Of those who remained, some may have grown callous; it is impossible to contest authentic instances of brutal heartlessness here and there.  But granting all that has to be entered on the dark debtor side, the overwhelming balance is the other way.  The bulk of the resident Irish landlords manfully did their best in that dread hour ...  No adequate tribute has ever been paid to the memory of those Irish landlords—­they were men of every party and creed—­perished martyrs to duty in that awful time; who did not fly the plague-reeking work-houses or fever-tainted court.  Their names would make a goodly roll of honour ...  If they did too little compared with what the landlord class in England would have done in similar case, it was because little was in their power.  The famine found most of the resident gentry of Ireland on the brink of ruin.  They were heritors of estates heavily overweighted with the debts of a bygone generation.  Broad lands and lordly mansions were held by them on settlements and conditions that allowed small scope for the exercise of individual liberality.  To these landlords the failure of year’s rental receipts meant mortgage fore-one and hopeless ruin.  Yet cases might be named by the score in which such men scorned to avert by pressure on their suffering tenantry the fate they saw impending over them....  They ’went down with the ship.’”

Soon after the famine, the Incumbered Estates Act was passed, by which the creditors of incumbered landlords could force a sale.  This in effect worked a silent revolution; for whatever might have been said up to that time about the landed proprietors being the representatives of those who acquired their estates through the Cromwellian confiscations, after those proprietors had been forced to sell and the purchasers had obtained a statutory title by buying in the Court, the charge became obsolete.  The motive of the Act was a good one; it was hoped that land would thus pass out of the hands of impoverished owners and be purchased by English capitalists who would be able to execute improvements on their estates and thus benefit the country as a whole.  But the scheme brought with it disadvantages which the framers of the Act had not foreseen.  The new purchasers had none of the local feelings of the dispossessed owners; they regarded their purchases as an investment, which they wished to make as profitable as possible, and treated the occupants of the land with a harshness which the old proprietors would never have exercised.  Like most things in Ireland, however, this has been much exaggerated.  It is constantly assumed that the whole soil of Ireland after this belonged to absentee proprietors who took no interest in the country.  That absenteeism is a great evil to any country, and to Ireland especially, no one can deny; but a Parliamentary enquiry in 1869 elicited the fact that the number of landed proprietors in the rural area of Ireland then (and there is no reason to suppose that any great change had taken place in the previous eighteen years) was 19,547, of whom only 1,443 could be described as “rarely or never resident in Ireland”; and these represented 15.7 per cent. of the rural area, and only 15.1 per cent. of the total poor-law valuation of that area.