There is a mistake here.  No murders are committed in Ireland for ‘national wrongs.’  The author has gathered together, as in a chamber of horrors, all the cases of assassination that occurred during the years of distress, provoked by the extensive evictions which succeeded the famine, and by the infliction of great hardships on tenants who, in consequence of that dreadful calamity, had fallen into arrears.  People who had been industrious, peaceable, and well-conducted were thus driven to desperation; and hence the young men formed lawless combinations and committed atrocious murders.  But every one of these murders was agrarian, not national.  They were committed in the prosecution of a war, not against the Government, but against the landlords and their agents and instruments.  It was a war pro aris et focis, waged against local tyrants, and waged in the only way possible to the belligerents who fought for home and family.  Mr. Trench always paints the people who sympathise with their champions as naturally wild, lawless, and savage.  If he happens to be in good humour with them, he makes them ridiculous.  His son, Mr. Townsend Trench, who did the illustrations for the work, pictures the peasantry as gorillas, always flourishing shillelaghs, and grinning horribly.  With rare exceptions, they appear as an inferior race, while the ruling class, and the Trenches in particular, appear throughout the book as demigods, ‘lords of the creation,’ formed by nature to be the masters and guides and managers of such a silly, helpless people.  Nowhere is any censure pronounced upon a landlord, or an agent, with one exception, and this was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Trench at Kenmare.  To his gross neglect in allowing God to send so many human beings into the world, he ascribes the chaos of misery and pauperism, which he—­a heaven-born agent—­had to reduce to order and beauty.  But there were other causes of the ‘poetic turbulence’ which he so gloriously quelled, that he might have brought to light, had he thought proper, for the information of English readers.  He might have shown—­for the evidence was before him in the report of the Devon Commission—­with what hard toil and constant self-denial, amidst what domestic privations and difficulties, Mr. Shirley’s tenants struggled to scrape up for him his 20,000 l. a year, and how bitterly they must have felt when the landlord sent an order to add one-third to their rack-rent.  I will supply Mr. Trench’s lack of service, and quote the evidence of one of those honest and worthy men, given before the Devon Commissioners.

Peter Mohun, farmer, a tenant on the Shirley estate, gave the following evidence:—­

’What family have you?—­I am married, and have two daughters, and my wife, and a servant boy.

’What rent do you pay?—­Sometime ago I paid 3 l. 19 s. 11d.  I was doing well at that time; and then my rent was raised to 5 l. 19 s. 9 d., and sometimes 6 l., and one year 5 l. 19 s. 6 d.