ibution 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.'

For my part, I cannot understand the meaning of improving a country by
disinheriting and banishing its inhabitants. I do not understand men
who say the population is too dense, and yet give to one family a
tract of land large enough to support ten families, turning out the
nine to make room for the one. A great deal has been said about the
evils of small farms. But the most disturbed and impoverished parts of
Ireland are those in which the farms are largest; while the two most
prosperous and best ordered counties--Armagh and Wexford--are the
counties in which small farms most abound. I call a reluctant witness,
Master Fitzgibbon, to testify that when the Irish tenant, be his
holding ever so small, gets common justice and is not subjected to
caprice, he gives no trouble. That gentleman informs us that there are
650 estates of all magnitudes, from 100 l. to 20,000 l. a-year, under
the control and management of the court of chancery; the total rents
of these amount to 494,056 l. a-year payable by 28,581 tenants. These
estates are in all parts of Ireland, not only in all the provinces,
but in all the counties, without exception; and, according to Master
Fitzgibbon, they fairly represent the tenantry of the whole country.
He has 452 of the estates under his own jurisdiction, and the rents
of thes