y jealousy or depreciation of the other great
sources of public wealth, for his sympathy with the trading classes
was genuine, but because he believed that constitutional preponderance,
while not inconsistent with great commercial prosperity, to be the best
security for public liberty and the surest foundation of enduring power.
But as reality was the characteristic of his vigorous and sagacious
nature, he felt that a merely formal preponderance, one not sustained
and authorized by an equivalent material superiority, was a position not
calculated to endure in the present age, and one especially difficult to
maintain with our rapidly increasing population. For this reason he was
always very anxious to identify the policy of Great Britain with that
of Ireland, the latter being a country essentially agricultural; and he
always shrank from any proposition which admitted a difference in the
interests of the two kingdoms.

Liberal politicians, who some years ago were very loud for justice to
Ireland, and would maintain at all hazards the identity of the interests
of the two countries, have of late frequently found it convenient
to omit that kingdom from their statistical bulletins of national
prosperity. Lord George Bentinck, on the contrary, would impress on his
friends, that if they wished to maintain the territorial constitution of
their country, they must allow no sectarian considerations to narrow the
basis of sympathy on which it should rest; and in the acres and millions
of Ireland, in its soil and its people, equally neglected, he would have
sought the natural auxiliaries of our institutions. To secure for our
Irish fellow-subjects a regular market for their produce; to develop
the resources of their country by public works on a great scale; and
to obtain a decent provision for the Roman Catholic priesthood from the
land and not from the consolidated fund, were three measures which he
looked upon as in the highest degree conservative.

When the project of the cabinet of 1846 had transpired, Lord George at
once declared, and was in the habit of reiterating his opinion, that 'it
would ruin the 500,000 small farmers of Ireland,' and he watched with
great interest and anxiety the conduct of their representatives in
the House of Commons. It was with great difficulty that he could bring
himself to believe, that political liberalism would induce the members
for the south and west of Ireland to support a policy in his opinion