shall be fed.’  There was hasty legislation to meet the emergency, but in all the haste, the heartless economists found time to devise clauses and provisions, by means of which, when the small farmers had consumed all their stock to keep their families alive, they were compelled to relinquish their holdings in order to get food for their famishing children.  They must submit to the workhouse test, they must not hold more than a quarter of an acre of land, if they would get relief.  Under the dire instigation of hunger, in the stupor and recklessness of their misery, they accepted any terms the landlords chose to impose, and so whole villages disappeared from the landscape, swept off with the besom of destruction.

The political economists (all the new school of land-agents are rigid political economists), taught by their prophet Malthus, ascribed the famine and every other social evil to surplus population, and to the incurably lazy and thriftless habits of the Celtic race.  According to them the potato blight had only hastened an inevitable catastrophe.  Therefore they set to work with all their agencies and all their might to get rid of the too prolific race, and to supplant the native cultivators by British settlers and wealthy graziers.

This has been done ever since by a quiet and gradual process, steadily, systematically, inexorably, propelled by many powerful tendencies of the age, and checked only by assassination.  What are the agrarian outrages which have become so terribly rife of late, but the desperate struggles of a doomed race to break the instruments which pluck them out of their native soil?  A generation of instruction in the national schools and a generation of intercourse with the free citizens of the United States, who call no man ‘master’ under heaven—­have taught them that it is an enormous iniquity to sacrifice humanity to property, to make the happiness, the freedom, the very existence of human beings, secondary to the arbitrary power and self-interest of a small class called landlords.  They regard the ‘improving landlord’ system as nothing but a legal and civilised continuation of the barbarous policy of extermination by fire and sword which we have seen pursued so ruthlessly in the seventeenth century.  It is still the land-war, conducted according to modern tactics, aiming with deadly effect at the same object, the slow but sure destruction of a nuisance called the ‘Celtic race.’  This may be a delusion on their part; but it is the deep-rooted conviction of priests and people, and hence the utter inadequacy of any enactment which will not render such a policy impossible, by making the tenure of the occupiers independent of the will of the landlords.  Until such time the peasantry will continue to offer a bloody resistance to the legal attempts to crush them out of the country.