poration in the empire. She had left her the name of a separate kingdom and a separate nationality as her excuse for withholding from her the equal rights to which she was entitled. The nationality which she insisted on preserving was to become a thorn in England's side-the instrument of a merited humiliation.

The Protestant colonists implanted as her representatives by James and Cromwell, finding that transportation to Ireland implied the sacrifice of their rights as English citizens, became Irish in sentiment, and trod again, step for step, the same road which had been travelled by the Norman conquerors. They adopted Irish habits; they adopted the Irish animosity against their oppressors. In the collapse of nobler purpose they had come to regard their position as an opportunity for plunder, and to consider the proceeds of the soil, whether in the shape of public revenue or private rent, as so much booty to be seized and divided.

In the misappropriation of the revenue England herself set the ignoble example. The Irish Parliament became simply the arena for the partition of the spoil. The English Cabinet retained the Pension List for corruption or for questionable court favorites. They retained the high offices of State as sinecures, to keep in good humor their Parliamentary friends at home. As the price of connivance, they left to the Irish leaders all else that could be collected as cess or tax to be absorbed by themselves, or to be disposed of among their dependents or kinsmen. Public interests meanwhile went to ruin. The army was neglected, the police was unexistent. Smugglers, houghers, Whiteboys, and women ravishers pursued their call

ing unmolested, till familiarity with their atrocities raised them into the rank of national institutions. The harbor defences crumbled and disappeared, the military stores were stolen. From Dublin Castle to the lowest custom-house the public service was pervaded with peculation, the Viceroys themselves playing the first part in the disgraceful spectacle-superior, doubtless, themselves to unworthy influences, but setting the example of buying the consciences of those who were nearest to them.

The least evil of bad government is the immediate consequence. The worst curse of it is the effect upon the characters of the people who grow to manhood in so detestable an atmosphere.

The attempts of George the Third to introduce reforms had only shown the hopelessness of the problem. Townshend and Harcourt had broken the power of the great nobles, but they had broken it only by more indiscriminate and lavish bribery. They had taught the so-called independent members that the service of the Castle was a safer road to fortune than the service of the Leinsters and Ponsonbies. The discovery once made, the hunger grew by what it fed on, till corruption became a thing of course, and honor and principle were words which ceased to have a meaning, except in rounding the periods of some fluent orator who laughed at them in his sleeve.

In their social relations, the Irish gentry were scarcely more satisfactory than in politics. Ownership of soil had descended from a time when the lordship of a manor was a military command. Services due to the Crown, both in England and Ireland, had long been compounded for; and the distinction be

tween real and personal property, so far as positive duty was supposed to attach to one rather than the other, was fast disappearing. But in England the spirit of the old form survived the letter of it. The great families remained objects of affectionate allegiance to the tenantry. They administered justice; they officered the army and militia; they commanded the yeomanry; they represented the counties, and in that capacity had been the guardians of public liberty. Placed by station and fortune beyond vulgar temptation, they held in check the adventurers who took up politics as a road to personal preferment, and by the degree of genuine integrity and patriotism which they have carried into modern Parliaments they have alone made possible the wholesome working of the Constitution.

In Ireland the form was the same; the reality was essentially different. Of the resident noblemen and gentlemen a minority retained their English character, and acted, so far as circumstances would allow them, on English principles. To them was due such progress as Ireland had made. Their estates became oases in the general wilderness, and they and their families were regarded by the peasantry with a feeling which went beyond allegiance the passionate attachment with which the Celt never fails to reward the masters who treat him with kindness and justice. But men like these kept clear of public life, or if they entered it can be traced only by ineffectual efforts to stem the general tide. At best they were but a handful of salt, to keep the mass from putrefying, and were never in sufficient numbers to influence materially the fortunes of the country. A third, at one time half, of the Protestant owners of land in Ireland

were absentees. Their connection with their properties was the mercantile one merely. Their duties were to send persons to collect their rents. Their lands were leased to head tenants, whom the law compelled to call themselves Protestants also; but these persons were often of the old blood, ashamed of the names they bore, and, being without religion of any kind, were without moral sense. The idea of duty having disappeared, the idea which took its place was the desirableness of being an idle gentleman. To live without labor, to spend his time in hunting, shooting, drinking, gambling, and fighting duels, became the supreme object of an Irishman's ambition. The head tenant let to others like himself, and they again to others, till the division fell at length below the line at which Catholics were excluded from holding farms. The Catholics would offer any rent, and thus gradually ousted such Protestant cultivators as had remained from earlier times. Over large tracts of the southern provinces the only Protestants were the agents of the gentry, or else tenants holding on lives and long leases. The cultivation fell exclusively to the Catholic peasantry, to wretched cottiers, themselves starving on potatoes, who in those above them saw nothing but a series of profligate extortioners, a reproach alike to the creed they professed and to the system of administration which they represented.

The extremity of worthlessness was to be found on the estates of the absentees. Of the resident proprietors, the smaller sorts, living most of them beyond their means, and buried in mortgages, nearly resembled the middleman. The more considerable, with a few remarkable exceptions, formed the Irish gentlemen of popular tradition, who, easy and good-natured,

had accommodated themselves, like the Norman barons, to the ways of their country. They, too, raced and rode and drank. They were out at elbows. They were popular among their tenants, and on the whole, kind to them. But it was the more necessary for them to find other means of replenishing their empty purses. In a land where industry was under a blight, they took up into themselves the genius of the nationality which their fathers had been planted in Ireland to eradicate. Light-hearted, reckless, and extravagant, they became like Irish chiefs of the sixteenth century in modern costume, living from hand to mouth, and recognizing but one obligation which was always and uniformly held sacred among them— to send or accept a challenge, with or without reason, at any place and at any time. These, for the most part, were the country magistrates, to whom the peace of Ireland was intrusted. The duties were light, for the crimes committed were of a sort which, till landlords began themselves to be murdered, opinion did not severely condemn; and those inclined to be more severe found themselves compelled to conform to the general tone. As a rule, the difficulty of obtaining evidence was a sufficient passive check. If a too enterprising magistrate went further, if he insisted on punishing a ravisher, or preventing a duel, or arresting smugglers or whiskey distillers, or interfering in short with any general right which custom sanctioned, he was encountered by a challenge to himself from one or other of the parties aggrieved, and he had to fight, or lie under the ban of society.

More unsuited than even the owners of the land for the work demanded of them, were the spiritual instructors which the Irish Constitution provided.