy and assassination is in Ireland most frequently associated with districts where there is a considerable admixture of race, combined with a peculiar tradition or custom of tenure-in Tipperary, for example, where a very large proportion of the tenantry are descended from the soldiers of Cromwell, who originally got their lands on the same terms that settlers now get land in Iowa or at Brisbane, and whose descendants or representatives conceive, not without historical, if without legal reason, that the landlord power has beenthey cannot exactly explain how-produced by a gradual, stealthy usurpation of their original rights, and a violation of the spirit and terms of the settlement. The same spirit has at times extended through the adjoining counties, which were similarly colonized, and notably through Waterford, Limerick, King's County, and Westmeath. These counties were, of the Ten which were given directly to Cromwell's soldiers and the "Adventurers," the most closely settled; and in addition they

have received from time to time strong Huguenot and Palatine Colonies. But the contiguous counties of Connaught, the county of Kerry, and the greater part of the county of Cork, which were not settled-or not settled in the same way-the most purely Celtic and Catholic parts of Ireland -have always been remarkably free from agrarian crime. Again, along the whole extent of the southern frontier of the province of Ulster, through the counties of Louth, Monaghan, Cavan, Leitrim, and Sligo, where the population is of very mixed origin, and where the landlords have been lately endeavouring to restrict the limits and lower the authority of the custom of Ulster in regard to tenure, and on many estates have even succeeded in abolishing it-throughout this extensive district agrarian conspiracy has long been endemic, now violently active, never less than smouldering. But the interior of the province, where the tenant-right custom is supreme, is as free from agrarian crime as Yorkshire or Sussex. So have been, almost invariably, what were called the "reserved counties" of Leinster at the time of the Cromwellian Settlement, Dublin, Kildare, and Carlow, with the adjoining counties, Wicklow, the most purely Celtic county of the province, and Wexford, the scene of the earliest English settlements in Ireland, but where, by process of time, a considerable amalgamation of race has been produced, and where the early English colonists were and remained Catholic. In these districts, but in particular, we may say, throughout the more purely Celtic regions of the country, there has not been within the memory of man that ready resort for redress by murder in agrarian disputes which Mr. Senior describes in his stupid, wholesale way, as the salient characteristic of all Ireland. Nor has the conflict, properly speaking, ever been between the English law "deriving its validity from Acts of Parliament and maintained by the magistrate, and the other law laid down by the tenants and enforced by assassination." For there has been a third law, stronger than either, a law unbearable by flesh and blood, opposed to Christian morals and Christian charity, incompatible with the dignity of man, and with civil liberty, sometimes codified, as in the rules of the Lansdowne estate, or in the Scully lease, but generally existing as an unwritten common law, and as a simple negation of all rights whatsoever to the occupying tenantry of the country.

Mr. Senior, who believes that the exterminating landlord is an instrument of God's good providence, and that the tenant is an assassin by blood and training, nevertheless understands perfectly well their respective contributions to the present

condition of the country. This is his succinct statement of the

case :

The Irish landlords, partly politically, and partly to obtain additional rent, by means of the potato, encouraged or (what was enough without active encouragement) permitted sub-division and the increase of population. The inhabitants of Ireland, from 4,088,226 in 1792, rose to 8,175,124 in 1841. The landlords were unable or unwilling to expend money on their estates. They allowed the tenants themselves to make the provision, by building and by reclaiming land from its original state of bog, or heather, or stony field, necessary to lodge and feed this increased population. It is thus that many estates have been created, and almost all have been enlarged, by generation after generation of tenants without assistance. It was the tenants who made the Barony of Farney, originally worth £3,000 a year, worth £50,000 a year."

The original value of the Barony of Farney, we learn from Mr. Trench, was £250 a year; and its valuation in 1843 was £46,395. Its rent-roll is now hardly less than £60,000 a year. One moiety of the barony is owned by the Marquis of Bath, the other by Mr. Evelyn Shirley. The Marquis of Bath has once deigned to visit this superb property for the space of three days; and there is a legend that his grandfather or great-grandfather exhibited a similar condescension. These occasions excepted, the owners of this segment of the estate have been absolute absentees for nearly three hundred years, during which the tenants have turned what was a wild alder wood, bordered by bogs and seamed by rocky valleys, into a fertile and splendid estate. The landlord of the adjoining section, Mr. Shirley, is not an absentee landlord. He is only one of those landlords whom their tenants would wish to be absentee. In the year 1849, he effected an extermination of his tenantry so ruthless in its character that it excited even public opinion in England. Mr. Trench in his book gives a very full history of the Barony of Farney, but he entirely omits this terrible passage in its annals-the real origin of the alarm and agitation, conspiracy and crime which followed, and which pervaded both estates. For the tenantry of Farney then conceived that the failure of the potato was to be taken advantage of to confiscate their interest in the enormous property which their and their forefathers' industry had admittedly created for the benefit of landlords, who hardly once in a hundred years came to see the place of which in the interval they knew naught except its ever-swelling rent-roll. Mr. Shirley, a landlord after Mr. Senior's heart, designed to clear his property as far as possible of men, and to put in cattle instead. Many of the evicted were not at all in arrears of