oldings. No one disputes now that he was right.
But the last thing he desired was to abolish the landlords. If they did
not like the leadership of the priests "they have," he said, "a remedy
left; let them make themselves more popular than the priests. If the
landlords will make common cause with the people, the people will make
common cause with them." There was never a truer word spoken, but it
fell on closed ears.

Moore himself broke the landlords' power at the polls; their infinitely
greater power, proceeding from control of the land, was broken by
another Mayo man, Michael Davitt, the evicted peasant from Straide,
close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come when Moore's warning
and the warning of men like him was set at nought. What a change it has
made! and what has been lost to Ireland!

Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope that Presbyterian
farmers of the North, interested in Tenant Right, who had been
temporarily allied to Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment,
might unite solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protestant gentry
afforded numerous supporters to Butt's Home Rule policy at its outset.
But of this nothing serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective,
and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would go on as before.
Throughout the 'seventies the landlord class was in undisturbed
supremacy. Country gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about "the
robbery of the Church"; in actual fact they were very complacently and
competently helping to administer its new constitution. Agriculture was
prosperous and rents went high, though the harsh and overbearing
landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, however, was poor
consolation to the tenants. In the county where I was brought up, one
landlord was a name of terror, and there was no redress from his
tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for themselves. The grim
old man died fighting hard before his brains were dashed out on the
roadside, and two innocent people were killed along with him; but no
sane person could fail to perceive that, within five years of his taking
off, the whole district was improved out of knowledge. The moral to be
drawn was only too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the
established interest of a class is too strong a thing for that class to
shake themselves out of its influence.

The men of that generation--how well I remember them! most vividly
perhaps as they used