ve, and so these interests remain often for years
untransferred, in the hands of some one who has a very limited and
often uncertain interest in them. Such a leaseholder is deterred from
making improvements by the state of the law which deprives him of the
entire value of his improvements if anyone should disturb him under
a prior charge or claim, however obscure or unknown, affecting his
interest. The remedy is to be found in an extension of the principle
of the Record of Title Act to the local registry of small leasehold
interests, and in the providing for the local sale of such interests
in a cheap manner, with an absolute title.'

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE LAND SYSTEM AND THE WORKING CLASSES.

We have been told over and over again that the business of Ireland,
and all its improvements, requiring education and integrity, are
carried on 'by the Protestants, by whose intelligence, and labour,
mental and bodily, its prosperity, such as it is, has been produced.'
This assertion has been made with great confidence, by many writers
and speakers. It is a gross exaggeration, and absurd as it is gross. I
say nothing of the unseemly egotism of a dominant caste, thus parading
its own merits, flaunting its plumes, strutting and crowing over the
common folk--of this pharisaic spirit of the ascendant Protestant,
standing close to the altar, reciting to God and the world the number
of his resplendent virtues, and scornfully contrasting his excellent
moral condition with the degraded Catholic--the vile publican and
sinner, overwhelmed with enormous guilt. These monopolising Pharisees,
who laboured at such a rate to assert their natural superiority, as
the favourites of Heaven, and members of the Sovereign's church, over
a race which England enabled them to subjugate and impoverish, have
found no trumpeter so loud as Master Fitzgibbon, a chancery judge. In
the same spirit the last census has been analysed by one of the ablest
defenders of the Irish establishment, the Rev. Dr. Hume, of Liverpool,
in order to prove that everything good in Ireland has been done by
the Protestants, and everything bad by the Catholics. But he does not
state fairly the conditions of the race. He does not state that one of
the competitors had been master for centuries, well-fed, well-trained,
possessed of all advantages which give strength, skill, courage, and
confidence, while the other was ill-fed, untrained, enfeebled, and
_over-weighted_, having to