carriages—­but food we must have; and the holders of land all the world over are really and rightfully trustees for the race.  The Irish peasant has no more right to neglect the possibilities of produce than had William Rufus, or his modern representative in Scotland, to evict villages for the making of a deer forest.  The principle of trusteeship in the land holds good with small holders and great alike; but imagine what would be the effect of a law which required so much produce from a given area on an average for so long a period!  The principle is of course conceded in the rent, rates and taxes; but a direct application to produce would set the kingdom in a blaze.

But in Ireland fields of thistles and acres of ragwort, with tall purple spikes of loose strife everywhere, seem to be held as valid crops, fit for food and good at rent-paying.  These are to be found at every step from Dublin to Kerry, and the most unpractised eye can see the waste and neglect and unnecessary squalor of both land and people.  As an English farmer said, with indignation:  “The land is brutally treated.”  So it is—­idleness, unthrift, and bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production.  Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden.  Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated.  Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady’s work-table.  In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table on an acre of waste.  Will the tiller, now the owner and no longer only the leaseholder, go back from his evil ways of thriftlessness and neglect, and instead of being content to live just above the line of starvation, will he educate himself up to those artificial wants which only industry can supply?  Will the women learn to love cleanliness, to regard their men’s rags and their children’s dirt as their own dishonour, and to understand that womanhood has its share of duties in social and domestic life?  Will the sense of beauty grow with the sense of proprietorship, and the filth of the present surroundings be replaced by a flower garden before the cottage—­a creeper against the wall—­a few pots of more delicate blooms in the window?  Will the taste for variety in garden produce be enlarged, and plots of peas, beans, carrots, artichokes, pot-herbs, and the like, be added to the one monotonous potato-patch, with a few cabbages and roots for the baste, and a strip of oats as the sole cereal attempted?  Who knows?  At present there is not a flower to be seen in the whole of the West, save those which a luxuriant Nature herself has sown and planted; and the immediate surroundings of the substantial farm-house, like those of the mud cabin, are filth unmentionable, savage squalor, and bestial neglect.