with that
better class of resident gentry and capitalized landowners, who in
their way are guides, teachers and helps to the peasantry. The absence
of this better class of resident gentry is one of the misfortunes of
French agricultural life and the justification of M. Zola; their
presence is one of the blessings of England. How will it be in Ireland
when the exodus is more complete than it is even now, and when the
villages and rural districts are left solely to peasant proprietors
and a celibate clergy? The Romish Church has never been famous for
teaching those things which make for intellectual enlightenment and
social improvement. The difference between the Protestant north and
the rest of Roman Catholic Ireland, as between the Protestant and
Romish cantons in Switzerland; is a truism almost proverbial. And
without the little leaven of such influence as the better educated and
more enlightened gentry may possess, the Irish peasant will be even
more superstitious, more blinded by prejudice and ignorance than he
is now. As it is, the old landlords are sincerely deplored, and the
good they did is as sincerely regretted. Those grand old hunting days,
now things of the past, still linger in the memory of the men who
participated in the fun and had their full share of the crumbs--and
the times when a grand seigneur paid a hundred pounds a week in wages
alone seem something like glimpses into a railed and fenced off El
Dorado, which the Plan of Campaign has closed for ever. So that the
sunshine has its shadow, for all the good to be had from the light.

It ought to be that peasant proprietorship will make the holder more
industrious and a better farmer than he has been as tenant. Whether it
will or not remains to be seen. As things are--always excepting Ulster
and the North generally--farming could scarcely be more shameful in
its neglect than it is--domestic life could scarcely be more squalid,
more savage, more filthy. Even rich farmers live like pigs and with
their pigs, and the stone house is no better kept than the mud
cabin--the forty-acre field no better tilled than the miserable little
potato patch. Had the farming been better, there would never have been
the poverty, the discontent, the agitation by which Ireland had been
tortured and convulsed. Had the men been more industrious, the women
cleaner and more deft, the Plan of Campaign would have failed for want
of social nutriment, where now it has been so disastrou