o be taken in good part, and she is classed
as a "domineering" person forthwith. And a general misunderstanding
can only be averted by timely concessions and the prompt dismissal of
English servants who neither can nor will live with their Irish peers.
And yet it cannot be fairly said that anybody is to blame. The
"foreigner" cannot endure to be kept in bed till late in the morning,
and hence easily acquires the reputation of a "tyrant." And the small
tenants feel the loss of the African system, under which they never
actually went short of a meal. As the right of mountain pasture and of
cutting turf have vanished on some estates, so has the privilege of
living at free quarters disappeared on others, to be replaced by no
compensating advantage. This is one of the features of a period of
transition during which, without ill-will on either side, the gulf
between rich and poor is becoming perceptibly wider.

Inasmuch as I am just now contradicted by peers in the columns of the
_Daily News_ itself, and attacked--I must add, in very courteous as
well as brilliant style--by a leader writer of the _Irish Times_, and
held up to public opprobrium at Sunday meetings, I thought it well to
submit the foregoing to a friend, born and bred in Ireland, before
committing it to print. Where, except so far as the retainer is
concerned, I was obliged to depend so much on hearsay evidence, I
thought it just possible that I might have selected an extreme case
instead of a fair type of what I have ventured to call the African
system. I am quite reassured. My friend, who is an accomplished and
experienced Irishman, tainted only by a very few years' residence in
England, assures me that I have considerably understated the wild,
wasteful profusion, slothfulness, and dirt of the old-fashioned
chieftain's kitchen. He assures me that families are now abroad in the
world without an acre of land or a halfpenny beyond their earnings,
who, within his recollection, have been "ruined by their
kitchen,"--literally eaten up by hungry retainers and tenants. He
mentioned one family in particular, whose income sank from 12,000l. to
nothing a year under the ancient system which united almost every
possible defect. The tenants were not, it is true, charged a heavy
rent in money, because civilisation had not advanced quite so far as
the commutation of all dues into cash; but "duty work" was as strictly
exacted on the lord's farm as it is now on some estates when