In this self-defensive war, they cannot cope with the armed power of England in the open field; and they are driven upon the criminal resource of the oppressed in all ages and all lands—­secret combination and assassination.  For this crime they feel no remorse; first, because it is war—­just as the soldier feels no remorse for killing the enemy in a battle; and, secondly, because their conquerors, and the successors of those conquerors, have taught them too well by repeated examples the terrible lesson of making light of human life.  Poor ignorant creatures, they cannot see that, while the most illustrious noblemen in England won applause and honours by shooting down Irish women and children like seals or otters, the survivors of the murdered people should be execrated as cruel, barbarous, and infamous for shooting the men that pull down the rooftrees over the heads of their helpless families and trample upon their household gods.  These convictions of theirs are very revolting to our feelings, but they are facts; and as facts the legislature must deal with them.  If there be a people, otherwise singularly free from crime, who regard the assassination of the members of a certain class with indifference, or approbation, the phenomenon is one which political philosophy ought to be able to explain, and one which cannot be got rid of by suspending the constitution and bringing railing accusations against the nation.

Mr. Trench speaks with something like contempt or pity of ’good landlords,’ a class which he contradistinguishes from ’improving landlords.’  But it should be remembered that by this last phrase he always means agents of the Trench stamp.  For he observes that the landlord himself cannot possibly do much more than authorize his agent to do what he thinks best; and it is rather an advantage that the proprietor should be an absentee, otherwise his good nature might prompt him to interrupt the work of improvement.  Now there is this to be said of the good landlords, who may be counted by hundreds, and who are found in all the counties of Ireland.  Their estates are free from the ‘poetic turbulence’ in which Mr. Trench is the ‘stormy petrel.’  They preserved their tenants through the years of famine, and have them still on their estates.  Nor should the fact be omitted that among those good landlords, who abhor the idea of evicting their tenants, are to be found the lineal descendants of some of the most cruel exterminators of the seventeenth century.  Their goodness has completely obliterated, among their people, the bitter memories of the past.  The present race of Celts would die for the men whose ancestors shot down their forefathers as vermin.  But the improving landlords run their ploughshares through the ashes of old animosities, turning up embers which the winds of agitation blow into flames.  We seldom hear of Ribbonism till the improving agent comes upon the scene, warring against natural rights, warring against the natural affections, warring against humanity, warring against the soul.