e his priest had been dishonoured. We so beg,
thinking that God's anger is hot also against us. But, lo! the famine
passes by, and a land that had been brought to the dust by man's
folly is once more prosperous and happy.

If this was ever so in the world's history, it was so in Ireland
at the time of which I am speaking. The country, especially in the
south and west, had been brought to a terrible pass;--not as so
many said and do say, by the idolatry of popery, or by the sedition
of demagogues, or even mainly by the idleness of the people. The
idolatry of popery, to my way of thinking, is bad; though not so bad
in Ireland as in most other Papist countries that I have visited.
Sedition also is bad; but in Ireland, in late years, it has not been
deep-seated--as may have been noted at Ballingarry and other places,
where endeavour was made to bring sedition to its proof. And as for
the idleness of Ireland's people, I am inclined to think they will
work under the same compulsion and same persuasion which produce work
in other countries.

The fault had been the lowness of education and consequent want of
principle among the middle classes; and this fault had been found as
strongly marked among the Protestants as it had been among the Roman
Catholics. Young men were brought up to do nothing. Property was
regarded as having no duties attached to it. Men became rapacious,
and determined to extract the uttermost farthing out of the land
within their power, let the consequences to the people on that land
be what they might.

We used to hear much of absentees. It was not the absence of the
absentees that did the damage, but the presence of those they left
behind them on the soil. The scourge of Ireland was the existence
of a class who looked to be gentlemen living on their property,
but who should have earned their bread by the work of their brain,
or, failing that, by the sweat of their brow. There were men to be
found in shoals through the country speaking of their properties and
boasting of their places, but who owned no properties and had no
places when the matter came to be properly sifted.

Most Englishmen have heard of profit-rent. In Ireland the term is
so common that no man cannot have heard of it. It may, of course,
designate a very becoming sort of income. A man may, for instance,
take a plot of land for one hundred pounds a year, improve and build
on it till it be fairly worth one thousand pounds a year, and thus