manager-in-chief at the
same time of the large estates of the Marquess of Lansdowne, in Kerry,
and Lord Digby, in the King's County. In all these undertakings,
ably assisted by his sons and his nephew, he has been pre-eminently
successful. If the Farney men had been driven off in 1843, or swept
away by the famine, it would have been said that their fate was
inevitable, nothing could be made of them. They were by nature prone
to disorder and rebellion. Well, Lord Bath visited his estate in 1865.
On that occasion a banquet was given to the tenants, at which Mr.
Trench made an eloquent speech. Referring to the outbreak in 1848, he
said: 'And yet never, my Lord, never even in the worst of times, did I
bate one jot of heart or hope in the noble people of Farney, never for
one moment did I doubt their loyalty to their Queen, their loyalty to
their country, their respect for their landlord, and above all, that
they would be true and loyal to themselves.' So much for the incurable
perversity of the Celtic race, for the 'black morass of Irish nature'
that can never be drained!

The people of Farney got justice, and they were contented and orderly.
They got security, and they were industrious and thriving. They
got protection under the constitution, and they were loyal. Densely
peopled as the estate is, the agent could not coax one of them to
emigrate; and after his former experience at Farney, he did not
venture on eviction, though, no doubt, he would gladly repeat the
Kenmare experiment in thinning the masses with which he has had to
deal. Mr. Horsman, a prophet of the same school of economists, says
that Providence sent the famine to relieve the landlords, by carrying
away a third of the population, and he seems to think it desirable
that another third should be got rid of somehow.

CHAPTER XXII.

BELFAST AND PERPETUITY.

Belfast, not being blessed with a cathedral like Armagh and Derry,
is not called a 'city.' It is only a 'town;' but it is the capital of
Ulster, and surpasses all other places in Ireland in the rapidity of
its progress and in its prosperity. It can boast but little of its
antiquity. There is probably not a house in the borough more than 150
years old. The place is first noticed by history in 1178, merely as
the site of a fort of the O'Neills, which was destroyed by John De
Courcy. It was only a poor village at the time of Bruce's invasion, in
1315, though Spencer erroneously calls it 'a very goo