Search for the thief had been fruitless: there was but one resourcewe must apply to the priest. How do our sins find us out! Among the unlucky remarks of mine which Father M. had taken so deeply to heart, had been an intimation intended solely for the benefit of English squires, that the Catholic clergy in Ireland set themselves against poaching. Lord L.'s keeper had told me that Father M. was worth six watchers to him. It was quite true, but I had been most heedless in repeating it. The Father had been bitterly pained; and now we must either lose our nets, with indefinite trouble lying ahead from the same cause, or we must appeal to him to exert the power which I had accused him of possessing. When the case came before him he considered neither his own injuries nor our interests, nor anything but the special welfare of the flock committed to him. A wrong act had been done; he instantly ordered restitution to be made; and within twenty-four hours word was whispered out of the air to the water-bailiff, that if he looked in a particular spot, at a particular hour of the night, the nets would be found.

The second and_more_agreeable surprise was, that Lord L.'s agent, the autocrat of the South-west of Kerry, the brilliant son of the author of Irish Realities, had dropped upon us out of the clouds. We had imagined him far away preparing for his impending marriage. He had been obliged to return to Ireland by an intricate lawsuit, which he had just brought to a successful issue at the assizes, and before he vanished again he had come to pay us a flying visit. What befell him on this occasion might claim a place in the next edition of his father's book. For fear his modesty might prevent its insertion, and because the story is characteristic of place and people, I will tell it for him. We had a neighbour between us and Kenmare

whose bounds marched with ours, and whom for various reasons there had been a desire at head-quarters to see removed. Mr. held the remains of another tenant's lease, and it was found extremely difficult to dispossess him. His house was like the castle of some border baron, patrolled by huge blood-hounds and wolf-hounds, whose deep bay echoed fearfully through the mountains in the midnight air. Among other weapons, he was an accomplished master of his pen. The war in the Courts was carried into the press-lampoons, rightly or wrongly attributed to him, were posted on the walls of the town-saucy, scandalous verses were dispersed through the post-office. For two years and more all our corner of Kerry had been agitated by the quarrel. At length it had been decided. The authorities of the estate had won the battle. A verdict had been given for Lord L. The sheriff's officer was prepared to execute the eviction, and T. had come down to us partly to announce his triumph. We had a delightful evening. Never had we found him more charming; never, for some reason, had he appeared more satisfied with the world and with himself. We offered him a bed; he was seventeen miles from home, and the road was peculiarly lonely. He was not to be persuaded, however: he had to return instantly to England on the most interesting of errands. Little knots of well-wishers from the neighbourhood had been to the house to wish him joy. The schoolmaster especially, slightly anticipating the future, had prayed 'that he might be wafted to heaven on the boosom of his numerous family." There was no moon, but the night was soft, sultry, and brilliant with stars. The car came round to the door an hour before midnight, and he was on the point of starting, when a gossoon, panting for breath from a long run, appeared suddenly upon the gravel. He had come to beg

T., if he loved his life, not to leave the house that night. Mr. was waiting for him upon the mountains, and had sworn to have his life.

It came out-confessed, perhaps, with a shadow of reluctance-that T., who had to pass Mr.'s gate on his way down to us, either unable to conceal his exultation in his triumph or wishing to give his enemy an opportunity of encountering him on his own dunghill, had stopped his car, walked up to his house, and executed a deliberate parade for some minutes outside the drawing-room windows. The provocation was too strong for flesh and blood to bear. Had Mr.- been at home, the consequences might have been considerable. Happily he was out, and T. had been gone for a quarter of an hour when he returned. There was an instant pursuit, but it was unsuccessful; and the indignant gentleman was now reported to be lying out on the top of the pass with his bloodhounds, and no one knew how many desperate boys besides, to waylay T. on his road home. What was to be done? We, of course, insisted that he must stay where he was; that with his marriage settlement signed, and the day fixed not ten days distant, he had no right to expose himself. If go he must, the water was open; we could send him up in a boat. We might as well have argued with the wind. He said that if he allowed himself to be frightened off the road he could never show his face among the gentlemen of Kerry again. He had done nothing but what was strictly in harmony with Irish proprieties. Go he must, if there were fifty- -s

in the pass and all the bloodhounds in the county. There was nothing for it but to give him a couple of double-barrelled guns, mount the Scotch keeper the other side of the car, and let him start. They drove off into the darkness, the driver scarcely able to keep his seat for terror. The ring of horses' hoofs on

the hard road gradually sank and was lost. We listened for shots, but all was still. T. told us afterwards he had been on the point of firing to give us a little excitement, but he recollected in time that it might bring us in force to the scene of action, and he forbore. He saw nothing either of or his dogs. Either Mr. had been tired of waiting it was by this time midnight-or perhaps he had never been on the hill after all. Anyhow T. got home with colours flying, and would have stood a degree higher (were elevation possible) in the estimation of the neighbourhood for his bearing in the whole transaction.

