rent. Many of them occupied holdings which the unaided industry of successive generations had made worth hundreds and thousands of pounds. But Mr. Shirley did not see that they had any right to live there in consequence. Right of property on their part he would consider it unconscientious to admit. He did his work with great system. He had a machine constructed by which an ordinary farm-house could be levelled to the earth in twenty minutes.* Some bed-ridden people, carried out while this operation was being effected, died on the road-side. The neighbouring workhouse was crowded to the point of epidemic.

But why dwell upon such incidents? Mr. Shirley was in his right; nay, he was doing his duty.

"That duty," says Mr. Senior, "the duty for the performance of which I believe that Providence created landlords is, the keeping down population. If there were no one whose interest it was to limit the numbers of the occupants of land, it would be tenanted by all whom it could maintain, just as a warren is tenanted by all the rabbits that it can feed; competition would force them to use the food that was most abundant-every failure of crop would produce a famine; they would have no surplus produce, and therefore no division of labour; no manufactures, except the coarse clothing and furniture which each family must produce for itself; no separation of ranks, no literature-in short, no civilization.

To prevent all this, Providence created landlords-a class of persons whose interest it is that the land should produce as large as possible an amount of surplus produce, and for that purpose should be occupied by only the number of persons necessary to enable it to produce the largest possible amount beyond their own subsistence."

Minimum of population, maximum of rent! Minimum of man, maximum of beast! If this was the design of Providence in the creation of the human race, is it not strange that landlords were provided on such an utterly inadequate scale? Strange it is that there have been and are so many nations with surplus produce, separation of ranks, even literature and civilization itself-and yet utterly without landlords, utterly unconscious that they are frustrating the designs of Providence in not having landlords, and stranger still, that these God-forgotten nations are not becoming nevertheless like unto rabbit warrens, even Yahoo warrens. In Ireland indeed, where landlords have had very much their own way; where (to take the present century only into account) in one generation

*This machine was, we believe, invented by the agent Morant, of whose appearance we give Mr. Trench's description at p. 5; but we have not heard whether it has been patented.

they stimulated the growth of population because that paid, and in the next generation proceeded to exterminate because that paid better still-Parliament impartially assisting both processes, enfranchising or disfranchising, giving facilities for subdivision or for depopulation, abolishing the forty shilling freeholders, or passing the Quarter Acre clause as requiredthe tenantry have not nevertheless learned to associate the institution with fine clothing and handsome furniture, with letters and æsthetics, with culture, and sweetness, and light. Mr. Senior, believing in the providential function of landlords, was at one time forcibly struck by the idea that it was possible to connect the economy of Malthus with the theology of Calvin. He had a conversation at Birr Castle in 1862 with a person who is designated by the initials A. B. (Archbishop Whately we suspect), and the question was as to the number

of the elect.

"Real Calvinism is logical," said A. B.; "if you assume the omnipotence and omniscience of the Deity, and deny his benevolence. It supposes that for the purpose of displaying His powers He created man. That for the same purpose He decreed that out of the millions of the human race a certain number shall be saved, and the rest, being the great majority, shall be damned. That the sacrifice of our Saviour was made for the redemption of the elect, being a small minority, and that its benefits extended only to that small minority."

"Are the elect," I said, "a number or a proportion?"

"A fixed number," he answered.

"Then," I said, "every increase of population increases only the number of the damned."

"Certainly," he answered.

Accordingly the Irish landlord, who fulfills the duty for which Providence created landlords, that of keeping down population, if he does not help to complete the ranks of the elect, at least helps to limit the number of the damned. When we are brought face to face with this supernatural view of the position of the Irish landlord, we begin to see the force of the epithet "mine of wisdom," as applied to Mr. Senior.

We have alluded to a certain tone of low personal scurrility rather prevalent in Mr. Senior's Irish clique, but which seems to have particularly characterized Lord Rosse's table, and for which that lamented nobleman appears indeed to have been himself mainly responsible. Here is one flagrant example. Mr. Senior was at Birr Castle immediately after the general election of 1852, and Lord Rosse, with every appearance of VOL. XII.—NO. XXIII. [New Series.]

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perfect veracity, gave him (and years afterwards in deliberate cold blood revised), the following account of the result in the King's County :

Captain Bernard, the Conservative candidate, had, according to his promises, an overwhelming majority. His opponent, a whisky sellerwhose uncle, the head of the family, still lives in a cabin-beat him at the poll by two to one.

