sly triumphant.
Physical well-being is a great incentive to quiet living--productive
industry checks political unrest. Those who have something to lose are
careful to keep it; and we may be sure that Captain Moonlight would
not risk his skin if he had a good coat to cover it.

Also there is another aspect in which this land question may be
viewed, and ought to be viewed--in reference to the manner in which
the Irish farmer treats the property by which he lives:--that is the
aspect of his duty to the community in his quality of producer for the
community. We must all come down to the land as the common property of
the human race. Parcelled out as it may be--by the mile or the square
yard--it is the common mother of all men. We can do without everything
else, from lace to marble--from statues to carriages--but food we must
have; and the holders of land all the world over are really and
rightfully trustees for the race. The Irish peasant has no more right
to neglect the possibilities of produce than had William Rufus, or his
modern representative in Scotland, to evict villages for the making of
a deer forest. The principle of trusteeship in the land holds good
with small holders and great alike; but imagine what would be the
effect of a law which required so much produce from a given area on an
average for so long a period! The principle is of course conceded in
the rent, rates and taxes; but a direct application to produce would
set the kingdom in a blaze.

But in Ireland fields of thistles and acres of ragwort, with tall
purple spikes of loose strife everywhere, seem to be held as valid
crops, fit for food and good at rent-paying. These are to be found at
every step from Dublin to Kerry, and the most unpractised eye can see
the waste and neglect and unnecessary squalor of both land and
people. As an English farmer said, with indignation: "The land is
brutally treated." So it is--idleness, unthrift, and bad farming
generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural
standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim
garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully
tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among
the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on
the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the
cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than
that work-table on an acre of waste.