of M. Zola; their presence is one of the blessings of England.  How will it be in Ireland when the exodus is more complete than it is even now, and when the villages and rural districts are left solely to peasant proprietors and a celibate clergy?  The Romish Church has never been famous for teaching those things which make for intellectual enlightenment and social improvement.  The difference between the Protestant north and the rest of Roman Catholic Ireland, as between the Protestant and Romish cantons in Switzerland; is a truism almost proverbial.  And without the little leaven of such influence as the better educated and more enlightened gentry may possess, the Irish peasant will be even more superstitious, more blinded by prejudice and ignorance than he is now.  As it is, the old landlords are sincerely deplored, and the good they did is as sincerely regretted.  Those grand old hunting days, now things of the past, still linger in the memory of the men who participated in the fun and had their full share of the crumbs—­and the times when a grand seigneur paid a hundred pounds a week in wages alone seem something like glimpses into a railed and fenced off El Dorado, which the Plan of Campaign has closed for ever.  So that the sunshine has its shadow, for all the good to be had from the light.

It ought to be that peasant proprietorship will make the holder more industrious and a better farmer than he has been as tenant.  Whether it will or not remains to be seen.  As things are—­always excepting Ulster and the North generally—­farming could scarcely be more shameful in its neglect than it is—­domestic life could scarcely be more squalid, more savage, more filthy.  Even rich farmers live like pigs and with their pigs, and the stone house is no better kept than the mud cabin—­the forty-acre field no better tilled than the miserable little potato patch.  Had the farming been better, there would never have been the poverty, the discontent, the agitation by which Ireland had been tortured and convulsed.  Had the men been more industrious, the women cleaner and more deft, the Plan of Campaign would have failed for want of social nutriment, where now it has been so disastrously triumphant.  Physical well-being is a great incentive to quiet living—­productive industry checks political unrest.  Those who have something to lose are careful to keep it; and we may be sure that Captain Moonlight would not risk his skin if he had a good coat to cover it.

Also there is another aspect in which this land question may be viewed, and ought to be viewed—­in reference to the manner in which the Irish farmer treats the property by which he lives:—­that is the aspect of his duty to the community in his quality of producer for the community.  We must all come down to the land as the common property of the human race.  Parcelled out as it may be—­by the mile or the square yard—­it is the common mother of all men.  We can do without everything else, from lace to marble—­from statues to