ed.' 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 th