al culture burn
here burn for each other only, and serve but to intensify the darkness
around.

In no part of Ireland that I have seen are class distinctions more
sharply defined. The landholding gentry are with but two or three
exceptions Protestants, and, with the exception of Lord Inchiquin, are
of English, Scotch, or Dutch descent, as such names as Vandeleur,
Crowe, Stacpoole, and Burton indicate. I am not aware of the landed
possessions of The O'Gorman Mahon, but I have already stated that his
nephew holds only a moderate estate, let by the way at about three
times the Government valuation--but not, I must add, necessarily,
rack-rented, for Griffiths is, for reasons fully explained by a score
of writers beside myself, a deceptive guide in grazing counties. The
gentry of the county, however, are nearly all Protestant, and it is
curious to note on Sunday at Ennis how the masters and their families
go to one church and their servants to another. I am not insinuating
that there is any sectarian squabbling. There is not, for the simple
reason that the two classes of gentry and tradesfolk are too far apart
to come into collision. On one side of a broad line stand the lords of
the soil, of foreign descent, of Protestant religion, of exclusive
social caste; on the other stand the people, the shop-keepers, the
greater farmers and the peasants, all of whom are Irish Roman
Catholics, and bound to each other by the ties of common religion,
common descent, and often of actual kinship. There is, excepting
perhaps a dozen professional men, no middle-class at all, through
which the cultivation of the superior strata could permeate to the
lower.

Probably no more difficult social condition ever presented itself. To
show how completely the members of what ought to be a middle-class, I
mean the large tenant-farmers, are identified with the peasant class,
I may add that many of them, working with a capital of many thousands
of pounds, are subscribers to the Land League, and that many are not
paying their rent. Lord Inchiquin enjoys a good reputation as a
landlord; but his tenants refuse to pay more than Griffiths's
valuation, and I hear that other great landlords in the county are not
much more fortunate. What is most singular of all is that the
middlemen, who are subletting and subdividing their holdings at
tremendous rack-rents, are among the most prominent in refusing to pay
the chief landlord. They see a great immediate advanta