These remarks bring us to the case of the barony of Geashill, the estate of Lord Digby, to which Mr. Trench became agent in 1857.  Lord Digby desired to obtain his services, but he did not communicate his desire to Mr. Trench himself, though nothing would seem easier.  It was first conveyed by Lieut.-General Porter, the confidential friend of Lord Digby, and next by Mr. Brewster, afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland.  When the police received a notice that the new landlord of Geashill would certainly meet with a ‘bloody death’ if he persisted in his threatened dealings with the tenants, there was no more time for diplomatic delicacy in approaching Mr. Trench.  The landlord’s extremity is Mr. Trench’s opportunity.  When leases are to be broken, when independent rights are to be extinguished, or ‘contracted away,’ when an overcrowded estate is to be thinned at the least possible cost to the owner, when a rebellious tenantry are to be subdued, and Ribbonmen are to be banished or hanged, Mr. Trench is the man to do the work of improvement.  He admits that he never had before him an uglier job than this at Geashill, and he had the worst apprehensions as to the danger of the enterprise.

It was nothing less than to break 120 leases, which had been granted from time to time by the late Lord Digby during the sixty years that he had enjoyed the property.  The value of these leases was 30,600 l., for the terms unexpired after his death.  Among those 120 leaseholders were the descendants of English settlers, gentlemen farmers, one of them a magistrate, and a number of substantial yeomen, the sort of men the country so much wanted to form an independent middle class.  But to an ‘improving landlord,’ the existence of such a class on his estate is intolerable.  At all hazards they must be made tenants-at-will, and brought completely under his control.

They had built houses and planted trees; they had reclaimed the deep bog and converted it into good arable land.  They had employed the peasantry, and given them plots of ground, and, more than all, they had allowed a number of families to squat on bits of bog by the roadside, where they lived as well as they could; working when there was a demand for labour, cutting turf and selling it in the neighbouring town of Tullamore, and perhaps carrying on some little dealings.  At all events they had survived the famine; and there they were in 1857 with their huts standing on their ‘estates,’ for they had paid no rent for twenty years, and they had as good a title in law as Lord Digby himself.  Mr. Trench seems to have been horrified at not finding the names of these householders in the rent-books of the estate!  The idea!—­that there should be within the four corners of the King’s County, even on the bog of Allen, a number of natives holding land, without a landlord!  It was monstrous.  But as they could not be evicted for non-title, they were all severally tempted by the offer of money, in sums varying from 5 l. to 20 l. each, to sell their freeholds to the landlord.  Pity they were not preserved as a remnant of the antediluvian period, ere the ancient tenures were merged in floods of blood.  Like a bit of primitive forest, they would be more interesting to some minds than the finest modern plantation.