I have rambled on incoherently, wishing rather to convey an idea of the constituents of daily life as they present themselves to an English stranger in the wild parts of Ireland than to tell a consecutive story. As I have observed little order hitherto, I shall be no less abrupt in the rest of what I have to say, and I shall conclude these sketches by a few words on the long-vexed Irish problem. I have nothing to propose in the way of remedial mea

sures: no measures could be expressed in words which could heal a chronic sore as little now as ever disposed to heal. I speak merely as one who knows something of Ireland and something of its history. Let it not be supposed that the late concessions to Irish agitation have touched as yet the source of disloyalty. They may have been right in themselves-I do not question it; but the wound remains, and will remain. The Irish, as a body, are disloyal to the English Crown, and disloyal they will continue. The Church Bill was the removal of a scandal; the Land Bill will rescue the poorer tenants from the tyranny of middlemen and adventurers chiefly of their own race; but the people generally regard these Bills, both of them, as extorted from us by the Clerkenwell explosion. They do not thank us for them. They rather

gather courage to despise us for our fears. Their sympathies on all subjects are in antagonism to ours. If we are entangled in a war, they will rejoice in our defeat; and they will do their worst or their best, whatever their worst or best may be, to forward our misfortunes.

England had one great opportunity of thoroughly assimilating Ireland to herself, and she threw it wilfully away. The Celts, who had been conquered by the Normans, recovered their power and part of their lands when England was convulsed by the Wars of the Roses. The great Norman families maintained themselves by adopting their manners and their cause, and intermarrying with their families. The Tudor princes had to contend with the hostility of the united island, and the struggle for supremacy continued till it closed in the decisive subjugation of the Irish race after the battle of the Boyne. The Irish party, Celts and Catholics, were totally broken; their leaders went abroad and took service in foreign armies; the restless spirits were perennially drafted off into the Irish brigade on the Continent; their lands were distributed among Scotch and English immigrants; their creed was proscribed; and for the first half of the eighteenth century the Celts were of no more account in their own island than the negroes in the Southern States of America before emancipation. The penal laws in the present state of opinion have become as execrable as slavery: they are mentioned only with shame and regret; yet the essential injustice in yet more important matters with which the poor country was trampled upon by England at the time that they were in force was yet more execrable than the penal laws. After a hundred and seventy years of intermittent rebellion, massacre, and confusion, something might be said in favour of severe coercion. It was natural to seek for a perpetual removal of disturbing causes which

were ineradicable except by excision; yet, if it was found necessary to confiscate an entire country, to prohibit the exercise of its religion, to create a new proprietary, to sow the four provinces with colonies of aliens of another race and another creed, the justification of those stern measures was to be looked for only in the most unrelaxed exertions to benefit morally and materially the people who were so cruelly held down-to develop their industry, to teach them a purer faith, to make them feel that the conquerors whom they had resisted so desperately were, after all, their best and truest friends. At the close of the seventeenth century a third of the population of Ireland were Scots and English, French and Flemings-all Protestants. They had nine-tenths of the land; they possessed all the skill, knowledge, enterprise, and capital; they were covering the country with flocks and herds; they were growing flax on a great scale; they had established a lucrative foreign trade; they had founded manufactories which were employing tens of thousands of people; and by the laws of natural expansion, had they been allowed to grow, they would have absorbed and provided with organised occupation the entire nation. They were sturdy Protestants, as I said-not lukewarm Anglicans misbegotten out of compromise, but men tried in the fire; sturdy Calvinists, who held the traditions of the Ironsides. Had such a race as these been allowed fair play, had England only abstained from interfering with them, it is absurd to doubt that the Celts of Ireland, broken down as they were, without leaders, mere helpless, ignorant peasants, would have yielded to the superior intelligence and irresistible influence of their masters, as their brothers of the same race yielded in Wales and the Highlands.

Worried as England had so long been by the Irish difficulty, it might have been thought that she would

have rejoiced at last to see the troubles there so happily composed, and would have exerted herself to build vigorously upon a foundation which had been laid so fortunately at last. But the victory had been too complete. The mercantile element in English legislation-always shortsighted, always mean, always preferring the base profits of individuals, I will not say to duty and high principle, for that is not to be expected, but to patriotism and national interest-took advantage of Ireland's political weakness to destroy in the germ her promise of prosperity. English shipowners took alarm at the growth of Irish commerce-English millowners at the dimensions of her woollen fabrics. Possessed as Ireland was of cheap labour and inexhaustible water power, they found that she could undersell them in the world's markets, and the dread of diminished profits drove them mad with jealousy. The woollen factories were nipped in the bud by prohibitive statutes. The industrial immigration was not only checked, but twenty thousand skilled Protestant artisans already settled in the North moved instantly back across the Channel. Driven from their manufactures, the settlers turned their hands to the growth of raw material and multiplied their sheep. Again they were forbidden to export their wool to any country except England, and in England only to a few selected ports. These are but a few instances of the detailed tyranny by which Irish industry was broken down. The prospects of Ireland were deliberately sacrificed to fill the pockets of a few English rich men, and the wretched natives were forced back upon their potato gardens as their only means of subsistence.

