man can do a whole land as by wading
through hundreds of volumes, for I am giving them the concentrated
knowledge I have accumulated by years devoted to profound study of the
subject.

The course of history may be taken up almost on the morrow of the
famine, for potatoes began to be a scarce crop again in 1850, yet the
country was improving rapidly, and the relations between landlord and
tenant were as cordial as in any part of the world.

So they continued in absolute amity until what is virtually universal
suffrage was introduced and the ignoramus became the tool of every
political knave.

Mr. Gladstone stated that he brought in the Irish Church Act to pacify
the country in 1868, when the land was as peaceful as English pastures
on a Sunday evening. He must really have done so to propitiate English
dissenters, for no one in Ireland appeared to want it.

By this Act a resident gentleman was taken away from every parish in
Ireland, whereby the evils of absentee landlordism were gravely
enhanced.

Mr. Gladstone called it an act of sublime justice from England to
Ireland. Previously, in virtue of ancient treaties commencing as far
back as the reigns of William and Mary, the English Government was
giving Presbyterians a grant--called Regium Donum--of L70,000 a year,
and by a more recent arrangement was giving Maynooth a grant of L24,000,
but that Whig Government actually paid them off out of the spoils of the
Irish Church, thereby saving the British Exchequer L94,000 a year.

And if this be an act of justice, then Aristides can be classed among
hypocritical swindlers.

It must be borne in mind that when William Pitt caused the Act of Union
to be passed in Parliament, the union of the Churches was a fundamental
feature, and this, indeed, was the main inducement held out to
Protestants to promote the Union.

Surely it cannot be held to be a valid Union when the principal
consideration in it is set aside, to say nothing of increasing the
taxation by two million sterling a year more than was ever contemplated
by the Act. This was clearly borne out by a Royal Commission composed
mostly of Englishmen and presided over by Mr. Childers, an earnest
politician and an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Catholic priests who expected that their Church would be established
were disappointed, while the landlords, who were generally Protestants,
had henceforth to support their clergy and at the same time to pay
tithes to the