irs on Knockdahurk. Nothing would
surprise me less than a strike against anybody in this neighbourhood.

If one may judge by the language used yesterday at Westport Fair, at
which I was glad to discover more outward evidence of prosperity than
had yet come under my observation in this part of Ireland, the
landlords and their agents are determined to make another effort to
get in their rents in January. Their view of the case is that the law
must assist them: but whatever abstract idea of the majesty of the law
may exist elsewhere is obviously foreign to those parts of Connaught
which I have visited. It is urged day after day upon me by high as
well as low, that if Sir Robert Blosse and Lord De Clifford can get in
their rents without "all the king's horses and all the king's men,"
other landlords must try to do the same. To prevent misconception, I
will aver, even at the risk that I may seem to "protest too much,"
that this argument is not thrust upon me by the Land League, but by
persons who are proprietors themselves. It is held ridiculous, in this
section of the country, that enormous expense should be thrown upon
the county in order that the rents of certain landlords may be
collected. There is, it must be admitted, a rational indisposition in
the West to ascribe any particularly sacred character to rent as
distinguished from any other debt. This is an agreeable feature in the
Irish character. In some other countries there prevails a preposterous
notion that rent must be paid above and before all things, as a
species of solemn obligation. Until the other day there prevailed in
Scotland the almost insane law of hypothec, which allowed a landlord
to pursue his tenant's goods even into the hands of an "innocent
holder." But there is no argument in favour of the landlord which any
other creditor might not advance with equally good reason. The
butcher, the baker, the clothier, as well as the farmer, the dealer in
feeding-cake and manure, have claims quite as good as that of the
landlord, and, as they think, a great deal better. Tradesmen who have
fed and clothed people, and others who have helped them to fatten
their land and their cattle, think their claims paramount. It is of
the nature of every creditor to think he has the right to be paid
before anybody else. But the landlord, probably because landlords made
the law, such as it is, has a claim which he can enforce, or rather
just now seeks to enforce, by the aid of ar