It is with the greatest reluctance that I thus allude to the work of Mr. Trench.  I do so from a sense of duty, because I believe it is one of the most misleading books on Ireland published for many years.  It has made false impressions on the public mind in England, which will seriously interfere with a proper settlement of the land question.  The mischief would not be so great if the author did not take so much pains to represent his stories as realities ’essentially characteristic of the country.’  It is very difficult to account for the exaggeration and embellishment in which he has permitted himself to indulge, with so many professions of conscientious regard for truth.  They must have arisen from the habit of reciting the adventures to his friends during a quarter of a century, naturally laying stress on the most sensational passages, while the facts less in keeping with startling effects dropped out of his memory.  Very few of the actors in the scenes he describes now survive.  Those who do, and who might have a more accurate memory, are either so lauded that it would be ungrateful of them to contradict—­or so artfully discredited as ‘virulent’ and base that people would not be likely to believe them if their recollections were different.  There is one peculiarity about Mr. Trench’s dialogues.  There were never any witnesses present.  He always took the wild Irishman, on whom he operated so magically, into his private office; or into a private room in the house of the ‘subject;’ or into a cell alone, if secrets were to be extracted from a Ribbonman in gaol.  Even conversations with the gentler sex, who knelt before him as if he were a bishop, were not permitted to reach the ear of his chief clerk.  On some matters, however, others have spoken since his book appeared.  He is very precise about the trial for an agrarian murder in Monaghan, giving details from his own actual observation.  Mr. Butt, Q.C., who was engaged in the case, has published a letter, stating that Mr. Trench was quite mistaken in his account.  It seems strange that he did not refresh his memory by looking at a report of the trial in some newspaper file.

Mr. Trench ’adds his testimony to the fact that Ireland is not altogether unmanageable,’ that ’justice fully and firmly administered is always appreciated in the end.’  And at the conclusion of his volume he says:—­

’We can scarcely shut our eyes to the fact that the circumstances and feelings which have led to the terrible crime of murder in Ireland, are usually very different from those which have led to murder elsewhere.  The reader of the English newspaper is shocked at the list of children murdered by professional assassins, of wives murdered by their husbands, of men murdered for their gold.  In Ireland that dreadful crime may almost invariably be traced to a wild feeling of revenge for the national wrongs, to which so many of her sons believe that she has been subjected for centuries.’