There is certainly one disadvantage connected with a settlement of the land question which would abolish the arbitrary power of proprietors and their agents—­it would put an end to the romance of Irish landlordism.  The Edgeworths, the Morgans, the Banims, the Carletons, and the Levers would then be deprived of the best materials for their fictions.  The fine old family, over-reached and ruined by a dishonest agent; the cruelly evicted farmer, with his wife and children fever-stricken, and his bedridden mother cast out on the roadside on Christmas Eve, exposed to the pelting of the hailstorm, while their home was unroofed and its walls levelled by the crowbar brigade; the once comfortable but now homeless father making his way to London, and trying day after day to present a petition in person to his landlord, repulsed from the gate of the great house, and laughed at for his frieze and brogue by pampered flunkeys.  Then he travels on foot to his lordship’s country-seat, scores or hundreds of miles—­is taken up, and brought before the magistrates as ‘an Irish rogue and vagabond.’  At length he meets his lordship accidentally, and reveals to him the system of iniquity that prevails on his Irish estate at Castle Squander:  Next we have the sudden and unexpected appearance of the god of the soil at his agent’s office, sternly demanding an account of his stewardship.  He gives ready audience to his tenants, and fires with indignation at bitter complaints from the parents of ruined daughters.  Investigation is followed by the ignominious eviction of the tyrannical and roguish agent and his accomplices, a disgorging of their ill-gotten wealth, compensation to plundered and outraged tenants, the liberal distribution of poetical justice right and left.

Many other agents have followed Mr. Trench’s example in forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from hospitality and charity.  An ejectment was lately obtained at the quarter sessions in a southern county against a widow who had married without leave, or married a different person from the one the agent selected.  But it is supposed that the threat of assassination prevented a recourse to extremities in this and other cases.  For the people seem with one consent to have made a desperate stand against this cruel tyranny.  A landlord said to me, ’No one in this part of the country would presume to evict a tenant now from fear of assassination. That is the tenant’s security.’

The wretched outcasts, whom ‘improvement’ has swept off the estates, are crowded into cities and towns, without employment, without food.  Feeling bitterly their degradation and misery, and taught to blame the Government, they become demoralized and desperately disaffected.  From these fermenting masses issues the avenging scourge of Fenianism—­’the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and slayeth at noonday.’