Spiritual matters went the same road. If the Irish Church was not oppressed in the same sense, it was oppressed in a worse; for the bene

fices, high and low, were distributed as patronage to make provision for persons who could not decently be promoted in England. The principle on which the vacant places in the hierarchy were supplied is immortalised in the bitter scorn of Dean Swift. The English Government, he said, nominated highly proper persons; but the reverend gentlemen were waylaid by the highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who cut their throats, stole their papers, and came over and were inducted in their places. When the Church could hold no more, there were the Irish revenues to fall back upon. Wretched Ireland was compelled to place upon its pension list every scandalous blackguard who, in unmentionable or unproducible ways, had laid the Court or Cabinet of St. James's under obligation.

Thus, hard as it might have seemed to ruin so fair a prospect, the English Government succeeded in doing it. The Protestant immigrants were driven back upon the Celts by this ingenious variety of ill-usage, and made common cause with them against a tyranny which had grown intolerable to both. In spite of the Government, their mere presence in Ireland had produced astonishing improvement. They had ruled, so far as their power extended, justly and wisely. They maintained unbroken order while England was convulsed with rebellion. The population increased three-fold in ninety years. The selling value of the land rose in places twenty and thirty fold. Ireland in 1782 was still in essentials a Protestant country. Grattan's volunteers were Protestants. Even the United Irishmen of 1798 were most of them Protestants; but they had been driven into revolt by England's unendurable folly; and, cut off as they were from the source of their strength, their ascendency inevitably declined. The era of agitation recommenced. The Celts raised their heads again. Their

relative numbers multiplied; they became once more the dominant race of the island. The Anglo-Irish authority, established so hardly, became a thing of the past, and the history of the last half-century has been of the recovery, step by step, by the Celtic and Catholic population of the powers which had seemed gone from them for ever. The country has fallen back into the condition in which William found it, and the families of the old blood inevitably have resumed the aspirations which they displayed in the last Parliament of James.

England deserves what has come upon her; yet the two islands must remain where Nature placed them. They are tied together like an illmatched pair between whom no divorce is possible. Must they continue a thorn in each other's side till Doomsday? Are the temperaments of the races so discordant that the secret of their reconciliation is for ever undiscoverable?

The present hope is, that by assiduous justice—that is, by conceding everything which the Irish please to ask-we shall disarm their enmity and convince them of our goodwill. It may be so. There are persons sanguine enough to hope that the Irish will be so moderate in what they demand, and the English so liberal in what they will grant, that at last we shall fling ourselves into each other's arms in tears of mutual forgiveness. I do not share that expectation. It is more likely that they will press their importunities till we turn upon them and refuse to yield further. There will be a struggle once more; and either the emigration to America will increase in volume till it has carried the entire race beyond our reach, or in some shape or other they will again have to be coerced into submission. This only is certain-that the fortunes of the two islands are inseparably linked. Ireland can

never be independent of England, nor is it likely that a fuller measure of what is called freedom will make Irishmen acquiesce more graciously in their forced connection with us.

The Irishman has many faults: he has one pre-eminent virtue. If the master of the best pack of foxhounds in England were to go to the kennel and say, 'My dear hounds, you have been kept in slavery-the finest part of your nature has been destroyed for want of your natural rights-you have been taken out when you wished to stay at homeyou have not been consulted either about your victuals or your lodging -you have been sent after foxes when you would have preferred haresyou have been treated as if you were mere dogs rather than as rational and responsible beings: I am going to alter that I shall put before you what is right, but I shall leave you to take your own way if you prefer it, and you shall each of you vote every morning exactly what you like to do-if the master were to act thus, the fate of that pack and of the flocks of sheep in the neighbourhood would not be difficult to predict. It was an Irishman who, when some one said 'one man was as good as another,' exclaimed, Ay, and better too.' He understands himself, if no one else understands him. He is the worst of leaders, but the truest and most loyal of followers. In the past he was devoted to his chiefs; in the present his allegiance is waiting for anyone who will boldly claim it. Give him a master, and he will stick by him through life and death; but it must be a master who knows that he is master and means to continue master. The wildest village boy that ever flung up his cap for O'Donovan Rossa has but to be caught, laid under discipline, and dressed in policeman's uniform, to be true as steel.

J. A. F.