ot, rather than make
any improvements which might tend to the landlords' ultimate advantage,
even though these improvements would produce immediate benefit to
themselves; and this bad feeling is actually supported by the
undisguised enmity, which unfortunately, of late years, subsists
between the gentry and the priests. We are far from saying that acts of
oppression and injustice may not sometimes be perpetrated by landlords
and agents. Amongst so numerous a body, there must be bad men: and if an
instance, lately mentioned by Mr O'Connell, be true--namely, that of an
agent who set a farm occupied by an industrious and well-behaved
tenantry, who owed no rent, to an extensive grazier, at a rent of four
pounds a year _less_ than the resident tenants offered to secure--we
must at once admit that nothing could be more heartless or cruel. But
then we are bound in justice to state, that the agent so accused was the
bosom friend of the great agitator himself, and a leading member of the
Repeal Association, which has constituted itself the protector, _par
excellence_, of the Irish people. May we not fairly suppose that, when
Mr O'Connell denounces his friends, he would not hesitate to drag his
political opponents to the bar of public opinion; and that the paucity
of _facts_ which he is able to adduce against the landed gentry, is a
proof that they have not neglected the duties of their station, in so
flagrant a manner as his wholesale denunciations would lead us to
expect?

How can we be surprised at Irish absenteeism? Can we expect that any man
who can avoid it, will willingly expose the lives of himself and his
family, by taking up his residence amongst the "Thugs" of Tipperary? If
an absentee comes to reside personally to superintend the improvement of
his property, and takes part of his own estate to make a demesne and
build a mansion, he must dispossess someone--_and, like Lord Norbury, he
is shot_. Should he escape his fate, his motives are misrepresented, and
his anxious endeavours to give occupation and employment to the people,
are converted into the worst crimes; because they can only be carried
into effect by changing the condition of men from pauper and idle
tenants to that of regularly worked and well paid labourers. And what
object can he have, in risking death in the cause of those who suffer
themselves to be so misdirected and misled? Local influence he can have
none--that will be monopolized by the priest; polit