All the facts in this case happen to be easy of reference. The Liberal candidates at the King's County election of 1852 were Mr. (at present Sir Patrick) O'Brien and Mr. Loftus Bland, Q.C. As Mr. O'Brien was returned at the head of the poll, by 1,976 votes against 1,148, given for Captain Bernard, there can be no question that he is the person whom Lord Rosse demeaned himself by describing as "a whisky seller." The English reader, ignorant of the case and the place, taking the phrase with its context, and presuming Lord Rosse to be an exceptionally high-minded and accurate nobleman, would naturally presume that the Liberal candidate so spoken of was some low publican, projected into Parliament in defiance of decency by the villainy of priests and the violence of mobs. Now the whole statement was untrue, and Lord Rosse knew perfectly well that it was untrue. Mr. O'Brien was at the time of his election a barrister at law of eight years' standing, the eldest son of a baronet, who was also at the time a Member of Parliament of six years' standing, and who had received the Queen as Lord Mayor of Dublin, when Her Majesty visited Ireland in 1849. The only possible foundation for the expression was the fact that part of Sir Timothy O'Brien's large fortune was made by the sale of Irish whisky. Many great fortunes, and not a few titles, in England as well as Ireland, are due to the distillery or the brewery. In Dublin there has been created since a Conservative baronet, Sir Benjamin Guinness, whose fortune was made by the manufacture of Dublin stout. Can any one suppose that if the eldest son of Sir Benjamin Guinness had offered himself to contest the representation of the King's County on Conservative principles, Lord Rosse would have considered it fair to describe him as "the keeper of a beershop?" A hasty expression of this sort, used in the heat of a general election among people who knew all the circumstances and could take the phrase at its just worth, might be excused, but it is notable .that Lord Rosse revised and even annotated Mr. Senior's journals, and that the terms are used so as to convey to a person who influenced English opinion, and to cause him to

put upon permanent record, a wholly false impression as to the way in which Irish Catholic politics are managed.

' "I have looked carefully over the returns," Lord Rosse continued, "and Ireland I find will give you in this Parliament only one Whig."

It is a pity Mr. Senior did not ask him who the one Whig was. It would be curious to ascertain by this exceptional example what was Lord Rosse's conception of a real Whig. The result of the general election of 1852 was that Ireland sent to Parliament at least forty only too steadfast supporters of the successive Ministries of Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, of whom certainly not the least docile were the two honourable members for King's County.

The manner in which O'Connell was regarded by Mr. Senior's Irish coterie reminds one of the stories that are told of the style in which the more silly Legitimists used to speak, sixty years ago, of the "Corsican ogre." This portentous and unprecedented personage, whose eloquence moved such masses of men as had never been stirred to the same depth by the voice of a mere politician since the days of Demosthenes; whose personal ascendancy over the nation amid whom he loved to dwell was a dominion that it would not be extravagant to compare to Napoleon's; who possessed more legitimate power in the State than any single subject then possessed or had ever possessed; and the fame of whose genius, whose great achievement, whose further designs filled the whole world—this great tribune, to produce the like of whom nature and history combine so rarely in the course of centuries, was, in the eyes of this circle of crabbed sciolists, only an obstreperous charlatan, and a sort of supreme incarnation of the spirit of Irish mendicancy.

O'Connell, said Lord Rosse, has left no successor, because from the time that emancipation was gained, his objects became purely personal; and even as personal objects they were sordid, for they scarcely rose above the acquisition of money to be spent in keeping open house for his tools and flatterers.

Lord Rosse was about as capable of comprehending the character and policy of O'Connell, as O'Connell would have been capable of setting a speculum to Lord Rosse's great telescope. But Lord Rosse must have known about O'Connell's personal position, when emancipation was gained, certain facts that were notorious. One such fact was that he had at that time the largest practice at the Irish Bar; that there was hardly any limit to its extent, or almost to its lucrativeness, except his inability to attend to it, caused by his devotion to

the public interest; that he was, moreover, a man who, in his keen, athletic, manifold way, highly enjoyed the practice of his profession; and that, after emancipation, there was no station of whatever rank or emolument, save one, among its many dignified offices which he might not have had simply by signifying the wish. Another such fact was that Mr. O'Connell, apart from his professional and political position, was a country gentleman of a very considerable inherited estate, for a Roman Catholic, in the county of Kerry; and was as much at home with his pack of beagles on the hills over Darrynane, as when volubly pleading in his wig and gown at the Four Courts, or amid the ringing peals of cheers, thunderous in their volume, yet so touchingly tremulous with human tenderness and passion, that used always to break forth when he stood face to face with the people. He was by circumstances alone placed as much above such sordid objects as, so to speak, Lord Rosse himself. Mr. Senior hated O'Connell in just the same small silly way. In one of his Edinburgh Review articles, published in 1843, after premising that O'Connell "cannot be a sincere repealer," he proceeds to account for the formidable agitation against the Union, which was then convulsing the empire, in the following shallow and rancorous sentence :-" He appears to be influenced by all the religious and national antipathies of his least civilized countrymen; and he has to avenge his own failure in the British Parliament, and what is more stinging-in British society." This idea was so pleasing to Mr. Senior's mind, which seems to have had a good deal of semi-feminine spite in it, that towards the close of the same article he resolved to elaborate the view; but the editor of the Edinburgh Review, it would seem, had the good sense to expunge the passage, which is now, however, restored, for the benefit of all who admire "the infinitely little," in a note. "In the House of Commons," he says, "O'Connell failed. His dishonesty, ignorance, and utter want of taste, moral and intellectual, rendered him of all speakers the least agreeable to a British audience. The same faults almost excluded him from good society. His wounded vanity and ambition drove him back to Ireland. To supply the funds necessary to feed or pay his sub-agitators he invented the rent. To obtain a further means of power, he supported the Melbourne administration. As a bond for his party he selected repeal-an object unattainable, and therefore not to be worn out like emancipation." This passage, it will be observed, combines with Mr. Senior's fine idea the view subsequently attributed to Lord Rosse. This is not the place to attempt a survey of O'Connell's career except in so far as is absolutely